Episode 58 - Liz Allan and Chris Chamberlain - From Data to Decisions, Unveiling the Future of Clean Mobility

Episode 58 - Liz Allan and Chris Chamberlain - From Data to Decisions, Unveiling the Future of Clean Mobility.

Liz Allan speaks to Chris Chamberlain, Vice President of Strategic Accounts and Co-Founder of Dodona Analytics. They discuss Chris' background in technology sales and how he embarked on a mission to plan the next phase of charging infrastructure, using data and evidence to make well-informed decisions. The Dodona Analytics web-based platform has evolved over time, and its customer base has remained loyal and growing.
They delve into the challenges and opportunities surrounding sustainable practices, and Chris addresses the issue of carbon offsetting and its effectiveness. Plus, they discuss the nitty-gritty of EV charging infrastructure, discussing topics like due diligence, the public-private dynamics in the UK, and the need for convenient and integrated charging options.

Chris Chamberlain Bio:
Chris Chamberlain is an experienced technology sales professional specialising in data science. Over the years, Chris has worked with various industries, such as insurance, publishing, and medical sectors. Around three and a half years ago, he had the opportunity to work closely with a customer who had recently taken over the public charging infrastructure for transport in Greater Manchester.
They needed help planning the charging infrastructure placement and realised the importance of having substantial data and evidence in this forward-looking market. Chris played a vital role in helping them gather and analyse extensive data to make informed decisions about the future of EV charging in the region.
Chris's expertise in technology sales and his ability to understand the importance of data-driven decision-making have helped Dodona Analytics establish a strong presence in the EV charging space and contributed to developing a well-informed and evidence-backed strategy for future growth.

Chris Chamberlain Links:
Website: https://dodonaemobility.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-chamberlain-uk

Episode K

Transcript

Liz Allan [00:00:01]:

Hello, everyone. So on today's podcast episode, I have got Chris Chamberlain, who's the VP of strategic I'm going to start again. Sorry, Tom. Who's? My producer. Okay, blah, blah. Right, okay. So on the podcast today, I have got Chris Chamberlain, who's the VP of strategic well, look, I've got I'm off again, aren't I? The VP of strategic shit. Strategic accounts. Your sales. No, sorry.

Chris Chamberlain [00:00:42]:

You used to say I work in sales.

Liz Allan [00:00:45]:

No, you have to say it properly. All right, can I just say vice president and co founder. Yeah, right. Okay. So on today's podcast episode, and I'll try third time lucky to say, Chris Chamberlain. He is the vice president and co founder of DoDona Analytics. Good to meet you, Chris. Thank you.

Chris Chamberlain [00:01:10]:

Thank you, Liz. Thank you for inviting along today. I'm looking forward to the session and hopefully some people will find it insightful as well.

Liz Allan [00:01:18]:

Of course, definitely. So we met at Fully charged through one of your colleagues who pounced on me whilst I was eating a flapjack or something, weren't they? That was quite funny.

Chris Chamberlain [00:01:31]:

Yeah. Janae, he seems to have this facial recognition where he can pick people out of crowds based upon their LinkedIn photos, which is a nice skill as people seem to have a LinkedIn photo. That's at least ten years old of mine.

Liz Allan [00:01:46]:

No, mine's not ten years old. It's only last year. But, you know, sometimes I have curly hair, sometimes I have straight hair. Just depends what mood I'm in. But no, listen, it was under this love mine's gray, but I'm not telling you, so right, tell me a bit about your so what is your background and what does dona do?

Chris Chamberlain [00:02:12]:

Yeah, so my personal background is I've worked in technology sales, and although I've got a grand title, I basically work in sales. But at the moment, I tend to deal with some of the larger accounts that we're working with. So as an organization, we're data scientists. We've worked in a number of different industries like insurance and publishing and also medical and things like that. And about three and a half years ago, we started speaking to our first customer in this space and they came to us and said, we've just taken over the EV charging infrastructure. The company is called Eduna, or Bev, and they've just taken over the public charging infrastructure for transport for Greater Manchester, and they'd signed up to provisioning EV charges for the metropolitan area. And they were like, great, we've won the business. Okay, what do we do next? It wasn't quite as bad as that, but they needed some help as planning where the next kind of tranche of charging infrastructure was going to go. And the more that we and they delved into that problem, it became clear that there was a need for having a lot of data, as much evidence as possible, because this is a forward looking market to make sure that you understood as much as possible about something that was unknown in order to get that to look reasonable in the future and show that you've thought about it and there was some evidence rather than putting equidistant pins on map.

