Electric
vehicles still make up just a fraction of the cars, trucks and SUVs on the road
today. But that’s changing: The number of electric and plug-in hybrid cars on
the world’s roads exceeded 3 million in 2017. By 2025, there are expected to be
20 million electric vehicles in just North America and Europe.
And that
means the world is going to need a lot more chargers.
ChargePoint,
the California startup that provides infrastructure for electric vehicles, said
Friday it will expand its network of chargers nearly 50-fold over the next
seven years. The company, which has more than 53,000 chargers in operation
today, has committed to a global network of 2.5 million charging spots by 2025.
The majority
of these new EV chargers will be evenly split between Europe and North America,
with smaller percentages in Australia and New Zealand, the company said Friday
at the Global Climate Action Summit.
ChargePoint
has raised more than $292 million since its founding in 2007. It’s used the
funds to add chargers to its network, including an expansion last year into
Europe. The company secured an $82 million funding round, led by automaker
Daimler in May 2017. A month later the company announced another $43 million in
funding from German engineering giant Siemens to bolster its European
expansion.
The network
expansion comes at an auspicious time for automakers, a number of which are
planning to roll out electric vehicles in the next several years. Tesla has its
own network of chargers that it calls superchargers. The automaker has invested
heavily to build out the network, which is now 1,342 stations with 11,013
superchargers globally.
Only Tesla
vehicles can use that network, which aims to promote long-distance travel.
Other automakers that are beginning to sell EVs will rely heavily on
third-party EV providers like ChargePoint. It’s estimated that at least 40 new
electric vehicle models will be introduced in the next five years. Jaguar will
start delivering its first EV, the i-Pace crossover, to customers in the U.S. this
fall. Audi plans to introduce its first electric vehicle, the e-tron, on
Monday.
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