Legal frameworks behind the e-Mobility market discussed by the industry experts.

Experienced content writer with over 4 years of experience in the energy sector and many industry-related publications released.

Gabriela Stawiarska

On June 16th we were lucky enough to have led a webinar in which our guests discussed some of the legal aspects of charging network expansion and business approach towards state legislatures and incentives while entering e-Mobility markets.

Below, you will find a video recording as well as a full transcript of the discussion.

What is the European status of e-mobility, now reaching mid-2021?

Yeah, well, it is an interesting question because it is always hard to really get the latest figures. But I think in general, in the electric mobility part, for this kind of overview, you need to split it into two things. One is how well the electric vehicle car sales are doing. And of course, you can split that also between busses, trucks, passenger cars in general, and the other part is the charging infrastructure. And in general, you can say that currently in the electric vehicle sales, new sales are going very well, I think better than expected. That's also one of the challenges that we face from your side, because, on the charging infrastructure side, everyone is doing their best, but it is hard to catch up with the number of vehicles coming in. So also a lot of new models. That's very good. We didn't see or we don't see any more concrete effects of COVID. We saw that last year. We could also register that amount of charging stations because at a certain moment everyone stayed at work from home. So we should withdraw directly, which was actually quite large, I think 20, 30 percent of the energy usage, the same for the old-fashioned fuel vehicles. I mean, no one needed fuel anymore because everyone worked from home. So there was definitely an effect. But currently, we see in the most recent statistics which show the amount of energy use is getting a bit back to normal. So in general, the progress is good. You still see a lot of differences in different countries. And I think that's one of the European concerns that we have both on electric vehicle sales sites, but also on the charging infrastructure side.

Have you noticed any particular countries that noted a boost when it comes to the growth of the e-Mobility market within this year?

We see that. Most of the time, there are almost the most obvious countries. I mean, Norway, of course, is one of the leading countries, especially in electric vehicles. When it comes to the electric vehicles infrastructure, you see that the Netherlands is leading. But we definitely see that countries like Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, are really doing great. Also, Germany and France are doing very well. On the lower side, we see that the numbers are not great when we look at countries like Greece, Czech Republic. But also, to be honest, Poland is not yet really on the move. So there are definitely countries that could take advantage of their current situation and what happened before the COVID period. But the good thing is, I think that I see from the European Union, the European Commission, that now they will really focus on the countries that are lagging behind a bit. So from that point of view, it's definitely positive that the movement is going on.


When it comes to you, EU directives, what updates can be expected during the next few months or next year?

OK, so we should start with the Green New Deal, which was issued on May 27th. Recent year.. It is a long-term recovery strategy because everyone, especially in Europe, but also in the whole world, was harmed and touched by the crisis caused by the COVID outbreak. So, the Commission prepared and issued this green new deal. First of all, the biggest today’s goal for Europe is to become a climate-neutral continent by the end of 2050. European Commission and European Parliament are performing many activities to achieve this target. European Commission will announce new legislative proposals in the coming year. And many of them will, of course, target e-mobility with special concern. That includes the benefits for the EV users, Charge Point Operators, and more restrictions, which can and will lead to automotive concerns and developers.

It can also be seen in the current legislation in both European and member states legislation. When it comes to regulations, we must say that in the field of electromobility and related sectors, there are plenty of examples of new, recent, and upcoming legislation. The most important one, that's happening now, is so-called the Clean Energy Package, which includes a set of updated and ongoing regulations, especially a review of the European Union taxonomy system and the Performance of Buildings Directive, which especially touches developers, renewable energy directive and the market design directive and regulation on energy efficiency. Maybe I will provide you with some more detailed information about those directives and regulations so everyone will have a little bit more knowledge about what's going on and what changes in the near future will occur. First of all, the European Union taxonomies climate is changing and it's a classification system that consists and establishes a list of environmentally sustainable economic activities. It’s a very important system because it's enabled to scale up sustainable investments and help to implement this European green deal. And a new and recent classification consists of some provisions which open and enable operators to provide financing for the companies, to entities which really, really need this financing to make some sustainable investments.

Another very important directive, which is currently changing and shaping is the Energy Efficiency Directive. It's an old directive because; it dates back to 2009, when the main reason to appoint was to reduce CO2 emission from new vehicles. The last version was passed by the parliament in 2013, and these regulations required lowering CO2 emission from new cars in 2013 to be lower by 37,5%. For 2021 protection will also be high - 41%. So in the nearest, eight, nine years this reduction will take like one-third of the emission, which is now. In June 2021, the European Commission will present a proposal to revise these targets and raise them, but they will need the support of the European Parliament because the European Parliament, as you know, is now very much in favor of ambitious climate targets. In the current term because it was said that up to 2015, we will have no emissions system in the European Union. And it's very interesting how the member states today react to this directive, because some of the member states are very clear in the favor of the rapid decarbonization of road transport, especially in Norway, but not only. There was a filed, joint open letter to the European Commission, which demands ban of the registration of combustion vehicles up to 2030. And this letter was prepared by a group of nine member states: Austria, Belgium and Denmark and Greece, Netherlands, Malta, Ireland, Lithuania and Luxembourg. So we may assume that the states declare that. Nevertheless, even if the European Commission wants to ban this registration of combustion engines, they will probably do that and perform some measures and activities to ban this registration.

Even if in this group there is no Germany but the experience so far shows that Germany will also play a key role in the European Council because they are very cautious about raising the bar for vehicle facturers., We may see a direct course from a Volkswagen Group - a largest car manufacturer in Europe, and it may mean the Germany will finally stop acting as a brake and will support a more ambitious policy to reduce the emission.

There is also a Renewable Energy Directive. And today, it must be stated that a majority of European Union member countries have not incentivized the use of electricity as, for instance, bio fuels, even despite that, obviously, electricity is the cleanest alternative to oil and it's even cleaner than biofuels.

This directive was refreshed and offers a chance to move away from the biofuels and to cleaner fuels. This creation of this credit system would, and I believe will help in increasing the rise of renewable fuels, since this electricity requires a separate infrastructure to be introduced to the market and everyone needs financing to implement that. It is important that the deadline for transposition of this directive in the member countries expires in June 2021. So this is happening now.

There is also energy performance of the buildings directive, which obligates new buildings and the buildings undergoing major renovations to either install charging stations or assure the installation of ducting infrastructure in parking spaces. So it also helps the growth of electric mobility.

Last but not least - in December 2010, 20 European Union proposed the revision of the directive to set the highest standards in the world for the  acquisitions of raw materials from which batteries come and the recycling of batteries, especially car ones. And it will help us have the whole Europe to be self-sufficient too, because right now we have a little problem with getting and exporting, importing lithium, cobalt Netco, which are required for battery production. And by 2014,, battery production will be mainly obtained from the recycled European batteries. So it's a huge boost finally to end this topic, referring to the legislation which committed to European Union climate neutrality by 2050. The European Commission proposed to increase the 2030 greenhouse gas reduction target to 55%. These kind of activities are very crucial for the growth of electro mobility, and I believe that will help us to have a cleaner planet.

In my opinion, there are two important things like Pawel said. All you have to do is legislation in which you are definitely focused on stimulation and support of electric mobility, like similar legislation regarding buildings, parking. Those requirements will definitely show several issues and ensure that you have the right, i.e. to get a charging infrastructure, a parking garages, etc. for buildings that it should be. On the other side, we see influence, which will come from the revised Alternative Fuel Directive. That will come in 2023 and actually the whole market is busy with that. The good thing is from one point of view, that it will be more strict in a way that the first alternative fuel directive, they gave too much room for the different implementations. This will be more strict. The kinds of sites that I see is that if the changes are too big, it will also not support all the new infrastructure which is needed. I mean, currently we talk about approximately 150 000 new charging points that need to be installed every year to meet targets. So we talk about 3000 chargers per week at least to meet the targets. So I hope the whole market, especially with its alternative fuel directive, contains a lot of different aspects like Pawel said, this is this very wide subject legislation. But I hope that it will be more strict that we are also part of that fight for your own foundation, but also in all kinds of ways that it will indeed help the market. But it's definitely one of the things to keep an eye on, the developments which are going on there.

