Gregg: 00:08

Welcome to the new episode of Take It EV. Greg Jaskiewicz and with me, I got Joel. Joel, introduce yourself. Tell us what you're doing currently, and then we can take it from there.

Joel: 00:18

Okay. Yeah. I'm Joel Tighe. I'm the founder of Cocharger, a community charging platform. And that's been my life for five years now.

Joel: 00:28

Wow. Which is quite surprising, and the imposter syndrome continue.

Gregg: 00:32

What made you decide to fund this company or or or or is it a company? Is it a business?

Joel: 00:38

Yep. Yep. Both. It's I'm I'm sort of a a a why person, if you like. There are people who are obsessed with how and the what, and I've I've always been white.

Joel: 00:46

And and I I think it came from my previous career as as a programmer project manager, mainly an IT. And I worked at the Met office for

Gregg: 00:57

about five years, which was a fantastic place to work. It's funny how the

Joel: 01:00

only place in the world that doesn't appreciate just how brilliant the Met Office is. It is the place where it's located. And working with climate scientists who don't alter things down, That that that puts a different spin on urgency of things like decarbonisation. But it also gave me a real schooling in the importance of people in solutions and how, if you wait for the perfect solution, you, you sometimes need a thousand ways,

Gregg: 01:31

Yeah. To

Joel: 01:32

combine, to, to solve something. And, and that's what they do. And if people realise just how much goes on in that building in Exeter and around the world. Yeah. We appreciate that place a lot more.

Joel: 01:41

There's someone at 600 PhDs that they're doing things that we can't even fathom. I just learned to nod and as if I could keep up with conversations. But, yeah, that that it was a a brilliant place. And then, you know, I I was also a car nut. I've had six Jaguars now and all sorts of very sinful cars, and I used to convert them to RPG and run those.

Joel: 02:03

And then a neighbor showed off his, I think it was a little Renault Zoe back when there was the first tiny one. They did a whole 80 miles, you know, and and he challenged me to, I think it off the mark. It it was quicker and smoother and quieter than my Daimler. And so I bought one. And it it arrived with at the time I had a driveway, I live in a flat now, and, it has arrived with a note saying, your your home charge will be another six weeks.

Joel: 02:29

So I had a car I couldn't drive. And back then, there was I think there was one public charging location in Exeter Seven miles away, and it hadn't worked for eighteen months. So I had a car I couldn't use. The solution was to blame my neighbor because I'm nice like that. And the no.

Joel: 02:44

The arrangement was I was I was working I was commuting to Exeter on a Tuesday night. I would, stop on my way home and stick a £5 note through his door because that's all it cost when the battery was tiny, and plug into his charger and walk home. And then on Wednesday morning, I'd walk and pick up the car and drive to work. And it worked, sort of, most of the time, and it started to grate because he'd forget or I'd forget, and, or five pound was too little or five pounds was too much. And we realized you need an app for that.

Joel: 03:12

And something like seven years later, you know, we've we've got the second biggest EV charging network in Britain is basically people with private chargers sharing them with their neighbors. And we're gonna be the first soon. Shell, we're coming for you.

Gregg: 03:30

When I got my first EV, I didn't have a home charger, so I had to rely on public charging. This was in London, so, obviously, different situation. But I remember commuting a couple times in the past to to one of my clients in Leatherhead in a 30 kilowatt hour leave, you know, limited range. Sometimes I like to put it you know, put my foot down and have a bit of fun. And if you do that too much, then you, you know, you still realize you you need some more juice.

Gregg: 03:55

And I remember asking people I I would basically go on a walk along the lunch lunch break, and I asked people, can I can I use your charger? And the first person who I asked, he said, I'd rather you didn't. And I was like, uh-oh. So I didn't ask anybody because I thought and and my thought was like, wouldn't it be great if I could just, like, find local people in an app? Because, you know, I'm not original I'm not English, so I'm happy to ask random strangers.

Gregg: 04:21

Right? Politely, obviously. But if they're all gonna be saying I'd rather not, then maybe not.

