EVOS is a company we’ve covered before in the Australian electric vehicle landscape and today, the Brisbane-based company unveiled a new EV charger, the SB7.
The charger has been designed and to be made in Australia and they say, was built with the everyday EV owner in mind, designed to be easily installed.
The AC charger is capable of 7kW and can add as much as 35km of range every hour. With that, the target market is EV owners that are looking at a standard overnight charge in their garage. This is also the cheapest form of charging.
Unfortunately, EVOS hasn’t provided a price tag today, expect that closer to launch, but the design of the charger certainly looks the part, offering the ability for businesses to brand the circular face, while the charger’s body doubles as a great place to look the charging cable.
The SB7’s built-in energy management system can intuitively select the ideal idle time to charge the vehicle – be it overnight in non-peak periods, during business hours, when feed-in tariffs are at their lowest or to leverage solar or battery power, for instance.
Ampol, Australia’s largest transport fuels provider, will act as the national distributor partner for EVOS and the SB7 EV Charger, in addition to EVOS’s Fleet Home22 Charger which was released last year.
Both the SB7 and the Fleet Home22 chargers will be available to the public later this year.
“We’ve designed this not only from the view of ‘how do we charge a vehicle’, but also from the view of the customer. We asked ourselves what the EV owner needs from a charger: it has to be easy to install with no restrictions as to where it can go on a property, be easy to monitor remotely and help them manage their costs in an era when everyone is concerned with energy prices, and it has to look good.
EVOS CEO and co-founder, Marcelo Salgado.
The SB7 ticks all of those boxes and more.
Indoors and outdoors, monitored from anywhere
The ethos behind the technology development at EVOS is to solve the challenges hindering electric vehicle uptake.
The biggest issue for electric vehicle owners, fleet operators and strata companies is not the charging, but the management of energy.
Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Chris Crossman.
Each of those segments features their own unique challenges, but the challenge that unites them all is the energy piece: namely, is there a way to optimise energy and lower costs amid soaring energy prices?
We’ve looked to address this in our technology roadmap, while ensuring that these sub-sectors and their unique challenges are addressed with each product iteration, including the SB7.
The SB7 has been built to withstand the harsh Australian elements. While our Austrlaian sun is great for solar power, the UV can erode plastics. Thankfully EVOS has constructed the charger with UV stabilised ABS plastic. This material not only offers an aesthetically pleasing look but also houses the electronic components in an IP65 rated enclosure, proving its strength in adverse conditions.
The charger is Wi-Fi connection capable, ensuring EVOS and/or the homeowner can monitor and control the charger, while software updates can be made over-the-air (OTA) to keep the charger constantly on the cutting edge.
The EVOS driver app allows drivers to monitor the SB7 and the cost of EV charging. The free app allows users to set up different charge schedules, while the SB7 can be integrated to the EVOS Grid Integration Device (GID – to be available early-2024) and enable drivers to utilise their energy better by choosing between solar or battery charging, providing dynamic load management and optimising tariff selection.
The design of the EVOS SB7 charger places the utmost importance on data security. It employs an end-to-end VPN, enabling a private and encrypted network that robustly safeguards user privacy.
The SB7 is equipped with cutting-edge safety features, such as its welding detection capability which allows the device to detect a permanently engaged switching contact, which could put live AC voltage on the charge cable.
Not only can the SB7 detect this scenario, but it can also notify the cloud platform of the safety issue, and the charger can disconnect itself from the grid until the safety issue is rectified.
Two chargers, with more to come
Following a $1.7m initial capital raise in July 2021, the company began production of its first product and, in November 2021, the company unveiled its Fleet Home 22 AC Charger and its energy management platform. The charger was designed to increase reliability and to simplify the charging experience for fleet operators, which need to negotiate power purchases, manage peak electricity loads, report on emissions savings, install electrical equipment and more.
Since that initial raise, the company expanded its team to 22 and began developing its roadmap further.
Earlier this month, EVOS announced it had secured $5 million in a subsequent capital raise, during which the launch of the SB7 was highlighted as the next cab off the rank for the company which designs and manufactures its EV charging products in Brisbane.
Now, the company is looking to take its products to new markets, while continuing to focus on the development of its roadmap of advanced EV technologies and further expanding its team of engineers and designers.
Solving that issue for fleet operators proved to the market that we understand the challenges faced by EV drivers, and that we understand how to address them.
Chief Experience and Innovation Officer Seshan Weeratunga.
The SB7 resolves a number of headaches for EV owners, and the next products on the EVOS horizon will equally address the pain points EV drivers face across the country and, soon, abroad.
