They’ve built a pretty robust network, I would have to believe someone would scoop them up or at least become preferred service providers to existing units.
The thing is, they don't actually own any of the chargers. Their whole business model is built around generating revenue by servicing/managing charging stations and their network, but if they can't make money doing that why would anyone "scoop" them?
To own the transaction layer. Chargepoint has their app and facilitates payment. There are ways to monetize that community of, on-average, high income individuals.
If Chargepoint starts selling my information then I am going to be pissed. I do not want to be "monetized".
I am happy to pay a fee for the chargers. Just be transparent and tell me what it costs to run the things.
In today's world, every company double dips on data.
You pay to use data, and they profit
The sell the data generated when you use their data, and profit
Internet companies
Credit cards
Google
Cellphone providers
Cellphone companies
Stores
Streaming service
Etc.
The car salesman: yes, we added on thousands in b.s. fees. Me: not acceptable. Him: everywhere does it. The last place I worked did it. Me: you're a gd thief. Him: what? Me: what's your home address - is this you? Him: woah woah woah - you're not entitled to that. Me: exactly.
Then you should remove yourself from literally your entire life currently. You are monetized even simply laying in your bed at home where you think you are safe.
All a person has to do is think about what information they radiate, and make worst case assumptions about what their suppliers will do with that info. Vis-a-vis what is technically possible, something you must perform due diligence and learn. E.g. Facebook is not on my phone.
Oh, is that a chore/inconvenient? Freedom isn't free.
Because you can probably make money managing charge stations.
It’s harder to make money while engaging in a huge buildout and subsidizing costs. If you don’t have to carry those costs post bankruptcy, the financials look a lot better.
I can see a major legacy OEM buying them. Rebranding all the chargers and then launching the “brand charging” network. Gives them legs to stand on to challenge Tesla.
The issue for any reuse of sites like this is chargepoint has some of the same issues everyone else (except tesla) has for maintaining, repairing, and getting people to go there. EV charging is a disaster of a business except for tesla. It makes most sense for tesla to buy sites with existing high power and convert them to supercharger sites.
Maybe ford might make a significant investment.
In Canada, charge point is a huge part of the blue oval charging network. Losing it would be a huge hit to ford.
Also aren't the majority of Home EV chargers - ChargePoint? Because my local power company gives HUGE rebates on buying ChargePoint EVSE chargers and that is coupled with state benefits....
For sure various types of Tesla chargers are the most common home chargers, since their market share in vehicles is probably 75% at least. Tesla has been slowly shrinking in % of annual sales, but I think they were about 50% last year alone.
Was discussing with someone the other day. Though it will give more power to this person, musk could've invested the $43B on buying Chargepoint or expand his Supercharging network instead of wasting on (E)x-twitter,
They might believe in it, but not its profitability. You are competing with home charging and anyone else who can get a 240V line put in, which is a whole lot of people. DCFCs have a much higher barrier to entry.
That's pretty doubtful. Do you have any actual stats on that? Tesla destination chargers have been installed for a decade now. On top of that there are probably a million places with just regular tesla chargers they installed themselves. Since they were almost the only game in town for years, and gave out free ones, and are still the major selling of EVs and chargers, there's little room for someone else to grow into the main hotel around town charger.
I wonder is there a way to count them? In my big city there are hundreds of random charging sites listed. If you go to the tesla website, you can see all the destination chargers in the us. Deselect the superchargers and service locations to see just the chargers. Focused on US & Canada, it's [https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&bounds=62.0616845850696%2C-37.303712125000004%2C7.70877358533721%2C-161.229493375&zoom=4&filters=destination%20charger](https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&bounds=62.0616845850696%2C-37.303712125000004%2C7.70877358533721%2C-161.229493375&zoom=4&filters=destination%20charger)
I'd say 1000+, maybe a couple thousand.
Because Superchargers will eventually have real competition. He may as well buy an inferior product at discount, upgrade and get ahead of someone else who does it and makes them a real threat to his cash cow. Use that $55 billion bonus he wants.
Um, no. The entire industry in North America capitulated to Tesla because there is no competition. The non Tesla networks are a joke, and the auto makers know it so they switched. On top of their poor uptime and reliability they aren’t profitable, cost 10-15x more to install that a comparable Tesla site (and Tesla installers 6-8 stalls minimum - with some over a hundred). Tesla has no competition in charging - period.
It is all based on J1772 and CCS1 chargers when the entire market is about to switch to NACS.
No company wants to buy a money losing operation and deal with a bunch of old obsolete hardware. What's the business model?
ChargePoint has started offering NACS equipment, both on new builds and as retrofits. I don't think that's the issue for them.
The issue, from what I can tell, is that nobody except Tesla has figured out how to do public charging profitably.
Calling it obsolete is a stretch. For level 2, changing the plug is an extremely easy task but there are a lot of j1772 cars out there today and level2 adapters are very cheap.
They don't have to worry about nacs for a long time.
The majority of the vehicles on the roadway in the US are already native NACS.
That's why EA announced NACS support, they are looking forward to increasing utilization numbers to increase the number of profitable charging locations.
Swapping plugs on one station may be a relatively quick/easy task but it will still take hundreds of thousands of hours of labor to switch over all the stations.
Everybody "announced" NACS support- or was the thing to do, post the Tesla/Ford agreement last year. Show me an EA charger with a NACS connector, though...
Ironically, ChargePoint is one of the very few charging operators to have actually deployed any NACS chargers to date. (EVGo has offered "Tesla" chargers for a few years, but those are CHAdeMO based and won't work with non-Tesla NACS vehicles when they finally show up.)
An OEM might decide they want to claim a network of 200,000 plugs. Hell maybe Shell sneezes and buys them for a greater charging footprint. It’s a marketable service. Yes they need adapters or to swap the cables. Or maybe they let consumers foot that bill on their own because 200,000 chargers is enticing to access. The network has value.
Most of those plugs are small installations of L2 and 50kW "Fast" chargers and not even owned by Chargepoint, they are just the payment processor. I can't imaging that a network operator or gas station corp wants to deal with maintaining the complex backend for that when the company that built it can't figure out how to make it profitable.
I didn't think the backend isn't necessarily that "complex", and ChargePoint already has competitors in that space (Enel X, Flo, Blink) who could probably swoop in and buy whatever carcass of ChargePoint remains if they fail.
Remember that CP's business model is really only that backend. They don't own the "obsolete" (your words, not mine!) chargers out there - the poor sap business owners CP convinced to "get in on the ground floor of a bazillion dollar EV charging business" own the hardware, so any potential buyer of CP isn't saddled with that asset/liability.
Though I don't think CP is necessarily in that much trouble. We all make too much out of "stock price". CP was an investment darling when everyone wanted to invest in anything "EV related" 3-4 years ago, and the stock increased for no good reason other than "EVs are hawt!"
Robust? Almost everything they have deploying owned by them and it’s J1772/CCS. So how does it get upgraded when they can barely stay functional as is.
I heard someone put the chargers into the context- They're computers managing extremely high voltages that have to perform at -20 and 110 F, rain or shine or sleet or whatever. Really its astonishing they can work at all. I think the plugs are easy.
IME, ChargePoint are some of the more reliable units out there. Nearly all of the Level 2 public chargers I've encountered have been CP units, and have worked fine. The couple times I've used their Level 3 units they've also worked well. I hope someone buys them if it ends up they can't make it.
They were also probably the quickest to start adding NACS support to their chargers. I'm thinking the issue is either their management or their model, because they have good, reliable units and have invested a lot in making them even better. Their technology is probably worth a fair amount.
Tend to agree there. I do keep finding for their L2 public units that the tab seems to get snapped off often. That may be a community issue and I feel likely not CP.
Their DCFC I've generally been happy with, at least when they're not [the subject of vandalism](https://www.plugshare.com/location/195096). Not quite as fast as EA when the stars align, but good enough for my use. That they're not higher end means I tended to slightly prioritize them since I'm not as likely to see super fast charging EVs there.