Joel: 04:26

And and you know you've just illustrated the point of one of the reasons you need the app is we we don't particularly encourage one off use because there is that psychological thing of meeting a person

Gregg: 04:37

Yeah.

Joel: 04:38

And negotiating. And that you need an app, really, to take the take the bits out that the English are bad at, particularly. Not just to make people aware. Obviously, we've got this sort of proximity pings that go on to tell each other, you know, tell users, oh, there's a new host in your area. That sort of thing is all done.

Joel: 04:54

But the important thing is it just takes all the awkward out. Yeah. But it only really works when it's an ongoing relationship, and target user hasn't got an EV yet. And I think that's what we have to I think the industry forgets sometimes. We we obsess about EV drivers.

Joel: 05:10

EV drivers aren't the problem. We're not burning anything. Let's look at the guy who's about to buy a petrol car. What will it take to stop them buying the petrol car? And the answer is a dependable, affordable, convenient way to charge while they've stopped.

Joel: 05:23

Yeah. So either at work or at home. So that they're, you know, the mobile phone model. You know, if if you tried to launch mobile phones now and said but you've got to once a week take it to a place and pay £8 and stay with it for two hours while it charges. None of us would even have a Nokia, you know.

Joel: 05:39

So it's it's that thing of let's empathize with the guy that matters, which is the one who's about to buy a petrol car. And and that means where's the obvious break in this? Public charging is essential. Nobody wants an EV without really good infrastructure. And I would say we, we get that.

Joel: 05:55

We've got that now. We're doing well. It's come on so well.

Gregg: 05:58

Oh yeah. Compared to like, you know, eight years ago.

Joel: 06:00

Even two years ago. And you go on zap map now, zap map now. It's crazy. Yeah. Really good.

Joel: 06:06

I can't remember the last time I waited for a charger or had a problem with yeah. It just works. But the only reason I am interested in using that public charger is that I had a base charging option, which is or was a home charger. It's now a co charger. I live in a flat.

Joel: 06:21

And I think that we failed to empathize with that and say, look. Is that person now we're into mainstream. We've the the early adopters have bought them. You you're a classic example. You were very brave and went electric without a home charger.

Joel: 06:34

We're not normal. Joe Public, you know, he's got other things to worry about. You know? So you got someone who's sitting there and they're they're already misinformed. They're nervous about making a switch.

Joel: 06:45

Are they really going to buy a car that, in my case, I'd never had a new car before. I think the youngest car I'd ever had was six or seven years old. It's a big leap. So doing that and saying, yeah, once a week or so you're gonna have to drive around and try and find a public charge point, which may cost more than petrol, and you're gonna have to sit with the car for two hours or more. And what we've seen year after year after year, despite the public charging network getting better and better better and better is they buy a petrol car.

Joel: 07:14

Yeah. And it hasn't really moved the needle.

Gregg: 07:17

Or a hybrid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there there's so many people that are people that I heard saying, oh, you know, I bought a PHEV, but I drive on electric all the time, and I just I don't wanna murder them personally because I'm like, why didn't you buy electric then?

Gregg: 07:33

You've just proven Yeah. That you're wrong.

Joel: 07:36

Yeah. I had I had a friend who bought one of those. They're very good Mitsubishi thefts. Worked everywhere for a while. Yeah.

Joel: 07:42

And bless him, he bought it, and he had to pay to have the petrol pump pumped out. Petrol tank pumped out because it went off. And I said, well, I did tell you, you're never gonna use it. You don't need. So yeah, it it is frustrating.

Joel: 07:54

To be honest, I have mixed feelings on FeVs. If they're the gateway drug then fair enough. Yeah. If all it does is create friends like people like my friend Andy who then just bought an EV. If that's what it takes, that's what it takes.

Joel: 08:07

I have different feelings about other types of hybrid. This, the Not a fan.

Gregg: 08:12

Yeah. Let's not go there.

