— owners and operators of public fast charging in the country. We then use the ownership of those assets to sort of create other revenue streams that are complementary to that ownership. We've been around for over 10 years. Very big network partnerships with booster companies, OEMs, site hosts. We're really excited about us creating a great driver experience for the millions more people who's gonna buy or lease an EV in the next few years.
Great. I'm just gonna jump right to it. You know, a couple months or several weeks ago, Tesla and Ford made an announcement. Last, recently, GM made the announcement that they're gonna use the NACS connector and be open up to the Tesla network. There was a lot of, I don't know, I'd call it confusion in the market, but let's just say, what does this mean for the EV charging industry? What does it mean for EVgo? How much of a threat is it? I mean, how, what should investors make of it?
EVgo has been using whatever connectors the cars had since our inception, so we've been around for a dozen years. EV charging lands started with CHAdeMO, which is what the Nissan LEAF used, which is what you have.
That's right.
The CCSs arrived with the German cars. EVgo has chargers with CHAdeMO and CCS. CCS started to dominate. We added Tesla Sidekick so that we could charge Teslas as well, because the supercharging network was very constrained, and there were lots of unhappy Tesla drivers that wanted to come and charge on EVgo. For us, we'll put whatever connector onto our chargers that the drivers need. With this announcement, what it looks like is that there's gonna be even more drivers that are gonna want a NACS connector. That's what we'll do.
The bigger decision was made, actually, I think by GM and Ford recently, because what they have to do is now build a new brain inside the, inside the vehicle to be able to use the Tesla connector. The way CCS works is that it, the entire brain is in the connector, right? The way the closed system of the Tesla NACS world works is that, you know, Tesla developed a system where half of the brain is in the charging connector, the other half is inside the car, right? What now, as I said, with GM and Tesla, or with GM and Ford are gonna do, is they're gonna have to build that brain inside the car. That's gonna take a couple years, but we'll be ready for that.
For us, adding the new connectors to our configurations is going to be about the same cost as 2 CCSs, we'll have 1 CCS and 1 NACS. That's, it's just, as I say, not a big drama. Practically speaking, though, Bill, I think for the next 5 years or so, look, we've already got close to 1 million EVs on American roads that are CCS only. Over the next 2 years, with Ford and GM alone, there are gonna be another, you know, 1 million or 2 million EVs that are CCS only. We are going to be living in a world in America where we have CCS and NACS, and then the older CHAdeMOs, 'cause we're gonna still wanna charge you as long as you keep that car.
Yeah.
We'll be serving multitudes of different connectors. Probably by the middle of the next decade, the world, or America, will have converged on one solution. Right now, for a while, it's gonna be people have adapters in their trunks, and they use lots of chargers.
Yeah. I guess the questions I've been getting recently is, like, what does this mean for your existing partnership with General Motors?
Our existing partner with General Motors is as strong as ever. If you're Mary Barra, you want your drivers to have a great experience, and you want there to be lots and lots of chargers. Right now, in America, there are somewhere under, close to 30,000 fast chargers. The forecast demand is that by 2030, we'll need 300,000 of those to meet all of the demand for all of the EVs, the, you know, the 150 new models of EVs that are coming. If you're an OEM, you want there to be choices for your drivers. You want there to be ubiquitous fast charging, we're part of that ecosystem.
As far as the contract that we've got, the one that, you know, the $90 million contract to get out there and build 3,250 fast chargers, that remains. What we may do is, we may be swapping out one of those CCS connectors for a NACS connector on those chargers. Again, we're working with GM on that rollout plan right now.
Okay. I guess another concern would be, you know, obviously, you know, Tesla's main business is selling cars, I guess. You know, they have maybe presumably a lower cost of capital, so the fear is that they're gonna gain market share at the expense of others. Why would that be the case? Why wouldn't it be the case? I mean, I don't know, growing market, but that... How do you think about market share?
