Charge@Large App Promises To Make Finding EV Chargers in Australia easier

The idea behind Charge@Large is admirable, but at launch it really clearly needs more data.

One of the most commonly cited pain points for any EV driver is range anxiety, typically expressed as concerns about whether there will be an available charger – preferably a fast charger – where they want to go across this wide, brown land.

That’s an understandable enough concern, and I’ve done a number of drives across the country in the years since I transitioned to only driving electric vehicles to get a real-world (though limited to sample size of one) feel for where matters are improving, and where work needs to be done.

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A new app, Charge@Large, developed by the Electric Vehicle Council with funding from the NSW and WA state governments is pitched as taking away many of those road trip stresses with the promise that it will enable drivers to find nearby chargers and see their actual usage in real time – not only if somebody else is using them, but also if they’re out of order and what level of charging they support.

You might be thinking at this point “hang on, aren’t there a lot of EV charging apps already?”

You wouldn’t be wrong, and the Electric Vehicle Council is well aware of this too. In a statement, Electric Vehicle Council Chief Executive Julie Delvecchio said

“There are a range of EV apps out there – some offer real-time availability but are limited to specific charge point operators, while others display availability across different brands but are static and lack live updates. ‘Charge@Large’ delivers real-time charger status updates across all participating charge point operators nationwide. What also sets our app apart is its ability to give these insights a second life by sharing it with governments to support charging network improvements.”

There’s a lot here that’s eminently admirable, because anything that makes road trips smoother and easier across the board is a good thing, especially when you can also tie it into real-time data monitoring to help with the planning and rollout of needed infrastructure.

Also, an all-in app is a great idea; right now to give this some context there’s more than half-a-dozen EV charging and mapping apps sitting on my phone, and that’s only because I’ve uninstalled a few I’ve not needed for ages. The clutter problem here is quite real.

All good, but the devil, as always, is in the detail. Charge@Large is available as a free app for iOS and Android platforms, and all it really needs is location permissions because naturally enough, it needs to know where you are in order to work out where your closest chargers might be.

Being the curious EV driver that I am, I installed Charge@Large this morning and looked to seeing what it thought was available near me – and I could instantly see the issue at launch. Right now, Charge@Large has EV charger data from Exploren, ChargeN’Go, Wevolt, Charge Hub and Sonic Charge, with the promise that it will soon also add CasaCharge and Charge Post.

Honestly, there’s a few networks in there that I’ve never even heard of before, which makes me suspect that they’re quite regional, but the more the merrier. The Electric Vehicle Council says that it “continues to onboard more operators with confidential discussions ongoing.”

Which means that many of the larger players in the Australian market – names like Chargefox, Evie and Tesla for example – aren’t represented on the Charge@Large map at this time at all.

I’ve driven an EV to Adelaide, and I’m quite sure that there’s more than one EV charger in the state of South Australia, for example.

Apps like the publicly updated Plugshare tend to have those chargers because people have added them in, but that’s an app that suffers a lot from data redundancy; I know a few sites that have never appeared on Plugshare, and I’ve been to more than a few where the app was insistent sites weren’t in use even as I rolled into them to see cars already using them.

Now, I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good here, and this is a new app with room to grow, but it really strikes me that it’s a pity that there isn’t a federally mandated standard for usage and availability data as a matter of openly available data.

We already see this (at least here in NSW) for ICE vehicles with services like Fuel Check, and having it be an open standard would make it considerably easier for apps like Large@Charge to get that data and make it available in a way that made sense to EV road users.

For now, though, Large@Charge is going to stay on my phone along with its EV charging siblings, and the search for the one true EV charging and mapping app to rule them all continues.

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