The search engine
The first question is always the same: where can I charge my electric car?
The decision to buy a plug-in car very often depends on whether or not you can top up with energy.
Anyone without a garage equipped with a power socket, and perhaps a wallbox (the system that allows faster charging), has to rely on public charging points.
In town it's a little easier. There are paid charging points, admittedly not many compared with the ever-growing demand, but what happens once you leave the city limits?
New-generation cars come with search systems: the sat nav, very often an optional extra to budget for, can display a map of the charging stations available in the area you are driving through.
In Italy we are stuck at 14,302 charging points (as of May, source: Motus-E) spread across 7,462 stations, most of them in the North. On average, 73% are public infrastructure and 27% are on private land open to the public (supermarkets or shopping centres).
We will have to wait for the next survey to see whether the 110% incentives introduced by the government this summer to build new electric refuelling points have given a decisive boost. In the meantime, initiatives are multiplying.
One in particular could prove helpful for anyone who decides to use an electric car for long-distance travel, including day trips and weekends away, even though these will be very limited this holiday season.
The idea
Nicola Carlon, 35,
founded Eviaggio,
the platform where
travellers can find
hotels with
electric car charging points
It's called Eviaggio and it works like a search engine for hotels and restaurants with electric charging sockets. The brainchild of Nicola Carlon, a 35-year-old manager at a company specialising in industrial robotics, it relies on the collaboration of users and owners, who report businesses with car charging sockets and their type. At present it lists 1,494 destinations, 192 of which are verified. When you open a listing, you see the basic information, a map of the location, the name of the property (where you can book your stay) and, above all, the type of charging available.
Users can also leave their own rating (from one to five stars) and a comment. For now, the system is paying the price of tourism being reduced to a bare minimum by the pandemic. Dividing Italy into risk zones certainly doesn't help long-distance travel. But Italians will travel again. And then the service offered by EViaggio will be able to develop and grow, with the help of travellers themselves.
[Source] “Plug-in charging? You can do it at your hotel too”, in L’Economia, Il Corriere della Sera, 14 December 2020, print edition.
