LONDON MOVE 2022 – A BERYLLS RETROSPECTIVE - Berylls

ovid is clearly over in the UK - and people are eager to meet in person again. So after two troubled years MOVE LONDON was back in full swing over two days last week.

Over 600 speakers had signed up and 350 exhibitors bought space on the vast floor of the ExCel centre. And thousands of delegates crowded the space and made this one of the biggest ‘future mobility’-themed gatherings.

With numerous presentations throughout the day happening in parallel on multiple stages it is impossible to provide a comprehensive summary – therefore please take the following as my subjective ‘personal notes’ with no claim to completeness.

BEVs ARE HERE…

… and will continue to take over much faster from ICE than expected only a couple of years ago – that seemed to be a general consensus across the event. And certainly, recent registration figures in many markets confirm that. But then, looking behind the façade, are we seeing a sustainable trend?

Author

Arthur Kipferler

Partner & MD (UK)

arthur.kipferler@berylls.com

One data point at MOVE caused second thoughts at least in my mind: CARWOW, the new car buying platform, said that after seeing 37% of their users considering a BEV in 2019, this number has grown to 49% in 2022. Keep in mind that in 2019 those 37% ‘BEV considerers’ bought only 1.7% of new cars. In 2022 the 49% considerers are buying the now almost 15% BEVs among all new cars in the UK. I couldn’t help seeing a rapid running out of BEV-ready car buyers in these numbers. Combine that with the pull back of government incentives and the BEV revolution might run out of momentum soon.

Not least because of … charging, which is certainly on top of the list for all BEV hesitators (and, knowing from my own experience, unfortunately also for us BEV drivers). And despite a lot of proposals and intensive discussions it will remain the main challenge for wide-spread BEV adoption. A few key themes discussed at MOVE:

Faster charging is much more helpful than bigger batteries.

Confirmed by BEV driver behaviour: they do prefer high power charging by far, with the faster 20% of chargers delivering 80% of the energy and charging times trending downwards to between ten and fifteen minutes – not too different from an ICE fuel station stop.
New solutions are developed and (hopefully) rolled out: high power chargers with built-in battery storage – allowing true fast charging in locations with limited electricity supply (at least for the first one arriving at that charger…).
Plug & Charge will help this further, eliminating the search for the right app and the matching password. The UK government also will make the acceptance of contactless payments mandatory, bringing the times to an end where every charger network requires a different app.
The Start-up dockChain provides a cost-efficient solution that allows sequential charging of several BEVs plugged into one high power charger – without the necessity to move the vehicles after each charge at normal ‘one plug’ HP chargers. Ideal for BEV fleets, work places, hotels, and airports.
And for a completely different approach: NIO Europe pledged to build 1,000 battery swap stations outside China by 2025. Another proprietary network built at high expense only to face dismal utilisation? And with a maximum of 13 batteries in each swapping stations this solution is hardly fit for the summer holiday rush to the beaches.

On the downside I could not fight of the impression that there is going to be a large problem with charging, at least in the short and medium term:

Wejo, sitting on rich data from over 10 million connected cars, is estimating that the demand for charging infrastructure will not be met if current supply & demand trends continue.
National Highways says that 95% of the UK highway network is already within 20 miles of an electric charge point today. While this sounds good at first glance, this statistic certainly includes every 3.6kWh charger – hardly what you need to keep you going on a longer distance trip. And it doesn’t subtract all the ones that happen to be out of order just when you need them.
The UK government’s ‘Project Rapid’ which will deliver £950 million of charging infrastructure at motorway service areas. Again, sounds great – but this includes the rollout of 6,000 rapid chargers by 2035, not exactly ‘soon’.
A lot of AI, bi-directional infrastructure and ‘management’ was quoted to assist meeting the challenge. Sounds like we won’t be free to charge our BEVs where and when we need or want, but when the grid allows.

Furthermore, the government stated that now was the time for multiple players to collaborate to solve the problem – something that usually doesn’t happen easily.

Over the last three years I often could not avoid the impression that for some experts and activists BEVs have become a purpose in themselves. MOVE, however, left no doubt that protecting the environment was the main reason to start the electrification of mobility – and Northern Europe was at the forefront:

Stora Enso presented their battery anodes made from sustainably farmed trees
Volvo (Cars) presented their objectives to sell 50% of their 2025 volume with a BEV drivetrain and a number of targets to become more ‘circular’. Is it coincidence that targets like these always sound so ‘appropriate’: 25% recycled plastic and steel by 2025…
Polestar announced to make their cars more sustainable by designing them for ‘peak’ instead of ‘permanent’ performance. Sounds very reasonable – they just must avoid selling to the 0.5% customer who does actually pull a heavy trailer up a steep hill the whole day (and other outlier users which too often dictate the attribute performance targets of a vehicle). This focus on ‘normal’ customer needs should help to enable the ‘net zero car’ (cradle to grave!) they target by 2023.

HOW TO GET THERE?

Facing and exploiting a new reality is too often easier for players with no legacy to protect. A case in point: While incumbents are devising strategies to keep BEVs coming to the franchised service network, new brands can turn the lack of parts to maintain and exchange into an advantage: Aiways is launching in Europe with service intervals of 100,000km – so that many first owners of an Aiways will NEVER see a workshop (assuming, that is, the ever more needed software updates come without problems ‘over the air’).

SHARED MOBILITY…

… was another big topic, even if many of the initial concepts have proven unviable. MyBee & City Bee seemed to confirm that some of these ‘shared mobility’ business models have a better chance of survival when they are combined. The Baltic car sharing car company successfully added car subscriptions to their platform – and now enjoys a higher fleet utilisation (but it remained unclear if that is already enough for a path to profitability). And then there was good advice from several presenters: walking and cycling are a much better substitutes for many car trips. I guess we all can start right here and now. I am just wondering if this trend can take off fast enough to keep so many different (new) providers of electric bikes and scooters and the related service profitable. It seems proliferation is still continuing for now, before the inevitable consolidation.

About the Author

Arthur Kipferler

Arthur Kipferler (1963) started his career in 1989 at the Boston Consulting Group, where he consulted for 13 years in the automotive industry. After consulting, Arthur Kipferler held senior management positions at Toyota in Europe and the U.S. From 2013 to 2014, he was global head of the BMW Group’s Future Retail program. Subsequently, he had leading roles in strategy, corporate planning and transformation management at Jaguar Land Rover in Coventry, UK. Arthur Kipferler complements the expertise of the Berylls by AlixPartners (formerly Berylls Strategy Advisors) partner team in the fields of market & customer, technologies, sales, and digitalization, as well as in the development and implementation of corporate, product, and regional strategies.
Mechanical engineering, production engineering, at the Technical University of Munich (TUM); MBA in Strategy, Marketing and Organizational Behavior at INSEAD Business School, France.

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