Having learned from our clients and over a hundred conversations with fleet managers electrifying their company cars, we believe that you should consider the following when choosing your charge card:

1. The pricing structure

Let’s start with the most obvious and crucial but not the easiest to compare: pricing. Pricing structures can differ a lot when comparing charge card providers. However, most of them fall into these categories:

• An initial setup fee

• A monthly fee per activated charge card

• A fixed fee per charged session

• Blocking fees

• The actual price per kWh for charging your vehicles, which can be assessed with price averages that are often published on free comparison websites

Our recommendation is to collect as precise pricing data (e.g. from first quotes) as possible before making a buying decision. Especially high blocking fees can unintentionally drive costs and create unpleasant situations with employees who forgot their car blocking a public charger. Some providers offer capped blocking fees to avoid exploding costs in these cases - there are worth a look.

Further, it is useful to compare the prices of nearby charging stations and of different technologies (AC vs. DC charging) that you frequently use, for instance by using the online maps or charge card providers applications.

Finally, it can be helpful to estimate the monthly costs for your actual fleet size. While for smaller fleets fixed fees can make a big difference, bigger car parks usually benefit from low price per kWh over the whole network.

2. The network

Which brings us to the second category - the network and its coverage. Keep in mind that not only the absolute number of chargers matters (despite marketing campaigns telling you otherwise) but also how they are spread. Especially the areas that you are mostly operating in should be covered all-over. For international trips into other European countries, a coverage above 80% should usually be sufficient.

So you should definitely check:

• The countries that are covered in your provider’s network

• The number of chargers in each country

• The coverage in the area your mostly operating in

• Provision of a map/application to find chargers & check prices, otherwise finding the nearest and cheapest charger can become like looking for a needle in a haystack.

3. The management (of existing charge cards)

But when your employees start using the charge card, there should be good management functions - the third category - to help you ensure smooth charging and reimbursement operations.

We advice you look for the following:

• The visibility of all public charge sessions in an app/browser

• A place to manage all your active and passive cards

• A card blocking feature

• An easy and reliable customer support (esp. with long opening hours and fast communication channel) in case of problems

Especially the first three features are crucial: being able to find all your charge sessions in one place and the possibility to activate and deactivate your cards remotely. Nothing is more annoying than depending on monthly spreadsheets to know which employee has charged where and at what price. Or having to contact customer service every time a card gets lost.

Nice extras can be remote control features to cap charging sessions. Or a white-labeling offer to make your cards look awesome in your own corporate design. And sometimes it can be more handy to get small RFID chips instead of plastic cards - but that’s up for discussion and purely subjective.

Congrats - If you made it until here you should have a good idea how to asses your future charge card provider. Just:

1. Choose the relevant aspects of a charge card that do matter to you and your company out of our suggestions and maybe add your own additional dimensions

2. Research the most convenient charge card providers and score each provider for each category

3. Order your charge card and contribute to greener mobility!

PS.: Or just skip the process and order a Guided charge card to manage your fleet with ease from within our platform. ;)

But seriously: We already did some work ourselves and created a brief comparison of charge card offers that convinced us the most. Feel free to reach out to us, if you want to have a look at our first assessment - we are happy to share!

Drive carefully and thanks for doing your part for a greener future!