The War of EV Charging Stations

The War

A war is  brewing between two Silicon Valley companies about the future of electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The reigning champ is none other than Palo Alto based Better Place with over $700 Million in funding. The company's most recent round of $350 Million places the company at a reported market cap of $1.25 Billion. Estimates call for another $1 billion in funding to realize the companies ambitious vision of getting the world off of fossil fuel based cars. Better Place is promoting a hybrid model of charging and battery swapping stations. The advantage is a fast turn-around time similar to the time needed to refuel the gas tank at a conventional gas station. There are other operational advantages also in this approach, such as the ability to pre-charge the batteries at off-peak charging times when the price of electricity is lower and then re-use it anytime. However, the company faces the daunting task of enabling the entire eco-system and creating some sort of standardization in the battery that is used with different makes/models. The company will also need to overcome the emotional issues associated with car-owners not owning one of the most critical and expensive pieces of equipment in their cars.

Better Place Battery Replacement Service

On the other spectrum of this debate is a relative new comer which has been installing charging stations which are more like conventional gas stations. These charging stations are installed at parking spots, homes and streets and consumers can access them by becoming a subscriber which gives them access to any of the charging stations in the entire fleet. The software also allows customers to discover the nearest available charging point given the current location. While the business model is very clean and the company is quite capital efficient having raised $14 Million in series B and has more than $37 Million in federal funding grants to establish a number of charging stations in North America. The charging times with the current charging stations is quite large (around 45 minutes with Level 3 chargers) but the low-cost, low capital, distributed nature of Coulumb's charging solution provides a very interesting alternative to Better Places's highly capital intensive model.

Coulomb Charging Station

Please leave your thoughts and comments on who you think will dominate the EV charging infrastructure of the future.