Envorso / Ford Motor Company

Making Electric Vehicle Charging Fun (with the Ford F-150 Lightning)

This student team worked to create an ideal Electric Vehicle charging experience that addresses the hurdles faced by EV owners today when trying to use public charging networks. Approaching the activities of budgeting power, finding a charger, and completing charging while on-the-go will include this student team to working to creative design and scenario formation. Specific pain points this student team worked to address included: - Billing , charge status, alerts of progress and problems, conveying charging rates in a way that makes sense to the average non-technical consumer, etc. - Can charger health become easy to understand in real-time? - Hardware, Software, and User Experience improvements (hardware improvements may be modeled, may require simulated data; if actual charging units are required for student ideas, additional investigation and scope is required). Outcomes this student team worked to accomplish included: - An end-to-end prototype of the "charging experience of tomorrow," factoring the full-stack of the charging experience from infrastructure (grid and distribution) to the vehicle/charger experience, completion of the process through billing. - Full software prototypes that can be experienced in vehicle. - Proposals in the form of click-through presentations for infrastructure. A stretch goal the student team aimed to work towards include: - Models or walkthroughs (3D or VR) would be fantastic for experiencing the facilities around charge points.