I think EVgo's business principle, which is unwavering, is that whenever we invest capital, we're gonna get a return on that. We have, again, through our history, since I've been at EVgo, since 2017, we have invested in building stations that pencil to double-digit IRRs. We're gonna continue to do that. There are a plethora of opportunities that will allow us to do that, and we will be a business that continues to deliver those returns. We will be guided by the opportunity set. We've got a line of sight to over 10,000 different location stations right now that pencil to those returns, and the limiting factor there is just capital availability. Should more capital become available at good terms, we'll grow even faster. Like, so that's sort of where we are.
I, you know, I think that there is going to be. Given that we need to go to 300,000 chargers or so in the next 7 years, there's ample room for lots of us to play to meet drivers' needs.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the corollary in really simple terms is if you have a gas car, you know, you drive down the road, you'll see multiple gas stations, not one brand. I don't know. Anyway, coming to your business, you actually have different line items. You charge core charging, you also have your eXtend program. Kind of just thinking about near term and in the back half of the year, where are you seeing the, like, the best growth opportunities for the different sub-segments of your business?
Yeah, so we, like, what we've seen so far is fantastic growth and throughput on our network. When you run a public network, throughput is like a big, giant metric, and it's up and to the right. We've got, you know, over. The top 10% of our locations have over 25% utilization. The top 20% of our locations have over 20% utilization. rideshare, you know, we've got partnerships with Uber and Lyft. You know, both Uber and Lyft have made commitments to go totally electric by 2030. Jonathan, what did you say there?
They've said that they're on pace, both of them, to hit their goal by 2025.
Right.
Okay.
When you... A rideshare driver, just to remind folks, a rideshare driver drives somewhere between 3 and 7 times more than the average retail driver. They need to charge fast because they're driving for a living. We love them on our network. We have special, you know, special pricing for our Uber and Lyft drivers because they're such frequent users. That is gonna continue. I mean, our expectation, to your question, is that's gonna continue to rise over the course of this year. We're also really excited about the deployment of our first Pilot Flying J stations through the EVgo eXtend program, right? We've been working toward those. They're under construction. They're well underway, and that's gonna be really exciting.
Those are Pilot Flying J with a bit of EVgo co-branding. That's a capital light business model for us that bolsters our revenue story at a very low risk, increases our geographic footprint and increases our reach. That's some really exciting stuff. I'm hoping. I guess one final thing, you know, when you ask me what I'm excited about, I always have to give many answers because I'm so excited about a lot of things. I'm also excited for the NEVI awards process to well and truly get going, right? I mean, again, I would just sort of turn it over to Jonathan to talk a little bit about that, if that's all right with you.
Yeah. No. Well, yeah. I guess let's talk about NEVI, maybe we can back up and talk about broader policy support and how that impacts your business. Yeah, maybe just explain quickly what NEVI is.
[crosstalk] Yeah.
We all have an acronym problem sometimes, myself very much included. NEVI is the acronym for the $5 billion formula funding under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It's been almost 2 years since that became law, and not a single dollar has gone to any companies yet. All the funds from the first 2 appropriations of it have gone to the state DOTs, and all the state DOTs plans have been approved, but only 7, to our knowledge, RFPs have been finalized from states. None of them have made any awards yet. To give you a little example, right? Indiana has actually published a fairly helpful calendar as far as transparency is concerned, but they haven't issued their RFP yet. That will come out in July.
They're not anticipating making conditional awards until late in Q4, and not actually having the final contracts until some point in 2024. It's one of those things where Kathy, on one of our earnings calls earlier this year, said: Policy is a huge tailwind, but it feels like a tail breeze right now. Because it's not coming that quickly. We're still on that same boat. It's clearly very important. If you take NEVI and the tax credits, 30C, with the new transferability provisions that came under the Inflation Reduction Act, those are huge opportunities to offset our CapEx.
Yeah.
There's still some clarification from the IRS. There's still a lot of work that needs to be finalized to make it all reality and help push it forward.
Yeah.
Jonathan and I recently had some meetings in Washington, where the folks in D.C. were really excited that the states are gonna start issuing the RFPs soon. We said, "We are, too. Those RFPs are gonna be really helpful, but you should just know, the issuance of an RFP is not the same thing as getting stations built. There's still a long process that follows that, so let's get everybody hustling.