Joel: 08:14

Let's not go there. But then, yeah, I used to work for

Gregg: 08:16

Self charging cars and all.

Joel: 08:17

Yeah. I I have worked for the company most guilty for purveying certain phrases that we all hate. I'm not surprised they did it. They weren't my favorite. Yeah.

Joel: 08:29

So moving on from them because, you're yeah. I think I think that the industry is now starting to realize, especially with the ZEV mandate, you cannot hit the targets, the objectives that we have to hit if you're excluding half the population. And half the population, give or take, for one reason or another, can't have a home charger, or is very unlikely to make it work. We have to start empathizing with the half. Yeah.

Joel: 08:56

It's a million people who would have bought a petrol car otherwise. Or would have bought a Electric car. Electric car otherwise. And we're ignoring them, you know, and we keep saying, oh, just use public chargers. No.

Joel: 09:07

They're not using, but how many years do we have to see the needle not move? Yeah. Before we realize, yeah, there are better options. There are other options and what we're trying to do now as a group, the near home charging group of companies, Us and Charge Ferry and the Gully people and the Gantry people and there's lots of options. And also residential charging.

Joel: 09:27

Yeah. It's public charging, but, you know, you're you're connected curves and you're there's streetlight people. We need to move the narrative. The response to someone who says I can't have a home charger needs to be moving off this dismissive thing of just use public charging too. Oh, yeah.

Joel: 09:44

There's loads of ways of doing it.

Gregg: 09:45

Yeah. There's there's so many solutions. What is your actual, you know, use case? So Yeah. So go but going back to so you you were sticking Fiverr through somebody's door.

Gregg: 09:53

Right? Your neighbor's door. Because, obviously, it was his fault that you got a bev. Fair enough.

Joel: 09:56

Yeah. I'm nice like that. Yeah.

Gregg: 09:59

Obviously, there's been a a giant leap from that to getting the to find finding a company and actually, you know, writing it up and Yeah. And all that. So what what is the rest of the story? Like, tell us the story.

Joel: 10:11

It's one of endurance, to be honest. Because at the beginning, you know, I I what I'm saying now wasn't as clear to us back then. Yeah. And I I got other people involved, an old boss of mine who worked in automotive and, you know, I got good people together. And we tried to understand the behavioral patterns and so on.

Joel: 10:31

And I think one that we we looked into an app that was just about charge point sharing. Plugshare had been doing that for something like fifteen years. Yeah. Yeah. Not a lot happens on it.

Joel: 10:42

No. And then we realized one one of the founding principles of Cocharger was be the best at one thing that matters. And helping EV drivers with an alternative to a public charger when they're on a wasteland doesn't help the environment one job. It's also not very practical to use a home charger. It's not very good economically for the host who might, you know, because the first time someone shares your charger is the time you probably go down to meet them.

Joel: 11:10

It's the first time you have to think about directions, which way around to put the car, how to use charge point, all that sort of thing. That's only worth it if they're coming back next week and the week after and week after. So we we tried that and it it was a little bit like trying to run a company and an app that was renting houses both for holidays and residential. Pick a lane. They are totally different use cases for different types of people.

Joel: 11:36

For a start, one is for EV owners and the other one is want to wanna be EV owners. Yeah. So we've very much doubled down on let's move the environmental needle. Let's help people not to buy petrol cars, and that means let's give them the best alternative to a home charger they can possibly have. And the best way to do that is there's about a million already.

Joel: 11:55

There's a million private chargers out there with under 5% utilization, And each one of them has got an on-site customer service rep, and each one of them is probably in a residential area. So isn't the answer obvious? You know, let's just do that, and all we have to do is make it easy. We have to get, like you say, get past the English thing of all but people and make it easy. We've got, you know, so hence the app just does the the hand, the the matchmaking.

Joel: 12:23

It does the reminders, the nudges, and it does the money. Because we hate asking for money. Yeah. That's why it was a fiver through the door, not knock on the door. Because then we'd have to argue over, oh, and what percentage was it when you started?

