Launch HN: AmpUp (YC W19) – A reservable electric car charging network
This is Tom from ampUp (https://ampup.io/). We're building a reservable electric car charging network out of shared private and home chargers.
As a Nissan Leaf driver without a home charger, charging has been almost a daily headache for me. For many commutes and trips I have to ask myself, should I drive my Leaf, use Uber, take public transit, walk really far, or just not go? This is due to the walk-in-only model of the public charger, which results in unpredictable availability. Worse, public charging is growing at a slower rate than EV adoption, and the range estimators on EVs are no better than a 10-day weather forecast.
I used the Plugshare app and it helped some, particularly the couch surfing style of charging where I arrange a 2 hour slot with some home charger hosts. When it worked well, it took out the unpredictability and therefore anxiety. However, it doesn’t always work well. Many times hosts won’t respond to text/calls to make the booking, and a couple times I forgot to bring cash/check to pay for the electricity as the host indicated.
My first attempt at this problem was building a webapp that worked as an addon to Plugshare where hosts can create a calendar for their charger, and set an hourly price where drivers can pay via credit card. Once that’s set up, the host would paste the unique url to their charger’s calendar in the description section of their Plugshare listing. Long story short, this added as much inconvenience as benefit, and drivers still ended up calling the host.
Given enough interests from hosts and based on experiences of a few drivers including myself, I decided to make a second attempt and just build a better app that focuses on the hosting and reservation flows.
After about 2 months of hustling and grinding, we released ampUp (https://ampup.io/), where users can host multiple chargers at flexible schedules and adjustable prices. Since the hosts set up sharing calendar for their chargers, the other users can make reservations with instantaneous confirmation. We use Stripe to enable peer to peer payment with credit card rather than cash/check. We know EV owners are willing to pay for charging and it’s important for hosts to be able to make a meaningful amount if we want to scale this to match our vision where one day there will always be a reservable charger near where the user is or will be. From our analysis, with a competitive (to public charger) pricing of $3/hr, hosts can expect to make $190-$270/month in profit with just 3 rented hours per day.
For ampUp, our business model is to charge a flat 1 dollar to the driver per reservation. If we use the $3/hr example from earlier, a 3 hour session will cost a total of $10 to add about 60 miles from a residential level 2 charger. This "fuel" cost is on par with the most fuel-efficient gas car which is the Mitsubishi Mirage. These numbers are based on Bay Area electricity and gas costs.
ampUp already has thousands of hosts, but many of them are listings we collected from all over the internet. The difference in the user experience with those hosts is that we have to confirm the reservation with them, as opposed to our own. This is a temporary limitation in the "do things that don't scale" spirit. Our goal is to instantly confirm reservations like Airbnb.
We sincerely invite the HN community’s feedback on our idea and on the app and everything else in this space. You can reach me directly at tom@ampup.io or for info@ampup.io. You can download the app at the top of https://ampup.io/. We hope ampUp will help more people to drive their electric vehicles as effortlessly as driving a gas car!
58 comments
[ 46.8 ms ] story [ 1974 ms ] threadThis also applies to folks who can charge at work. Charge speed does not matter if charging happens while you're inside doing something else for several hours.
OpenEVSE could be a perfect platform for prototyping this. Our hackerspace has one on the wall right now, and we're adding another because so many members drive EVs now.
Most EVs charge at about 3mph from L1, and if you're on-plug for 10 hours overnight, hey, that's longer than a lot of people commute in a day. Might be able to keep your SoC pretty high with that alone.
Of course L1 is too slow to be useful for sharing, but for a resident it often works out quite well.
So far, I haven't needed to go to the fall back option. I charge at a l2 host place near my work, and once a week I go to a fast charger near some restaurant.
$3/hr * 3 hours/day * 30 days = $270. However, this doesn't subtract the cost of electricity to the provider.
My local utility (San Diego Gas & Electric) has a (rather high) standard-rate of $0.51578/kwh in summer (beyond >400% of baseline, which I assume I would hit if I was powering EVs 3 hours every day) [1]. Nissan Leaf's Level 2 charging is 6.6kw [2], so my cost calculation for this service would be:
$0.51578 kwh * 6.6 kw * 3 hours/day * 30 days = $306
So my napkin math says I would lose money ($36/month) providing this service. Am I missing something or would I have to charge more than $3/hour to stay out of the red?
[1] https://www.sdge.com/sites/default/files/regulatory/3-1-19%2...
[2] https://pluginamerica.org/understanding-electric-vehicle-cha...
Most residential EV users will enjoy the reduced overnight rates, but probably not useful for public-service charging which usually takes place during the day when time-of-use electricity rates are at their highest.
[1] https://www.sdge.com/residential/pricing-plans/about-our-pri...
eMotorWerks especially is experimenting with chargers that have wifi + a lot of smarts built into them.
I guess that underscores that the napkin math gets pretty complicated and local use-cases can vary greatly. I'd be very interested in user-focused calculators that could help in guiding these napkin-math decisions the right hourly price to set locally, and/or whether the combo of residential-utility rates and local average public-charging prices makes it worth providing the service at all.
