Challenges Faced

  • Increasing fleet size means more complex and costly operations plus an additionally stretched operational capacity.
  • Vehicles often only recharged once their range is close to empty, rendering them unusable for a considerable amount of time.
  • Low availability of the fleet - underutilized vehicles result in lower revenue as cars cannot be booked by customers due to being insufficiently charged.
  • City Restrictions - Cities limit EV parking duration at charging stations. Cars that stay in the charging stations after charging is complete incur fines.
  • Demand-driven placement of the fleet was required to increase revenue.
  • High energy costs to charge electric vehicles.

NECTURE stepped in with a pilot in July 2021 with the plan to address the above issues and to create a scalable operations model in line with ELOOP's plans for the future. Following the success of the initial pilot, NECTURE's service was moved onto full production and fine-tuned to where it is today: a successful partnership with ELOOP.

NECTURE’s Solutions

The goal of NECTURE's service is to move vehicles with low batteries to charging stations for charging as well as unplug and rebalance fully charged vehicles into high utilization areas where vehicles are likely to be rented quickly (“Hot Zones”).

Pick up & Plugin (Predictive Charging)

Pickup of vehicles to be subsequently charged. The selection of vehicles is based on a business logic jointly defined (battery level < 120km). The selected vehicles are made available to StreetCrowd for pickup. Once picked up, vehicles will be driven to a charging point (considering availability and distance). At the charging point, the charging process is started.

Unplug & Rebalance

Once a certain charging level is reached (305km agreed with ELOOP), the vehicle is made available to  StreetCrowd again. After unplugging, the car is relocated to a position with predicted high demand in the upcoming hours. This will ensure the optimizing the number of trips and revenue a vehicle is able to generate after recharging. The service was further optimized to incentivize StreetCrowd members to unplug cars between 3 am and 6 am in order to reduce fines incurred by cars that stayed at charging points after the completion of the charging process.

Rebalance Cars

Cars that are idle in cold zones for 48 hours or in a neutral zone for 72 hours will be eligible to be repositioned into a hot zone in order to meet demand and generate revenue for ELOOP. 

Energy Optimization (Charging as a Service)

Technical integration into the Wien Energie Charging Network - which is a prerequisite - was completed.  StreetCrowd members utilize this charging integration in order to execute charging tasks via the StreetCrowd app.

The Results Achieved

  • StreetCrowd performs over 1000 charging and unplug tasks a month for ELOOP ensuring the fleet is fully optimized and available for customers to be booked and thus increasing ELOOP's revenue. 
  • NECTURE's operation reduces ELOOP's requirement for a high number of operations employees in order to keep up with the demands of an optimized fleet. Currently, ELOOP has only 4 operations employees. 
  • Reduction in energy costs of ELOOP as NECTURE performs >60% of ELOOP's fleet charging at the discounted rate agreed with Wien Energie and NECTURE. 
  • Reduction of parking fines as a result of StreetCrowd performing tasks earlier in the morning and during the day. Currently, ELOOP pays <10 parking fines a month on average with consideration of over 500 charging tasks performed by StreetCrowd on average every month. 
  • Demand-driven placement of cars both after they are unplugged and with the relocation-only service ensures that the cars are booked by ELOOP customers quickly in order to increase ELOOP's revenue further. Statistics show that an additional average of 2.2 trips per car are booked by ELOOP customers after a StreetCrowd relocation within a 24-hour window.