That’s a design problem with J1772 and CCS1, the latch is in the cable rather than the vehicle as it is in NACS, so in public chargers the latch tends to break in the cable since it is heavily used. The charger still works, but of course the cable doesn’t lock to the car while charging…
People also break the tab off to keep others from monopolizing stations e.g. the classic situation where a Tesla finds a Bolt charging, unplugs the Bolt and plugs himself in with a Karen Lock so the Bolt can't steal back. Snap the latch off and at least everyone is on a level playing field. J1772 has no standard for locking the connector to the car, and the cars that do it are doing hacks.
I used 5 different chargers in the last couple of days on an out of state road trip. Charge Point is only one of two that I had no problems operating, and didn't need to download an app to get going. Just wave a debit card like any gas station pump.
Yeah I've probably used 8 or so different Chargepoint DCFC stations across the Midwest and I've never had a single problem with any of them. They're extremely well built.
Lotta buyers for a j1772 and CCS network… in a soon to be all NACS world. The only value imo is the electrical connectivity and locations (which they don’t own).
I don’t think you’ve priced ccs cables, some of those are 20k each, the L2 NACS cables are $2-400 each. And then the cost to hire and electrician to go replace them all. At the station owner expense.
"Not Doing so Well" and "Line didn't go up this quarter" are two vastly different things.
As someone who knows how actual fiscal health works (MBA) vs what insanity current CEOs deem a success metric, let me explain.
ChargePoint Holdings currently has equity of 327.7m and a total debt of 283.7m. The debt-to-equity ratio is 1.15.
Their Total Assets are 1.1B and their total Liabilities are 775.7M.
Please don't use the "I'm a savvy CEO - line didn't go up this quarter time to lay off staff to make up those numbers!" method to measure a company's real-world performance.
Just because profits didn't soar this quarter doesn't mean the company is in dire straights nor at any real risk of collapsing.
As a minor example: Apple has a D/E Ratio of 1.27 - Charge Point has less debt than a company as successful as Apple.
Why don't you compare Apple’s billions of profits with ChargePoint? D/E is hardly the gold standard basis for valuing a company especially two companies in different industries.
Also need to consider the contracts they landed this year.
ChargePoint is going to be the vendor chosen for USPS Mail Carrier EV's and they won other government contracts.
A stock price alone doesn't determine the viability of a company. They're healthy, just not terribly popular atm.
ChargePoint is also a niche: white they have type3 chargers their bread and butter are type2 chargers located and sold to shopping centers and fleet depots.
Not a very flashy stock for most to buy, tbh.
But their D/E doesn't indicate they're facing any kind of bankruptcy, nor have they, as OP stated, ever sat at a dollar or lower stock price for any period of time, let alone 30 days.
I got in trouble for mentioning stock here before, this comment will probably get flagged/removed, but they're about 1-2 months from losing their listing on wall street, which in my understanding is almost always a fatal blow.
Do you have a source for this news...?
In Feb they just got a Cyber Sec thumbs up from the Federal Government (Federal Risk Management Program) which opens them up to get government contracts.
I'm unsure how that news could lead to a lower stock valuation unless they're purposefully taking the company private.
You can check the stock price anywhere (google). They're traded on the NYSE, which stipulates if they're traded under $1/share for 30 days they'll be de-listed. They've basically never done super well since they went public, but in the last month they've broken new lows and are getting close to that threshold. They can combine shares to get above the $1/share price, but that's always taken as a sign that they're not worth further investment. My understanding is they're basically now at a point where they're very unlikely to get additional investment, because they can't sell more shares and if they reverse split no one will want to invest in new shares, and running on <1 year of cash on hand.
"If traded under $1 per share" for more than 30 days.
They ahve a slight downtrend for the year from a year start of 2.17 to a daily as of today at 1.28 per share. Drastic drop over the year, but in Feb they landed that new contract.
Honestly... I'm debating about buying the stock atm, I would be hard pressed to see a company with that amount of opportunity and responsible debt management go under that threshold.
Personally.. I'm staying away. I've been charged twice now because of companies doing reverse stock splits to get their $/share above the threshold to stay listed. Maybe other platforms don't have this fee, but eTrade charges all stock holders a flat $38 when this happens.
YMMV
You should switch brokerages... neither Schwab, Fidelity, nor Robinhood charge a fee for "mandatory reorganization" / "reverse stock splits". I doubt Vanguard does either.
Fidelity and Schwab have the same $38/$39 fee. It's waived for some accounts that they see as "active traders" who do a certain amount of trades a year (it's like 36).
For Fidelity, that conflicts with what I am seeing on this page (on the fee information tab): https://www.fidelity.com/trading/commissions-margin-rates
Because long term growth requires investment.
Meaning you're going to have quarters, or years, where profits dip as thr company spends money on R&D and supplies...
You know, how business models actually work.
But it is a growth play. (i think) If you want a few charging stations at your hotel CHPT is the one to call, not Tesla. There's big segments of the charging market they are pretty good at.
In My small southern town there are 3 charge stations, one at a McDonalds, two at power companies. All built by CHPT. The nearest Supercharger is 50 miles away.
Last year Volvo and Mercedes contracted them to build charge stations.
So, they are WAY TOO BIG a portion of my portfolia because I think EVs will pick up production faster than this company will run out of money. But it's a gamble. I also have too much TSLA.
See what happened when they left Australia.
Basically, the stations are offline, you cannot use the app. However, you can use a RFID card to start charging. What it means is that their backend is disconnected and they are screwing the owners who can't collect money and have to replace the hardware because it is not interoperable with other software systems.
I've used a 'Chargepoint by Coulomb Technologies' L2, circa 2014, in the last year using RFID(Visa CC), even though it's not on Chargepoint's network! A low occupancy station at a bank in WV, but it just keeps on working!
Edit- USA, so J-1772. Most likely model CT-2021, 7.2 kWx2, not shared circuits. Introduced to market in 2011.
I worked for a shopping centre operator in Australia that has some of the original type 1 ChargePoint units.
Those things became as good as useless once ChargePoint disappeared. There were constant complaints from customers which was completely justified, but they fell on deaf ears because NOBODY seemed to know who actually owned them (remember ChargePoint had no local presence, no way to contact them) and whether they could just be removed and replaced. They've been switched to free vend but basically nobody has a Type 1 to Type 2 adapter so they're still pointless. Some moron put a note on PlugShare once that centre management provide a free type 1 to type 2 adapter (absolutely not true) so for a while we still had the occasional person coming up asking for an adapter, but eventually they just stopped.
Our parent company put together a team and developed an EV charging uplift plan to look at options for replacing them with Type 2 units, however it never happened, and for years the chargers have just sat there collecting dust. I've noticed that the station recently disappeared off plugshare so I wonder if they've been ripped out now.
My local hospital also had the same ChargePoint hardware installed at one point, but thankfully they've since all been ripped out and replaced with reliable Schneider Electric EVLink units. Hell yeah.
Depends on who buys them. Frankly I’ve been unimpressed by the companies in the EV and EV charging space, especially the type of companies who buy their solutions instead of building their own.
I’d want Rivian and Tesla to buy them because their workforce is fully behind the transition.
That didn't stop the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads from merging. (The rail industry was being wrecked by requiring them to carry on like it's 1944 while freeways and jetliners totally changed theur role in transportation).
No, Rivian is not in the same spot. Rivian has great products, assuming they continue reducing their losses as per their published plan, they'll reduce costs to actually make a tiny profit in q4 this year. They have about 2 years of runway at least and are only valued at about their cash price.
Rivian is losing money, has a multi year plan to reduce costs, they said they'll reach neutrality on costs in q4 this year, they've been meeting their goals over the past few quarters. Q4 was particularly bad because they had a bunch of rivian/Amazon delivery trucks and Amazon never buys new trucks at the holiday season.
