EV Charging for Parking Operators

Classify sites before designing any

Group by supply headroom, dwell pattern, access type and civil complexity. Most portfolios resolve into three or four classes, and designing one solution per class rather than one per site is where the efficiency comes from.

Underground is a connectivity problem

Cellular coverage underground is frequently poor and site Wi-Fi is not always available or reliable. Where the civil work is happening anyway, Ethernet during the trench costs far less than retrofitting connectivity later.

Sequence by supply, not geography

Starting with sites that need no supply work delivers capacity while longer supply processes run elsewhere in parallel. Supply lead time usually determines a rollout's shape more than anything else.

Commissioning has to scale

Units should arrive pre-provisioned so on-site work is installation and verification rather than configuration. A process requiring a skilled engineer per unit does not scale across a portfolio.

Bay occupancy is your existing competency

Parking operators already manage occupancy, enforcement and pricing, which is exactly what charging bays need once demand exceeds supply. That is a genuine advantage over property owners entering this cold.

The two failure modes that generate your complaints

For a parking operator, charging generates complaints in two ways, and neither is about charging speed.

Neither of the two is about charging speed.

1. 1

   A point that was occupied

   More points at lower power serve more drivers from the same supply than fewer fast ones. The driver who could not plug in at all is the one who complains, and a faster charger would not have helped them.

2. 2

   A session that failed underground

   Most parking structures kill mobile signal, and any charger that needs to reach a backend to authorise will fail there intermittently. Drivers read that as broken equipment.

Our units keep charging and access control working locally with no internet and reconcile when the connection returns. In a basement that is not a nice-to-have, it is the difference between equipment that works and equipment that works sometimes.

How we work with you on this

Charging is a small part of your operation and it should not become a management burden. Most of what we do with parking operators is make faults diagnosable remotely so no engineer is dispatched to look at a charger that is working.

Where an installation is not viable, usually because of supply or access, we will say so before anything is ordered. A site that should not have been built is worse for you than a site we did not sell.