How to Launch Your Own EV Charging Network with eDRV

Most of our customers are experts in the field of electric vehicles (EVs). Often, they have had experience carrying out charging installations, and plan to launch their own service to customers in multi-family apartment buildings, commercial businesses or workplaces. We are often asked about how eDRV can help aspiring network operators launch an EV charging business -- here's how.

‍The Problem

Putting together an EV charging network can be daunting even for an installation expert. There are many questions about hardware, software, and user experience that need to be answered. 

• Which electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) hardware to choose?
• Which charging management back office to use?
• How to accept payments from drivers?
• How to ensure good data coverage, and which cellular network plan to choose? 
• How to provide support for drivers who need help with charging?
• How to make the charging stations easy to discover? 

Each of these questions are essential to a local EV charging business. They touch each part of the organization from infrastructure and payments processing, to branding, and interacting with EV driver customers. Once an aspiring network operator has made these decisions, they need to work with a wide range of equipment and service providers to acquire everything necessary to roll out a charging network. 

eDRV recognizes the difficulty of coordinating all of these different pieces as a major pain point for EV charging operators. We’ve simplified the process by providing all the tools an EV charging network operator needs in one place, so they can get started faster, and focus on growing their business. 

Our Solution 

eDRV provides a combination of hardware, charging management, and white-labeling services for our Open Charging Point Protocol based backoffice management platform. As a local network operator, customers can get the eDRV bundle, which includes a customized driver-facing mobile web app, integrated payments infrastructure which settles payments weekly (and supports over 100 currencies), with factory-customized hardware in the brand design of the network. What is more, drivers can go to a website customized for the network (e.g. yournetwork.com), find and select charging stations, view all the necessary information and pay for charging.

The customized hardware arrives pre-configured for the eDRV back-end charging management platform with LTE data connection activated, and tested on each device. Driver support can be set up in minutes through our off-the-shelf integrations with popular messaging and business applications like Intercom, Zendesk, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp and SMS.

Any EV charging installation provider can now launch their own network of EV charging and start earning an income from offering charging services in a matter of days with a single partner, as opposed to having to source everything from around the world over several months.

As we transition to an electrified global transportation system, alleviating pain points like these will encourage more installations by facilitating faster project completion times and giving our customers a competitive edge.

Register now to use eDRV's EV charging network, or contact us now to learn more about us.