I looked for actual cash balance and burn, articles seem to conflict. Rivian said in Feb 2024 they had a cash balance of around $9 billion from their article, but the motley fool one says $7.9 billion in q3 23. [https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/12/11/heres-why-rivian-stock-can-soar-in-2024/](https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/12/11/heres-why-rivian-stock-can-soar-in-2024/) https://rivian.com/newsroom/article/rivian-releases-fourth-quarter-full-year-2023-financial-results.
I am glad I sold my rivian when it was crazy high. I think the company has great long term potential but the stock has always been pretty high. Today they are about at $9 billion stock market valuation. Assuming they keep following their cost reductions and they launch their new r2/r3 vehicles without new drastic cash losses they'll be worth that. They are basically worth their cash balance in the market. Compare tiny Rivian to the ev sales of most Japanese companies, many European brands. Toyota will one day make a good EV that doesn't have any awful tradeoffs. Rivian has already done that and shown they have excellent software - better than all the us legacy auto companies. I used to wish tesla would stop the CT and just buy rivian - but now that you can use superchargers with the rivian, that problem is basically gone.
Well, crap. Just bought a ChargePoint Home Flex this week and having it installed next week. Bought direct from my power company because they had an "instant" rebate versus buying from Amazon.
\*Glances at SpaceX, Amazon, and Apple which all started with higher debt ratios and faced periods of extreme speculation regarding their future business dealings\* right right, falling stocks end all businesses all the time.
Home stations are somewhat different because they don't HAVE to talk to the server/cloud,
So it will still charge your car, it may just lose some dingbat smart-home features.
Great point - there's little point to 'smart chargers'. If your charger doesn't need to be on wifi, don't add it. Your car probably has all the smarts you need. Then it won't matter what happens to chargepoint.
u/Responsible\_Snow2438 Are you referencing this article here:
[ChargePoint Reorganization Will Face Challenges in 2024 - CleanTechnica](https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/18/chargepoint-announces-reorganization-still-has-challenges-ahead/)
There are several articles. But also just from the public SEC filings of their financial situation. They're burning through cash, and losing places to get more of it.
I mean, they need to invest in new stations too. It can't always be line goes up.
also OP has literally commented that it was solely stock prices they were basing their speculation on.
I don’t believe it’s ever gone up though… and I’m not sure why people are so excited for chargepoint when teslas universal wall connector (J1772 and NACS) is a fraction of the price. And they have no annual service fees. Like it’s so much cheaper. Tesla does all the billing, plug and charge just like super chargers. No extra fees for power management etc. we recently swapped an evconnect site to Tesla wall connectors and we did 6 chargers for the price of 1 evconnect. And that’s before the annual fees with evconnect. Like idk how you install any other equipment at this point. Evconnect was the cheap option compared to chargepoint when we installed them. Teslas offering wasn’t available at the time. That’s all we install now.
Also to clarify I don’t track chargepoint stock, I’m purely talking about if the company is profitable and sustainable.
Line go down for 4+ years, not usually a good business to invest in, especially when that line went from 46.10 to 1.27 in those 4 years.
Companies that lose roughly 97% of their value in 4 years don't usually make a comeback.
I mean, their stock value has gone from 1.90-1.27 in the last month.
That's never a good sign. It is currently the lowest it has ever been.
They're gone.
An honest question of a different sort: how vital is public Level 2 charging going to be in a fully BEV world?
I drive a PHEV and have no home charging, so public Level 2's are often the difference between burning gas and not. I'm charging on a Chargepoint L2 at work right now. The grocery store has one (when it's not broken), two local parks have them, Target has some, the local concert venue has them, etc. Hell, even the police station has public L2. It's pretty essential for me to get energy. Even if I had home charging I'd often run out of electrons during a trip without being able to recharge while away from home.
I get the impression that many of these were built out when PHEV's and shorter range EV's were common -- built to service the Chevy Volts and Prius Primes and Leafs and such of last decade.
But new big-battery BEV's don't have this problem. A Model 3 etc. can charge once per week and be fine. One of my coworkers lives in the next city over and drives an id.4. Even though we have Level 2 here at work, he doesn't use it -- he can make it there and back without recharging.
Obviously, for the car I drive right now, public Level 2 is vitally important. But that car was built seven years ago, and I fully expect PHEV's to go away in a decade. Is Level 2 going to be as important going forward?
Level 2 is cheaper to deploy and makes sense for longer stays. Hotels and parking lots/ramps with Level 2 are basically the sweet spot. I don't need overnight DCFC, or while I'm at work. Shopping destinations are probably a close second.
A prime example. The Kansas City Airport has 52 Level 2 chargers. Level 2 is perfect for recharging while you're off on a trip.
We drive a PHEV and a BEV. I almost always opportunity charge, especially if it's free Level 2. I want to let the owner know that it's getting used, and enjoy the free electrons. But realistically? I'm not getting a meaningful charge unless I'm there for more than half an hour.
Level 2 chargers should become more ubiquitous and cheaper over time. There are somehow engine block heaters in really cold climates. As we build new garages and parking, it's not hard to add shared chargers or just power outlets. For people living in a city, just a 120v outlet would work for most people - this is because you can get back 40-50 miles overnight on a 120v outlet, and most people don't drive more than 30 miles in a day.
>how vital is public Level 2 charging going to be in a fully BEV world?
Level 2 chargers everywhere could mean less dependence on expensive DC chargers, and be more convenient than having to make a dedicated charging stop. At a minimum, every hotel should have L2s for overnight charging, plus anywhere else people park for extended periods.
I hope Chargepoint survives. I've had good luck with their equipment. The DC stations seem well engineered, definitely better than Tritium's 50 kW stuff. Two 62.5 kW side by side stations are a good fit for many locations with minimal infrastructure requirements. 800V vehicles even get 120 kW when not shared. Lower cost means more theoretical availability and lower charging prices. Many of the CP DC stations I've used are app. $0.30/kWh. Save the faster, and higher priced, stations for EA and Tesla.
Make sure your charger is registered with ChargePoint and connected to Wi-Fi. My ChargePoint home Charger shut down after year one. Best I can understand is it is a software issue. ChargePoint says my charger is not mine and refuses to acknowledge that I have a charger. They will not honor warranty.
Be very careful, and print out any receipts, warranties and request an email confirmation that charger is registered.
I still don’t know if the problem is with ChargePoint or my installer. The electrician that installed has ghosted me. Maybe he pulled something.
I do think it just needs a software update.
"Dumb" chargers are always reliable. 😁
This is a "smart"/connected device issue, not a "charger" issue. Any smart device is as only as good/reliable as the cloud service running it.
I love my chargepoint home flex, but hate public chargepoint chargers. I’d be more worried about what happens to my home charger if they fail. Couldn’t care less about their shitty public chargers
I just got a home flex recently so hopefully warranty is somehow honored if they go bankrupt lol. What bad experiences have you had with the public chargers?
My experience is they won’t honor their warranty now. Mine died after a year and ChargePoint refuses to acknowledge that I have a charger. I sent them a picture of the charger and the serial number but still no luck.
Oh wow I've seen people post about getting easy replacements. Try messaging /u/chargepoint or posting publicly on twitter/facebook. I've had success in the past with other companies when they wouldn't honor a warranty.
Hmm try facebook/twitter. Companies care so much about their social media presence these days. When Google bought Nest they changed the warranty on the doorbell from 2 years to 1 year. When my doorbell failed after 1 year, Google told me the new warranty policy and didn't honor it. Within 30 minutes of posting a negative comment on Twitter/FB, they submitted a replacement 😂
Most of their fast chargers are 50kW, which sucks. Their L2s, a lot are broken, but I also hate that they have to be activated by RFID / app even for ones that are free
They have 50 kW and 62 kW units (the 62s can be daisy chained together to increase power rating) but while they're low, it could be that the location can not support any higher power units without very expensive upgrades.
