Exploring social charging behavior between EV users in sharing charging points

With the growing uptake of Electric Vehicles (EVs) world-wide the demand for charging infrastructure has increased as well. In a number of frontrunner countries mature public charging infrastructure have been developed over the last years. Research has revealed issues of limited effective use of Charging Points (CP) in terms of connection duration and lower charging duration, which negatively affects the business case of charging infrastructure as well as availability for EV drivers. Anecdotal evidence in the Netherlands suggests that EV drivers organize themselves and collaborate on charging, for instance in WhatsApp groups or dedicated (commercial) applications, to increase utilization of charging infrastructure by enabling other EV drivers to charge, a process that we label ‘social charging’. In this paper we present the results of a survey amongst EV drivers to explore the extent to which social charging is taking place and under which conditions social charging is more likely to occur.