Charging at Evie Networks. Supplied
Australian EV charging network provider Evie Networks says it has been forced to make around 30 staff redundant, mostly in its depot and home charging business, saying the market is yet to develop.
Evie Networks chief executive officer Chris Mills says the redundancies announced this week has been an “incredibly hard decision”, but said that after an initial burst the market for depot charging for fleet operators and corporates had failed to develop.
“The market is just not there,” Mills told The Driven on Friday. “There has been not much of a follow on from corporates after an initial bump. It’s just not where it needs to be for us to absorb costs.”
Mills says the home charging market has also proven tough because of intense competition. Evie had offered vouchers for its fast charging network to customers that installed its home charging equipment, but could not gain a significant share of the market.
“Home charging is a pretty competitive field,” he said. “There is very little barrier to entry. Gee whizz, you can buy a cheap home EV charging box nowadays.”
Mills is still optimistic about the future of the EV industry, and the company’s fast charger business remains unaffected – despite the woes of its sister company Tritium, the EV charger manufacturer also backed by Trevor St Baker that fell into receivership and was sold late last week.
But Mills says that FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt – has had an impact on the market, particularly after the introduction of the federal government’s vehicle emissions standards.
“We’re on the precipice of a big change, but there is an enormous amount of FUD. Those people who have been anti-EV have ramped up their rhetoric. That has had its impact,” Mills said.
“We just found that both those lines of product were not going to get to where they need to be. We couldn’t see it happen for 18 months to 2 years. They were carrying too much costs, and diverting money from the fast charger business.
He said the employees affected by the redundancies had been incredibly professional. “This one was a gut punch, but I can not fault their professionalism, the way they took the news and the way they reacted to it. ”
The Driven understands 32 staff – out of about 100 – were affected by the cuts.
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of The Driven, and also edits and founded the Renew Economy and One Step Off The Grid web sites. He has been a journalist for nearly 40 years, is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review, and owns a Tesla Model 3.
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They need a new CEO!
Chris
Big Oil and social media are fueling all the FUD! Changing a CEO alone will not cut it.
Old media are guilty also.
As does Tesla.
The established media are as dependent on old dealership ad spending as the dealerships are on high maintenance ICE power. And a quiet Bathurst/F1 looms.
Sell THAT to the masses !
We need to fix the stupid ATO decision to class a EV home charger as a fringe benefit to fix the uptake of home chargers
Its like ATO are upset for not getting the FBT revenue because EV are FBT exempt, so looked for another way to sting corporates who choose to put their staff in EV over ICE vehicles
I don't know why the charging companies haven't challenged the ATO over this
Good points, needs a petition. I’d sign it.
What a damn shame.
Evie is doing poorly because they market a second rate product and have incredibly bad customer service, and the three times that I have tried to charge at a Evie station, their chargers did not work, the phone number provided did not answer on two occasions, and the time I did get through the CSO was incredibly rude and demanded I sign up to the EV network or he would not help me.
My charging experiences with Tesla 100% positive, with Evie 100% negative.
Try Chargefox if you want bad service and reliability. For me Evie is a close no. 2 to Tesla.
Yeah, the amount of thought has been incredibly disappointing & certainly taken the wind out of the sails.
There are x-wits who spend their days coming up with youtube garbage about how EVs are always catching on fire, despite statistics showing the opposite.
Re EV fires: While it’s true that ICE cars also catch fire, these fires are easy to put out. When an EV catches fire, the results are horrendous, as they cannot be extinguished (EV batteries generate their own oxygen due to exotheric reaction) and will cook ANYTHING nearby, due to their extreme heat. Maybe you should watch a few of these videos before you park one of these cars in your garage, under the kiddies’ bedroom. I would recommend “John Cadogen” on YouTube…
The risk is undoubtably there, but if it was anything remotely common, Norway would be a blazing inferno all the time. Which it isn't.
Congratulations, you're the problem.
"I would recommend “John Cadogen”"
ROFLMAO!!!
You are wrong about ICE vehicle fires. ICE vehicles are proven to catch fire much more frequently than EV's and are not always "easy" to put out - look at the Luton Airport fire for evidence As for John Cadogan, he emphatically called the Luton car park fire an EV fire.....then it was discovered to be a diesel. Amongst many other examples, this YouTuber is biased.
We tried to promote the products, amazing BTW BUT the company were / frustratingly non responsive to information, pricing , finance and tech support. Basic ingredients for a successful business. Perhaps a little introspection on performance and professionalism , hire better staff...sell more units. Jobs saved. Simple
Sorry for those made redundant.
But on the comment of cheap home EV chargers (well technically EVSEs) - that should be the case.
After all they are not much more than glorified power points with in some cases a few smarts built in.
A decent branded 10A outlet might be $25. It's crazy to me that people are willing to pay well over $1000 for a unit that can typically only supply their car with 3-4x that power.
Gee, maybe it has something to do with EV’s resale value being about the same as a previous generation mobile phone… then there’s the fire hazard posed by battery “thermal runaway”… Consumers are finally waking up to what a poor investment these overpriced, oversized barbecue starters really are…
Poor resale value, then you say "overpriced". Which is it to be? Originally, EV's were at a substantial premium to equivalent ICE, now they are much cheaper, this has always been the expectation and plan towards electrical mobility for everyone. As for catching fire......ppppleeeaseee this is just FUD.