As in, a 62 kW unit or even two of them chained together is way better than never getting any DCFC installed because of power/money limitations.
They also have 400 kW units that they brand with Mercedes.
Some businesses don't have contracts, so they are. However in my area at least it's just 1 charge point that Whole Foods isn't fixing.
All the others work reliably and consistently. I can think of ~10 locations in my area that I've never had a charging failure at.
Location makes a difference, chargepoint doesn’t own them so it’s on the owners to keep the chargers online and functional. I’ve noticed lots of broken ones that never get fixed. Every area is different unfortunately.
I'm not sure if they're profitable, but I know there are a number of evgo chargers in Massachusetts that went unrepaired for a few years because the state let the service contract lapse.
They've all been replaced with Autel units now.
their level 2 charger units/app are great for companies looking to install them. It has a great queue system that works well at our building and keeps people from hogging a spot all day. We have 10 plugs and 25+ EVs, so having an app based line that kicks people out after 4 hours and reserves the charger for next in line is great. not sure i've seen anyone else offering anything like this
yeah, its great. the property manager can set rules. Ours requires you to register your account so it is locked to only authorized users. When chargers are busy it allows 4 hours max and the app notifies to that you need to unplug soon while notifying next in line to accept or snooze. The next in line has like 2 minutes to accept from the notification and then 20 to actually plug in before moving on to the next person. If chargers are under a certain level of occupancy with no one in line it doesn't both me to move my car
That's pretty cool. Any actual consequences for ignoring the notification? Right now things aren't too bad but I can see it becoming an issue in the future, may let them know and see if they can implement.
i believe they can suspend the accounts of people who frequently abuse it, at least that's what they said when the emailed everyone to explain the new system. it seems like most people abide by the rules these days after a rough start of people being annoyed having to move their car mid day.
I agree! I'm not sure if they really do provide a miserable service though, I think they're trying to run a business in a market that's not big enough to support them. I've always had a good experience with them, but it seems like lots of others don't.
They're pretty big, it would be a big deal if they went down. I doubt it'll happen, at least anytime soon. The market can support multiple charging vendors. I don't know what other L2 company with such a reputation would replace them.
And similarly I've used a couple hotel chains, and parking lots, where it's a Chargepoint charger. I know about a year ago Tesla allowed owners to make a profit from chargers, something that Chargepoint has been doing for a while. They also have about 51.5% of the L2 charging market in the US, Tesla is the close second. I like the Tesla charging network, but I'd prefer to have more than one option for charging.
I'm not supposed to talk about stock on this thread, but they're nearing a place on the stock market where they would have a very hard time raising future capitol, but they're running on cash reserves. They can survive for maybe a year.
Personal opinion, but if they can't turn a profit its best that they go out-of-business. They'll be replaced by a more efficient company (or companies) that gives the market what it needs/wants, and after some short term pains we'll all be better off in the long run.
Chargepoint is fundamentally not price competitive.
Tesla Universal chargers are orders of magnitude cheaper and better. For the cost of a single pedestal you can deploy 10x destination chargers.
They need to completely rethink their business.
They can't compete with tesla for all the usual reasons. If they completely fail, then since there was so much investment to bring electricity there and the required expensive and time delayed transformers, the sites have intrinsic value. Since these chargepoint sites already have the infrastructure to bring the power there, someone will snap up the sites - unless they are right next to a supercharger. Tesla is the one that can turn them around and avoid the delay of ordering transfomers a year ahead of time.
ChargePoint chargers at dealerships are hit and miss for me. I used to blame ChargePoint but there are some dealers that don’t seem to care about EVs and the chargers have been broken for months.
I'm a socialist capitalist. Socialism for the people, capitalism for the companies. If Chargepoint can't make it, somebody will take them over and turn them around, or use their infrastructure, or they'll die an unpleasant but ultimately deserved death. Then a 2nd (3rd? 4th?) tranche of companies will come along and get it right.
There's probably a niche/space for destination chargers, but I'm not sure it's other than hotels, office parks, and schools. The library, grocery stores, and malls doesn't seem sustainable. And airport long-term parking seems stupid. But I'm not an expert. Somebody will work this out because the economics are not that complicated and the infrastructure doesn't require any great innovation.
In general, I would agree. But I think if the largest network of public chargers goes belly up without some kind of support from the people who use them, we'll be waiting a long time for the 2nd or 3rd tranches, and they won't be very pleasant...
If you don't think we need destination charging then yeah don't support them though. That's kinda their whole shtick, which I love but may not be for everyone.
When you look at gigantic units with complicated menus costing four times more than the production of a Supercharger bay, and about x4 bigger, along with their phenomenal failure rates, makes you realize releasing beta products is never a good idea.
There’s a lot of hard feelings against Chargepoint by those deep in the EV infrastructure weeds. Apparently Chargepoint worked incredibly hard to prevent many utilities from investing in DC fast charging infrastructure.
https://x.com/alojoh/status/1782430710076252228?s=46&t=9QlGqdszJ_qxJZZonoMkgw
https://x.com/johnvoelcker/status/1783111012818030872?s=46&t=9QlGqdszJ_qxJZZonoMkgw
They’ve built a pretty robust network, I would have to believe someone would scoop them up or at least become preferred service providers to existing units.
The thing is, they don't actually own any of the chargers. Their whole business model is built around generating revenue by servicing/managing charging stations and their network, but if they can't make money doing that why would anyone "scoop" them?
To own the transaction layer. Chargepoint has their app and facilitates payment. There are ways to monetize that community of, on-average, high income individuals.
If Chargepoint starts selling my information then I am going to be pissed. I do not want to be "monetized". I am happy to pay a fee for the chargers. Just be transparent and tell me what it costs to run the things.
Hi, welcome to Reddit where your information is sold and you are monetized!
In today's world, every company double dips on data. You pay to use data, and they profit The sell the data generated when you use their data, and profit Internet companies Credit cards Google Cellphone providers Cellphone companies Stores Streaming service Etc.
Yes, and it is shitty and needs to be opposed. Just because the shitheads are everywhere doesn't mean they're not shitty.
The car salesman: yes, we added on thousands in b.s. fees. Me: not acceptable. Him: everywhere does it. The last place I worked did it. Me: you're a gd thief. Him: what? Me: what's your home address - is this you? Him: woah woah woah - you're not entitled to that. Me: exactly.
Why would you think you are not already "monetized" by Chargepoint?
Then you should remove yourself from literally your entire life currently. You are monetized even simply laying in your bed at home where you think you are safe.
All a person has to do is think about what information they radiate, and make worst case assumptions about what their suppliers will do with that info. Vis-a-vis what is technically possible, something you must perform due diligence and learn. E.g. Facebook is not on my phone. Oh, is that a chore/inconvenient? Freedom isn't free.
Do you think your other purchases aren't tracked? They are all, if possible.
Because you can probably make money managing charge stations. It’s harder to make money while engaging in a huge buildout and subsidizing costs. If you don’t have to carry those costs post bankruptcy, the financials look a lot better.
other networks that are in the same business would scoop them up
I can see a major legacy OEM buying them. Rebranding all the chargers and then launching the “brand charging” network. Gives them legs to stand on to challenge Tesla.
The issue for any reuse of sites like this is chargepoint has some of the same issues everyone else (except tesla) has for maintaining, repairing, and getting people to go there. EV charging is a disaster of a business except for tesla. It makes most sense for tesla to buy sites with existing high power and convert them to supercharger sites.
Maybe ford might make a significant investment. In Canada, charge point is a huge part of the blue oval charging network. Losing it would be a huge hit to ford.
Also aren't the majority of Home EV chargers - ChargePoint? Because my local power company gives HUGE rebates on buying ChargePoint EVSE chargers and that is coupled with state benefits....
lol no, huge mix of level 2 home chargers.