Yeah. Actually, that's an interesting thing. We've heard actually in different parts of this conference is about permitting. I mean, you're in D.C., permitting actually is a big challenge broadly, but that has been an impact to some of your build-outs last year. How is that today for-
Yeah.
-on the permitting side?
Look, Kathy and I were having this discussion, too, yesterday. Permitting, most people think permitting. Especially right now in the D.C. conversation, it's big permitting, offshore wind, pipelines, things like that. We're talking about distributed energy projects. We think about it in terms of our permitting as local counties or building departments saying, "Yes, you can build in this parking lot." It matters a lot as we go to bigger footprint, especially these charging stations we're building on land that we secure for the sole purpose. Really, what matters even more to us is utility approval timelines. Unfortunately, those aren't getting a whole lot quicker. The transformer supply chain issues are still there. Then sometimes just getting them to show up and do the final inspection on the utility side, that can be the limiting factor.
We need those partners to continue to up their game so that that's not holding things up.
Yeah.
We also need to make sure. One thing that's interesting about NEVI, the implementing agencies at the state, as Jonathan mentioned, are the State Departments of Transportation. Now, their normal day jobs have been funding bridges and major interstate projects, which almost always require an environmental impact statement or the equivalent, which is usually a multi-year process. We need to make sure that they understand what Jonathan just said, which is charging stations of four, six, or eight chargers are distributed infrastructure that doesn't trigger the need for an environmental impact statement to that level. Because of their lack of experience in doing these things, it's on us to help them understand that. It's on the federal government to make sure that they don't feel that they're required to do that. I mean, would you add anything?
Yeah. The only other thing to add is really we had hoped that state energy offices or state environmental protection agencies would get this money. That didn't happen. The very inside baseball that's a good thing is that the National Association of State Energy Officials signed an MOU with the Association of State and Highway Transportation Officials so they can work together, and we're hopeful that they can use Colorado as a really good model, where during the Dieselgate funds, Colorado took the funds that went to their air quality district, their Department of Energy, and their DOT, commingled them, and worked together on an integrated plan. They still moved a lot more quickly than other states that just said: "Oh, we don't know what to do with this money.
Yeah.
If your head's about to explode with all of the Washington, D.C. acronyms, you can understand why EVgo has a competitive advantage as having had some experience in Washington, D.C.
That's right. Okay, your core business, and you guys are generally more in urban or suburban areas, like high utilization zones, which to be honest, like, if you think about some competitors' charging stations tend to be off a highway in the middle of nowhere. In any case, how is this a, like, a competitive advantage? Like, what data do you have? How do you analyze it? I guess, you know, you think about the needs for public charging, how does it inform where you're gonna be placing all the next tranches of hundreds of systems?
Yeah, well, so, frankly, we look at it through the lens of everyday Americans. Like, what do you need to do with your life? How... You need to get fuel in your vehicle, and if you've got an EV, that's charging. You need to go grocery shopping. You need to take your children to do something at a park, whatever it is. What we try to do is make it as easy for people as possible to combine those activities. Maybe it's because I've always been a working mom and a multitasker, but, like, we love building our stations in grocery store parking lots and shopping centers, you know, next to a public park, because the dwell time for even, like, today's most modern cars, you're gonna spend...
If you go to a 350 kilowatt charger, you've got a really powerful car, it's still gonna be 15, 20 minutes. That's a nice time to go run into the grocery store and grab some things. Our theory of the case is to make it convenient for people to get their charge and to do other things in their lives, and that's borne out. Like, when you look at our utilization trends, and you look at our consumer responses, and you look at the partnerships. I mean, Bill, when I started at EVgo in 2017, our site developer teams were having to educate, you know, grocery store operators or shopping center operators, not only what an EV charging station was, but what an EV was. You had to beg for: "Can you
Al, can you rent us two parking spaces?" The tables have turned completely, where we now have national partners, every grocery store chain, you know, big box stores, fast casual food, like Chipotle, saying, "We wanna put charging stations in every single one of our properties." We have to say: Actually, not every single location will pencil for us. It is now, like, the creation of the norms of this is something that you can do while you're doing something else, I think we're well on our way to providing a convenient, reliable service. It turns out that when we research our when we ask our customers and do surveys, what matters most to them is convenience and reliability. What actually matters less to most of them is price.