Joel: 12:36

Oh, it's a 5. Should it be £8 today? Oh, let's make it 2. I'll call it a pint. You don't wanna do that every week.

Joel: 12:41

Just turn up, plug in, go to bed, come back, unplug, drive off. Yep. That looks right. Pay the money. Done.

Gregg: 12:48

I mean, now that you said that, I think I charge my car. I've I've got a driveway and a zappy charger with solar panels. So I charge my car car I charge my car either when it's sunny, and I know that I'm gonna have some extra diverted power or where I need to charge. And that's usually overnight because I'm on the Octopus, and I have to pay 7 and a half p per kilowatt hour at night. But that only happens once, twice a week tops.

Gregg: 13:17

So like I say, the charger's probably utilized 10% tops. I mean, the car sits there in front of it all the time anyway. Yeah. I mean, in my case, we have loads of chargers in town and and couple of rapid chargers as well. So I feel like, you know, we're covered for people who are just passing by or people who visit somebody.

Gregg: 13:40

How would you encourage somebody like me to, you know, to open my charger to other people?

Joel: 13:46

Yeah. There's two sides to it, and the nice thing is our our latest user research confirmed this. Some people, the money is the important thing. You can make if or you have a lot of Uber drivers and delivery drivers who got a big fleet thing going on. If you get one professional driver using your charger five times a week, that you that's nice income.

Joel: 14:06

You know? And, it's good value for them. Everybody wins. It's also very important for air quality. Obviously, keeping Oh, yeah.

Joel: 14:11

Keeping a diesel van off your town streets is huge. So the money is important, but the altruistic thing is important. And almost all our hosts, it's it's both. And they're sort of not quite half and half, but generally altruism is higher. So helping your community is important.

Joel: 14:29

Helping fight climate change is important. Air quality is a huge one. It's a little bit like ex smokers. You don't like people smoking around you or your kids. Yeah.

Joel: 14:39

An EV driver doesn't like someone driving a dirty gray SUV petrol past their kids. So it it you combine that and it it's just one of the things of, we encourage people just do it. For a start, yeah, it's free to try. Free to sign up. It doesn't cost you any you know, it's a really deliberately simple, almost simplistic process.

Joel: 15:00

And we know that almost nobody stops. You know, our our trust rating came in at 96%. Fifty seven % of users have recommended it unprompted to someone else. We know that once people start using it, they keep using it. It works really well.

Joel: 15:19

The problem tends to be just that imagined apprehension. We get things a little bit like with EVs themselves, you know, you get the guy down the pub saying, oh, but, you know, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if I have to drive 300 miles to a hospital in a hurry? They'll invent what ifs to avoid change.

Joel: 15:33

Right? And we get the same with this is they try and they go, oh, is that it? Yeah. That that's it's it's that simple. It's it's so easy to do, and it's so gratifying to do, you know.

Joel: 15:44

So we we've got, a I live in a block of floor four flats. We've got one charger and that will cover all four flats comfortably. And it's no hassle. It doesn't actually, you know, it's it's it's even if you have to move your car, it's like taking the bins out. So what?

Joel: 16:00

Might have to do that once a week. It's it's really, really simple, and it's well worth it. And whether it's the money or the altruism that that triggers you for doing it, it doesn't matter. It's making a difference. And I think the other side of it is if we don't do this, we ain't gonna make it.

Gregg: 16:16

Yeah. Yeah. The the plug the the gap in the market. Right? The, we don't have enough solutions out there for people to just charge, you know, if they live in a without a without a charger, even if they live in a house, but they don't have their own space to park every time.

Gregg: 16:34

Yeah. And you you're just around the the corner. I mean, yeah, I've got a I live in a funny neighborhood. People are resistive to, especially elder people or people, you know, past their sixties. They're generally resistant to, anything new naturally.

Gregg: 16:48

Mhmm. And EVs are not common. But couple of people moved out recently, and the new people came with their EVs are are putting, you know, charges on their walls. So I'm just Yeah. I'm grinning, basically.