Liz Allan [00:03:51]:

Yeah, because I suppose working in continuous improvement, I've always been told data is king, isn't it?

Chris Chamberlain [00:03:59]:

Yeah, it is continuous improvement and I think where it is today and where it'll be in five years, ten years is going to be very different but sometimes it is a bit like the Wild West out there.

Liz Allan [00:04:14]:

Okay, so you said to me before we started recording, you sell a dream.

Chris Chamberlain [00:04:19]:

Yeah, I think well, I mean, hopefully we can make that dream a reality. Or that's the idea, but initially, because it's kind of intangible and we have a platform that helps people be able to visualize things. But I think we're at the beginning of this kind of EV journey at the moment that we all need to do. Otherwise, unless you live on a hill, you're going to have a nice swimming pool or moat round so I think we need to do something, it needs to happen now and it needs to happen fairly quickly so kind of sitting on our hands for another years or even months shouldn't really be an option. So what we're trying to do is to say, look, how can you do this at scale? How are the assets going to be in the right place? Serve the community and also the local.

Liz Allan [00:05:11]:

Businesses and what systems do you use? So how do you generate the data then?

Chris Chamberlain [00:05:17]:

So we take the data from a number of sources, some of which we pay for the data because publicly the data is not available. Or you're taking data from the census, from car density, EV density, all of those kinds of things. And then those are layers that can be interrogated individually, and you can look at them in isolation. But where it really starts to become powerful is that we use AI or data science principles to combine those together in the right kind of way in order to be able to make sense of it and press a button, and the answer comes back to you. That's the idea, to be able to quantify it, because gut feel, unfortunately, doesn't scale well.

Liz Allan [00:06:06]:

I've got a bit of a thing about AI. How advanced is AI for this then?

Chris Chamberlain [00:06:13]:

There's a lot of AI about at the moment, some of which bad and.

Liz Allan [00:06:19]:

Go on, tell me what you think is bad, what's bad?

Chris Chamberlain [00:06:23]:

I think this is the first time that computers or machines have the ability to be able to think independently without necessarily a human giving someone a prompt, and I think unleashing, that has the potential, and I'm not a social commentator from that perspective, but it has the potential to change things fairly rapidly. What happens if the technology decides and says, all right, there's a power shortage at the moment, let's turn the power off to the hospital. It's not something that humans that we would perhaps do. I think it has impacts across everything from that to kind of education. It's like if you were writing dissertation, you go, okay, write me a dissertation on this in 1000 words, or whatever. Although it's possible, it doesn't necessarily show the competence of the individual. So I think unleashing it kind of wholesale without any kind of controls on it is we've seen that with Chat CBT, where it's suddenly everyone's kind of playing with it. But what happens if it starts to become part of government systems and that starts to create a problem?

Liz Allan [00:07:47]:

Right there is that, I must admit. Like I say, I don't know, I have this I just love using chat GPT because I've shown people it and I've kind of gone, look, ask it a question and you're just seeing this whole page of results coming. Up and it's scary, but it's amazing.

Chris Chamberlain [00:08:14]:

At the same working on algorithms where's the veracity of the data, even the underlying data and I think there was an example, I can't remember it specifically, but it was basing the decisions off of data that was ten years old. So where are the checks and balances in there? And obviously things change fairly quickly and unless you go back and interrogate each of those data points and or the kind of decisioning that's gone on in order to create the output. Okay, yeah, computer says it's a bit like the Little Britain. The computer says that and I think we've all probably had experiences like that in our life. And you go, well, it's just not right. But you know that the computer says this.

Liz Allan [00:09:03]:

Yeah, computer says no.

Chris Chamberlain [00:09:06]:

In my mind at least, what we do, it provides a better basis for decision, doesn't provide the decision. It still requires humans to interact with that, whether that's on our customer side or whoever the end customer may be.

