A new app from Essent: charge your electric car remotely
Essent introduces an app which allows electric car owners to navigate to public charging points and to find out whether these are available for charging their vehicle. This ‘E-driving app’ for smartphones and tablet PCs also allows electric car charging to be arranged remotely. The E-driving app is already the third app that the energy utility has introduced to the market since October 2011.
The app allows electric car owners that are Essent customers and who connect their vehicle to one of the energy utility's charging points, to start and stop the charging of their car remotely, plus they no longer require a charging pass. The app also how much the battery of an electric car has charged.
Similar to the charging points map (in Dutch) on Essent's website, which was launched last month, the E-driving app shows all public charging points in the Netherlands, both regular charging stations and fast chargers. Users of the app can navigate to more than 1,300 public charging points in the Netherlands, as well as to approximately 1,100 charging points of Essent’s parent company, RWE, in Europe.
Charging points in the Netherlands
Using the app, it is not only possible to view the location of Essent and Nuon's almost 325 charging points (most of them situated in Amsterdam), but also whether or not they are free at that time. Essent comes to agreements with other operators about the automated provision of 'live' information about charging points, so that it is always possible to see which points are available and where they are located.
More Essent apps
The E-driving app is not the first app to be introduced by Essent. The Usage Manager app was launched late last year, which enables customers to monitor whether their standing order payments are still in line with the power they use. This was followed by the E-thermostat; a room thermostat which can be operated remotely using an app. The apps are hugely successful; in total they have already been downloaded more than 70,000 times (1 March 2011).
The E-driving app is suitable for smartphones with Android and iOS operating systems and is available from both the Android Market and the App Store. Essent offers the app free of charge.
Related links
App in App Store (iOS)
App in Android Market
All about the E-driving app (Dutch)
All about Essent and e-mobility
Published: 08 March 2012