Gregg: 17:00

Seeing that.

Joel: 17:01

Smug mode. Exactly. Yes.

Gregg: 17:02

But, like, from a practical perspective. So if I if I wanted to put a charger on, but I'm I have got all these, you know, anxieties, Random stranger's gonna tell turn up on my drive, and it's just gonna plug in. And I don't know who they are, why they're here. They, you know

Joel: 17:19

That's why we're here a lot. Yeah.

Gregg: 17:20

Yeah. Yeah. How how do you, how do you, you know, alleviate that, or how would you how do you make, like, how would you comfort peep people with that, like, from both, you know, the the host and the, the person who charges?

Joel: 17:33

Yeah. I I think the first thing to point out is, you know, this isn't a new concept. Yeah. We've been doing this for years, thousands and thousands of sessions, and it's never happened. I did think I saw a video of it happening.

Joel: 17:43

Nothing's with a cocharger, and then it turned out to have been staged. And the answer is, if you've got $3,040,000 quid's worth of your private metal, are you really going to park it on someone's driveway illegally to steal 8 quid's worth of electrons for six hours. Doesn't happen.

Gregg: 18:00

Yeah. But then your car essentially, yeah, somebody else's driveway. Yeah.

Joel: 18:02

How do you do that? Yeah. And it's just you are opening yourself up for all kinds of abuse. So I don't think it really happens. I think it's a bit like electric car fires.

Joel: 18:12

If it does ever happen, it will

Gregg: 18:13

be everywhere, and it will be the exception. Everyone thinks it's

Joel: 18:16

the norm. But, you know, it doesn't happen. We it does seem that most of our hosts don't lock their charge points, and yet it doesn't happen.

Gregg: 18:24

Yeah. So I never locked my locked my charge point. It's currently you know, we're at Everything Electric in Farnborough. I'm away from home. In with my car, we only have one electric car or one car, period.

Gregg: 18:36

The the the charge is there. If somebody turned up in the the and and plugged in, they would have to fight with the octopus scheduling thing. But other than that, you know so that leads me actually nicely to other point, which is how do you how do you charge people? How how much how do you know they've how much they've they've taken, and how do you kinda do, you know, the whole billing, what I think?

Joel: 18:59

It's it was quite an interesting modeling exercise. We did lots and lots of modeling and trials and so on before we started design designing the platform. And and the first thing we realized is data interfaces, especially to to private charge points. Back then were problematic. They still are.

Joel: 19:18

It's getting better. There's security issues. There are reliability issues. There are maintenance issues. It's costly.

Joel: 19:26

So we decided, let's make this freestanding. Let's make it so that nothing has to talk to anything. And that way, you know, there's nothing quite so secure technically as six feet of air, you know. And so we stuck with that. And what we ended up doing, which was was just one of the models we tried and

Gregg: 19:41

we thought, well, we'll start with that.

Joel: 19:43

See how it goes four years later, no reason to change it. Is that we know we know the speed of the charge point. We know the size of the car's battery, the the usable capacity. All we need to know is the state of charge when they plug in. So we ask the chargee to put that into the app when they hit start session.

Joel: 20:01

But they can fiddle that. Right?

Gregg: 20:03

Of course. Yeah.

Joel: 20:03

Yeah. So we just make them take a photograph. Okay. The app just makes you take a photograph of the dash. And it's just there in case anyone disagrees.

Joel: 20:10

But what we found in reality is that's almost never needed because what makes it work, and another reason we avoid the one off thing is, the host needs the Sharji and vice versa, that it is in their interest to look after each other, and it's actually one of the joys of my job. We are more like if someone uses a query button at the end, it's more likely to be a host saying, I I think something went wrong and they've been they've paid too much. It's far more likely to be that than the other way around. And the exception eventually proved a rule. We had a chargee that tried it on.

Joel: 20:41

So if you come back before a % and you say, oh, it's 85 and you unplug, you just pay for the period of time from start to finish rather than the calculated time that it normally does. You just unplug and drive off, and it says, oh, okay. We know it would have taken this long, so you pay for that long. But if they come back, it does make you take a second photograph. And it's not because we need to know the percentages, because we need to know you were there.