When it comes to network fees and network development, can we witness something that could be called the road to unification?

We have a lot of different networks across Europe and then there is indeed a challenge. One of them is indeed based on the fees because you have different ways you make use of roaming hooks, you can do with peer to peer. You need to connect an operator with service providers to ensure that the service providers get access to the networks and finally, to the EV drivers. There are all kinds of arrangements there, to be honest, I don't expect many regulations on the fees. And I do hope and do currently already see that because of the competition, the fees will not be raised extremely. But it is a complicated market. From that point of view, unification will be done. But I don't expect it directly on the fees because finally, that is also up to the market. As an EV driver, you have the choice to choose your own insurance provider, a service provider, you have the choice to choose the different operators. But of course, it's a big market with a lot of money involved where companies make choices. So I do see that the next networks connect to each other. But in the concrete fees that you need to pay, for example, to roaming or to a service provider or the service provider to an operator, I don't expect there will be much of a registration from the EU site.

It would be good and that's maybe an interesting view that if the consumer authorities would keep an eye on it. There are in all countries and also by the EU, there are authorities to look at to assure honest competition. And I think that's an important role. But in my opinion, that role is not yet taken or not yet managed. I think it would be good to have those types of organizations more proactive in this, because there are definitely threats. I mean, if we look at the current developments via the car industry, like I'm using the 15118 ISO protocol, which is a possibility that via your car, you can directly connect to networks. In itself, it's not a bad development. But if it would exclude certain service providers or other parts of the market, then you get an issue. And I know that from their point of view, I don't think that the fees need to be regulated, but I hope that the authorities will keep an eye on it and assure that an open, valid or equal competition landscape will be there. And that's actually what could help in this

From the point of view of operators and the Union, what regulations can soon arise?

Yeah, well, I think regarding the operator, some mean the biggest regulations that also Pawel mentioned earlier, tax regulations are definitely a hot topic which will influence them, which was actually also rare for a long time. We were not really involved in this. I think at this moment, countries unite there and talk more or less with one vote or work together on that. The alternative fuel directive, which we have, which will have impact. We work together with a lot of companies and the Sustainable Transport Forum, where the EU is thinking about the legislation, about short term data formats, those kinds of things. So there are things which will definitely have an impact on the operator and which might also influence the way that they work. I mean, if I currently see, for example, that you need to offer outlook charging. So that means the ability to charge without subscription cards, those kinds of activities or activities will have an influence. There is another movement where you see that companies, or rather countries, will demand certain displays or certain information that need to be shared with EV drivers. Well, that's quite often it's either shared directly or via the service providers.

So there are a lot of things which are coming to the operators which will influence their work. We all need to catch up with the legislation, but also with improved and updated protocols and connections. So, yeah, I expect a lot of developments there. And I'm not sure if everything will directly be an improvement, because also to be able to say for a long time we as markets did not have maybe the right the right focus. And then you see that the EU, for example, takes the lead and says, well, we need to share data via national exit points. It simply requires that all operators need to open their network and share all the public SMI public infrastructure information towards our national exit point. And so you see these kinds of movements going on and that will have impacts on the way operators work.

It's another wide problem and wide question. I think I will come out with one very important regulation, which I believe will soon arise. First of all, it must be stated that the regulations which regard EV charging infrastructure and mobility, must respond to the real problems which are faced currently by EV owners and CPO’s and eMSP’s and among other areas of law. I believe that especially crucial and urgent for the development of the European single market for EV charging infrastructure may be considered to the VAT directive, particularly when it comes to cross-border transactions to e-roaming. And the industry is currently confronted with very uncertainties regarding the correct interpretation of European Union, especially VAT directive and national VAT laws. Furthermore, the existing VAT regime has turned out to be a major obstacle to the development of this integrated European trudging infrastructure market, because currently there is a big issue that EV charging can be seen either as a supplier of the goods, especially electricity, or as a supplier of service in terms of VAT. This distinction is very important because the VAT directive and after that national VAT rules for six different rules for supplies of goods and supplies of services when it comes to the determination of the place where the transaction is taxable.

Of course, there are some guidelines which were issued by the European Commission in 2019 on the subject that were issued on the request of Italy and France. However, they are not transported to directive or a national law. Now, according to these guidelines, CPO should be regarded (when it comes to e-roaming) as a supplier of electricity in the meaning of this VAT directive. From the point of view of European Union Commission e-roaming (CPO) is making a supply of electricity to the eMSP, who in turn makes the supply of the same electricity to the EV driver. However, it's only the view of European Commission. It's not a hard law. Some member states don't comply with the statement. And we are having issues where it is. It is regarded as supply of services, performing services, and it's a big problem for the unification of the market. And I believe that VAT committee, which is making a new VAT directive, it should be and now is scheduled to reconvene the opinion of the commission and today will decide in this directive, either commission's guidelines are right and they will be transferred into the directive and then all the member states will and must comply with this directive. However, now there are no binding guidelines, no binding regulations, and we are having big trouble with this. This problem regarding that and its complexity led to a situation where most industry members are reluctant to offer charging services to other member states. It's a big issue and I believe it will be changed in the coming years.


When it comes to open network across Europe, what is an optimistic and realistic scenario of forming this one bit in European Union?

I'm actually quite optimistic. I mean, I want to be optimistic. But I think we are not there yet. Let me be clear about that. We are working very hard and that means the whole market: the whole ecosystem, the companies but also the governments. We are all working very hard to achieve and to support an open, better network with the right information to EV drivers, but also possibility for competition, possibility to earn money, connectivity. So that’s the combination actually that we talk about here. There are things that need to improve and that we need to solve but we are working on that. If I look at where we are now and the fact that in the past I needed eight or more different cards and tokens to charge my vehicle across Europe - now, I can do it with two.So it is definitely improving. Networks are more connected to each other. They talk to each other in different standardization bodies. Also regarding the legislation, they definitely work together more and more. By the way, and I also think that's an important actor, which was quite often forgotten, but now we work together with those organizations, which are the communities of EV drivers. Finally, that's the group we do it for. We see that we really work together there. So I'm positive that in the next year or so, together with the EU, I mean, we all talk to each other. I think that's a big achievement - we don't talk about each other, but with each other. And that's a different level. So, the only thing I hope for and it’s a bit of a concern is that not only the main countries, so not only Netherlands, France or Germany, but also the other countries. I mean, it would be great if countries like Poland, like Czech Republic, etc. could also catch up and join and participate. And I know that from the EU also with their self funding mechanisms, they focus now on those countries to support the network. So they really look at the gaps where infrastructure is not yet good enough or where more needs are to be added. That way we can really ensure that it will be a real covering network and not only from a few countries. But again, I mean, we have huge targets. We have huge challenges. The biggest challenge might be the ability to install enough charging infrastructure. I mean, don't underestimate it. If you need to install a few thousand chargers per week in countries, it's going to be a real challenge. But we’ll get there. The next step for us is looking at busses, trucks or vans that are definitely the next important things, which will also have a huge impact on the charging infrastructure.

I totally agree. I believe that we are at a great point. We are after the biggest outbreaks of pandemic. We did it. We managed to survive. We are growing. There are more and more EV users on the European streets. So I believe the worst part is behind us. I believe everything is in our hands. I also believe that the goals we have are very demanding. They demand appointing a set of regulations and targets of member states, companies, consumers in the right direction. But I believe the commission, especially European Parliament is doing a great job in adopting common standards. The standards ensure the interoperability and coordination and support for the member states and the deployment and development of electrical charging infrastructure and while this targeting infrastructure grows. Also, the number of EVs on the European streets will also grow. So I believe we did a very good job and we are on the right pathway to reach these goals. Moreover, in the near future, we may expect some new solutions and regulations which will open this electromobility market, in a world of tokens and cryptocurrencies. And I'm glad to announce that at this point Nexity, together with a partner from our Capital Group - Columbus Energy, we are introducing to the market a solution which enables the tokenization of electricity from renewable energy sources; photovoltaic. It enables its balancing and also its further resell, not only to the neighbors, but also to every interested entity, as well as the purchase of the services of companies from our capital group. So, ladies and gentlemen, I believe the future is now and we are on the right path for this.

Where to look for legal guidance when deciding to enter a new market?