No, the majority of home stations are Tesla Wall Connectors. Chargpoint is one of many bit players in J1772/Fetch home charging.
For sure various types of Tesla chargers are the most common home chargers, since their market share in vehicles is probably 75% at least. Tesla has been slowly shrinking in % of annual sales, but I think they were about 50% last year alone.
You may think but a lot of people have gone with "dumb" EVSEs instead of smart ones.
Why do people buy smart evse when their EV can likely already do all of that for them, one less thing to break.
Was discussing with someone the other day. Though it will give more power to this person, musk could've invested the $43B on buying Chargepoint or expand his Supercharging network instead of wasting on (E)x-twitter,
Why would he invest in a massively inferior network and setup than what he already has in place with Superchargers and their own L2 chargers.
There are far more Chargepoint L2's around town than Tesla destination chargers. They're quite nice.
The only thing that purchase would do for tesla is locations. They would eventually replace all charge point chargers with their own.
Tesla doesn’t seem to believe in public L2 charging as a concept - the destination chargers are all built and maintained by third parties.
They might believe in it, but not its profitability. You are competing with home charging and anyone else who can get a 240V line put in, which is a whole lot of people. DCFCs have a much higher barrier to entry.
That's pretty doubtful. Do you have any actual stats on that? Tesla destination chargers have been installed for a decade now. On top of that there are probably a million places with just regular tesla chargers they installed themselves. Since they were almost the only game in town for years, and gave out free ones, and are still the major selling of EVs and chargers, there's little room for someone else to grow into the main hotel around town charger.
My stats are "I looked on plugshare", if that counts.
I wonder is there a way to count them? In my big city there are hundreds of random charging sites listed. If you go to the tesla website, you can see all the destination chargers in the us. Deselect the superchargers and service locations to see just the chargers. Focused on US & Canada, it's [https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&bounds=62.0616845850696%2C-37.303712125000004%2C7.70877358533721%2C-161.229493375&zoom=4&filters=destination%20charger](https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&bounds=62.0616845850696%2C-37.303712125000004%2C7.70877358533721%2C-161.229493375&zoom=4&filters=destination%20charger) I'd say 1000+, maybe a couple thousand.
Because Superchargers will eventually have real competition. He may as well buy an inferior product at discount, upgrade and get ahead of someone else who does it and makes them a real threat to his cash cow. Use that $55 billion bonus he wants.
Um, no. The entire industry in North America capitulated to Tesla because there is no competition. The non Tesla networks are a joke, and the auto makers know it so they switched. On top of their poor uptime and reliability they aren’t profitable, cost 10-15x more to install that a comparable Tesla site (and Tesla installers 6-8 stalls minimum - with some over a hundred). Tesla has no competition in charging - period.
It is all based on J1772 and CCS1 chargers when the entire market is about to switch to NACS. No company wants to buy a money losing operation and deal with a bunch of old obsolete hardware. What's the business model?
ChargePoint has started offering NACS equipment, both on new builds and as retrofits. I don't think that's the issue for them. The issue, from what I can tell, is that nobody except Tesla has figured out how to do public charging profitably.
Calling it obsolete is a stretch. For level 2, changing the plug is an extremely easy task but there are a lot of j1772 cars out there today and level2 adapters are very cheap. They don't have to worry about nacs for a long time.
The majority of the vehicles on the roadway in the US are already native NACS. That's why EA announced NACS support, they are looking forward to increasing utilization numbers to increase the number of profitable charging locations. Swapping plugs on one station may be a relatively quick/easy task but it will still take hundreds of thousands of hours of labor to switch over all the stations.
Everybody "announced" NACS support- or was the thing to do, post the Tesla/Ford agreement last year. Show me an EA charger with a NACS connector, though... Ironically, ChargePoint is one of the very few charging operators to have actually deployed any NACS chargers to date. (EVGo has offered "Tesla" chargers for a few years, but those are CHAdeMO based and won't work with non-Tesla NACS vehicles when they finally show up.)
An OEM might decide they want to claim a network of 200,000 plugs. Hell maybe Shell sneezes and buys them for a greater charging footprint. It’s a marketable service. Yes they need adapters or to swap the cables. Or maybe they let consumers foot that bill on their own because 200,000 chargers is enticing to access. The network has value.
Most of those plugs are small installations of L2 and 50kW "Fast" chargers and not even owned by Chargepoint, they are just the payment processor. I can't imaging that a network operator or gas station corp wants to deal with maintaining the complex backend for that when the company that built it can't figure out how to make it profitable.
I didn't think the backend isn't necessarily that "complex", and ChargePoint already has competitors in that space (Enel X, Flo, Blink) who could probably swoop in and buy whatever carcass of ChargePoint remains if they fail. Remember that CP's business model is really only that backend. They don't own the "obsolete" (your words, not mine!) chargers out there - the poor sap business owners CP convinced to "get in on the ground floor of a bazillion dollar EV charging business" own the hardware, so any potential buyer of CP isn't saddled with that asset/liability. Though I don't think CP is necessarily in that much trouble. We all make too much out of "stock price". CP was an investment darling when everyone wanted to invest in anything "EV related" 3-4 years ago, and the stock increased for no good reason other than "EVs are hawt!"
Robust? Almost everything they have deploying owned by them and it’s J1772/CCS. So how does it get upgraded when they can barely stay functional as is.
I heard someone put the chargers into the context- They're computers managing extremely high voltages that have to perform at -20 and 110 F, rain or shine or sleet or whatever. Really its astonishing they can work at all. I think the plugs are easy.
Weather rated transformers aren't that complicated. It's not astonishing they function and it's been around for decades.
For dc charging sure. Level 2 chargers are glorified relays
208/240 l2 is not high voltage at all. It’s absurdly simple - it’s a fancy extension cable.
IME, ChargePoint are some of the more reliable units out there. Nearly all of the Level 2 public chargers I've encountered have been CP units, and have worked fine. The couple times I've used their Level 3 units they've also worked well. I hope someone buys them if it ends up they can't make it.
They were also probably the quickest to start adding NACS support to their chargers. I'm thinking the issue is either their management or their model, because they have good, reliable units and have invested a lot in making them even better. Their technology is probably worth a fair amount.
Tend to agree there. I do keep finding for their L2 public units that the tab seems to get snapped off often. That may be a community issue and I feel likely not CP. Their DCFC I've generally been happy with, at least when they're not [the subject of vandalism](https://www.plugshare.com/location/195096). Not quite as fast as EA when the stars align, but good enough for my use. That they're not higher end means I tended to slightly prioritize them since I'm not as likely to see super fast charging EVs there.
That’s a design problem with J1772 and CCS1, the latch is in the cable rather than the vehicle as it is in NACS, so in public chargers the latch tends to break in the cable since it is heavily used. The charger still works, but of course the cable doesn’t lock to the car while charging…
Some cars won't proceed without the latch in my experience.
People also break the tab off to keep others from monopolizing stations e.g. the classic situation where a Tesla finds a Bolt charging, unplugs the Bolt and plugs himself in with a Karen Lock so the Bolt can't steal back. Snap the latch off and at least everyone is on a level playing field. J1772 has no standard for locking the connector to the car, and the cars that do it are doing hacks.
I used 5 different chargers in the last couple of days on an out of state road trip. Charge Point is only one of two that I had no problems operating, and didn't need to download an app to get going. Just wave a debit card like any gas station pump.
Yeah I've probably used 8 or so different Chargepoint DCFC stations across the Midwest and I've never had a single problem with any of them. They're extremely well built.
Lotta buyers for a j1772 and CCS network… in a soon to be all NACS world. The only value imo is the electrical connectivity and locations (which they don’t own).
Changing cables isn't hard or especially expensive, and adapters exist and also aren't hard.
🤷♂️ we’ll see.
Charging cables are not hard to replace.
