Chargeway Launches Web Beacon for Dealer.com, Sincro Websites
Chargeway, the Oregon-based software startup best known for developing a simple, intuitive color-coded visual language for charging EVs with “electric fuel”, has announced a new product called “Chargeway Web Beacon” that’s aimed at helping a very specific group of people understand and explain electric vehicles: new car dealers.
“Almost every major automaker has announced plans to go ‘all electric‘ or ‘mostly electric‘ within the next decade,” explains Chargeway’s founder, Matt Teske. “But the burden is on the dealers to sell those electrified cars, and it will be the ones who adapt to that EV buyer and learn to respond to questions about range anxiety and charging networks with facts, instead of hearsay, that are going to prosper while others fall behind. That’s why we’re focusing our efforts at Chargeway towards developing tools to not only educate the new car dealers themselves, but to help them inspire ‘Range Confidence’ in their customers.”
The first of Chargeway’s dealer-focused tools was the Chargeway Showroom Beacon— a 43″ interactive touchscreen kiosk that launched as part of a pilot program in Oregon. Together with Forth, the Oregon Auto Dealers Association (OADA), Portland General Electric (PGE), Pacific Power, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), and OpConnect, Chargeway placed a number of Chargeway Showroom Beacons in key auto dealers along the I-5 and I-84 corridors.
“The Showroom Beacon is a great tool for salespeople to answer questions about EVs in the physical dealership, but a lot of the new car buying process happens online, days or sometimes weeks before the customer ever walks on the lot. That’s where the Chargeway Web Beacon comes in.”
When a customer visits a dealer’s website and finds an EV they’re interested in, they’re prompted with a “Chargeway” button. When they click on it, they’re greeted with a map of local charging options that are specific to that exact vehicle. Unlike other EV charging maps, all the noise of incompatible stations is filtered out, giving electric car buyers a clearer, up-to-date image of what the electric infrastructure looks like in their area, for their vehicle, right now.
“We update the station data every twenty-four hours,” offers Matt. “That goes along with the concept of ‘Range Confidence’, too. We’re showing people– and the dealership is showing people exactly where they can find electric fuel for their electric cars. There’s no guessing and no generalization, just straightforward, correct answers that are tailored precisely to the new car they’re looking at. Dealers without Chargeway? They’re just going to have to wing it and hope their salespeople don’t cost them a sale.”
The Chargeway Web Beacon offers a similar user experience to the Chargeway consumer app, and, in addition to the more familiar charging station maps and charge timer functions, offers customers accurate information about incentives like tax credits and utility rebates for installation of at-home chargers– all without ever leaving their local car dealers’ existing website.
“People often point to uninformed or misinformed car dealers as an obstacle in the way of EV adoption, but I don’t know if that’s really fair. There is so much information out there, and so much of it can be confusing, that it’s no wonder a salesperson here or there gets it wrong. But consumers are so defensive when it comes to dealership interactions that any misstep is seen as deception, and it’s hard to gain that consumer trust back. With the tools we’re offering dealers, they should be able to get the information right every time, and that means a better experience for everyone involved, especially that first-time electric car buyer.”
The Chargeway Web Beacon site plugin is available now for Sincro and Dealer.com managed websites. The Chargeway mobile app is currently available for download on both the App Store and Google Play for iOS and Android mobile devices, respectively.
Original content from Chargeway.