[1] https://www.sdge.com/residential/savings-center/solar-power-...
- I don't have an electric car charger, but my understanding is that the charger is usually located inside a garage, meaning that the host would have to let the driver into the garage/house. If that's the case, what kind of liability insurance would AmpUp provide?
- Does AmpUp provide pricing recommendations for hosts, or provide information on what other hosts on the platform are charging?
- Is there a internal ratings system for hosts/drivers like Lyft/Uber? Otherwise if a host provides a date/time for charging and doesn't show up and it becomes a major logic path, you would have to provide calls/text support anyways.
- Are you concerned about the possible gamification of prices and hosts on the platform, like that of Airbnb's, that may unduly affect pricing or quality of service for customers that would box you into a corner, and are there any game plans developed for tackling such behavior?
Best of luck, and hope to see greater EV adoption because of AmpUp!
Also there is a high chance of pissing neighbors off if you have constant stream of new cars coming into the street, I know me and my neighbors would be, as we have kids playing outside.
It's knowing about all these rates and rebates that's tricky. Dealers should be able to provide you with all this info, but well, that's a whole other story...
The other issue that comes up is that anyone with an older home most likely won't have the electrical infrastructure to support a Level 2 EV charger, either because of the existing wiring or because the home is served by a <100A panel.
So that's why many can't make the investment you take for granted.
Your service effectively makes electric cars equally or more expensive to drive than gas cars. Could work but seems to remove a solid benefit of EVs.
Do you have plans to integrate with public & semi-private CPOs? (charge point operators)
We are a startup CPO. I'm thinking about some of our multi-res customers who installed stations in visitor parking. They have asked us to list their stations publicly so they can recoup their initial costs. Your platform might be a good fit for this.
Let me know if this is interesting!
Talk soon!
Few notes about the website:
Check the meta tags. "title" says "Template" and "description" says "Sample". I tried to share this with my friends and url preview said Template / Sample.
Currently your website title is "Home" it probably should be your apps name.
Good luck.
I'm excited about the concept, because it has the elements of something great. But I'm skeptical about the "sharing economy" approach of renting out time on home chargers. Like others have mentioned, the real problem is affordable, available chargers at the user's residence, rather than trying to make more chargers available in residential neighborhoods.
But the other problem that EV users have, especially users that aren't simple there-and-back commuters, is that they need predictable and dependable charging while away from home.
I own an EV myself, and I can't tell you how many times I've made a trip somewhere during the day, expecting to have a charger available, only to find that they're all taken when I arrive. This is somewhat alleviated by networked chargers, where you can see whether they're available beforehand, but there's been many occasions where the charger is snagged by someone else while I'm driving there. Because of this I'm extremely cautious about driving too far in a given day, and in fact, end up using a regular gasoline car if I know I have to drive beyond the range of my EV, since it's too hard to tell if and when I'll be able to charge along the way.
So where your concept comes in is the ability to reserve chargers. That means I can actually plan my day, plan a road trip, etc. And ideally the chargers will be in the same places I actually want to go - along freeways, in shopping centers, downtown, etc (i.e. not far off in residential areas).
I could definitely see this as a service that could plug into existing networks (e.g. EVGo, Blink, Chargepoint, etc), although getting them all to play nice together is difficult. But I would heartily applaud someone who could organize and simplify EV charging away from home and make it dependable and predictable. Good luck!
I can tell this problem has affected you and you have thought about it deeply. Really appreciate your feedbacks. Overall I agree with you completely. The biggest assumption regarding this startup/project is that the p2p charging market can be build up to a substantial size beyond just one-off emergencies or long road trip cases. This is something some folks doubt and something I'm betting my blood, sweat and tears in. What makes me confident is my own experience. I was FORCED to try the couch surfing type of charging with Plugshare first that I was super skeptical of myself, and LUCKILY my first experience worked really well. I also noticed with just 2 simple features the experience can be mostly consistently good. There are more than 10,000 hosts on Plugshare, and if the experience can be consistently good, it could turn into THE largest charging network in the world. We are not there, but I want to get there.
My 2012 Leaf takes 3 hours to fully charge on a L2 charger, and that gets me 35-40 miles range. $9 for 35-40 miles. My Camaro gets 20 miles to the gallon, it's significantly cheaper to put gas in the 320HP Camaro than pay this kind of rate for charging.
With that exact example of $3/hr, yes it's more expensive to use p2p charging than driving your Camaro. There are hosts that offer cheaper or free charging. The $3/hr is an example based on public charging rate in the Bay Area. Another case is if the host happen to be in a highly visited location and charge $10/hr for charging and parking.
EVs are still overall a bit more expensive than gas cars. That's why there are still subsidies. In the bigger picture, it's still paramount we switch to a cleaner and more sustainable energy source, and electrifying transportation is an inevitable step. I'm confident the technology will mature and will mature fast.