Kia EV and OVO Charge Anytime - when will this be eligible for direct to vehicle (D2V)?

Hi @Colzee and welcome to the OVO Forum. It’s great to have you. 

We explained there that:

“adding additional electric vehicles via direct to vehicle, and additional charges, means working with those companies and their technology to unlock Charge Anytime. As a result it’s very difficult to provide insight on time frames. I’m told that OVO are really keen to unlock Charge Anytime with any many partners as possible as fast as possible.”

Fingers crossed this is up and running in Aug/Sep!

Charge Anytime - Can KIA publish a timescale/roadmap for when other EVs will be supported? Currently I am checking every day waiting for more news to see if my EV will be supported. Trying to avoid being forced to change supplier to get on an EV tariff,  to have OVO announce that my car is supported on Charge Anytime weeks later.  Even just a schedule of dates when newly supported EV’s will be announced would help. 

The absence of information makes it very hard to have confidence that Kaluza are actually working to bring more EV’s and Chargers into the program. I know this has been asked before, but two months has passed and the information vacuum is growing.

Specifically I have a Kia EV6 and Hypervolt charger.

Hi @JellyBean and thanks for the post. 

There’s a similar topic on this here: 

Where we advised that:

adding additional electric vehicles via direct to vehicle, and additional charges, means working with those companies and their technology to unlock Charge Anytime. As a result it’s very difficult to provide insight on time frames. I’m told that OVO are really keen to unlock Charge Anytime with any many partners as possible as fast as possible.

What charger have you got, @JellyBean?

@Tim_OVO  thanks for the reply, I have a Hypervolt 2.0 charger. I still don’t understand the ‘difficulty providing timeframes’ piece. If there is no engagement with any other potential partners then the statement is disingenuous. However if there is active engagement then there must be a roadmap. It may be that there is no desire to publish this, but that is quite different to it being ‘difficult to provide insight’. Someone knows what the current plan is!

Hi @JellyBean I totally understand your perspective there. 

We can’t commit to any kind of timeframe for any specific manufacturer as we’re reliant on them and Kaluza. Any date would be a guess and not fully in our control to stick to. 

Of course the level of detail available internally is greater than what we can share on a forum, but I can see that Kia is on the list for EVs where a connection with Kaluza is possible but it would be a poor user experience.

I hope that helps.

@Tim_OVO thanks that is actually helpful. Much appreciated.

Having read the previous posts I can see there are a few Kia EV owners wanting to use Charge Anytime. I am also a KIa EV3 owner with a Pod Point charger, and it would be extremely useful to know when support will be provided.

PodPoint support might not be coming anytime soon unfortunately as they’re owned by EDF if memory serves. Kia support is something that I believe OVO wants to implement, but it requires Kia to approve it first.

Unfortunately OVO have made clear there is no publicly available plan so your best bet currently may be the Intelligent Octopus tariff if you have a Kia? 

I suspect there may be a need to regularly flip between suppliers going forward to get the best EV rates as more products are launched. 

The problem with other EV tariffs is that the cheap rate is only available at a fixed period during the night. The idea of being able to charge at “anytime” is a compelling idea. Hopefully EVO will add support for KIa cars in the not too distant future. I don’t really want to switch suppliers as I’m currently on a fixed rate tariff that’s lower than the energy cap.

I didn’t know that Pod Point was acquired by EDF. Apparently this happened in 2020.