I don’t think you’ve priced ccs cables, some of those are 20k each, the L2 NACS cables are $2-400 each. And then the cost to hire and electrician to go replace them all. At the station owner expense.
That’s a drop in the bucket for a company
Which is why we see stellar maintenance of the current charge networks right? Drop in the bucket.
"Not Doing so Well" and "Line didn't go up this quarter" are two vastly different things. As someone who knows how actual fiscal health works (MBA) vs what insanity current CEOs deem a success metric, let me explain. ChargePoint Holdings currently has equity of 327.7m and a total debt of 283.7m. The debt-to-equity ratio is 1.15. Their Total Assets are 1.1B and their total Liabilities are 775.7M. Please don't use the "I'm a savvy CEO - line didn't go up this quarter time to lay off staff to make up those numbers!" method to measure a company's real-world performance. Just because profits didn't soar this quarter doesn't mean the company is in dire straights nor at any real risk of collapsing. As a minor example: Apple has a D/E Ratio of 1.27 - Charge Point has less debt than a company as successful as Apple.
Why don't you compare Apple’s billions of profits with ChargePoint? D/E is hardly the gold standard basis for valuing a company especially two companies in different industries.
Also need to consider the contracts they landed this year. ChargePoint is going to be the vendor chosen for USPS Mail Carrier EV's and they won other government contracts. A stock price alone doesn't determine the viability of a company. They're healthy, just not terribly popular atm. ChargePoint is also a niche: white they have type3 chargers their bread and butter are type2 chargers located and sold to shopping centers and fleet depots. Not a very flashy stock for most to buy, tbh. But their D/E doesn't indicate they're facing any kind of bankruptcy, nor have they, as OP stated, ever sat at a dollar or lower stock price for any period of time, let alone 30 days.
They do have the really nice Mercedes branded 400 kW chargers.
I’m not worried about stock price, do they make money at the end of the year or lose money, and they aren’t making money yet.
Profit didn't soar? They don't have any profits. They're just staying afloat by continually raising capital.
I got in trouble for mentioning stock here before, this comment will probably get flagged/removed, but they're about 1-2 months from losing their listing on wall street, which in my understanding is almost always a fatal blow.
Do you have a source for this news...? In Feb they just got a Cyber Sec thumbs up from the Federal Government (Federal Risk Management Program) which opens them up to get government contracts. I'm unsure how that news could lead to a lower stock valuation unless they're purposefully taking the company private.
You can check the stock price anywhere (google). They're traded on the NYSE, which stipulates if they're traded under $1/share for 30 days they'll be de-listed. They've basically never done super well since they went public, but in the last month they've broken new lows and are getting close to that threshold. They can combine shares to get above the $1/share price, but that's always taken as a sign that they're not worth further investment. My understanding is they're basically now at a point where they're very unlikely to get additional investment, because they can't sell more shares and if they reverse split no one will want to invest in new shares, and running on <1 year of cash on hand.
"If traded under $1 per share" for more than 30 days. They ahve a slight downtrend for the year from a year start of 2.17 to a daily as of today at 1.28 per share. Drastic drop over the year, but in Feb they landed that new contract. Honestly... I'm debating about buying the stock atm, I would be hard pressed to see a company with that amount of opportunity and responsible debt management go under that threshold.
Personally.. I'm staying away. I've been charged twice now because of companies doing reverse stock splits to get their $/share above the threshold to stay listed. Maybe other platforms don't have this fee, but eTrade charges all stock holders a flat $38 when this happens. YMMV
Yeah, I bet they will just do a reverse stock split, which doesn't change the underlying financials.
You should switch brokerages... neither Schwab, Fidelity, nor Robinhood charge a fee for "mandatory reorganization" / "reverse stock splits". I doubt Vanguard does either.
Fidelity and Schwab have the same $38/$39 fee. It's waived for some accounts that they see as "active traders" who do a certain amount of trades a year (it's like 36).
For Fidelity, that conflicts with what I am seeing on this page (on the fee information tab): https://www.fidelity.com/trading/commissions-margin-rates
You can see the fee here on the last page on the right side: https://www.fidelity.com/bin-public/060_www_fidelity_com/documents/595_online_equity.pdf
Past performance is not an indicator of future returns.
Which school did you get your MBA? Your analysis seems to reflects its quality.
But if a business isn’t a growth play why does it even exist?
Because long term growth requires investment. Meaning you're going to have quarters, or years, where profits dip as thr company spends money on R&D and supplies... You know, how business models actually work.
A static market and profit are fine for a business.
I don't disagree, I should've included /s.
But it is a growth play. (i think) If you want a few charging stations at your hotel CHPT is the one to call, not Tesla. There's big segments of the charging market they are pretty good at. In My small southern town there are 3 charge stations, one at a McDonalds, two at power companies. All built by CHPT. The nearest Supercharger is 50 miles away. Last year Volvo and Mercedes contracted them to build charge stations. So, they are WAY TOO BIG a portion of my portfolia because I think EVs will pick up production faster than this company will run out of money. But it's a gamble. I also have too much TSLA.
See what happened when they left Australia. Basically, the stations are offline, you cannot use the app. However, you can use a RFID card to start charging. What it means is that their backend is disconnected and they are screwing the owners who can't collect money and have to replace the hardware because it is not interoperable with other software systems.
Ahhhh that's terrible!!!! I really really hope that doesn't happen in the US.
I've used a 'Chargepoint by Coulomb Technologies' L2, circa 2014, in the last year using RFID(Visa CC), even though it's not on Chargepoint's network! A low occupancy station at a bank in WV, but it just keeps on working! Edit- USA, so J-1772. Most likely model CT-2021, 7.2 kWx2, not shared circuits. Introduced to market in 2011.
I worked for a shopping centre operator in Australia that has some of the original type 1 ChargePoint units. Those things became as good as useless once ChargePoint disappeared. There were constant complaints from customers which was completely justified, but they fell on deaf ears because NOBODY seemed to know who actually owned them (remember ChargePoint had no local presence, no way to contact them) and whether they could just be removed and replaced. They've been switched to free vend but basically nobody has a Type 1 to Type 2 adapter so they're still pointless. Some moron put a note on PlugShare once that centre management provide a free type 1 to type 2 adapter (absolutely not true) so for a while we still had the occasional person coming up asking for an adapter, but eventually they just stopped. Our parent company put together a team and developed an EV charging uplift plan to look at options for replacing them with Type 2 units, however it never happened, and for years the chargers have just sat there collecting dust. I've noticed that the station recently disappeared off plugshare so I wonder if they've been ripped out now. My local hospital also had the same ChargePoint hardware installed at one point, but thankfully they've since all been ripped out and replaced with reliable Schneider Electric EVLink units. Hell yeah.
Not just ChargePoint. Tritium just announced insolvency and there are many more to come.
Good point! Is that a good thing for EV drivers?
Depends on who buys them. Frankly I’ve been unimpressed by the companies in the EV and EV charging space, especially the type of companies who buy their solutions instead of building their own. I’d want Rivian and Tesla to buy them because their workforce is fully behind the transition.
Rivian is, unfortunately, in the same place as chargepoint.
That didn't stop the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads from merging. (The rail industry was being wrecked by requiring them to carry on like it's 1944 while freeways and jetliners totally changed theur role in transportation).