Liz Allan [00:09:23]:

I was going to say, because human interpretation is obviously you're going to look at some data and look at it from a human point of view, which is very different to the kind of like the very straight kind of understanding of machine learning or AI, isn't it?

Chris Chamberlain [00:09:41]:

Yes, no, definitely. We were talking about just before we started the record, but I think the context is everything. So something taken out of context or viewed through a different lens can mean that that information, or even the output of that information, could be viewed very differently and go, okay, this looks good to me. But it doesn't. Look good for the other people because it may not be able to deal with that complexity, at least at the moment of mashing together. What two organizations aspirations are, I think, providing visibility of it. For example, if we were to select an EV charging site, you can look at that and you can look at all of the data that's gone into that and you go, okay, right, well, I'd rather it wasn't skewed in that way and therefore it has to improve over time.

Liz Allan [00:10:35]:

So you'd said to me before we started recording as well, that you can use the AI data sets for cabling to understand, cabling for district network operators, et cetera. Can't you?

Chris Chamberlain [00:10:47]:

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the big things. And again, that's kind of a fragmented market and probably 18 months ago the DNOs were not keen on working with us. Now they're getting hundreds or thousands of connection requests a month and they don't have the ability to trooper. They're now happier to give us that data. But I've heard some horror stories recently about someone putting in 650 kilowatt chargers and there's only 200 kw worth of power available. And you go, okay, well, you've just now put these assets are probably fifty K a pop. They've got into the ground and either they'll be throttled back and it'll be distributed, load balanced across the whole set, or it's just a waste of assets along the way. You see people go, I thought this was going to charge my car in 30 minutes, and because everyone's plugged in at the same time, there's just not the power available. So power availability is certainly, as far as the faster DC charging is concerned, is absolutely key.

Liz Allan [00:11:58]:

So what will have gone wrong if that's happened? Has it just been an incorrect site survey that's been done, how's that managed to get through?

Chris Chamberlain [00:12:07]:

Yeah, ideally our customers don't suffer that problem, but it's realistically just not enough due diligence. There was someone that had spoken to me and they said, oh yeah, we've got this fantastic brownfield site closer to Heathrow Airport, and you go, okay, great, but you're looking at the traffic flow on this particular road. Oh, it's a small B road, maybe not ideal on the face of it. It looks great and then you go, okay, and it's a kilometer away from the nearest substation and you're going to have to dig that. It's about 250 pounds a meter to dig. So you kind of go, okay, right, well, this is not viable or indeed feasible in the first instance. So if you're looking at hundreds or thousands of candidate sites, how do you take 500 to 50? That's a kind of humanly manageable amount that you can then put an additional level of due diligence into. But if you're doing that, trying to do it with 500, it's just not just not possible. You're kind of shooting in the dark or making unnecessary kind of rounding errors. As far as that's know, it shouldn't happen, but it does happen. I think it's interesting, the public private kind of dynamic, certainly here in the UK that's going on at the moment, there's a lot of public money available and then you've got smaller private entities that are working on this and yeah, that causes a disparity as well, but we're having to move quickly. And sometimes when you move quickly, mistakes are made.

Liz Allan [00:13:56]:

I was going to say, especially people don't mean to cut corners and I don't mean cutting corners in a dangerous way, but I mean, if you've got to push something through really quickly, then it's possible that you might have missed something, isn't it?

Chris Chamberlain [00:14:14]:

I mean, we look at the could, but we also look at the should. Is it going to serve the public? Is it going to serve businesses? But also is it going to make the end the charge point operator? Is it going to allow them to make money? I'm not sure whether I entirely agree with it, but McKinsey said at the end of last year that 40% of charges going into the ground will never be profitable. Well, that's a scary number and if I was in that business, I'd be kind of scared by it. It's a waste of assets and it's underservic and it also gives the transition to EV a bad rap as well.

Liz Allan [00:14:49]:

And I was going to say because that was something else we were talking about before we started recording, wasn't it? Where we were saying about convincing other people and making sure that people who need to understand about kind of changing to an EV and the charging networks, et cetera, et cetera, they understand what they need to do.

