A starting point

There was a moment when eMobility finally started to make sense to me.

It clicked when I saw a first picture.
And let it sit for a while.

The picture that helped me orient myself

A driver charges a car at a charging station.

You’ll often see this written as “EV driver” in eMobility. I sometimes wonder why.

We never talked about ICE drivers before. It was just the driver.

I’ll do the same here.

That charging station is operated by the company responsible for building and running it.

This operator uses software to manage the station.

But that software isn’t just there to manage hardware.

It sits between the operator and other systems.

It connects to the companies that face the driver directly.

They provide the app.
The contract.
The ongoing relationship with the customer.

That’s it.

These are the first roles. Nothing more.

Between them, data flows back and forth.

Authorisation.
Status updates.
Meter values.

Each role has a specific responsibility.
Each one looks at the same charging event from a different angle.

A realization that came later

If you’ve been working in eMobility for a while, this picture might feel obvious.

I have to admit: it wasn’t to me at the beginning.

It took me some time to really realize how central the charge point operator’s role is in a charging scenario.

We’ll look at this more closely in later issues.

For now, it’s enough to say that I keep meeting newcomers who describe the exact same blind spot.

And no, the companies facing the driver aren’t irrelevant either.

They are the connecting layer.
The bridge to the customer.

Only much later, after I became more active on platforms like LinkedIn, I started to notice something else. How many other companies are actively trying to get the attention of charge point operators.

Which makes sense.

They build and run charging infrastructure.
And they rely on hardware, software, tools, services, and support from many other market participants.

But I don’t want to go further into that just yet.

Why we stop at version 1.0

This picture is incomplete. And that’s intentional.

There are more roles. More interactions.

Some things happen in sequence. Others happen at the same time.

EV charging isn’t just one flow.
It’s multi-dimensional.

Introducing all of that now would be too much.  And not very helpful.

So we stay with this version 1.0.

We focus on understanding who is involved and which role each one plays in this simplified view.

Where this leads

In the next issues, we’ll slowly extend this picture.

Adding roles.
Adding interactions.

Looking closer at specific moments.

And later, once this flow feels familiar, we’ll zoom out again.

For now, it’s enough to hold this first picture.

Not to analyse it.
Not to extend it.

Just to see it clearly.

We’ll continue from here.

Do you already see yourself in it?