Yeah, makes sense. I'm going to stop to see if there's any questions before moving on, and again, if there is any, we'd use the microphone. All right. Let's come back to partnerships, because I think this is something that maybe people don't understand. You know, you've got partnerships across OEMs, you know, rideshare, you know, maybe there's potential for fleets. Like, how should we think about the, you know, how that looks today and what, how it looks in the future in terms of across the partnership spectrum?
Jack, you wanna go first?
Yeah. Look, I think, you know, Cathy mentioned part of our DNA is these blue chip partnerships, right? They each have multiple roles to play, right? If you look at our automaker partnerships, in the case of General Motors, they're helping subsidize our infrastructure build. We're also working with them and Toyota and others on charging credit programs, which are not only ways to make it easier for the customer, but they're customer acquisition engines for us. We have co-marketing programs with Nissan. These partners are all part of the entire value chain, and as we think about these, the opportunity segments in fleet in particular, rideshare is that first cab off the rank, to paraphrase Cathy.
They don't just bring us more utilization, which is really nice in the public network, they're also doing essentially ride and drives for customers who may not otherwise be in the back of an electric vehicle. Suddenly, that also helps you with your brand, with people, with filling the top of the funnel. Our logistics fleet partners, our last mile delivery partners, even we've got a program going on Class 8 trucks with a company called MHX. It's early days for that kind of electrification, but by proving it out now and being that reliable partner, when they scale, we're the first phone call.
Yeah.
I mean, look, the thing I would add to that, Bill, is, like, we've got a pragmatic, realistic approach to this market will become more competitive, right? If we figured out a way to make money on this, and if there is a rising tide, then other people are gonna come and enter. Establishment in these early days, as of yourself as a market leader and a trustworthy partner is really, really important in terms of securing and deepening, widening your competitive moat.
Mm-hmm. Maybe to that point, I think one of the things that people ask about is, like, the reliability of the network and, you know, where the perception is that Tesla is, you know, ahead of everybody else. I mean, what is your thoughts on reliability? What are you doing on your own reliability? I guess, how should investors think about that as we move ahead?
Yeah. Well, look, Tesla was able to design a closed system, where they designed the car, and they designed the charger, and they had 4 models. 3, 4 models. That, like, would our engineers wish that that were the case for us? We, EVgo, we have an open network. We have over 50 models that we're charging. We don't design the vehicles. We design the chargers. We have an innovation lab that Bill has visited, where we've invited. You know, we invite every OEM. We insist on every potential charging vendor that we might procure product from. We, we issue specifications for chargers and then test rigorously, even after they've met our qualifications in in sort of in the spec. We test.
We test every car with every charger, and that's sort of the first way that we try to make sure that what we're doing is we're deploying chargers that'll work with EVs. What happens is, if an OEM changes the firmware, does an over-the-air update to the car, and they don't tell us. That can cause problems, because then our charger can't talk to that car anymore. That's happened with a number of the OEMs that we've already mentioned today. That's okay, but we need to have that ecosystem work more closely. We've got a program underway right now called EVgo ReNew, where we're taking a look at our entire fleet. You know, we've been around for 12 years, we've got some old legacy chargers that are 50 kW.
Some of them are still good workhorses. We've got our highest utilization charger at the moment is over... It's a single in a Walgreens parking lot over in Brooklyn, 53% utilization. Why is it utilized so much? Because probably there aren't any alternatives. You know, it's actually a great money spinner for us, and it's a workhorse. There are others that are either in bad locations or they're more problematic chargers because they're early generation. What we're doing is we're selectively taking those, swapping those out, either replacing them with higher power chargers, installing an additional charger.
In some cases, we're saying, "Eh, this location isn't great, so we're just not going to invest further in this site." As we've been doing that, we've been undertaking diagnostics to try to understand what are the various things that are causing problems. Our engineers will say I'm oversimplifying this because I'll say there's basically three buckets of challenges to chargers. There's what's happening with the chargers that includes the cables and the connectors, what's happening inside the vehicle that can cause a problem, and then what's happening with the drivers in terms of driver user error. There are three different buckets. Underneath that, there are probably 200 different things that cause error codes, we're running all of them to ground.