 I can tell you about it in my own example, because we are expanding to other markets. And first of all, we are searching contacts with associations, which conduct and care for electromobility in other countries. We are reaching out to them, contacting them and talking with them. Very often such associations provide us with different bulletins, guidelines for starting, growing and expanding in the foreign market. So I think and I believe that's a good way to go.

Now, I agree that definitely industry bodies or organizations or branch organizations are a good starting point. I also have to admit that this is definitely one of the challenges because it is hard to find single places where you can find all the information, all regulations and legislation. Partially, it is EU regulation. Also, a lot of things like the tech issues are not even solved yet, but we got a lot of questions about it. But there are a lot of discussions going on and you can't wait to start until everything is solved and there is national legislation and regulations. And then you also have the non-directed or the non-legislation parts which are simply the agreements between parties. So what Pawel is saying is definitely good to start with organizations like EV Roaming Foundation or other organizations. Finally, if you go to a certain country and try to get in touch with those countries and do good research on it. Also legislation and these kinds of things change on a regular basis. I mean, especially if we look at all kinds of incentives, it is very hard to keep track of all that. So, you need to do it also on a national level and investigate the possibilities. Unfortunately, I can't say there is one website where you can find all the information. There are good websites. I mean, look at the European Alternative Fuel Observatory, which can definitely be a good starting point. Still you need to look on national level and also maybe on the EU level to find the lost situation.


When creating a pan-European MSP offer, do companies need to create legal structures into every country that they offer access to the charging station in order to manage VAT requirements?

Oh, it's a little bit of a hard question to answer from the top of my head, and I believe we could provide a proper answer after checking and reading some interpretations in this regard. But I believe that the proper answer is that it depends mainly on the place of the taxation. And then I believe you don't need to meet any additional entities in the foreign country to provide your services. However, it is difficult to answer because of this VAT problem, which I mentioned earlier. And in every country, it must be checked if the roaming and roaming services are considered, services or are they considered goods. And I believe in the near future we may check the legislation in the different countries and provide you with some information on our blog.

There was the advice from a group of countries which was also something as guidance adopted by the U.S. on regulations, so to look at it as selling energy as a good but recently, Italy sent a big report with the question to reconsider it and to consider selling electricity for charging stations as a service. That can depend a lot on how you deal with that. The same as Pawel was saying, where do you deliver the energy? That's also a discussion. I mean, an operator in Poland active in Germany, where does he deliver the energy? So that's another discussion. In general what I normally advise, is that at the moment you get considerable volume, reasonable volume. The question is then what's reasonable? Having your own or legal company in a certain country can never harm when the volume is still small. It's probably too much effort, but it is a delicate discussion as Pawel was saying. Your options are waiting until the EU agrees, but then you can't do business for the next two years.

Are any directives being made that you are aware of, that will regulate the exception right for roaming partners throughout the EU? Small EMSPs are getting less chances to roam with large operators, which slows the development down.

It's a bit of an open market and I know where the question comes from because I also hear those issues and I see it. But it is a bit of a challenge. Do you also want it to be EU regulated? It's a bit of what I mentioned. I think that we have the authorities in the different countries who should definitely keep a good eye on honest and open competition and the possibilities for that. But if a certain operator is asking a large high fee to an EMSP and it can indeed be that bit maybe blocking or may be making it more difficult to enter the market for that EMSP. But there can be good reasons. I mean, if volumes are low, then it is not really strange to ask for a higher fee but these are difficult discussions. Almost on a daily or weekly basis I get those questions: can you do something about it? It is hard to do, and I think, do you want to get the EU to say “well, now we put a certain cap on it”. I mean, what's reasonable? You always get those kinds of discussions. Maybe Pawel will know something about it from a legal perspective. But we do stimulate the companies to be reasonable to each other and I think maybe branch organizations can play a role that the companies that are members of those organizations assure a kind of equal playing field. So that if you are a member, then you need to comply or apply to do all those business. I know where the question comes from, but it is hard, it's the market…

Do most member states consider electricity as a good or as a service? Are there any visible trends?

The only thing I can say, if companies are interested there is from the EU committee open information available. And that's the only thing I can say and you will see that as Pawel was saying, they also don't agree yet, but that information is available and can be shared.

To summarize, there are those guidelines from the European Commission from 2018, according to which the supply of electricity supply is regarded as supply of goods. However, there are a few member states where it is considered a service. But I believe mostly it is considered to supply imports. But it's only a trend. Now we need to have VAT directive changes, which I believe will come out in the next few years.

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Ebook - The Growing concept of e-Mobility

Replay and transcript of eMobility Open Standards webinar.

Being an eMobility leader in various projects across multiple startups, Piotr was responsible for OCPI and OCPP integration as well as EMP and CPO platforms development. With extensive expertise in the open standards field and eMobility tech solutions, he is leading teams of experienced developers and contributing with invaluable knowledge and experience.

Piotr Majcher

Krzysztof is our Head of Products and he leads the technical development behind the suite of our ready-made solutions. Throughout the years in Solidstudio, he gained an invaluable insight into the eMobilty industry’s requirements and is now more than qualified to share his knowledge with others.

Krzysztof Ciombor

On October 14th Piotr Majcher and Krzysztof Ciombor led a webinar in which they discussed open standards applied in emobility. Below you can find a video recording of the presented use case, and a transcript for those of you who prefer the written form.

Unlocking eMobility platform using Open Standards - video:

Unlocking eMobility platform using open standards - transcript:

 Hello and welcome to our meeting about the emobility. We'd like to talk today about unlocking the eMobility platform using open standards. OK. Two important things worth sharing before we start. The first one is, as you can see in the topic, we'd like to talk today about 

, but not only. We'd like to also mention different approaches to unlock mobility platform, which are, for instance, OICP by Hubject. And other different protocols allowing to do the same, but in a different way. And the second important thing, we would like to show you, is that we are going to talk about the use case. It's not going to be a theoretical presentation. We would like to show you a step by step description of how we unlock mobility platform using open standards. Let me just quickly go through the agenda. We'll start from the short introduction and just off ahead, we'll go through the description of how we open eMobility platform using the open standards. We'll start from the initial state of the project. That was the point when we decided to introduce open standards to the platform. Then we'll go a bit deeper into technical details. We will describe the transition process and at the end of that part, we will tell you a bit about the challenges and risks. The last part of the presentation is about the results. So, actually what we achieved by opening the platform using open standards. I'm Piotr Majcher and I am a CTO and co-founder of Solidstudio. Three years ago, I and my partner decided to stop working as consultants and we started a software house.

 Now, apart from being IT experts, we are also focused on the EV market, especially in the field of the integration between different components and different partners in that market. Here with me is Krzysztof Ciombor. Krzysztof, can you say a few words about you?

 Yes. Hello, everyone. I am Krzysztof. I've been working with Solidstudio for almost two years now. I am the lead developer in eMobility project. I was primarily a backend developer specializing in JVM technologies and I particularly love the Kotlin programming language

 Thanks Krzysztof. Just let me add a few more things about us. So, why do we share these insights? We have been cooperating with one of the European EV leaders for two years and we have experience in developing both sides of this market. So we were responsible for delivering features normally recognized as something delivered by eMobility service provider. But we are also responsible for the development of the charge point operating platform, and we were involved in the integration between the partners using both approaches. So we were using open standards like OCPI standards and OICP, but we are also using custom APIs.

I'd like to show you a few numbers about the EV market now and in the future. I'd like to focus only on the first number. As you can see here, in 2018 in the UK, almost two percent of all cars sold were electric. I've seen quite hot Twitter news a few days ago that in Norway last month, more than half of the cars sold were electric. I think it proves that the movement of introducing electricity into transport is 

. And there's no question ‘if we should do that’, but ‘how should we do that effectively?’. Before we go to the technical description of our journey from closed to open platform...

 ...let’s talk a bit about the benefits of open standards. I'd like to start with the question. So the first benefit is business model optimization. The question I'd like to ask you is ‘what limits you and your company when making a decision about the integration with partners?’ We have a technical background, but we are working with sales and other business teams.

