Chargeway Launches Its Biggest Update Yet

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Chargeway, the EV charging app that makes EV charging easy to explain by replacing complicated acronyms and engineering jargon with simple colors and numbers, has just released its biggest update yet, with the release of Chargeway 2.0. This major update brings a sleek new user interface and intuitive features designed to make EV charging and trip planning even easier than ever before.

Chargeway 2.0 introduces an array of new features, including:

• A redesigned user interface (UI) for effortless navigation across various stations and trips.
• Real-time uptime reports on the availability of public charging stations from the biggest major networks.
• Accurate charge time estimates for each station and charger, personalized to the user’s specific EV model and battery settings.
• An enhanced trip planner that takes into account weather conditions, driving speed, and recommends the optimal charging power level for efficient energy use.

“Visually Chargeway is now completely new, but the update a lot more than that,” explains Chargeway founder and CEO, Matt Teske. “As far as what’s the same? We’re still using easy-to-understand and intuitive colors and numbers to define plug options and charging speeds, not acronyms and voltage figures that you need an engineering degree to understand. That simplicity is still the core of (what makes Chargeway the best EV charging tool for drivers and dealers). The biggest change in 2.0 from the consumer side is a more polished, modern look that integrates some very intricate engineering.”

Full disclosure, Matt is a dear friend of mine. We’ve hosted nearly 300 episodes of the Electrify Expo podcast together, shared the stage at several EV events, and generally like to get weird and talk about Borax and hockey whenever the wine starts flowing. But my infatuation with Chargeway came before all that, and I can assure you that Matt has spent the last five years not just telling the industry how best to communicate the confusing landscape of EV charging, but listening to the people he’s met along the way.

“I’ve talked to so many people over the years, standing at charging stations, helping people to make sense of all of it,” Matt told me (I’m paraphrasing here). “Giving drivers a clear, up-to-date image of what the electric infrastructure looks like, for them, in their area, right now, in a format that’s easy to visualize, is critical to instilling confidence in a customer who is driving their first EV.”

Chargeway does that, but the “new-and-improved” Chargeway experience isn’t just about better functionality, but also personalization, enabling users to select their vehicle from a comprehensive list and quickly customize their EV’s profile in the app, which not only streamlines station finding and trip planning but also enables owners of multiple vehicles to quickly scroll between their vehicles.

My favorite updates, though, are in the station map, which not only gives users a detailed look at the charging stations in their immediate vicinity, but also how long it will take to charge their vehicle at each one, and — crucially — whether or not the station is online and available.

Updated Station Map Screen

Station map, image courtesy Chargeway.

“There’s nothing worse than pulling up to a charging station that you picked from a map, far from home and with a low state of charge in your battery, and realizing that the station is offline or worse not the power level you expected,” offers Teske. “We’re making sure that doesn’t happen … and we’re working to ensure that drivers of older EVs, who may not be able to take advantage of ultra-high-speed charging speeds, don’t plug into a port they can’t take full advantage of with ‘recommended’ labels (on specific charging ports).”

That simple step of recommending a specific charger to drivers helps keep the fastest ports open to EVs that can make use of them, which helps everyone charge up faster.

“We imagined a first-time EV driver who maybe has an EV as a rental and they’re staying at a hotel,” explains Matt. “Whether they’re on a business trip or on vacation, they want to see the charging stations they can use near them, and they want to be able to quickly understand how long it will take to charge their car. The new station map puts all that information front and center, and enables that first-time EV driver to ‘fuel up’ and get on with their day without having to calculate around a vehicle’s 400v vs. 800v system architecture or 50 kW vs. 150 kW of charging. The app says ’45 minutes’ on this charger and ’15 minutes’ on that one, so I can make a more informed choice about where I want to plug in.”

The updated trip planner also benefits from those calculations. Here, too, Chargeway does the “heavy lifting” for EV drivers on long road trips by not just recommending charging stations along the way, but by calculating how long you’ll need to plug in at which station to make it to the next stop based on your EV’s charging capabilities, presenting the best charging plan available on your route along with length of time to charge and excluding stations that are offline or busy.

The new Chargeway app is available for iOS and Android from November 10th. Download it, then let us know how you think it compares to the app you’re using today in the comments.