Joel: 21:03

Yeah. And one guy was taking a photograph of black, and it it was it was the bedroom ceiling. And then saying, oh, I unplugged at 04:30. No. You didn't.

Joel: 21:11

So that idiot is now sleeping in his car at a BP charge point every night because that was his alternative. So it's been really lovely. It sort of restores your faith in human kindness that, yeah, when you facilitate a mutually beneficial relationship between two people, that's better than any technical security you could build in.

Gregg: 21:34

Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, I I love the simplicity of this solution. Right? And it also encourages people to move on move their cars if they're done to make room for somebody else in case that somebody else needs it. Right?

Gregg: 21:45

You don't want people to squat the, the car on your driveway.

Joel: 21:48

I I think we've had a handful of occasions where one host has had more than one session in a day. Generally, it's not the point. Our busiest hosts, we've we've got one guy who's a taxi driver. I think he's had five or 600 sessions now. Still only once a day.

Joel: 22:03

You're not interested in you're not doing it as a business. You're not queuing people up. You're not you're not waiting. I mean, who is really going to stop for several hours at someone's home on their way somewhere? You're not queuing them up.

Joel: 22:15

It's a very different this is why we don't do that scenario. We stick to what matters. Get give that personal way to run their car, which is generally plug it in, go home to bed. Yeah. Just it's it's home charging with the longer walk to your door.

Gregg: 22:28

Yeah. Yeah. I see. So so there's generally people who live in the area anyway, and you just get to meet meet more people living in the area.

Joel: 22:35

Yeah. It just connects you up because, you know, we're not that neighbourly. We don't know. But most people have got several thousand people near them within a five minute walk who, at some point or another, are gonna need a charging Yeah. Option.

Joel: 22:48

A base charging option, as we call it. And all we do is do do that matchmaking, and just make it easy. And and what's turned out to work best is simplicity. It's it's why there's, for instance, you know, it would people asking about what if I've got a variable tariff when I'm setting my price as a host? And the answer is, well, set it to the maximum based on your maximum cost, your day rate for electricity.

Joel: 23:09

That's fine. It still works out really, really good for the chargee. We don't need to make it more complicated. At this point, when the objective is decarbonize, what that person, that nervous first time potential EV buyer wants is priority. Yeah.

Joel: 23:26

So if they can't answer the if I can't answer the question, how much does it cost? With a simple answer, with a number. If I say it depends, they're buying a petrol car. So we've kept it simple. It might mean that the host is making more money than they're comfortable with.

Joel: 23:43

I'm sure they can find ways of dealing with that. It it it's just sticking to that thing where you're helping two people to help each other out, and they will work it out. You know? So my my setup means that, yeah, the the prices are sort of hybrid between the highest and lowest cost because everybody use that charge point. At some point, they're using the the cheap period, so it's sort of down.

Joel: 24:04

I think we're we're all paying something like 28 p per kilowatt, something like that. And it it everybody's happy. There's no need to complicate it.

Gregg: 24:12

Yeah. So now the question becomes, how do you make money as a as a company? Obviously, you wanna you wanna keep this going. Right?

Joel: 24:20

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. One of my great heroes heroines is is Juliet Davenport, who came to speak at the Met Office, actually. I I met her back then. Of course, she actually founded good energy.

Joel: 24:31

And her attitude seemed to be, and I I hope I'm doing a low injustice here, Do good and make enough money to do more good. And I like that. That's a good attitude. Yeah. And and our principle is we only take money when someone stops burning something.

Joel: 24:46

So there's the the app doesn't cost anything. There's no subscriptions. There's nothing. It's just at the end of it, if the as soon as the host hits approve, there's, you know, the the chargee has has got a preregistered payment card. It takes the amount off that, takes 12%, ten % plus VAT, goes to us, and then the banks rip us for a big chunk of that, and we run the scheme off what's left, and the 88 percent gets queued up and gets paid to the host.

