Safety First: Co-founder and CEO of ChargeSafe Kate Tyrrell

When a hairy charging experience left Kate Tyrrell searching for a safe and secure EV charger, she decided to take matters into her own hands.

As the co-founder and CEO of ChargeSafe, Kate and her team assess charging points all over the country and rank them based on their levels of safety and accessibility. Here, she outlines the mission of ChargeSafe and how CPO’s can make their networks safer.

What is the story behind ChargeSafe?

I started driving an EV as part of my full-time position with myenergi – I had a company car and as one of the perks. My role was events and relationships manager, so I was driving up and down the country all the time in an EV.

I was driving back from Grimsby to Portsmouth on a Friday evening. It was just before COP26 in Glasgow. I had a lot of things on my mind. I needed to get back to Portsmouth to pack, to drive, back up to Glasgow and it was really late so I was driving along the A3 and came across a section of the road that had been shut off for roadworks which my navigational system hadn’t advised me on.

I was stuck in Farnham which is an area that’s unfamiliar to me. I don’t normally have to divert through there, I don’t know where I’m going and I was losing that excess mileage so I thought I should probably stop to charge, and in stopping to charge, I lost even more range because I was driving around looking for these chargers.

I had three separate charging experiences within a very small window and that evening, so it’s about 11pm, it was very dark and it was pretty abandoned.

There was nobody there but some youths in a car. They were just chilling but it was enough to make me feel a bit vulnerable because it was quite late. I’ve got out to plug the car in and notice that there’s no contactless payment, so I would have to register via an app to use the charger, and the longer that I stood there just trying to work this out, the more vulnerable I felt. I’m stood outside of the car, it’s unlocked.

I’ve got my keys, I’ve got my card and my phone on me and I just freaked out and thought no, there would be a better one. I jumped back in the car and found another charger around the corner at a supermarket, where I assumed they’re going to have good lighting, it will be more visible and I’ll feel safer. I drove into the car park and the supermarket is apparently very energy savvy and had all their lights switched off, so that wasn’t a great start.

The charger was located underneath a tree in the back end of the car park, and it wasn’t visible to the road, so if anybody drove on the road next to the charger, they just wouldn’t have seen me sitting there charging. To the right of that charge point, there’s dark alleyway – I don’t know who could be around and I was a bit shaken up and a bit scared by this so jumped out the car again, tried to plug in and it didn’t initiate, so then I’m on the phone to the chargepoint operator in tears.

They couldn’t get the charger to work, so I had to hang up and I ended up going to a petrol station nearby to use another charger, which also wasn’t working and away from the well-lit forecourt. The next charger was 24 miles away at a service station on the M3, and at this time I had 22 miles range left.

I had to drive along the M3 at 15mph on the hard shoulder with my hazards on and my partner was on the phone telling me exactly where I would find the charger at the service station, which was lucky because as you drive into the service station it’s not immediately obvious where they would be.

The next day. I was just so wound up by it and I thought I could go on Twitter, and I could call out all these different chargepoint network operators, but I don’t know if they would do anything. My partner is a software developer and he said ‘let’s just do something about it instead of moaning’ so we came up with ChargeSafe.

What does a 5-star chargepoint look like?

To get the absolute five star we would want it to be completely visible to any passing by vehicle or footbfall, and so ideally it would be placed nearby a facility that has usable food and drink access with staff on it 24/7. Lights directly over the charge points themselves and lighting in the local area and leading up to the chargepoint. Security cameras en route so that you’re filmed driving towards the charger, as well as over the charger so that if something was to occur you you’ve got video footage of whatever happened.

There would be clear signage leading up to the chargepoints, so you’re not playing hide and seek with it, and you know exactly where it is when you’re driving into the vicinity, and the road quality would be good, so you’re not going to go down a pothole and give yourself a flat tyre., meaning you can’t drive away from the chargepoint.

Even late at night, at least a 24/7 security guard nearby, and so in the worst-case scenario, if you’re screaming, someone is going to help you, and that is the grim reality of the personal safety at chargepoints and then on the facility side of things, making sure that they’re accessible and that they’re clean and nicely staffed.

What has the journey of ChargeSafe been like?