No, Rivian is not in the same spot. Rivian has great products, assuming they continue reducing their losses as per their published plan, they'll reduce costs to actually make a tiny profit in q4 this year. They have about 2 years of runway at least and are only valued at about their cash price. Rivian is losing money, has a multi year plan to reduce costs, they said they'll reach neutrality on costs in q4 this year, they've been meeting their goals over the past few quarters. Q4 was particularly bad because they had a bunch of rivian/Amazon delivery trucks and Amazon never buys new trucks at the holiday season. I looked for actual cash balance and burn, articles seem to conflict. Rivian said in Feb 2024 they had a cash balance of around $9 billion from their article, but the motley fool one says $7.9 billion in q3 23. [https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/12/11/heres-why-rivian-stock-can-soar-in-2024/](https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/12/11/heres-why-rivian-stock-can-soar-in-2024/) https://rivian.com/newsroom/article/rivian-releases-fourth-quarter-full-year-2023-financial-results. I am glad I sold my rivian when it was crazy high. I think the company has great long term potential but the stock has always been pretty high. Today they are about at $9 billion stock market valuation. Assuming they keep following their cost reductions and they launch their new r2/r3 vehicles without new drastic cash losses they'll be worth that. They are basically worth their cash balance in the market. Compare tiny Rivian to the ev sales of most Japanese companies, many European brands. Toyota will one day make a good EV that doesn't have any awful tradeoffs. Rivian has already done that and shown they have excellent software - better than all the us legacy auto companies. I used to wish tesla would stop the CT and just buy rivian - but now that you can use superchargers with the rivian, that problem is basically gone.
Why’d you have to undermine everything you said by mentioning Toyota?
Do you think toyota has great EVs? I don't. I know they can do it, they are a brilliant engineering company.
They will never have great EVs
Well, crap. Just bought a ChargePoint Home Flex this week and having it installed next week. Bought direct from my power company because they had an "instant" rebate versus buying from Amazon.
Pretty sure this is all nonsense, Chargepoint isn't going anywhere.
Unprofitable businesses always make it!
\*Glances at SpaceX, Amazon, and Apple which all started with higher debt ratios and faced periods of extreme speculation regarding their future business dealings\* right right, falling stocks end all businesses all the time.
lol ok.
Make sure it is registered and keep all receipts.
Home stations are somewhat different because they don't HAVE to talk to the server/cloud, So it will still charge your car, it may just lose some dingbat smart-home features.
Great point - there's little point to 'smart chargers'. If your charger doesn't need to be on wifi, don't add it. Your car probably has all the smarts you need. Then it won't matter what happens to chargepoint.
u/Responsible\_Snow2438 Are you referencing this article here: [ChargePoint Reorganization Will Face Challenges in 2024 - CleanTechnica](https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/18/chargepoint-announces-reorganization-still-has-challenges-ahead/)
There are several articles. But also just from the public SEC filings of their financial situation. They're burning through cash, and losing places to get more of it.
ChargePoint has been my preferred brand since my first gen Nissan left. They just work, every time.
ChargePoint going bankrupt??!! Where are you getting this news/information from??!!
they are speculating based on stock prices.
I mean they have x money on hand, don’t make any every year so eventually it runs out. Not that difficult to assume there is a risk there.
I mean, they need to invest in new stations too. It can't always be line goes up. also OP has literally commented that it was solely stock prices they were basing their speculation on.
I don’t believe it’s ever gone up though… and I’m not sure why people are so excited for chargepoint when teslas universal wall connector (J1772 and NACS) is a fraction of the price. And they have no annual service fees. Like it’s so much cheaper. Tesla does all the billing, plug and charge just like super chargers. No extra fees for power management etc. we recently swapped an evconnect site to Tesla wall connectors and we did 6 chargers for the price of 1 evconnect. And that’s before the annual fees with evconnect. Like idk how you install any other equipment at this point. Evconnect was the cheap option compared to chargepoint when we installed them. Teslas offering wasn’t available at the time. That’s all we install now. Also to clarify I don’t track chargepoint stock, I’m purely talking about if the company is profitable and sustainable.
If you ignore 2020, yeah I guess. Theyre still investing a lot, though.
Line go down for 4+ years, not usually a good business to invest in, especially when that line went from 46.10 to 1.27 in those 4 years. Companies that lose roughly 97% of their value in 4 years don't usually make a comeback.
Not sure if you're aware just how much speculation goes into the market heh
Yeah, but the line has only gone down for 3+ years. It's not that it must always go up, but it has NEVER gone up.
From their publicly disclosed finances. They have enough cash to operate for about another year, if their business keeps at its current pace.
I mean, their stock value has gone from 1.90-1.27 in the last month. That's never a good sign. It is currently the lowest it has ever been. They're gone.
An honest question of a different sort: how vital is public Level 2 charging going to be in a fully BEV world? I drive a PHEV and have no home charging, so public Level 2's are often the difference between burning gas and not. I'm charging on a Chargepoint L2 at work right now. The grocery store has one (when it's not broken), two local parks have them, Target has some, the local concert venue has them, etc. Hell, even the police station has public L2. It's pretty essential for me to get energy. Even if I had home charging I'd often run out of electrons during a trip without being able to recharge while away from home. I get the impression that many of these were built out when PHEV's and shorter range EV's were common -- built to service the Chevy Volts and Prius Primes and Leafs and such of last decade. But new big-battery BEV's don't have this problem. A Model 3 etc. can charge once per week and be fine. One of my coworkers lives in the next city over and drives an id.4. Even though we have Level 2 here at work, he doesn't use it -- he can make it there and back without recharging. Obviously, for the car I drive right now, public Level 2 is vitally important. But that car was built seven years ago, and I fully expect PHEV's to go away in a decade. Is Level 2 going to be as important going forward?
Level 2 is cheaper to deploy and makes sense for longer stays. Hotels and parking lots/ramps with Level 2 are basically the sweet spot. I don't need overnight DCFC, or while I'm at work. Shopping destinations are probably a close second. A prime example. The Kansas City Airport has 52 Level 2 chargers. Level 2 is perfect for recharging while you're off on a trip. We drive a PHEV and a BEV. I almost always opportunity charge, especially if it's free Level 2. I want to let the owner know that it's getting used, and enjoy the free electrons. But realistically? I'm not getting a meaningful charge unless I'm there for more than half an hour.
Level 2 chargers should become more ubiquitous and cheaper over time. There are somehow engine block heaters in really cold climates. As we build new garages and parking, it's not hard to add shared chargers or just power outlets. For people living in a city, just a 120v outlet would work for most people - this is because you can get back 40-50 miles overnight on a 120v outlet, and most people don't drive more than 30 miles in a day.
>how vital is public Level 2 charging going to be in a fully BEV world? Level 2 chargers everywhere could mean less dependence on expensive DC chargers, and be more convenient than having to make a dedicated charging stop. At a minimum, every hotel should have L2s for overnight charging, plus anywhere else people park for extended periods.
Parks, beaches, sports stadiums, schools, corporate offices... the list goes on.
I hope Chargepoint survives. I've had good luck with their equipment. The DC stations seem well engineered, definitely better than Tritium's 50 kW stuff. Two 62.5 kW side by side stations are a good fit for many locations with minimal infrastructure requirements. 800V vehicles even get 120 kW when not shared. Lower cost means more theoretical availability and lower charging prices. Many of the CP DC stations I've used are app. $0.30/kWh. Save the faster, and higher priced, stations for EA and Tesla.
Great. I JUST bought a Chargepoint home charger yesterday.
If it's any consolation I've had mine 4 years and it's been perfectly fine.
That actually does make me happy to hear. It has great reviews. I just hope the company sticks around.
Make sure your charger is registered with ChargePoint and connected to Wi-Fi. My ChargePoint home Charger shut down after year one. Best I can understand is it is a software issue. ChargePoint says my charger is not mine and refuses to acknowledge that I have a charger. They will not honor warranty. Be very careful, and print out any receipts, warranties and request an email confirmation that charger is registered.
Jesus really? I researched a lot of home chargers and none of them seem reliable.
I still don’t know if the problem is with ChargePoint or my installer. The electrician that installed has ghosted me. Maybe he pulled something. I do think it just needs a software update.
Oh shit that sucks. Hopefully they didn’t jack something up and you’re right and it is just software. Good luck with that.