Chris Chamberlain [00:15:19]:

I think if you look at consumer adoption of any new technology in the 20th century, whether it's kind of air conditioning, refrigeration, color TVs, videos or whatever, it follows an S curve where you've got early adopters and that's realistically. We are where we are now. Then it'll hit a much more vertical or near vertical growth profile and that will be when people really start to come on board of it. We've got some evangelists that believe in it and like the feeling of a car that accelerates in a straight line and that kind of thing. But I think we're looking at about 3% penetration of EVs in the UK at the moment. We've got a long, long way to go and the customer experience is essentially pretty rubbish. I was talking to some guys earlier, they're based in Germany and it's one of the big utilities there. If you were traveling around Europe, you need to have a separate app on your phone for each of the seven geographies and the company will remain nameless, but it's normal to cross borders there and you go, well, now I want to charge and I don't have this app. Well, that's not great experience.

Liz Allan [00:16:41]:

No, but don't you think that that's not there's also lots and lots of different apps in the UK, isn't there? I always say we're very close to getting an EV, but we haven't got one yet. But I've already collected about ten apps on my phone.

Chris Chamberlain [00:16:57]:

Yes. Friend of mine, Neil Riddell. A company called Power.

Liz Allan [00:17:04]:

You know Neil lovely.

Chris Chamberlain [00:17:06]:

Most people in the industry do. Neil says that it has to be simple, so simple your grandmother can use it. And we're some distance away from that at this point, the level of customer experience. I think the early adopters are prepared to deal with the rough, with the smooth, but if we were to deal with this level of customer experience in a more mature industry like financial services or ecommerce, we just wouldn't find it acceptable. It would be absolutely terrible. So there's a lot that needs to be done to help people on that adoption curve.

Liz Allan [00:17:46]:

But you know what I'd liken it how it is at the moment to car parks. So car parks or on street parking. So I'll probably look on my phone now, hang on a minute. How many parking apps have I actually got? I have got 12341 of them isn't a parking app. So two, four. I've got about seven parking apps on my phone because I'll go to a council car park, it'll be run by I probably shouldn't say all the names by Ringo or Pay by phone or somewhere like that. There are other parking apps available if you need to download them. Do you know what I mean? It's kind of like when you go up to there's one specifically, and I don't know whether you know tame at all. There's, like a cattle market car park. If anybody's listening or watching, you know, the cattle market car park. It's one of those pay machines where I've worked in parking services years ago. But it's one of those pay machines where you have to put, like, a nifty 50 digits in. Oh, you've got to try and work out for a start off. Remember what your edge is. Now, I'm pretty good. If it was my husband, you'd have no chance. But then you've got to do all these other things and it doesn't really give you any idea about what you need to do next. So I've just downloaded the app because it makes it easier for me and I'd rather do that. So in some ways, I don't mind using an app because I'm used to using it. As long as I've got a connection, I've got some kind of data that I can use, then doesn't matter to me.

Chris Chamberlain [00:19:20]:

Yeah, I mean, I had a similar experience. I visited a friend in Hackney, helping him move some stuff, and the London borough of Hackney decided it was a good idea to charge me seven pounds an hour to park on the street, but took me best part of 20 minutes. And I'd like to think I'm reasonably technology savvy, although some of my colleagues might disagree with me. And then, actually, if you think about that, it took me 20 minutes and it's going, oh, great, that's cost me over two pounds to do that. Now if I was charging as well. And I think that that's one of the things that needs to be really considered is, like, where can you charge on public charging infrastructure where you're already spending time, whether it's kind of going for a swim, walking the dog, whatever, it might what's the core function of being there and then allow people to charge at the same time? At the moment, a lot of the time you've got what we've just spoken about, which is paying for the parking, and then you got to pay for the charging as well. So it's another lapse that different car parking provider, different charge point operator. And then you go, okay, great, well now it's taking me 40 minutes to do this. Ridiculous. So I think that ease of use and we're having a number of conversations at the moment, it's like just turn up, put your credit card on the contactless thing, you're parking, how long do you want to park for? Ideally it recognizes who you are from your card and then on digital screen says, are you charging as well? Yes, done. And I think it has to be that simple. We're some distance away from it at the moment, unfortunately. But yeah, I think as the market adopts more then the consumers will demand. And businesses, arguably, because the businesses time is money.