Gregg: 25:12

Okay.

Joel: 25:13

And that's it. And we try to stick to that. We are launching a fleet offering, which brings in some other elements that work specifically for fleet operators if you're trying to decarbonize your return to home LCV fleet, where you can pay for exclusivity, exclusive use for host and things like that, I mean, standardised pricing and things like that. But that's just for that market. But the principle is there is our income is linked to decarbonisation.

Gregg: 25:43

That's I like the, as an engineer, I I appreciate anybody who's doing things in a simple manner. Yeah. Always. Occam's razor. Right?

Gregg: 25:51

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So another question would be, do you give any training to the peep you know, people who will come and charge and the hosts as well? Is there any video to watch or anything like that?

Joel: 26:04

Yeah. There there's a few and we're adding to them all the time. And I think it's at the time when your this is where my team can answer better than I. At the time when you are due to start your first ever session, you get an an SMS with a link to a video, and the host gets one saying, here's what you do. I think they're twenty eight seconds long.

Joel: 26:24

And the chargee says, here's what you do. And you get emails as well, then you get all the rest of it. And and now we're adding more and more. To be honest, it's it is that simple. Yeah.

Joel: 26:34

There's not a lot to it.

Gregg: 26:36

Yeah. But, yeah, you want something to put people at ease. Right? Like, just ease them into the the the process.

Joel: 26:40

And and videos are best. I think, you know, if if you're like me, you're a lazy so and so, and you get fed up of reading screens, you're just just sitting there and watching a video on your phone is a good way of doing it. But, yeah, the vast majority of people just get the app, set up an account, book a charge, do it, and it just happens. There's not an awful lot of of the of of anything else goes on. And like I say, we we deal with lovely people.

Joel: 27:05

It's so nice. And so when we do provide, instructions, it tends to be pretty brief. I think we possibly suffer from people expecting it to be more complicated than it is.

Gregg: 27:18

What is the what does the future hold for, for Cocharger?

Joel: 27:22

Yeah. Well, we're now in a position it's very exciting. You know, we've been around. We we stayed the course. I think it's the main thing.

Joel: 27:27

We're still here. And I I think

Gregg: 27:28

You've proven it, basically. Yeah.

Joel: 27:30

Yeah. It's it's it's long gone are the days when, oh, interesting concept. You know, this is how people run their EVs now. And we know, yeah, I, I, I've, I've used research, the stats are sky high, you know, when people start using it, they keep using it, they like it, they recommend it. All that stuff's good, but we need to scale.

Joel: 27:46

And we're, you know, we we don't come from some big backer or anything like that. This is all funded by, you know, we we we raise money on a platform called FX, which is, it's like, seeders for ethical companies. And now we're in the fortunate situation where with the fleet model coming in, because it works it's particularly effective for fleet. You know, we've got a lot of Uber drivers using us and delivery drivers and so on. That means we need hosts.

Joel: 28:09

We need to get from our 6,000 to 16,000 pretty quickly. So we're we're looking for anybody, organisations, who have interaction with private charger owners to encourage them. I think there should be a principle a bit like recycling. It should be if you can share, do share. Yeah.

Joel: 28:26

Because it's in everybody's interest to do this. There, there's gonna be 10 to 15,000,000 people still running around in eight year old petrol cars in 02/1938 if we don't do something about this. So, yeah, I I think our main challenge now is we've got the fleet offering coming in, which we we yeah. We've we've worked with fleet. We know it works beautifully.

Joel: 28:47

It removes a massive problem in that sector where electrification of small vans return has stalled at under 5% in the last year. That's not good. It didn't increase at all. I think it dropped slightly. But to match that, you know, a professional driver will keep a a host busy on their own.

Joel: 29:06

So we we need more people to to sign up and just just share their charge point because it makes a massive difference, and we need to get from yeah. Okay. 6,000. It's it's great. Now we're lovely people, but we need a lot more.

