From TransportEvolved.com: Very little in this world comes for free, yet until recently, most public electric car charging stations in the world have been free to use — provided you have the right membership card for the network you’re trying to use or happen to be a Tesla customer.
With the exception of Tesla, which factors in the cost of providing free charging at its Supercharging stations into the sticker price of each and every car it sells, it’s now generally considered nigh-on impossible to have a financially sustainable business model which revolves around free charging,. Yet one Californian company thinks it has figured out the perfect way to make money and give EV owners free power to charge their car: billboards.
Volta’s business model relies on ad revenue to provide free EV charging.
Enter Volta, a Californian firm which is working hard to revolutionise the way we think about public EV charging with a very simple idea: build a charging station into an advertising billboard.
No smart card, no membership requirements, and no need to get your credit card out, Volta’s concept is elegant, simple, and leverages the high-value potential of billboards with the need for EV charging in busy cities.As any ad executive will tell you, they’ll pay top dollar for any well-placed billboard that will help reach their product’s target market, so combining the high-income role of advertising with the relatively low-cost of level 2 charging provision seems like a perfect match.
Essentially, the ad revenue from each location not only provides Volta with a steady income stream, but it offsets any costs associated with providing free electricity.
Advertising on public charging stations isn’t new. Before it went bankrupt, Blink did display ads on some of its rapid charge and level 2 charging stations. Similarly, Chargepoint offers clients who buy its charging station the option of having ad-sponsored messages displayed on the charging station for plug-in car drivers to see.
In both of these situations however, the ads have been targeted primarily at the person charging their car, and are normally too small to see from more than a few feet away. They were essentially charging stations with ads on them.
What would you say to free EV charging if it came with a billboard beside it?
Volta’s solution is the inverse of this: integrating charging stations into billboards. That’s what we think makes this such a killer app.
At the moment, Volta is concentrating on urban Level 2 charging, presumably because it’s far easier and far cheaper to install a Level 2, 240-volt charging station than it is install a powerful three-phase DC CHAdeMO or CCS charging station. It’s also worth noting that the kind of places where a more powerful charging station is likely to be — like a freeway rest stop for example — are less valuable locations for billboard advertising. In addition, we’d assume that even with high-rate ads, the return on investment is far lower with rapid charging than it is with Level 2.
At the moment, the majority of Volta’s charging stations seem to reside in Arizona, but the company has plans to compete with the established charging providers for urban Level 2 charging all across the U.S., giving customers a subsidized, ad-supported free charging experience instead of the pay-as-you go model most charging providers are now moving towards.
