A US-based EV charging technology company has launched in Australia with a vision to help Australia’s service stations become ‘multi-fuel convenience hubs’ and evade the downfall of the traditional servo as Australia’s car sector increasingly electrifies.
Konect is a subsidiary of Gilbarco Veeder-Root (Gilbarco), a US company which manufactures fuel dispensers, payment systems and other components of fuel stations, and which already holds a 60 per cent market share in Australia’s fuel technology sector.
The move marks a pivot in the company’s offering to keep it competitive in a changing vehicle landscape.
Australia’s climate goals require EV market share to reach 30 per cent by the end of the decade – in the last year up to one in every ten new cars sold has been fully electric, although that share has halved in recent months due to a plunge in the sales of market leader Tesla.
With the number of service stations in Australia shrinking from 25,000 in the 1970s to about 7,000 today, Konect is positioning itself as a way to help remaining service stations remain open as the automotive industry changes.
Merrick Glass, global head of strategy and marketing at Gilbarco, says traditional fuel stations were prime candidates for EV chargers for a number of reasons, including driver familiarity, their useful locations which tend to be important points along major traffic routes, and amenities.
Konect already has a major global footprint, but this week’s announcement marks their first foray into Australia, which Glass sees as a particularly promising EV growth market.
“You’re starting to see a lot of the regulatory push come through in Australia that we’ve seen to be very effective in other parts of the world,” he said.
Such regulations include the NVES, the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard, which came into effect on January 1 and sets mandatory targets for the average CO2 emissions of new cars sold in Australia. Manufacturers that fail to meet their targets can face penalties, though these will not be enforced until July 1.