In the middle of nothing: an English expression describing the total sense of being lost that one can feel in certain situations. And it is precisely the fear of one day finding yourself in that situation, with a completely flat battery on a remote road, that is one of the factors that most holds back, perhaps unconsciously, the purchase of anelectric car. Well, from the idea of a young Italian computer engineer, an online platform called EViaggio has taken shape, offering a genuine antidote to the “phobia” of running out of charge.
“As I travel a lot and own an electric car,” says EViaggio’s founder, Nicola Carlon, “I have often found myself having to choose a hotel with charging so I could travel with peace of mind and avoid stressing the battery with expensive rapid charging. To choose hotels and restaurants I always rely on sites such as booking.com and TripAdvisor, but on both platforms the charging situation is unclear. In particular, I noticed that many hotels that advertise an electric vehicle charging service actually mean bicycles and scooters.”
The need to bring together hotels and restaurants from an electric mobility perspective
Nor is there any shortage of extreme cases, such as “the hotel that had listed the charging point in an adjacent public car park as its own, but couldn’t say which connectors it had…”. Numerous travel experiences, including overnight charging via makeshift connections to hotel wall sockets, have made ever clearer the lack of a tool to bring together, from an electric mobilityperspective, hotels and restaurants verified by users.
“Among the many apps for finding charging points,” explains Carlon, “there was nothing dedicated exclusively to destination chargers, where the owner could also claim their property, update the information and reply to reviews. That is how EViaggio was born, a platform that lets you add destinations and fill in a series of fields useful for EV travellers, such as connector type, power output, whether or not the service is free and compatibility with cars of various makes.”
The main features of the EViaggio platform
EViaggio’s features include the option of also adding the Booking.com and TripAdvisor links for the property with the charging point(s), “precisely because it is always useful to read the reviews of ‘non-electric’ users, as there are many more of them”. What is more, destinations can be reviewed and also claimed. This means that owners can take over their page on the site, update the information and reply to reviews, just as on the best-known platforms.
Another aspect highlighted by Nicola Carlon is that the service is free, for both users and owners: “The aim of EViaggio is not profit but to create an open and independent community. At the moment there aren’t even any ads. The platform is growing (it already has more than 1,300 destinations) but needs everyone’s help to establish itself, in the hope that one day it will no longer be needed because everyone will have a charging point.”
[Source] “EViaggio ends the nightmare of a car with flat batteries”, in ElettricoMagazine, 16 September 2020, Marco Ventimiglia, https://elettricomagazine.it/emobility/eviaggio-cancella-incubo-batterie-scariche-auto-elettriche/