So how does it work? Normally, the ideas about integration with the partner are brought by the sales reps to the company. They have ideas, because they see some potential benefits from integrating with network parties. But before making the decision about integration, they have to know the time needed to deliver that. They have to somehow involve the delivery team, and in general, integrations with other partners are time-consuming tasks, because we have to remember about two things. If we are integrating with another company using a custom API, we are synchronizing two things. We are synchronizing models and we are synchronizing work of two teams working in a separate organization.

When it comes to the model, we know that the same things can be molded in a different way. For instance, one CPO (Charging Point Operator) may use only sockets and that's enough for their business. But another company may use a much more sophisticated model of charging infrastructure. They may use location, charge points, maybe electric vehicle supply equipment, connectors. And when we are doing the connection between those two different boards, we need to establish some common language. So we have to synchronize our models to be able to talk to each other. And the second point is synchronizing two teams and it's always challenging, even inside one company. My experience says that integrating using custom APIs is a matter of months, not weeks or days. The business knows the answer and that is let's assume three months. That starts during the calculation because they need to compare possible benefits coming from the integration of the partner with the cost of the delivery of such integration. And we just realized that in some cases, business decisions are driven by the cost of technical, by the cost of the delivery of the integration. That's, of course, not good.

Now, imagine a different scenario. Imagine that business doesn't have to ask tech teams about the estimation because they already know that integration with the partners normally takes four days. And for instance, there are some cases when no code has to be changed because everything is done on the platform. Such flexibility to our business can be brought by introducing open standards. The second point, our OCPs are also very important. And the point is our users. We believe that no matter what we are doing, so if you are the CPO, ESP (eMobility Service Provider), or as we are Solidstudio, a software house, users are the central point of our business. It's because scaling in most cases means that more and more users can benefit from our services.

So I’d like to start again from the question, what can make our users' life easier? According to the surveys, users are still worried about not having enough access to efficient charging stations. This is recognized as one of the most serious barriers to purchase EVs. Imagine that the user of the platform, which is not integrated with many partners, is somehow locked to the infrastructure provided. We can compare that to the situation of traditional cars. In order to buy gasoline, you are forced to look for the petrol station of the partner that you have a contract signed with. That's, of course, not a user-friendly approach. But by introducing open standards and by integrating more and more partners, with a quick integration, we can change that. And we can open as a CPO, our charge points to be used by any user on the market. And on the other hand, from the ESP perspective, we can allow our user to charge at any charge point. That brings us to that next point, which is, I believe, a long term goal for the whole market, so it's building a real European charge point network.

I think that the current state of the charge point network in the world can be compared to what we saw in the early years of electricity. There were a lot of small power plants and they produced energy without any kind of standards. Now we have one single grid in Europe and the end-user is not even aware of all those technical details under the hood. Any device can be plugged in and in any place in Europe and it just works. On the other hand, multiple power plants are also connected to the same grid. We can build the same type of experience by introducing more and more operators and mobility service providers into the same network.

I think that we can conclude the introduction now. And now we'd like to dip a bit deeper into the transitional process.

Initial state of the project - scattered, custom-made API

 Thank you very much, Piotr. OK, now we'll talk a little bit more about the technical details, starting with the initial state of the project, which we had a couple of years ago. And it was actually the point where we started to wonder if we can do better. We had many custom-made APIs exposed specifically to the partners that we were integrating with. And it quickly became apparent that this solution is not going to work for the future and it's not going to be maintainable. So let's start with the initial state of the project. As I said, we had multiple custom-made APIs. Those APIs were very limited in the scope of the data that we were exposing. Those APIs were only capable of exposing basic static data out to charge points, which means including the location data, for example.

But it definitely did not support full e-raming flow. And moreover, there were no real-time updates. So whenever a partner wanted to have the current state of the charge points, for example, they had to do it in a polling fashion, which is, of course, not very efficient. Also, we had multiple different APIs exposed to our partners. And as I said, this solution was not very scalable.

Main challenge with this approach was that we had to implement monitoring in multiple places in order to make sure that our APIs work correctly. We also wanted to have those APIs secured. But since we had contractual obligations different in the set up with every partner, we had to have multiple different security mechanisms in place, and we had to test every one of them independently to make sure it worked correctly

Finally, as I already mentioned, the maintainability was not so high, because any change done to our system would then need to be propagated and updated in every single one of those APIs. So, as you can imagine, this leads to an exponential explosion of the cases that we need to cover.

We need to make sure that we test them and we are exposing the correct things in production. And the biggest issue with that approach was also something that we already mentioned from a business perspective. Since we did not have the opportunity to create new integrations in short time This leads to scaling problems because we are only limited to a single user group, which are actually the users that have contracts signed directly with us. As, for example, CPO, use our touchpoints. And we can not extend this to a larger group of people that will be able to use our charge points.

So let's briefly talk about the transformation process and how we applied those changes from a technical perspective.

The transformation process itself is relatively simple. We first decided on the open standards that we want to use and then implemented the simple use case to confirm that the standard is really suited for our needs and we can actually implement it correctly. Then we added successive modules to enrich the API and exposed new functionalities. And finally, we achieved this huge milestone, which is the full e-roaming functionality.

This allows us to open our charged points to more external users and more external integrations. And this is like the full e-roaming functionality is beneficial for both the MSP (Mobility Service Providers) because the MSPs want to attract more users by having more access to more charging networks. This approach is also very attractive for CPOs because we want to increase the utilization of our charge points, and if we are exposing them to a much larger user base, and this means that the utilization will eventually grow, and our charge points will be used more and more. And finally, we can apply the testing and monitoring staff directly to these open standards and have centralized in one place.

As you probably are aware and you have probably seen this picture many times before, there are basically four open standards available on the current market. Of course, for the purpose of this presentation, we are focused mostly on the CPO and MSP connection, which may or may not include the clearinghouse in between. In this area, we have basically four open protocols which are widely used across Europe. This includes the OICP protocol, the Open Intercharge Protocol, which is a proprietary protocol, developed by Hubject, we have the OCPI, which is actually a peer to peer protocol, but it also can be used in a peer to hub fashion and this is currently maintained by the EV Roaming Foundation (previously, it was maintained by a Dutch company). We have the eMIP, the eMobility Interoperation Protocol, which is a kind of proprietary protocol developed by a GIREVE platform. They are a French market player and it also is a hub connection to their platform. And finally, we have the OCHP protocol. Again, to a clearing house and is maintained by the e-Clearing Net Foundation.

So even though those protocols are very similar to the functionalities they expose, like every single one of them allows you to do, the basic authorization exposes the charge information, has a possibility to get information about the session and CDR, and finally, support for e-roaming info. We still need to decide which bridge protocol suits our use cases the best. Having selected the protocol, we can continue with the step by step implementation.

It's important to realize that most of those protocols and in particular OCPI protocol allows us to do the integration step by step. What I mean by that is that OCPI protocol exposes so-called modules which can be implemented basically independently, and that allows us to start with a very simple use case. Then out successive modules along the way for the simple use case, we selected POI data sharing. This, even though it comes with the initial spike in the development effort, because we need to, for example, implement the credentials module in order to perform the full handshake flow.

After completing that once for the first partner, we can basically reuse the implementation for any successive integration with any new partner. And POI data is only about a single module, which in OCPIs the locations module. And in our OICP for Hubject, we can use EVSE data exchange in order to achieve basically the same result. So even though this process is simple, we can already see after completing that, we can already see the benefits, because we can expose to POI data, which can then be used, for example, for display purposes on external partner modules.

Having done that, as I said, we can continue with our successive model implementation along with the new requirements that come from new integrated partners and for this purpose. We can then start, for example, sharing the CDR if a partner is interested in that and finally complete the e-roaming milestone, which for OCPI I would include command sessions and CDR module and remote start-stop session for Hubject OICP protocol. By doing that, we can already start switching existing partners and deprecating the legacy integrations in favor of using open standards. This allows us to successfully remove those custom made APIs and centralize everything within this one open protocol. But that's not the end. We can push it even further and include additional modules like, for example, tariffs, token and charging profiles to improve this platform even more and expose more functionalities to our users.

