A power station for electric cars is on display at the Essen Motor Show on November 30, 2015 at the fair grounds in Essen, western Germany. | PATRIK STOLLARZ/AFP/Getty Desperately seeking sockets Electric cars are still impractical because it’s hard to find places to charge them. One Berlin start-up is changing that.

Down on the crossroads where power meets transport is a business niche for helping electric motorists plug in their rides.

Recharging an electric car on the road is not as easy as stopping at a gas station for petrol. Public charging stations come in different configurations and require different ways of paying. And they are still thin on the ground.

“There are large gaps, and some regions have a very low coverage,” says Peter Van den Bossche, a professor at the Free University of Brussels, who works on electric vehicle infrastructure standardization.

Differing technical standards and business models don't help, but the main problem is information. “Within one area, even with large coverage, a major source of fragmentation is the lack of a consistent database of charging points.”

Charging point operators, communities of users and independents are all trying their hands at filling this gap. “This is very confusing for the user,” says Van den Bossche. “There is need for a comprehensive, independent dynamic database.”

Berlin start-up PlugSurfing has its eye on this prize. In addition to building a pan-European database of public charging points, it also aims to helps EV drivers pay for their power once they find it.

This is an issue because charging point networks rarely cooperate. In Berlin, for example, an electric vehicle driver needs separate contracts with companies RWE and Vattenfall to use the city's main networks. “If you put that onto the national level, you would need 70 different contracts to charge your car everywhere,” says Adam Woolway, who co-founded PlugSurfing in 2012 with Jacob van Zonneveld.

To solve the problem, they added a billing system to their location app and started to make deals with charging point operators so that drivers could also use the app to pay for access.

Along the way, they had to deal with some old technology; aging software means that many charging points cannot be accessed by mobile app. Instead, each requires a different radio-frequency identification (RFID) device.

“An electric car might give an outside impression of being at the forefront of innovation and technology, but below it the industry is still quite archaic," says Woolway. As a work-around, the company sells users an RFID “key hanger,” a single device that allows access to participating charging points.

PlugSurfing now connects with almost all major charging point operators in Germany and the Netherlands, and it is making headway in Austria, Belgium and Luxembourg. “We give access to 15,000 charging points across Europe,” Woolway says. “Our users can use them and pay for everything with one bill to PlugSurfing.”

The industry was initially wary of what the start-up was trying to do. “It was very tough to get our first operators on board, but as soon as we could show them that we had a community of users then they started to come around,” Woolway says.

PlugSurfing sets its own price for users, aiming to negotiate a discount from operators to create a margin on each transaction. The pitch to operators is that the app brings them new customers and saves them the cost of billing.

This works, but leaves little room for profit. For now, investing in expansion to new countries, such as France, Italy and Norway takes precedence over the bottom line.

“It is very tight at the moment, which is why we are looking at what else we can do with our user base,” Woolway says. These ideas are currently under wraps.

At present the majority of the company's revenue comes from business-to-business deals, with fleet operators and fuel card providers using the PlugSurfing system to cover electric vehicles.

“Nevertheless, access to public charging is still a very important part of the puzzle, and our next challenge is how we can build upon that and make a sustainable and successful business out of it.”

Meanwhile, the electric vehicle landscape is evolving, with Brussels adding pressure for harmonization. The European Union's EV Connect roadmap, published this summer, sets out actions to address issues such as unified access and billing systems, and the creation of a single charging point database. The EU also agreed on a standard for harmonizing RFID devices used in charging.

Woolway says PlugSurfing's niche will survive the changes. “In the foreseeable future, this fragmentation is here to stay,” he says. “Even if it is solved — and of course we hope that we are the ones to solve it — but if it is solved by someone else, we are broadening what we do so that we have a defendable position.”

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