Siemens is teaming up with a B.C. startup to convince more businesses and landlords to go electric—without having to rip up and rewire their parking lots. 

The German engineering giant is hoping it can smooth over the sticking point that’s slowing the EV transition by creating a charger designed in partnership with sustainable-construction startup Nexii. 

Siemens approached Nexii two summers ago looking for ways to get more underground electrical infrastructure into outdoor parking areas.

“Siemens being a big company, we also needed a push to be more agile,” said Siemens busway product manager Cameron Reid. “Nexii was a good opportunity to partner with, and get something in the ground quickly.” 

What it is: Siemens has created charging bays that resemble car-wash booths, which owners can buy and install in their parking lots. The bays use Nexii’s wall panels, which aim to be sturdy like concrete but are hollow and easy to remove, repair and, importantly, run wires behind, said Morgan Allan, Nexii’s vice-president of market development. Ideally, Allan said, the modular design and recyclable materials mean property owners can easily move or add to the bays over time, and the charging technology can be swapped out as needs change. 

Why it matters: The charging bays should “eliminate up to 90 per cent of the underground cable requirements,” John DeBoer, head of Siemens eMobility North America, said in a press release—meaning companies won’t have to rip up all the asphalt in their parking lot every time they need to connect a new EV charger to the grid. 

The hope is the charger, designed for high-volume commercial traffic, could minimize some of the pain points—like long construction timelines and finding trained repair technicians—that businesses face when making the switch. 

While fast-growing Nexii has faced some challenges, working with Siemens—an investor in the sweeping charging initiative Electrify America—opens it up to a potentially massive new market.

The big picture: The initiative is one of many the industry is exploring to help commercial property owners whose existing buildings aren’t set up to accommodate enough EV chargers. Hydro-Québec’s fleet service Cleo, for example, helps set up grid connections to shipping containers in outdoor parking lots where school buses are stored overnight.

B.C.-based fleet-services firm 7Gen (which has also benefitted from Siemens’s interest in Canada), said “charging infrastructure is for many of our clients the hardest part to solve.”

“We have basically a 24/7 hotline … in case there’s any issues on the vehicle on a charger,” CEO Frans Tjallingii told The Logic last month in an interview.

For small and medium organizations, welcoming EVs is both nitty and gritty at the moment: Propulsion Québec estimates that it takes six months to a year and a half to adapt buildings and infrastructure for electric school buses; for delivery vans, the Pembina Institute found electricity and infrastructure costs were “highly variable,” ranging from $4,500 Level 2 chargers, to $100,000 per fast charger. On the consumer side, offering charging services to customers is rarely profitable, U.S.-based McKinsey analysts have found. 

At least when it comes to construction, “relying on the local contractors’ price and labour rates and how much it costs to rent a machine … we’re reducing that ambiguity,” Allan said.

Read Shift—The Logic’s authoritative weekly newsletter on automotive technology industry news—for more; and if you know someone who should be reading it, they can sign up here.