Liz Allan [00:21:19]:

For example, this little car part, there's probably 150 spaces in there. So it's not massive, but it's of a considerable enough size. And not everybody's going to want to charge when they're there. No, but at some point in the future there will be probably maybe a third or half of people that will want to charge there.

Chris Chamberlain [00:21:42]:

Yeah, absolutely. And so I think that when I just said the could, the should and the when, it's like, the when is like when do you roll it out? And it's a problem that we're kind of grappling with at the moment is how do you size something if there's 150 spaces, how many of them should have EV charging bays? Now it's like a hotel. There's obviously different speeds of chargers and it tends to be the faster DC ones and much more expensive pieces of hardware. And so think about a hotel. Some people are going there to have a meal or a meeting, other people there are staying there overnight. So you've got to have the right blend of infrastructure to do that. And it's a conversation I was having on Friday at the fully charged north show. And just trying to understand this. How do you include the charging with the core function that's already there? I mean, I think there will be times when people are en route and like on Friday, and actually, don't tell anyone this, but I took my ice on Friday because I was driving 500 miles in the day. I was going to be driving for 9 hours anyway. The fully charged event notes of the organizers for next year, there's no EV charging on site. So it would have been nice if my car had been fully charged when I was leaving and going home, but it was 500 miles, I didn't really want to have to stop for 2 hours and maybe those kinds of things. So we're still not at the true level and that's an extraordinary journey. Most weeks I drive less than 100 km so that's okay, right. But there are times where you want to do these journeys and I think that's one of the reasons why EVs will often still tend to be a second car in a household ability to pretty much have indefinite range where you can just put the thing in the tank, off you go.

Liz Allan [00:24:02]:

But things are going to change, aren't they Chris? Over the next few years, I've said this to loads of people. If you think about back to kind of the days of the massive big mobile phone, I used to have this guy that I worked for and he had this massive big it was the size of a suitcase. Mobile wasn't really mobile phone because he'd be like, oh, struggling along with it. It was so heavy.

Chris Chamberlain [00:24:26]:

If you got carry that.

Liz Allan [00:24:29]:

Oh, we used to call him Cornish pasty shoes, but that's a total nother story. But yeah, so he'd be there with his phone and thinking he was really like, hey, I'm so cocksure of myself and look how we've changed now. So I mean, I know that's a number of years away, but we are going to be looking at different size batteries, longer range, better capabilities. It's got to be happening, hasn't it?

Chris Chamberlain [00:24:57]:

Yeah, I mean, I think there's some other kind of macro trends as far as the car ownership is concerned. I mean it's close to 80% of the people in the UK will never buy a new car throughout their whole lifetime. I'm one of them until there's a residual market. And the idea of people that I think there's 7.2 million people in this country that are living in some kind of fuel poverty at the moment and the idea if you said, oh yeah, and you're going to buy a 50,000 pound Tesla, well that's not happening. And then there's other things that kind of, I think in my mind play into that the traditional route to the market for the automotive OEMs where people buy cars because you've got some level of certainty what the residual value is going to be in three or five years time or whatever it may be. And that route's market of getting used cars on the market quickly has been through the rental car companies. Well, in no meaningful way are the rental car companies buying those vehicles from the OEMs at the moment. So I think I was lucky enough to go to Sicily a few weeks ago and I think for the first time ever I was offered an EV. But I also kind of know what it's like from a charging infrastructure perspective in Sicily. I didn't opt for that option but I think it's something that will become normal booking.com. I think now I've started giving when you select a hotel whereas years gone past I might have wanted kids club so I got some peace and quiet for a couple of hours.

Liz Allan [00:26:38]:

Yeah, I know that one.

Chris Chamberlain [00:26:41]:

Has the site got EV charging? That kind of thing, that demand of saying okay, we're losing customers, we're not attracting the right demographic because we're not offering this, we're beginning to steer.

Liz Allan [00:26:57]:

Yeah, I was going to say Airbnb's got the same. I noticed that a few months ago that Airbnb will actually say you've got an option, do you need EV charging? And bizarrely enough, we stayed in Pembrokeshire over Easter and there were two charge points in kind of like the car park of the place where we were staying because they know that they're going.

