Owning an electric car comes with a lifestyle shift of refueling the car in five minutes to spending about 60 minutes in charging an electric car along with finding the nearby charging stations.

Hopcharge has built an on-demand door-to-door EV charging solution to reduce the many woes of electric car owners in densely populated metros. The company will enable electric car owners to order the charging service at their doorstep whether it is their homes, office, movie cinemas, or any other location. The company claims to take an average of 36 minutes to charge the electric car, depending on the type of vehicle.

“We have built custom hardware which has a battery and a high power charger, just like the chargers which you find at the fast-charging stations. The custom hardware is then fitted inside CNG vans to add mobility to it, and enabling the flexibility to charge on-demand at any location,” he added.

Service bookings

Users can book charging through the android/iOS app, and Hopcharge e-Pod (energy pod) with compatible charger comes to the EV at a stipulated time when the user's EV is idle and hence saves time. The company sees Hopcharge as a complement to the existing fixed infrastructure rather than a replacement to it.

The charging service will be priced somewhere between petrol charges and slow-charging EV costs. “We are aiming to keep it less than 50 percent to 60 percent from the petrol kilometre cost but 20 percent to 30 percent higher than the slow charging,” said Arjun Singh, Founder of Hopcharge.

Further, talking about the need for such chargers, Singh said, living in densely populated cities requires a significant electric load to serve in a particular geographic area which is constrained by the local transformer, substation, main stations, etc. Setting up multiple EV chargers in these societies would mean increasing the power load of the society transformers and will create a need for expensive infrastructure upgrades. All of this makes access to electricity increasingly inconvenient, expensive, and unreliable. Hopcharge technology solves this problem by introducing energy storage systems that are modular, mobile, connected, and distributed in a city.

“If you are living in a vertical high-rise apartment, getting a charger in your condominium for your car can be very tough. A society is built around a transformer with a fixed load. Now, imagine everyone in the 700 flat condominium asking for a dedicated charger in their parking. This will change the load demand in society and require them to upgrade the transformer. Hopcharge eliminates the need to do so,” Singh added.

Global expansion goals

With eyes set on building a global product, Hopcharge’s charging solution has been made compatible with all the global charging protocols. The Indian company also has a strategic presence in Japan, and membership in the global Fast Charging technology organisation CHAdeMO.

“As more and more OEMs like Tesla enter India, providing EV users with charging convenience and options, is what we strongly believe, will lead to exponential EV adoption, which will help the ambitious vision of the Indian government to achieve energy independence and its target of 30 percent vehicle electrification by 2030,” said Singh.

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