Welcome to our new R&D facility.
A testing laboratory dedicated to driving EV charger reliability and making plugging in as easy as possible.
You might think that it’s already straightforward. Take a connector, plug it into your car, pay and away you go.
And yes, that’s the story most of the time. But our data shows that’s not the case every single time and we want to do better for our customers.
Smoothing that process and making it as seamless as possible for customers is the rationale behind our new EV charging test lab – the first of its kind to be developed by a charge point operator here in the UK.
Based at the GRIDSERVE Innovations and Operations Centre (GIOC) in Swindon, the new test lab features a lineup of the latest EV chargers designed to replicate real world scenarios.
We’ll be focusing on the ‘handshake’ between charger and vehicle – that’s the bit where the two bits of advanced technology talk to each other and decide whether to start a charge.
As you can imagine, with a wealth of different brands, each running different software configurations that are regularly, making sure our chargers work perfectly is a full-time job.
Ever had trouble trying to hook up a new printer to a laptop? And why isn’t that presentation that you tested yesterday working smoothly for the big meeting this morning? Software often has a mind of its own.
That’s where our GRIDSERVE Technologies engineers come in. They have conducted thousands of hours of interoperability testing on chargers and a variety of electric vehicles, rigorously examining power cabinets, battery energy storage systems (BESS), software and firmware to identify network improvements.
That’s everything from best-selling electric cars to pioneering electric trucks (as part of the Electric Freightway programme), as well as exciting pre-production prototypes. Needless to say, we’re big fans of the Morgan XP-1, the electric three-wheeler prototype you can see in these pics.
So why are we doing all this? We know that reliability is key to customer confidence. People won’t make the switch if they’re concerned the charging infrastructure doesn’t work.
The GIOC helps us improve our existing operations, while enhancing the EV charging experience for all our customers in the future.