OK, let's talk about the challenges or risk factors that we encountered along the way and explain what are the main problems and what you should be aware of? OK, so first of all, this is a brief overview of the challenges we encountered. The situation may be different for your company, but in general, we believe that those are accurate representations of everything that everyone is trying to use open platform struggles with. This includes actually a standard selection, many internal processes and data models to the open standards, applying some modifications and extensions to the standard, migrating to a newer version. And finally, the necessity of supporting multiple open standards and open standard versions.

First of all, accurate standards, selection, as we described. There are multiple standards available on the market. So it's important to realize which standard you should implement. This is, of course, dictated by two factors. If we want to achieve wide market coverage, we should probably support the standards which are used by most of the players on the market. But it quickly turned out that this is actually difficult to find out. And it may come only from experience or by, for example, being a member of this larger EV market or EV platform. For example, the EV Roaming Foundation, if you are a member, they may have some data about that. This is particularly important for OCPI where the latest version is 2.2, the 3.0 is in progress, but actually, the most used one is still the 2.1.1 Version.

Selecting the appropriate variant is also important,if you want to apply additional features that are needed for your company, like, for example, supporting the charging profiles and thus enabling the smart charging because this is available only in OCPI 2.2 and it's actually not supported in previous versions. So depending on the use cases in your company, you may want to implement a different standard.

When it comes to matching internal processes and data models to the standard, it comes in two ways.

So first of all, as we already mentioned, you for your purposes internally may model the data differently and the OCPI or OICP or any other open standard requires you to do so. That may need additional transformation/mapping layers in between your internal data models and the open protocol itself. So even though this representation you may already have in your system, in order to fulfill the open standards requirements, you will probably need to remap them to comply with the schema, when it comes to the process adjustments. This is particularly important for the CPI protocol, where this protocol is bi-directional. That means that it supports both a push and pull source. This is not usually the case for developing rest APIs.

For example, where it is mainly about getting the data and there is no active push. However, by doing the bi-directional communication, we achieve real-time updates where we can immediately push, for example, the EVs status change to our partners. And thus they can, for example, show it to the user if a charge point is available or not. I also want to mention the data quality, and this is a part of the processes adjustments since we want to ensure the best experience for both our integrations and our partners, but also for our users.

We want to make sure that the data we're exposing is actually of high quality, which includes, for example, checking the location data, if it's accurate, checking the street name, if correct, et cetera. So some partners are already doing that on their side. For instance, Gireve has their own team, which handles data quality. But for some integration, it is up to you to make sure that the data you're exposing is of high quality.

When it comes to standard modifications and extensions, this is again driven by both sides. It can be driven by us or it can be driven by our partner. What we mean by driven by us is that sometimes we actually want to expose more data than the standard provides. Imagine a case where you as a CPO have a platform for gathering telemetry data from a charge point, and you want to share it with telemetry data with your partner. But there is no property for doing that inside the open standards. If there is an agreement between you and your partner, you can proceed with extending the protocol and thus exposing more data for this particular integration. This is very useful in some cases, but the modification itself can be also driven by our partner, which is a very prominent case in OCPI 2.1.1 where there is actually a slight gap in the standard itself. Basically, there is no property to properly connect CDR to a session. So some partners are forcing you to adjust the standard and again. For Gireve for example, they introduced their own property called authorization idea, which they're using for these purposes. But it means that you will need to adopt the standard on your side and comply with those requirements if you want to integrate with Gireve when it comes to new standard migration.

So, as we already mentioned, the OCPI 2.1.1. version is the most widely used and adopted version on the market. Both version 2.2 Introduces some major changes, which, for example, enabled the smart charging, so you may be tempted to do the upgrade to the latest version. But this also needs to be coordinated properly with the partner you want to integrate with. And it's not always so simple.

Finally, we want to mention that there will be at least for the next couple of years it will be necessary to support several open standards for two reasons. The first reason is that those standards are constantly evolving and they serve different purposes. So if you want to integrate, for example, with Hubject you are basically forced to use OICP protocol. But the other reason would be to enable more peer to peer integrations. You would want to go with OCPI, but the reality for the next couple of years is probably that we either end up with this status quo where we need to have our support for multiple standards.

There are a couple of predictions that it may happen that there will be some kind of unification of the standards, and that will be one open standard. It's up to discussion whether or not this is a probable scenario. But if not, and if the open standards are there on the market, we may need to support them for the future.

So to conclude this section, we want to compare this current status with the status that we had before. So all of the issues we had previously are now solved. For monitoring, we have a single centralized place where we can monitor our APIs and make sure that we are not doing anything wrong. For security, it's not only about a single entry point but also about the unified mechanism where previously every single API of ours could be secured using a different mechanism like basic authorization. Some API can use authorization talk and now they're all forced to use the authorization mechanism provided by the standard. And finally, maintainability. And it should be pretty obvious any change applied directly in our system, can be updated only in one place and propagated to all our partners. It also includes easier testing because we can use some open-source testing tools. We can use interoperability tools to confirm that our APIs are working. Finally, there are also some events called plugfests where everybody gathers and tests their integrations all together to make sure that everything works. If everyone is speaking the same language, which is in our case the open protocol, they can communicate seamlessly and confirm that their APIs are working correctly.

 Thank you Krzysztof for taking us on a journey of opening the platform, using open protocols. I'm sure that this type of information would be very useful before someone decides to introduce open protocols onto their platform.

This is actually the last thing we'd like to share with you, and these are the results of what we did. And we needed four months in order to introduce OCPI into the charge point operation platform. And after that, we were asked by the business ‘How long does it take to integrate the next partner?’ and we estimated the effort to several days. It was about four days. It means that we reduce effort to integrate a partner by 95 percent.

I think that does answer the question that I asked you when we started, how to make our business not limited by the technology. Thank you. That's the end of our presentation and we still have the space for the questions. So if you have any questions, please, use the chart on the right side, and we will do our best to answer.

OK, so you see the first question from Chris. Could you briefly describe some main differences between, OICP and OCPI. How about the cost effectiveness of OCPI? Is it worth a shot? I think this is a question for Krzysztof

 Sure, I can try to explain. So the main difference between OICP and OCPI would be the connection type because OICP's strictly pure to hub connection and Hubject in this example. Where the OCPI is an open protocol which allows both peer to peer and peer to hub connection. Now, in terms of the properties that are exchanged through those protocols, the OCPI is actually more flexible and includes more data. This is especially important, for example, for the German market, where we need to have the signed meter values included in the standard for Eichrech conformity, which is a German specific case, but it's still needed for the open protocols when it comes to the cost effectiveness.

This is rather a question of what is your use case and how you want to integrate with the partner. If you can do a peer to peer connection and this suits you best, it's probably good to try the OCPI. But if you want to integrate the subject, there's no other way. And to use the OICP.

 Thank you Krzysztof. And I hope that answered the question. Here we have another question from Michael. Do you operate on your own network or do you support other networks in those integrations? Solidstudio is a software house and we are supporting our partners, who are looking for technical support. So we have an 

 so we know how to do that, but we don't have ours as a Solidstudio, we don't have our own network. Please let me know if that answers your question.

And we can go to another one from Adam. Question: What is the adoption of OCPI among EV charger manufacturers or suppliers? As Krzysztof mentioned, in order to know such details, we would have to be the member of some bigger organization, some organization that connects similar companies. We know that those four open standards that were presented are widely used, and we have an experience that since we introduced that OCPI into the company, we already have a few other partners that are willing to use that. We also have one partner that used our custom API and now is willing to switch. So I only can say that the adoption is quite, quite big, but I can't give you an exact number.

OK. And the next question: in your opinion, what are the missing features you would like to see in the future of OCPI versions?

 So first of all, I think the standard is relatively good for the cases that we are apparently trying to do, considering the whole EV market. But for the future, they would definitely need to be supported for the upcoming things like the new ISO 15118 standard, which is about the plug and charge functionality, which basically means that you can skip the whole authorization process because the car itself will be authorized within the charge point. So I would like to see OCPI supporting that, maybe not for the features of the OCPI, but I would really like to have a well-defined testing suit and maybe some testing plasma for OCPI because from our perspective, especially, the handshake flow is pretty tweaking OCPI and a lot of people make a lot of mistakes there. It would be nice to have it improved for future integration.

 Thank you Krzysztof. That was the last question we have for now. Let's wait five minutes more. And we have another question, from the US? Some are saying there are problems with PKI governance. Can you please discuss the role of PKI in OCPI?