Joel: 29:20

There's a million private charge points points out there. I'm I'm sure we can find 10,000 more of them.

Gregg: 29:25

Yeah. We're talking UK only. Right? The At the moment.

Joel: 29:29

Yeah. We're we're waiting to hear, and I I don't think it'll be right for me to discuss the countries involved, but, yeah, I think the word has gone out. I think we're the only people in the world really doing this.

Gregg: 29:40

In such a simple way as well. Right?

Joel: 29:41

Yeah. There's some real I should point out there are really good other child point sharing apps, but we're the only ones that just do this model and we stick to our guns on it. And the nice thing is actually, I don't care. Yeah. We're talking to the government about encourage sharing.

Joel: 29:56

If someone wants to sign up for all the others, which all do slightly different things, it's fine. We all play nicely together. You know, I talk, you know, I I have a pint with them. I know, they we're nice.

Gregg: 30:08

We're all mates. Yeah.

Joel: 30:09

They don't clash. So if someone wants to, for instance, rent out their driveway during the day, if you know, live live near a station or something, rent out your driveway during the day, and there are apps will do that and let you charge for charging. Yeah. And then by night, you're a community charger because they're not gonna pay to park if they're parking for free. Yeah.

Joel: 30:29

But they might do it. Yeah. So if you're near the station, but at night, a neighbor can use it, and it's a different thing. That's community charging. So I'm all for just getting this concept of look if you've got a private charger share it.

Joel: 30:43

We'll do what we do. We're quite proud of it. It's going nicely. There There are other people doing other things. Just just just do it.

Gregg: 30:50

Have you I I know the simplicity of of it is the key, but the people that I interviewed beforehand were talking about work charging. You know? There's loads of workplaces that have that people turn up in the morning, plug in. At lunchtime, they unplug. Somebody else plugs in for the rest of the day, but virtually everybody leaves at 05:30 Yeah.

Gregg: 31:12

And the whole place is deserted. Have you ever thought about reaching workplaces like that and asking them to to open that up as well?

Joel: 31:19

Very much so. One thing we do when we work with local authorities and they're trying to get this going, we try to encourage a share first policy. So if you've got your Levi grant to put in on a hundred public charges, my challenges to them is is put in 99 and spend the price of the last one. I bet I'll get you another hundred of community charges for the price of one public one. You know, share first.

Joel: 31:39

Use the money to do the difficult bit where the gaps are. Yeah. You know, and one thing we encourage them to do is to get on Google maps and find every doctor surgery, every private chiropractor, every community hall, every church, every school and actually OZEV are really good at it. They encourage if you've got school parking, which is outside the security gates and you've got charges on it, share it with it. They're promoting Go Charge for that.

Joel: 32:06

And that's a really good sort of kickstart to get community charges in your in your in your area. It doesn't scale all that well, but it doesn't matter. It gets it going. Yeah. So, yeah, that's happening.

Joel: 32:16

And some of the bigger companies, Johnny, if you're listening, there are some big corporations with car parks with rows of chargers in unused, and they've got blocks of flats, in some cases, Johnny, directly across the road. So put them on co charger, go and knock on doors or put flyers through when saying through doors saying, you know, you can have an EV now. This is your home charger. It's over the road. You know, you you you book it.

Joel: 32:43

It's totally reliable. It costs a hell of a lot less than public charging, generally. Yeah. I'd I was so we're encouraging that. It's there's no losers in it.

Joel: 32:54

It's just one of those things, why wouldn't you do it?

Gregg: 32:56

Yeah. That sounds great. Should we end on that note

Joel: 32:59

Sure.

Gregg: 32:59

And just send people to to your website, which is co-charger.com.

Joel: 33:04

That's right. Yeah. Just go to the website, get the app, doesn't cost anything. It's really easy to set up, and we're nice people. If you've got any questions on how to use it, particularly use cases, we've had loads here at the Everything Electric South Show.

Joel: 33:16

Always happy to talk. So, yeah, just get the app, get in touch, be part of the community, make some good help.