We've undertaken, you know, a new program within EVgo ReNew called Charge Talk, where our CTO, Eva Steflak, and our COO, Dennis Kish, are gonna be Click and Clack, like the, you know, the Car Talk guys. We've just done a shoot with these guys where they're gonna take different topics, and we're gonna actually work on helping consumers understand what can cause the problems, because part of this is not understanding. Like, on the consumer side, one of the things that we've discovered is that, you know, we've got hundreds of thousands of customer accounts. We probably actually should have even more because we People go through when they sign up on the app, and if they don't give us a credit card, because guess what? We do have to charge for the electrons we dispense.
They haven't completed the process, but they think they have the app on their phone. They're like: "Oh, I'm all good." They drive up to an EVgo charger, they try to charge, but we don't have their credit card information, so there's an error. Again, these are solvable issues that companies have to deal with. We're working really hard on those. What we're aiming to do is improve what we call it inside of EVgo, One & Done. What we want to do is get to, you know, a really, really very high first attempt results in a charge. Drivers should deserve nothing less. I mean, they should expect nothing less.
We're working on that, and with all of these identification of these little problems, these hundreds of problems that have existed for years, we're getting better and better and better to create that seamless charging. Yeah.
Just to keep nerding on it for 1 second, or 1 minute even. It used to be, as recently as 2 or 3 years ago, that if something didn't work, there was 1 error on the charger. It would just say connection error, and that didn't matter if the charger was broken, if the car was timing out, if the customer didn't plug it in properly. Our team worked up 17 minimum recommended error codes, open sourced them, published them on our website, said: "Hey, manufacturers, competitors, use these so that we can at least find out, Oh, wait, there is a problem with the power. There's a problem with the communication. There's a problem with the car." Those are really helpful to our diagnostics and our analytics, so that we can prevent these problems going forward.
Go see. Just check again if anybody has any questions before moving on. Wait. Just wait for the microphone, please.
Hi. To the extent that the range of the batteries keep improving dramatically, to what extent that affects your business model?
It's a great question. There are so many EVs that need to be charged, I think we're really, really excited about the range increasing. As the batteries improve, the charge rates also improve. One of the things, like, historically, we've measured utilization in terms of minutes every hour, every day, 365 days a year, we should probably, over time, measure instead, the throughput per stall, because the average charge rate of EVs is going up every year.
I don't know what, you know, Bill's Nissan LEAF, your max charge, you charge your average charge rate?
45.
45 is average charge rate?
What's his max?
Our max- [crosstalk]
Yeah.
[crosstalk] - thirty something, yeah. Our CFO replaced her Nissan LEAF with a, with a new Audi e-tron, which is double that, or at least?
Yeah, that max is 150, and it actually.
The average —
The average is pretty high because they're.
7 or 8. My point is this, again, we're nerding out here. My apologies for that. My point is, for every minute, as the cars improve, for every minute, we dispense more of our products. Yes, the ranges will go up, but, you know, we're not charging most cars every day, other than our rideshare drivers. There's so many EVs on the road, we're not the least bit troubled by ranges going up and people, rather than needing to charge once every 2 weeks, they need to charge once every 3 weeks. No big deal. The rideshare drivers are still charging just about every day. Maybe they charge every 1.25 days if the ranges go up a whole lot.
Actually, our throughput is going to increase phenomenally because the batteries are more powerful and more capable of sucking up more electricity more quickly, and there is so many EVs. Net-net, we are pretty excited.
To get biological for a second, the longer range is really helpful to selling the car, and then once you're driving, your bladder is gonna be a limiting factor for you. You're still gonna stop, and then you're gonna stop and charge while you're there.
Yeah. All right. Right over here.
Thank you. Just to go back to the reliability question, and I know that the kind of communication between car and charger is a big part of this. We talked about the different types of error codes. I'm wondering, as we think about the competing standards, to what extent does a CCS standard or the NACS, once it gets actually standardized, to what extent should we expect error codes or communication protocols to be part of the standard? To what extent can that help with reliability?