Starting a business is just a wild ride. At the time when ChargeSafe started. I had a job that I loved. I loved the business. I liked my boss. I loved the job. It was so good and then I was going to have to leave my job to pursue this job of making charging inclusive for everyone, and so that was difficult to accept.

We looked at what value we could bring to chargepoint network operators and in the very early days, during the first week of COP26 I put out a tweet saying “hey everybody, what would make you feel safer at chargepoints” and it gained a lot of traction. It also caught the interest of Ian Johnston from Osprey, and he DM’d me and he was watching this with interest.

That was great – we already knew that at least one chargepoint network operator might be interested in something that we had to offer as a solution, which then made it a viable business.

We’ve got Osprey signed up as our first chargepoint network subscriber, meaning that they get raw data on their sites and they can understand where to put their budget in order to make improvements on legacy sites and future sites, rather than splashing money on things that they might not necessarily have to pay out for. We have also just announced 3ti that builds solar car parks.

We’ve done an inspection on their ‘Papillio’ unit as it is right now which scored 4.09, and they’re going to make revisions to that unit using our recommendations to make it safer and accessible, and then when they release their second version come September, we will reinspect that unit. It’s really exciting to be involved with a CPO, but also someone who’s looking very much at the development stage.

How does ChargeSafe work on a day to day basis?

This works in two different ways. We’ve got ChargeSafe Pro and ChargeSafe Flight. ChargeSafe Light will work using public inspectors, so if you the next time you’re at a charger, you could log into our online portal, register as a user and answer ten very simple, very quick questions about the environment which will give us an idea of what that looks like.

If anything comes in at a three star or lower, that will red flag on our system as a priority for us to go out and do the pro inspection, which is 63 points. With ChargeSafe Pro, that’s where inspectors that we employ will be driving around the country full time, purely just to inspect these units, and that’s using the 63-point inspection that is designed to deliver a completely unbiased, independent score on how the charge point is rated on the safety side of things.

It’s much more of the qualitative type of data that we’re gathering. What’s the environment like? How would you rate it out of five stars? How good is the lighting? Then there are assessments that are much more quantitative – physical measurements that you’re taking with a tape measure.

That side of things will be verified by third party at random. We will pull out inspections that our inspectors have done just to ensure it’s been done appropriately without bias. That will be contracted to a third party so a completely external function from us, just to ensure that we are doing exactly what we say we’re doing.

Have you had any conversations with government about improving the standards of public chargepoints?

I’d really love to be a part of that process. We’ve spoken to OZEV about some bits and pieces and they’re really keen to have our feedback on some stuff and I really want to work with them, and I think collaboration is key in this industry. Let’s all work together. Let’s fix and produce solutions for the problems that we’re having.

We all know as EV drivers that things could definitely be improved. What I say to anybody who’s looking to adopt the EV lifestyle is that the infrastructure today will never be as bad as it is today. It’s improving every day.

We’re putting more chargers in the ground every day. We’re being more conscious about where they’re going, and we’re looking at safety and accessibility every single day. It’s a really exciting time to be in the industry and as long as we go into there with an open mind and with a moral heart, integrity is really important here and to build a real, functional, sustainable future infrastructure.

What are the short-term goals and long-term vision for the company?

For the rest of this year, I would like to have at least another two Chargepoint network operators as formal clients to start hiring inspectors. Ideally, I would like to have three inspectors by the end of the year so that we’re collecting as much information across the UK as possible, and I’d like them to be dotted out all over the country and hopefully we would have inspected every single rapid charge point by the end of 2022.

I think there’s 5000 currently. If we could get three full time inspectors, there’s no doubt in my mind that we would be able to achieve that and the application would be built and functional by the end of 2022 into 2023. We were already thinking about Europe. We’ve had calls with people and businesses in France and it would be really exciting to do that. We could just replicate this model and take it over to Europe. Long term, in ten years, it’s to just continually maintain that framework to be able to deliver updates to chargepoint network operators.

As things change, by then everything will be safe and accessible and working beautifully, and by then our standards will be like an accreditation, so each network would be ChargeSafe certified on an annual basis rather than a month by month raw data release.

The really important thing is to just roll with the punches and be adaptive and involved and not be stuck in one particular mindset about what we want to achieve, but big ambitions and completely fluid to which direction we lead in.