Porsche to Create Proprietary Charging Network, Again
In their 2022 Annual Press Conference a few days ago, Porsche AG announced plans to build their own high-power charging locations exclusively for Porsche customers. Technical details are a little thin on the ground owing to it being a press conference, but the automatically generated transcript lists the following:
Up to twelve charging points per station
Up to 350kW maximum power
“Premium” charging experience
First location to open in southern Germany at the end of the year
Porsche network to supplement existing Ionity network
Initially only Germany, Switzerland and Austria
These specs are better than Tesla’s V3 Supercharging which is 250kW shared across two stalls. No mention of power sharing by Porsche but a reasonable guess would be sharing across two stalls as well.
This news is both new and old, since Porsche announced nearly exactly a year ago that they would be building out a proprietary charging network and as far as I can tell there were approximately zero sites built. It does mark a departure from Porsche’s previous strategy of partnering solely with charging network company Ionity, a joint venture with all the other European non-Tesla car manufacturers.
The premium experience idea is interesting as charging UX is important and is something that a patchwork of independent third-party charging networks simply doesn’t have. Charging, especially on long trips, needs to be 100% bulletproof. Turning up at a charging station to find all stalls occupied, or discover one or more broken is a terrible experience - ask me how I know. The car should know the availability and status of chargers during your journey, and perhaps route to a different location if required.
Vertical integration between the car company and the charging network allows for usage metrics about customer behaviour, charging speeds, and durations. Most importantly, broken infrastructure should be able to be detected and fixed quickly. Over the last year I have visited several charging locations in Australia where the hardware has been broken for months with nothing but note in PlugShare saying “sorry, we’re waiting on parts”.
Until independent charging networks up their game to the same level as Tesla (and presumably Porsche as their network gets built out) in both reliability and availability, they are all going to be second-tier players only able to compete on price against an oligopoly of big companies.