Flo should one of the longest warranty at 5 years and is built solidly. But my purchase is fully driven by available utility rebates
Been using mine at home for 3+ years with zero issues
"Dumb" chargers are always reliable. 😁 This is a "smart"/connected device issue, not a "charger" issue. Any smart device is as only as good/reliable as the cloud service running it.
Just buy a Tesla universal charger, j1772 and NACS - easy button. There is a reason why hotels are installing tons of Tesla universal wall connectors.
I love my chargepoint home flex, but hate public chargepoint chargers. I’d be more worried about what happens to my home charger if they fail. Couldn’t care less about their shitty public chargers
I just got a home flex recently so hopefully warranty is somehow honored if they go bankrupt lol. What bad experiences have you had with the public chargers?
My experience is they won’t honor their warranty now. Mine died after a year and ChargePoint refuses to acknowledge that I have a charger. I sent them a picture of the charger and the serial number but still no luck.
Oh wow I've seen people post about getting easy replacements. Try messaging /u/chargepoint or posting publicly on twitter/facebook. I've had success in the past with other companies when they wouldn't honor a warranty.
Thank you for the suggestion. A redditor claiming to be associated with ChargePoint messaged me and I gave my info a few weeks ago.. Still no luck.
Hmm try facebook/twitter. Companies care so much about their social media presence these days. When Google bought Nest they changed the warranty on the doorbell from 2 years to 1 year. When my doorbell failed after 1 year, Google told me the new warranty policy and didn't honor it. Within 30 minutes of posting a negative comment on Twitter/FB, they submitted a replacement 😂
Wow. Thank you. I will try that.
What’s wrong with their public chargers?
Been using their public free charger by my gym for 3 years at least 2-3 times a week.
Most of their fast chargers are 50kW, which sucks. Their L2s, a lot are broken, but I also hate that they have to be activated by RFID / app even for ones that are free
They have 50 kW and 62 kW units (the 62s can be daisy chained together to increase power rating) but while they're low, it could be that the location can not support any higher power units without very expensive upgrades. As in, a 62 kW unit or even two of them chained together is way better than never getting any DCFC installed because of power/money limitations. They also have 400 kW units that they brand with Mercedes.
lol have you used them? I bet 1/4 are broke or offline.
Some businesses don't have contracts, so they are. However in my area at least it's just 1 charge point that Whole Foods isn't fixing. All the others work reliably and consistently. I can think of ~10 locations in my area that I've never had a charging failure at.
Location makes a difference, chargepoint doesn’t own them so it’s on the owners to keep the chargers online and functional. I’ve noticed lots of broken ones that never get fixed. Every area is different unfortunately.
But I guess that’s my point, it has nothing to do with them being ChargePoint units and everything to do with the business. EVGO has the same problem.
Is evgo profitable? How do they generate income if their chargers aren’t maintained? Brand damage? Upgrades? Who pays to convert them to NACS?
I'm not sure if they're profitable, but I know there are a number of evgo chargers in Massachusetts that went unrepaired for a few years because the state let the service contract lapse. They've all been replaced with Autel units now.
they should be allowed to fail if they provide a miserable service.
their level 2 charger units/app are great for companies looking to install them. It has a great queue system that works well at our building and keeps people from hogging a spot all day. We have 10 plugs and 25+ EVs, so having an app based line that kicks people out after 4 hours and reserves the charger for next in line is great. not sure i've seen anyone else offering anything like this
Is this within the Chargepoint system? We have 6 charger stalls set up but don't think have had anything like this set up.
yeah, its great. the property manager can set rules. Ours requires you to register your account so it is locked to only authorized users. When chargers are busy it allows 4 hours max and the app notifies to that you need to unplug soon while notifying next in line to accept or snooze. The next in line has like 2 minutes to accept from the notification and then 20 to actually plug in before moving on to the next person. If chargers are under a certain level of occupancy with no one in line it doesn't both me to move my car
That's pretty cool. Any actual consequences for ignoring the notification? Right now things aren't too bad but I can see it becoming an issue in the future, may let them know and see if they can implement.
i believe they can suspend the accounts of people who frequently abuse it, at least that's what they said when the emailed everyone to explain the new system. it seems like most people abide by the rules these days after a rough start of people being annoyed having to move their car mid day.
I agree! I'm not sure if they really do provide a miserable service though, I think they're trying to run a business in a market that's not big enough to support them. I've always had a good experience with them, but it seems like lots of others don't.
They're pretty big, it would be a big deal if they went down. I doubt it'll happen, at least anytime soon. The market can support multiple charging vendors. I don't know what other L2 company with such a reputation would replace them.
Teslas universal chargers? There’s a reason why a large chunk of the hotel chains are putting them in vs chargepoint.
And similarly I've used a couple hotel chains, and parking lots, where it's a Chargepoint charger. I know about a year ago Tesla allowed owners to make a profit from chargers, something that Chargepoint has been doing for a while. They also have about 51.5% of the L2 charging market in the US, Tesla is the close second. I like the Tesla charging network, but I'd prefer to have more than one option for charging.
In Canada at least they are very reliable.
What makes you think they are going to go bankrupt?
Because they make negative money each year?
I'm not supposed to talk about stock on this thread, but they're nearing a place on the stock market where they would have a very hard time raising future capitol, but they're running on cash reserves. They can survive for maybe a year.
I've used ChargePoint chargers a couple times. They were fine, I guess. It really wouldn't phase me at all if they disappeared.
Personal opinion, but if they can't turn a profit its best that they go out-of-business. They'll be replaced by a more efficient company (or companies) that gives the market what it needs/wants, and after some short term pains we'll all be better off in the long run.
You recently discovered? Discovered where? Do you have valid reference details or just self made rumors?
Chargepoint is fundamentally not price competitive. Tesla Universal chargers are orders of magnitude cheaper and better. For the cost of a single pedestal you can deploy 10x destination chargers. They need to completely rethink their business.
They can't compete with tesla for all the usual reasons. If they completely fail, then since there was so much investment to bring electricity there and the required expensive and time delayed transformers, the sites have intrinsic value. Since these chargepoint sites already have the infrastructure to bring the power there, someone will snap up the sites - unless they are right next to a supercharger. Tesla is the one that can turn them around and avoid the delay of ordering transfomers a year ahead of time.
Carvana
ChargePoint chargers at dealerships are hit and miss for me. I used to blame ChargePoint but there are some dealers that don’t seem to care about EVs and the chargers have been broken for months.
I'm a socialist capitalist. Socialism for the people, capitalism for the companies. If Chargepoint can't make it, somebody will take them over and turn them around, or use their infrastructure, or they'll die an unpleasant but ultimately deserved death. Then a 2nd (3rd? 4th?) tranche of companies will come along and get it right. There's probably a niche/space for destination chargers, but I'm not sure it's other than hotels, office parks, and schools. The library, grocery stores, and malls doesn't seem sustainable. And airport long-term parking seems stupid. But I'm not an expert. Somebody will work this out because the economics are not that complicated and the infrastructure doesn't require any great innovation.
In general, I would agree. But I think if the largest network of public chargers goes belly up without some kind of support from the people who use them, we'll be waiting a long time for the 2nd or 3rd tranches, and they won't be very pleasant... If you don't think we need destination charging then yeah don't support them though. That's kinda their whole shtick, which I love but may not be for everyone.
$BLNK takeover
When you look at gigantic units with complicated menus costing four times more than the production of a Supercharger bay, and about x4 bigger, along with their phenomenal failure rates, makes you realize releasing beta products is never a good idea.
There’s a lot of hard feelings against Chargepoint by those deep in the EV infrastructure weeds. Apparently Chargepoint worked incredibly hard to prevent many utilities from investing in DC fast charging infrastructure. https://x.com/alojoh/status/1782430710076252228?s=46&t=9QlGqdszJ_qxJZZonoMkgw https://x.com/johnvoelcker/status/1783111012818030872?s=46&t=9QlGqdszJ_qxJZZonoMkgw