So by PKI, I mean Private Key Infrastructure. So it's not included, at least in the version 2.1.1 OCPI defines the shape of the data that are replaced by their partners. So it's rather the definition of the in short, JSON's that they're sent from one partner to another and also defines something else. OK, so the concern is with the PKI in OCPP. Well, OCPI, but you know, OCPP. So OCPP is a bit above what is the scope of our webinar. So we are talking about the integration. OK. Sorry for interrupting, but I'm getting more and more information from Michael. So the first question was for the PKI in the context of OCPI, but it's in the OCPP. So is there a similar concept OCPP. OK.

 I would try to clarify that. I already mentioned that while telling you about differences between OCPI and OICP in version 2.2, we do have support for signed meter values which can be used to exchange those authorization data, and also assigned data through the OCPI protocol. As I mentioned, this is required for German conformity. But is still up to our partners to decide on the standard of the encryption and the key exchange, but it's technically supported in OCPI 2.2 but as far as I know, there are plans to improve these OCPI 3.0. I hope that answers your question.

 Thank you, Krzysztof for the support. OK. So if there are no questions. Please feel free to reach us out using our emails. If you have any questions regarding our presentation or in general if you'd like. If you are looking for support in those topics that we presented, do not hesitate to contact us. Thank you very much again for your time for being with us here. And see you next time, hopefully in the next webinar by Solidstudio.

Replay and transcript of eMobility Open Standards webinar. Click to learn more.

Unlocking eMobility platform using Open Standards - #OCPI use case

Challenges & opportunities for EV charging network development

After founding Solidstudio, Pawel was an originator in terms of pursuing expertise in eMobility. With the build-up of a solid knowledge-base on industry’s needs & wants, he now keeps a close eye on products’ development. He’s also hugely responsible for the business’ side and designs the business models for our products.

Paweł Małkowiak

Electric vehicles, much like any other industry, came a long way. With first-ever electricity-powered automobiles constructed back in 1830 all the way to Tesla becoming a global giant, the EV market noted a revolutionary headway. Despite the major milestone, the e-mobility industry still faces challenges that may not be overcome for yet another solid bit of time. Insofar as the transportation industry can be easily dubbed as one of the most advanced, the e-mobility sector itself has still a lot of work to put in, mostly in terms of infrastructure. As much as developing long-range EVs with rechargeable batteries is quite a task to get grips with, charging network is what really holds back the mass adoption worldwide. Although, seemingly perceivable as a straightforward action of intensifying large-scale installations of EV charging points across the nations, the issue is a lot more multi-dimensional. Namely, a few solid charging-oriented companies which are ready to manufacture and install charging stations is not enough. Behind the mass adoption, there are many interconnected elements, such as: governmental support through the implementation of various pro-electric policies and incentives i.e. in the form of tax reductions, progressive software development allowing for more user-friendly operation of charging stations, infrastructural changes backed up by local authorities, or simply extending people’s knowledge and awareness about environmental degradation the combustion engines cause and many more.

It goes without saying that developing a global network that would allow EV users to seamlessly travel from one place to another takes a large amount of workload and time. Even though there is still plenty of work ahead some major milestones and discoveries are already taking place.

In this article we want to give some insights into the EV network’s development and its current state around the world.

It wouldn’t be an in-depth discernment if we didn’t start off with elaborating a bit on the types of charging stations. Three main ones can be distinguished:

 being the fastest way to charge an EV, these stations are usually located along motorways and close to main roads. They come in handy en route especially during lengthy rides. Depending on the car’s brand, the capacity of such charges can reach even an 80% charge within 20-30 minutes while at 50+kW.

possibly most common ones, usually installed in business districts, offices, major car parks and urban areas where it’s usual to leave the car for approximately an hour. Their charging capacity oscillates at 1-2hour when at 22kW (most popular one).

known for being the most commonly used as home-chargers, rated up to 3kW. They are typically used for overnight charging, but occasionally found in offices where employees can charge their vehicle while at work. They take between 6-10h to fully charge the car.

It must be noted that we can differentiate more subtypes, especially when it comes to rapid chargers. With charging being one of the main focuses of the entire industry, brands keep on developing highly-efficient and very fast stations. That includes: UltraRapid DC which provides power at 100kW or Tesla’s Supercharger that can charge up to 150kW.

In the big game of charging stations it is most likely that the e-mobility future will be dominated by slow and fast charging stations due to their convenience and low-cost electricity. Although, it doesn’t change the fact that rapid chargers are the ones which will eventually alleviate the range-anxiety and might be the most prominent way of charging for branches such as taxis or buses.

Electric vehicles infrastructure doesn’t fail to ever grow and evolve. Yet, it’s somehow fallen into a vicious cycle of “there will be more charging stations when people buy more electric vehicles” vs “people will buy more electric vehicles when there are more available charging stations”.

Nevertheless, despite such unanswerable nuances, the infrastructure has been doing well in recent years. According to the most recent numerical data, as of 2019, there were 7.3 million chargers worldwide (6.5 million of which - private; light-duty vehicle slow chargers in homes, multi-dwelling buildings and workplaces). In terms of public charging points, which hold the 12% share in the overall number, it’s been noted that their amount increased up to 60% year on year. This figure exceeded even the electric light-duty vehicle stock growth. Such impressive expansion naturally has a lot to do with various policies advocating EV’s adoption.

Although the figures look very promising, there is one particular drawback and that is the distribution of ownership across the globe. Nearly 61% of all private-owned charging stations are located in two countries only. It must be noted that these are some major countries with large numbers of citizens, but still, it shows well how EV charging networks are falling behind in some areas of the globe.

The leadership of the pack stays with China, which holds top performance in almost all EV-related rankings. In terms of private charging points, the figures are as follows:

Publicly accessible charging stations are spread very similarly. With slight distinction for the Netherlands, which has 8% share of public chargers. Public charging points accounted for 12% of global light-duty vehicle chargers.

In terms of fast charging stations, China left no room for competitors, with a whooping 81% share.

This data clearly shows that a vast majority of charging networks is located within some specific areas, leaving the rest far behind. The superiority of China is dictated by various reasons. For instance, the popularity of fast charging stations in China is powered by the high demand due to its very dense urban areas as well as the impressive figures behind how many public service means of transport (i.e. buses) are in fact electric there. In other countries (mostly in EU top EV performers: Netherlands, Germany, UK, Sweden) the increased demand for electric vehicles has been fueled by heavy governmental incentivization. In the USA, Tesla played a huge role in shaping the drive for green cars.

Impact of Covid-19 on e-mobility progress

Pandemic outbreak is taking its toll on nearly every industry and so e-mobility also took a hit. Luckily, not a critical one. Coronavirus has rubbed the EV network the wrong way in two fields mostly. Firstly, it slowed down the manufacturing and development as many factories halted production and closed up for some time (same goes with batteries/chargers firms). Secondly, observable changes in traffic volume impacted the amount of cars on the roads, especially in big cities where the number of people working from home was the highest. Later, when in some of such areas, lockdown policies were being gradually loosened up, other restrictions were put forward limiting public transport capacities, simultaneously increasing the traffic and creating a difficult environment for EVs. This creates a space for local authorities to step in and take actions advocating for electric automobiles.

While touching upon potential challenges and opportunities for the industry, one must differentiate between the areas where e-mobility is doing well and those where it’s practically non-existent.

In the first instance, naturally a lot more opportunities emerge. With EV charging networks already greatly developed (China urban areas, Norway, California), electric vehicles on the streets are no longer a surprise. Namely, people are willing to purchase such means of transport, simply knowing that it will bring no difficulties in terms of usage and daily commute. This also drives the demand for ever-evolving development and implementation of new, more technologically advanced findings. Such an environment poses great opportunities for local entrepreneurs and companies. According to an old, well-known rule - where there's demand, there’s supply - business owners are not afraid to invest in the e-mobility market, knowing they will find partners and clients. This creates a self-fueled setting for a healthy competition followed up by constant development in charging infrastructure. It must also be noticed that certain areas, where e-Mobility plays a major role within the transportation industry, are doing so well due to significant incentivization by governments. Subsequently, local authorities, seeing their actions have a valid reflection on reality, are more likely to implement yet another facilities for EV industry, such as financial subsidies for companies who aim to broaden the EV charging network.

