They say buying an electric truck is the easy part of electrifying a fleet. The complexities often come from choosing the right charging infrastructure to support those electric trucks. We caught up with Chris Thompson, head of product marketing with charging company, ABB eMobility, to discuss what fleets need to know about choosing and operating EV chargers.

Chris Thompson: The biggest thing, about introducing charging infrastructure is what’s your business model? How are you going to make money? No one’s in business to lose money. So it’s to understand the business and strategy and what you do with, your truck, your scheduling, and your strategy of where to put that infrastructure. Are you, let’s say, in a trucking business doing short haul, where maybe you just have your infrastructure in your fleet or depot? Are you doing long haul where you need to do it on the road, so you have bigger batteries, bigger battery sizes? So some of those are the parts of the equation of what you need to set up the infrastructure, as well as how much energy you get from the grid.

Okay. And how do you determine what is the right charger for your application? You have a1.2 megawatt charger here, and you have this 400 kilowatt over there, 50 kilowatt here. How do you understand which is the right charger for your application?

Thompson: That’s a perfect, perfect question. So what you see is we’ve actually divided the market into four distinct subset segments, because we know each user group has its own pain points and its own things to solve. So, for example, if I think about the retail and destination segment, where we have a 50 kilowatt charger, 50 kilowatts is exactly the perfect sweet spot. If you’re going to the grocery store every week for 43 minutes, that’s enough time to charge up your battery on today’s cars to have one week’s worth of driving. So it’s really segmented there. And typically, these companies do other things. They’re not selling energy. So we then manage the business for them. So it’s imagining what pain points they have, which is completely different from the public charging where these companies are in the business to make money and they only do charging. So they have maybe a service team. Everyone is dedicated to making money with charging. So completely different, let’s say, profiles in the segments.

And and that’s how we look at bringing the technology, the platforms together to answer those needs, whether it’s a 50 kilowatt, 200,300 or 400 kilowatt, 1.2MW, or a distributed system for, like, school buses. So that’s how we look at the market today, dividing into four segments and really placing what technology they need where.

Okay. For a professional driver who’s new to EVs, what do they need to know about using chargers? Is it really simple to plug it in and go? Or what what what is there training involved?

Thompson: We try to make it as easy as possible. There is training involved, but we look at it like an iPhone. So you don’t really have instructions on how to use your phone. It’s really a touchscreen or a push button. It’s very easy to use. It’s very intuitive. You have the lighting to guide you through the entire process. So we built this for everyone, first-time users and repeat users.

Okay. You even have some on screen instructions to make it even easier for you.

Thompson: Exactly. We combine, let’s say, the digital physical also with the lighting to communicate, what’s happening.

Okay. And lastly, there’s a it’s a crowded market. There’s a lot of companies providing charges to the industry. How do you choose the supplier that’s gonna be best for you?

Thompson: So actually, we’ve looked at what the key components are and brought those in-house. So all the power modules and, let’s say, the heartbeat of the charger is done by us internally. So designed, manufactured, everything by ABB E-Mobility. And that allows you to build and architect and engineer the charger around the heartbeat so we can design and do that. And then we carefully select fire suppliers like the cable connector, payment terminal that integrate with our ecosystem, because we want to find where the pain points are and eliminate them. So, again, supplier testing, all of that. So we look at that, as the way to build a charger today.

We do hear frustration sometimes about people that find chargers are down. Down too often, down too frequently. What are the most common failures or pain points for for a charger?

Thompson: The number the number one thing is payment, today. So what we’re looking at is vertically integrating the payment, stack in our experience module. So we’ve tried to take that out of the equation. It’s kinda like a a fuse in a house. If something goes down, you know there’s a fuse box, what do I need to switch?

So we look at it like that for payment. And then you mentioned about the charger — we have a cloud domain that actually monitors the health of the network. So this is how you do it, whether the charger’s up, whether it needs service, what’s the schedule. So that’s how we look at it — if there is a problem, getting the best service team out there to correct the problem as quickly as possible.