Chargepoint's Pat Romano: "Hiding in plain sight"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Pat Romano, chief executive of Chargepoint, the world’s largest electric car charging company, to talk about the rise of the electric car (3:00), its genesis of the company 10 years ago (5:30), the importance of Elon Musk (11:20), California’s electric car policy as a model for the world (13:00), getting over charging's engineering hurdles (15:50), the end of the internal combustion engine (19:40), the cost of an (electric) fill-up (24:15), the problem with different plugs (28:55), the danger of an oil price drop (30:20), how self-driving technology will revolutionise transport (33:45), how to please the petrolheads (35:35), a dangerous and messy transition (37:40), how Chargepoint makes money (41:15), and the “fleetification” of cars (43:00).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:03.0	What is it all about?
0:04.0	It was a quarter billion cars and light duty trucks on U.S. roads.
0:08.0	And if you overnight had level five autonomy and every consumer comfortable with autonomous drives,
0:13.0	so just wave a magic wand and pretend that, you know, we all got over our fears and it's what we want to use.
0:20.0	You would need somewhere between 33 million
0:22.4	and 50 million cars depending on who you ask. It's an eighth to a fifth. Hello and welcome to
0:29.0	Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from deep inside the Silicon Valley Future Machine. We have
0:34.5	a super interesting show for you this week.
0:40.4	You know, there's a saying that goes back to the gold rush.
0:41.9	Oh yeah, I'm going way back.
0:47.2	That most of the people who made their fortunes didn't find gold, they sold shovels.
0:56.5	And today's show, we have Pat Romano, who is in the great electric car revolution that is coming, he's selling lots of shovels. Romano is the chief executive of ChargePoint, which is the world's largest operator
1:02.4	of electric car charging stations. So I don't know if that metaphor quite works, but you get the
1:08.1	idea. Chargepoint has more than 50,000 charging points, charging
1:14.1	ports and counting. And what's interesting is that they've been at this for like 10 years. So going
1:21.3	back to when no one really needed a charging station because no one had an electric car. And what's
1:26.9	interesting here is it feels
1:28.1	like the market appears to maybe finally be catching up to their evangelism. And the car
1:34.5	companies themselves seem to agree. So charge point last month raised $240 million from a whole
1:42.1	bunch of investors, including BMW, Daimler, Chevron, the big oil
1:48.5	company, obviously.
	...

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