The situation looks drastically different in areas where EV charging network is limited to none. The focus there needs to be entirely on encouraging to start building any EV infrastructure in the first place. Again, here is where local authorities should come in with as many incentives and programs as possible in order to trigger interest in e-mobility investment. Without it being widely advocated and advertised, the likelihood of entrepreneurs reaching out to fund such investments is relatively low. As we all know, the first steps are the hardest, that way it certainly will take some time until favorable conditions arise. With that being said, the biggest challenge would be to engage local authorities, public transport managers and local companies to start implementing e-mobility solutions.

EV charging network is one multi-dimensional and complex topic. Its distribution across the globe remains uneven and dependent on numerous factors. In some parts of the world, electric vehicles have come a way long enough to freely say that the most prominent milestones have been already reached and it’s only now a matter of development. Other countries are in their infacies and still have lots of work to put forward. Nevertheless, the future generally looks bright for EVs and the entire industry is excited of what’s yet to come.

A revolutionary road to the next big step progressing EV charging network development. What's next?

EV charging network - where to go next?

Research data, latest achievements, and statistics on e-mobility development

Research explanation of e-Mobility as a Service

Before the digital revolution and user-centric approach, the concept of accessible, new forms of transportation was the future vision of what life could be like. With the rapid growth of technology, mobile devices, enhanced battery capacities, wide Internet connection, investments in new unexplored forms of service delivery, and quick social adaptation in the last ten years we have witnessed a great transformation.

Raising enthusiasm boosted consumption and proved that rapid adaptation is possible and widely accepted. New economic models have begun to take into account sharing concepts and value the tangible benefits of such solutions. In a sharing economy, not used assets such as parked cars and extra bedrooms can be rented out. We transferred from owning to renting. And this concept widely approved first by Uber users moved to other transport areas offering new possibilities. In the Alternative Journal article, 

 , Ray Tumulty (2014) the sharing economy is described as a clearly urban phenomenon. To achieve economies of scale for shared economy services satisfactory population density is required. Moreover, these services are seen as an extra option, not a replacement for traditional sectors. Ridesharing is used along with public transportation in cities.

With the growing success of rented items and services, new forms of transportation options come to the market. The mobility concept grew to form a comprehensive ecosystem offering numerous moving variants, such as city bikes, electric scooters, car rides, ticket purchasing options, city traffic monitoring, planning the most convenient route, parking options, integrated payments, and available charging options for ‘e’ users. All available in real-time from the mobile app on one’s phone. This progress developed the term 

 , which covers a wide range of mobility services available on the market, and its integral part becomes a shared economy providing extra value for participants.

On a high-level, the MaaS ecosystem includes transport infrastructure, transportation services, transport information, and payment services. Within the ecosystem, the common objective is the delivery of a seamless mobility experience and transportation network improvement by utilizing the benefits of each service - public and private. Besides, other participants such as local authorities or data administration companies can collaborate to smooth the operation of the services and improve their profitability.

One of the MaaS ecosystem examples was presented by the Siemens Mobility Division in 2016 for Tampere City, Finland. The ecosystem is build of 4 main elements: service providers; a business-to-business (B2B) platform; mobility retailers; and the users. The intention of the project was to unite the existing and upcoming transport services with the operations of the local paratransit services.

A similar approach on a high level was presented by König project ‘Mobility As A Service for Linking Europe’. Four different levels define the public and regulatory level, the transport and logistics service providers level, the mobility service level, and the end-user level. On the basis of similar concepts and definitions, a framework for Mobility as a service was developed.

From a business perspective, MaaS is described by Kamargianni and Matyas in the paper ‘The Business Ecosystem of Mobility-as-a-Service’[1](2017) as ‘the wider network of enterprises that influences how a dominant company, in this case, the MaaS provider, creates and capture value’.

To support theoretical premises on shared mobility, a survey conducted by McKinsey&Company (2017) provides some insight into the consumer’s opinion on ride-hailing and car-sharing. Respondents were asked how their usage of ride-hailing and car-sharing services will change within the next two years. In both cases, over 60% responded that it will increase or increase significantly. Shared mobility is mostly favored in urban areas, but seems to be less attractive for running errands or multi-stop shopping trips.

We are an integral part of the next global transformation, where alternative fuels and green energy takes charge. The concept explained above has been extended with ‘e’ - a possibility to travel in an eco-friendly way, where ‘e’ stands for electric solutions.

Electric Mobility as a service combines Mobility as a Service (MaaS), Electric Mobility Systems (EMS), and Shared Electric Mobility Services (SEMS) [2]. As a concept eMaaS operates upon MaaS, where the last one became one of the complementary components. With that defined, all MaaS participants become, as a consequence, eMaaS attendees. Providing they offer electric mobility solutions.

Electric Mobility System (EMS) covers technologies (batteries, charging technologies, drivetrains, and EVs), infrastructure (physical and organizational of charging stations, electricity grid, information and communication technology), and users (manufacturers, suppliers, end-users, service providers, governments, and agents).

Shared Electric Mobility Services’ (SEMS) applies to a new economy implementation, where instead of ownership there is an on-a-need basis share connected by the technology with users and providers. SEMS replies to the environmental, social, financial, and transportation-related benefits that had already been correlated to emobility and shared mobility practice connecting both. Five business approaches are proposed:

Membership-based (e.g. e-bike sharing, e-car sharing, e-ridesharing, e-ride hailing, e-scooter sharing, e-bus sharing),

Peer-to-Peer(e.g. e-car sharing, e-bike sharing, e-scooter sharing),

Non-membership-based (e.g. e-car rental, elimousine rental),

For-hire (e.g. e-car/bike/scooter sharing, e-ridesharing e-carpooling),

Mass transit systems (e.g. e-Public Transport, airport autonomous shuttles).

As a part of a wider concept, combined with two other components MaaS & EMS, together provides multiple eco-friendly transportation possibilities. Successful implementation of such a concept requires multi-level support, well-designed system architecture, and an extensive network in public structures.

The user-centric approach will always be foreground. It applies to the development of the widely recognized concept of e-mobility as a service. From accessible payment methods for single ticket purchasing, subscriptions, to well-developed charging networks and various means of transport access. At each stage of the proposition should be declared value.

We are still in the early stages of what could be called e-Mobility as a service. Most customer journeys are under development, and achieving overall flow is still in its infancy. There is a lot of research to be done, but there is room for the general necessary approaches. Each of the participants, in order to achieve success and remain successful in this growing market, should remember the needs and behavior of the end-customers - have in mind that ½ users are likely to bail on service or purchase because of a single bad experience.

One of the success factors will be easy, integrated payments, giving preferable plan or demand models.

Plan option: Participants pay a monthly fee befitted to their transportation needs. Such plans can be split into an urban commuter, family, business, and casual. They include all public transport options as well as taxi, rideshare, carshare, etc, to cover individual needs.

Pay on-demand alternative: Paid as traveled with the difference that the payment is for the whole trip in one go independent of transport means. So if in need to take the train, bus, and then taxi on one trip, it’s all included in one, joint payment, executed automatically via smartphone.

Technology changed the way people consume goods and services. With handy devices, ¾ of consumers expect the service within five minutes from the initial contact. The same share wants ‘the simple experience’. From all players, customers expect immediate action, personalization, and convenience. This requires a broader view focusing on journeys, not only touchpoints, which will become a framework for further expansion.

When it comes to user preferences, whether it applies to simple app development or complex system design, it’s been always about developing a complete value proposition that answers the needs of the user and delivers a convenient solution. With a unique experience, trust, and the right technology that supports EV drivers, e-mobility participants can succeed.

E-mobility revolution driven by technology

The entire development of various e-mobility solutions is powered by rapid smartphone penetration. Since the handy device gives us access to countless possibilities, the way people consume goods and services changed. As a matter of fact, smartphones enable and will be a core factor for rapid growth in eMaaS concepts and Smart City solutions. Among the technologies being developed electric cars, route optimization resolutions, car-to-car communication will change the way we commute itself.

