Excerpt from: “Electrification 2018, Looking Back and Looking Forward,” a PUF interview of GM’s VP-Global Strategy, Mike Ableson, and Director-Advanced Vehicle Commercialization Policy, Britta Gross:
Mike Ableson: We've had this conversation with Consumers Energy, with [CEO] Patti Poppe, who’s an ex-GM person. She's been helpful in bringing the GM side and utility side together to have some of these conversations around journey mapping and how people think about charging.
We find when we do our customer research, that people buy cars from us, but they don't think about buying chargers from us. We offer a charger as an accessory and it doesn't have a great take rate.
When we ask people, who do you think about when you talk about home charging? They say, well of course the electric utility, because it's going to appear on my electric bill. Why would I talk to anybody else?
I think there's a huge opportunity for utilities to build more customer interaction.
When we talked to the Consumers Energy team, they're very intrigued by this idea of getting their customers to interact with them more frequently than just paying a bill once a month. With this idea of smart charging and setting times when your car is going to charge, you can easily envision a much more frequent conversation between the customer and the utility and how to work together to optimize charging and the home electricity usage.
Britta Gross: Today we're selling to folks that are almost exclusively single-family home residents. For EV charging, a complete untapped market is the apartment, condo, this multi-unit dwelling area. If we talk about home charging, that's got to be included.
That's got to be a part of the plan, and one that the utilities are going to have to tackle. There's no one else equipped like utilities to go into these places and do it and meet the building codes.”