Australian freemium electric car charging station provider JOLT has just launched JOLT PLUS.
JOLT PLUS is a new subscription EV charging service for people who drive more than the average Australian short daily commute and like me don’t have a garage or parking lot at home to charge their electric car battery.
When I arrived at a JOLT charger today to top up my media loan review MG4 77 Long Range I immediately noticed the promos for JOLT Plus in the app, as you can see below.
During my test charge I added 6.99kW for free in 18 minutes. The car said that added 9% to the cars 77kWh battery.
JOLT says that JOLT PLUS is aimed at EV drivers who can’t have a home charger, are always on the road and want to pay less for everyday charging.
The original free JOLT membership level remains, where the first 7kWh your car fills up (using CSS2 or CHAdeMO connectors) on their network each day is free, which is enough to drive about 30-50km depending on your car efficiency and driving style.
JOLT Plus gives paid subscribers access to either a mid range plan of $9.99/month for 10kW free kW/day and lower charging rates or a flat monthly fee of $69.99 for unlimited charging.
Don’t try and scam the JOLT system by letting friends or family use your JOLT login, you can only use one vehicle per account.
JOLT PLUS memberships last one month and renew automatically. To cancel your paid JOLT PLUS membership, you’ll need to re-subscribe to any other membership via the app before your next billing date eg the free 7 kWh/day membership (which costs $0.00).
Cancelling/changing your JOLT PLUS membership takes effect immediately and you’ll no longer have access to the features in your JOLT PLUS membership. To keep your JOLT PLUS benefits until the end of your billing cycle, update your membership closer to (but still before) your next billing date.
JOLT launched with great fanfare a few years ago and attracted significant funding from Blackrock in late 2021.
From the perspective of Australian EV drivers the rollout of JOLT charging stations has been relatively slow since then and patchy.
Purely speculating, by looking at where JOLT chargers are located on a map of Sydney, Melbourne etc it looks like they are happy to install plenty of chargers in council areas that work well with them and expedite approvals.
Perhaps the reason we don’t have hundreds of JOLT chargers across our big cities is caused by slow approval from most councils and/or complaints by NIMBY’s near proposed JOLT locations?