In search of efficiency, communication will become a smart blend of technology, infrastructure, and users. Electromobility and autonomous driving development are considered to be the catalyst for changes taking place in urban consumption. E-mobility secures eco-friendly and efficient vehicles on the roads. E-driving became globally a high priority. Climate change, oil shortage (Statistical Review of World Energy 2017 estimates that the world’s currently known oil reserves will last +/- 50 years given current levels of consumption), and air pollution brought forward the development of green solutions. As long as the power is received from renewable sources e-cars and hybrids represent the most efficient and environmentally friendly ways of driving.

Core components of business and technology are connectivity solutions, integrating components, user interface, infrastructure development, battery technology, driving software and product design, high accuracy maps, secure solutions, data storage and processing, between-vehicle communication. Well-developed services build upon a user-centric approach, providing integrated, smart, handy assistance.

According to a survey conducted by Otonomo [3] among the citizens of European countries, most car owners think that manufacturers collect their data for product improvement or development, advertising, segmentation driver types, and learning more about habits, reliability, usage, or preventative maintenance.

Consumers declare that they would love to have access to data generated by their cars. Three-quarters of survey respondents showed an interest in receiving data held by OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) more than twice a month and nearly 50% of respondents would love to receive data frequently (even up to once a day).

Additional information consumers would love to receive are car alerting about dangerous conditions ahead (72%), early necessary maintenance and repairs detection (59%), car knowing the traffic and suggesting an alternative route (59%), an app that allows deliveries to be made to your car’s trunk (51%), car suggesting nearby, available parking (48%) and software that allows having fuel delivered (46%). So, not only drivers do not mind gathering information but also would appreciate receiving feedback and insights.

One of the widely appreciated models by the 2 billion consumer segment is car sharing [4]. Generation Y (born between 1977 and 1994) desires connectivity and convenience. Having numerous transportation options Millennials are more likely to choose on-demand services instead of ownership. New mobility service providers connect seamlessly drivers with passengers (carpooling, taxi) or passengers to cars (car-sharing).

The latter one, powered by technology and finest logistics, offers great value for one-way trips, as well as planned round-routes. Without bearing the cost and effort of car ownership Millennials can get a unique feeling of driving. The sharing economy provides favorite conditions with a blend of technology and service without exhausting the possibilities. Car sharing leads in big cities where scale effect is easy to achieve by, among other things, cost reduction and lifestyle changes. To confirm this, in 2019 Global Car Sharing market value was 2.5B USD (Global Growth Trends) and is expected to grow up to 9B USD globally in the next 6 years.

Car sharing quickly became outstanding among other mobility services thanks to a wide range of business models applied, offering different experiences and pricing systems. One of the success factors is the flexibility provided with usage areas and distances to be traveled. On the basis of a well-known car rental model, three concepts were developed: 

free-floating, stationary, and peer-to-peer car sharing

. The latter business model, where individuals can offer their car rental to private users via a platform, successfully conquered the French market. P2P offers long-distance transportation mode for longer routes and became an alternative for short-term rental or carpooling.

Allows to pick up the vehicle and return anywhere within a certain area, operates mostly in the city centers, usually providing smaller cars, in cooperation with local authorities providing dedicated parking spaces. When it comes to car sharing in a free-floating model, many providers see the investment as a strategic step, as a new promotional channel, and direct access to customers’ insights.

Free-floating business model success factors are:

location (high density to reach the scale),

cooperation with local authorities or private sector (e.g. in Poland IKEA offered dedicated parking spaces for Traficar as a part of yet another transport service), and

convenience (the majority of the fleet consists of city driving cars).

E.g. In France free-floating cars, according to a study by Les Échos newspaper, represent 26% of carsharing vehicles. Among these, 44% are electric. Free-floating electric car-sharing in Paris emerged in late 2018 with the following launches of Free2Move, Car2Go, and Zity. Over 1,400 electric vehicles were deployed across the French capital by these companies.

What is interesting, on the basis of free-floating, other urban transportations are offered, such as electric scooters, city bikes, e-bikes, and mopeds.

The oldest model with the start and endpoint at the same station, dedicated to round routes. With different needs, the lack of flexibility is being replaced with a wide fleet variety. Stationary car providers usually operate in smaller cities and rural regions. What is interesting, they do not operate globally (with one exception Flinkster by Deutsche Bahn Rent). Success is linked to extensive local market knowledge and customers' needs understanding. They often rely on other providers' cooperation, creating broader networks offering free-floating alike experience on a long-distance driving.

Key success factors in this oldest, but nourished with fine technology, are:

location in medium-sized cities and rural areas

availability (often located by the airports or train stations)

pricing based on hourly rates or distance

wide fleet selection for various purposes

Some global players see the opportunity in free-floating, e.g. in 2011 as a joint venture of BMW and Sixt established DriveNow, other invest in stationary car sharing, e.g. Volkswagen by investing took over 60% of Greenwheels in 2013.

In February 2020, Daimler AG and BMW announced yet another car-sharing services partnership under a new brand, 

 . By merging Car2Go and DriveNow, 'ShareNow’ became a market leader, being present in 20 European cities with a fleet of over 20 000 vehicles. ShareNow actually is a mix of both concepts mentioned - a combination of stationary car-sharing and free-floating. Various paths of car sharing are being tested, thanks to a broad range of possibilities offered by technology. In October 2020, Toyota launched its new car-sharing service to provide a wide range of mobility services for short-term use on the Japanese market. Based on these few examples we can only expect new services to be tested and developed. Combining traditional concepts with modern technologies may soon influence consumer behavior, look at certain aspects of e-mobility as well as create new businesses. Hence, the theoretical aspects of emobility presented earlier reflect the real changes.

P2P seems to be a niche market, is the only concept where private individuals offer their own vehicles. The exchange takes place via a dedicated platform, offering insurance and telematic equipment to provide smooth access. The car must be returned the same day within the pick-up area and used for round trips. The pricing provides a great alternative to car rentals or stationary car sharing. A decentralized fleet offers a wide range of brands and models.

Being called a niche, drivy initially operated in the French market, quickly converted to 

 , and operates now in the UK, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Belgium, and the USA. Undoubtedly, the P2P car-sharing success happened due to most favored factors among consumers, similar to Airbnb, unique value combined with technology resulting in a great alternative to other, more traditional services. A prime technology - the platform and telematics ease the use. Thanks to one of the shared economy principles, P2P car sharing offers a diverse, accessible network, quickly spreading to new markets, providing value to each participant. Moreover, the P2P concept getaround is empowered by well-designed insurance policies to cover lending concerns.

The increasing traffic congestion in urban districts doubled with overloaded public transport facilities is boosting the car-sharing market revenue. The emergence of electric vehicles in public areas will be accelerating in order to reduce gas emissions. Attracted by extra benefits, such as incentives, 

 , parking spaces in exclusive, centered areas, providers will enhance the electric cars fleet.

Although the concept of car sharing is enthusiastically acclaimed this doesn’t mean that ‘ownership’ will go into a niche. Today’s consumer profile on the EV market is evolving from early adopters to mass adoption. According to a survey conducted by Accenture [5] in 2019 in China, Europe, and the US, respondents declared that they expect to own a car in the future. When asked if they would resign from possessing in favor of services, nearly 50% would consider giving up ownership in favor of integrated mobility services. What is more interesting in Europe, 55% of premium car owners and 41% of non-premium owners are more likely to switch.

One more factor may place a sharing idea further afield. A 

 conducted in June 2020 by cars.com showed that 70% of respondents declared the coronavirus has led to a reduction in commuting, and 49% reported their commute has been greatly reduced or become nonexistent. 58% who previously commuted via a public vehicle - carpool, taxi, ride-share, or bus - 44% of them said they’ve had a reduced the need, and 15% reported having no need to commute. 38% stated they usually rely on a bus to commute to work, 42% declared they’re riding less and 15% said they aren’t riding the bus at all. More than 55% of respondents actively consider buying or leasing a car, and 7% actually acquired a vehicle due to the pandemic. What is more, the pandemic became a reason to consider buying a car for 20% of respondents. The decisions were strictly dictated by the concerns about public transportation and the sanitation of ride-sharing vehicles.

EV charging infrastructure: cross-border directives and state legislations

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