Rubicon’s head of e-mobility, Hilton Musk, has spearheaded a major change for electric vehicle (EV) charging in South Africa that is, in some ways, ahead of more developed countries.
The second cousin of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO with the same surname, Musk is a qualified civil engineer with 25 years of experience across various industries.
He has been working at Rubicon, South Africa’s second-largest charge point operator (CPO), since 2022.
In addition to growing public EV charger locations, one of the biggest issues that Musk is tackling is the friction drivers experience when trying to use these facilities.
In countries where EVs have been widely adopted, a common complaint is the need to juggle different RFID cards and apps to use different companies’ chargers.
Musk’s dad experienced this while trying to rent an EV in Europe. Due to the complexity of managing the charging apps, he ditched the idea.
“Imagine you needed one card for BP, another for Shell, and a third for Engen, just to fill up with
petrol,” said Musk.
“It was so complex that he rented a petrol vehicle, because that is what he knows and trusts”, Musk said. “He knew he could just go to a fuel station, fill up, and pay with his bank card.”
To eliminate this issue, Musk has forged partnerships between Rubicon and bank card payment facilitators Visa, Verifone, and EFT Corporation to make paying for EV charging simpler and faster.
Musk previously told MyBroadband that supporting conventional card payments could significantly improve the charging experience.
“Paying with your bank card or a digital wallet like Apple Pay or Google Wallet is the most natural and established mechanism that is already widely used by consumers,” Musk said.
In addition, the solution could create additional value-added opportunities for fleet cards, banking products, and loyalty programmes.
South Africa’s EV charging ecosystem fairly simple — for now
Currently, approximately 30 Rubicon public EV chargers support card payments, and the company plans to incorporate this feature into all its upcoming chargers from the initial installation.
Musk believes that every charging station should have the solution. “We will never get to a point where it is widely or commonly available if we only have it at select locations,” he said.
“From the 30 that we’ve installed, we’ve seen quite a lot of uptake. Some people who even have EV charging apps and wallets just use them out of interest.”
The solution is proving most beneficial to recent EV adopters who did not receive a dedicated RFID charging card from an e-mobility service provider (EMSP).
In the current environment, the EMSP handles the customer-facing part of the charging process, including user access via cards, apps, vouchers, or wallets, payment systems, customer support, and station mapping.
The CPO is responsible for installing and maintaining the physical infrastructure, and in some cases, power supply agreements with the relevant electricity supplier.
These companies can be one and the same. In other cases, the Open Charge Point Interface standard enables interoperability between different CPOs and EMSPs through a roaming registry.
Roaming registry
In South Africa, Rubicon and GridCars are currently the only participants in the roaming registry, which
allows Rubicon customers to use GridCars stations, and vice versa, using just one card or app.
While it is a better setup than in many more developed countries, it is still not as frictionless as regular banking cards, as it requires pre-loading charging credits onto an EMSP’s platform.
EV charging already takes significantly more time than filling up a fuel tank; having to keep a special card or app on your phone adds unnecessary complexity to the process.
Requiring a dedicated app or card also gives EMSPs some ability to see and control customer data and increases the barriers to entry in the market for new charging companies.
Musk believes the main reason this system had been the norm was that it was easier for CPOs and EMSPs to give customers RFID cards linked to a backend.
That enabled user authentication without integrating interoperability with banking systems, which can be a long and expensive process.
However, he believes that deploying regular card payment terminals at EV chargers could bring down public EV charging operational costs in the long run, especially app development and maintenance costs.
EV manufacturers would also no longer have to partner with CPOs or EMSPs to provide RFID cards to customers for charging at public stations.