That's a great question. It's really... You might have a theory about that answer.
Yeah.
What's gonna be in the standard?
I think in that question, you've demonstrated more of an understanding of the core issue than a lot of people have. NACS is a connector. CCS is a protocol and a connector. Our understanding is that the Ford and GM vehicles in 2025 that will have the NACS port will still speak CCS over that, even to the Tesla stations. It's really important that the whole industry come together and understand those things, what it's communicating, as well as making sure that we are adhering to a standard. What Cathy mentioned earlier on cars changing their firmware, sometimes that had a very minor but real impact of they shaved a fraction of a second off of the timeout protocol beyond the spec of the standard, and then suddenly it wouldn't work with certain chargers.
This is why we agree that if NACS is gonna be the standard for a lot of cars, it needs to be a real standard, and you can then get the benefits from it that the whole industry, including the most important stakeholder, the driver, really, really needs.
I would say, though, it, yeah, our observation, Jonathan mentioned this, it's such a young sector. Effectively, we built a lab and have been we've been pioneering what the error codes need to be. You know, and our manufacturers are just like, "No, it's just an error code." It's like: No, you've got to do... We're happy to continue to be a thought leader to that and pass any of this over to any of the standards bodies and contribute to this. I absolutely agree with you. I mean, the... We need some standardization in order for the charging experience for everybody to improve.
I mean, the truth is that a GM car that gets tossed a Tesla or a NACS adapter in the next year or so is gonna have a CCS experience even on a Supercharger, right? Because it's gonna be working to the CCS protocol. It's not gonna be speaking Tesla. It's gonna be speaking CCS, and that, and that's fine, but it's not. There should be no illusion that it's all of a sudden going to be... There hasn't been a brain, a Tesla brain has not been built inside that GM car yet, right?
Yeah.
You kind of alluded to it earlier, and there's a lot of provisions for, you know, maybe site hosts to receive federal funding. I just want to speak to that, because I think the question oftentimes I get, and last year you were here, you were talking about, you know, a charging station being like $150,000. Maybe that's coming down, who knows? What are your options, and what kind of benefits do you get from some of these programs that can offset some of these costs? It is a capital-intensive business.
Yeah, yeah. What we've done is we've had a build plan in place. We have a great network planning tool that our analysis team has developed. We've looked at all the geographies that we think, "Oh, these are gonna pencil." We've overlaid literally the NEVI corridors. For this first strand of funding, it really is, it's mostly on the highway corridors. Where's the overlap between where we wanna build and where there's NEVI money, and where does the NEVI money broaden that reach? We've identified those. We'll be applying for that money. In addition, there are locations where we don't necessarily wanna build, but others do.
Like, I don't know, some of the, some of the gas stations or some of the other restaurants that are in rural areas. We can offer EVgo eXtend to them. Because for most of those folks, whether it's a Meijer or a McDonald's, they're not necessarily gonna wanna become charging experts. They need to partner with somebody, and what they get if they partner with us through EVgo eXtend, is they you know, we can actually do the NEVI application for them. They will own the charging asset, but we will engineer it, we will construct it, we will operate it for them. We will collect some revenue from, for being their service provider, and they will get to own the asset.
Yeah
Look, we see NEVI as being, this first round being a big uplift for corridors, and then the next round, we're hoping to get into some of the community applications.
That's also not even including 30C. I mean, there's a tax credit transferability provision that suddenly makes that 30% credit a lot more valuable than it was previously.
We're pretty much out of time, but just any closing thoughts, things that, you know, maybe you misunderstood about the story? What's key thoughts on investment pieces moving ahead?
Look, we're, like, we're in a such a great spot. We're starting to see real operating leverage on SG&A. Our core business model on the asset ownership is leverage to EV adoption and leverage to this increasing charge rate, which is beautiful. In the near term, we've got these capitalized light businesses, you know, while we're waiting for utilization and EV penetration to grow. We just feel like we're in a really great spot.
Great. Well, thanks for the insights here. We look forward to following the progress.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Thank you. Yep.