Several large-scale forecourt firms are said to be considering installing a new type of EV chargepoint that allows drivers to order from operators’ on-site stores via a built-in touchscreen and payment terminal.
The Willbert ultra-rapid chargepoint was developed by two former CERN scientists, and its integrated touchscreen and payment terminal allow people using the chargers to buy whatever operators want to offer via the screen.
The number of EV drivers is set to grow exponentially over the coming years as government mandates for electric car sales ramp up, but this presents a headache for forecourt and motorway service operators, as Willbert’s head of sales, Mikko Summala, explains.
“A big problem for providers is that people using EV chargers tend to sit in their cars and not come into the shop.
“We have a full point-of-sale kiosk service, so when a customer plugs in, at the same time they can go and select from the retail offering – a coffee, a sandwich, parking fees, whatever you want”, he adds. As well as delivering electricity and facilitating shop sales, the Willbert can serve advertisements to charging drivers, too.
Summala says that while some operators may want to integrate the chargepoint so that drivers come into the store to collect their orders, ‘bring-to-car’ is likely to become the dominant model, with staff delivering food, drinks, and whatever else is purchased via the touchscreen to people sitting in their EVs as they charge. The promise shown by this model was evidenced last year, when Just Eat developed a new service specifically to deliver food to charging drivers.
A demonstration Willbert at the Retail Technology Show showcased a quick and slick touchscreen, with selecting how much electricity a customer wants to put into their car no different an experience from ordering a double cheeseburger.
All orders, including electricity, can be purchased with a single tap of a card on the payment terminal, with receipts sent to the driver’s email address, entered via the touchscreen.
As well as offering a seamless ordering and payment experience, the Willbert provides some of the fastest charging rates around. The demo model we saw had two screens and allows for four cars to be charged at a time, with a maximum rate of charge of 360kW if a single vehicle is plugged in. Asingle-screen, two-plug version is also available.
Named after William Gilbert, the 16th-century physicist who coined the word ‘electricity’, two Willbert units can be linked together to delivery electricity at 720kW, while the firm will soon offer a facility for four to be connected for even faster charging – grid capabilities allowing, naturally. These speeds are partly facilitated by the silicon carbide transistors that feature in the Willbert – the device being the first to feature such technology. Summala says Willbert is also the only firm he knows of offering a fully integrated touchscreen kiosk, and payment facility.
The firm designs and builds the chargers itself in Poland and develops all of the software, too, streamlining integrations. “We control the whole software stack,” says Summala. “This fixes one of the biggest problems at present: there are so many different players, and somebody makes a little change in the software and the whole stack collapses, and the customer doesn’t get the electricity.”
The chargers can be configured by operators, too: main panels can be ordered in different colours, while the LED edge lighting, which changes colour depending on charger status, can be made to protrude less, should operators be concerned about damage.
While the firm is a relatively new player on the market it already has a reasonably full order book, with one Continental firm committing to a triple-digit number of units. As for price, Summala says the Willbert is “much in line” with other ultra-rapid chargers.
The capabilities of the Willbert, or Willbert by Euroloop, to give it its full name, may have something to do with to the fact that its designers, and the firm’s two founders, were previously employed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the famed particle-physics laboratory in Switzerland. The pair also won Elon Musk’s 2017 SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, a technology that (one day) aims to use magnetic propulsion combined with sealed low-pressure transport tubes to move goods and people about at high speed using relatively little energy.
