A Chat with Steffen Brans, CEO at Electric Vehicle Charging Company: EEVEE

People know how much it cost to fill up their petrol cars, so why don’t they know how much it really costs you to charge their electric vehicles? While it’s cheaper to fill your car up with electricity rather than petrol, the increasing number of charge solutions, cards and rates makes it hard for EV owners to keep track of exactly how much they are spending.

EEVEE connects directly with Electric vehicles and unlocks real-time data so you can monitor your charging costs all in one place via the EEVEE app. Transparency in charging costs is essential to drive EV adoption. Luckily, electric cars store all this information and drivers just need the right tool to access it such as our app – no extra hardware is needed.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
It started when I bought an EV and discovered the problem that you charge at different locations, be it at home, at work, or at public chargers, but in the end you don’t have an overview of all your charging costs in one place.

So we started looking at different solutions like smart cables, smart charging stations and charging passes, but this posed a hardware problem – you have to buy the hardware in the first place, which is quite expensive, then you have to manage it, and for companies it’s not ideal installing charging stations at employee’s homes which you have to get back when people switch jobs.

We found that it was hard for consumers to track how much they spend on charging and for businesses to reimburse employee’s charging costs for work use, so that’s why we started to develop our own solution.

We found that there’s actually only one place where all your charging data is stored – your car. So we used this data from vehicles to create a holistic overview of your charging costs. It began with an easy-to-use app and later we developed our business solution for companies to manage the charging costs of their fleets and to reimburse employees, as well as a solution for energy companies. Our aim is to accelerate the adoption of EVs to help bring about a zero-emissions future.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
Despite the EEVEE team working from home, it’s been full steam ahead! We devoted a lot of attention to analysing user feedback and are translating that into new features in the app. We look objectively at our product and are constantly improving and refining it to help achieve our goal of building the best EV app in the world.

As you might expect, due to Covid19 we’ve seen that the distance travelled by our users has been reduced as less people are driving, but our user base continues to grow steadily in different countries throughout the world.

We’ve also used this time to take a closer look at our data to further communicate the benefits of EV charging to help the world transition towards a zero emissions future. For example, in the UK we found that Tesla drivers save almost £30 per month in charging costs compared to fuel costs for drivers of petrol cars.
 

What can we hope to see from EEVEE in the future?

 
EEVEE will be given a fresh look with even more insights, smarter features and more transparency into consumption and charging costs (we’re currently working on a beta version of this). In addition, we’ll increase our partnerships with electric vehicle and electric charging companies as well as energy companies.

More broadly though, we’ll continue to move forward on our mission to build a zero-emissions future by accelerating EV adoption through our ecosystem of digital products and services.