Chris Chamberlain [00:27:19]:

To attract someone that could afford to buy 50,000.

Liz Allan [00:27:23]:

But we didn't have an EV then. That's the irony, isn't it? It's ridiculous. But at least I know if we go back and we've got an EV then we'll be able to charge it.

Chris Chamberlain [00:27:31]:

And the likelihood is you will go back there when you've got an EV because that will allow, you know, that it's going to be convenient. So you're more likely to rebook. So I think it's becoming much more normal now. Without a doubt.

Liz Allan [00:27:46]:

Yeah. So going back to your emobility solution then so who are your main customers?

Chris Chamberlain [00:27:56]:

We've chosen to work mostly with the ChargePoint operators because we're a small company. We're only about 25 people so we're not huge at the moment and I think some of the sales cycles with the local authorities can be long. They want to know everything about your company and probably we don't hit all of those kind of due diligence targets although we think we're very good at what we do, they might perceive us as being a risk. So we chose to work with the commercial entities, many of whom were kind of startups in the first instance. I mentioned Aduna but I think our second customer was connected Curve that we spoke about earlier as well. When we first started working with them they were 14 people, very co founder, energetically Led and now they're 120. They received 100 million in funding from Aviva last year. So it's starting to become kind of grown up if you want. So we work mostly with ChargePoint operators but that line is kind of blurring now as well because a hotel could be a quasi ChargePoint operator CPO as a service working with them because they want to increase footfall, they want to increase dwell time, they want to increase their average spend. If build the chargers where it's already there but we're already beginning to see it where the oil and gas companies that received a lot of money with the energy kind of windfall last year so they've got plenty of money to spend, I think. Although they may be continuing to sweat their kind of assets. They know that they're going to have to change at some point, and they will do. And also the utilities companies are starting to become involved as well. So I think it's become sufficiently large now and in my mind at least, very likely to happen. There's still things like hydrogen, which in my mind has some challenges as well, but I think it's incredibly likely to happen. And they're now saying, okay, we need to start investing in this. And I think probably in 20 years time, it will be same as the oil and gas majors now. It'll be dozens rather than hundreds.

Liz Allan [00:30:25]:

Exactly. So when you work with the CPO, then when do you start working with them and when would you finish working with them on a project?

Chris Chamberlain [00:30:36]:

The platform that we provide is web based. It's persistent. We're going to work with them and evolve over that period of time. So the customers that we acquired two or three years ago, they're still customers. They'll probably still be customers in five years time, although we'll have other kind of add ons to what we do. So I think that the EV charging infrastructure space will not peak until about 2045, based on our estimates. There's a lot of other geographies that slower to adopt and adapt, basically. What's going to happen in sub Saharan Africa, what will happen in the Indian subcontinent? I think that the average vehicle age, say, in India, is I don't know exactly what it is, but I'm guessing that vehicles looking at the black smoke that comes out the back end of the trucks, I guess most of are probably 15, maybe 20 years old. And it may be there were some guys that been trying to help in Uganda, and it's kind of not vanity project, but we're trying to help them as much as we can. But the air quality in some of these places is really not great. So will they skip an evolutionary step? They never really had fixed line telephone and went straight to mobile. Will they go to Ebikes or E Scooters, that kind of cleaner form of individual mobility. And not everyone, the vast majority of people don't own a vehicle in geographies, so it'd be interesting to see how that pans out once they make that decision. If it makes sense for them, I think just go ahead and do it.

Liz Allan [00:32:40]:

Yeah, exactly. And you were saying to me before, weren't you, about you kind of supporting so the organizations have got commercial vehicle return to home fleets as well.

Chris Chamberlain [00:32:53]:

Yeah. No, absolutely. It's one of the things that we've looked at because businesses is time is money. The local authorities want local businesses to stay in their area. Even if people wanted to charge in depots, they probably can't. So that tends to be a problem. How does the vehicle get back home?

Liz Allan [00:33:22]:

Did you see that? It totally kicked me. Out then did it?

Chris Chamberlain [00:33:26]:

Right. Do we need to do that question?

Liz Allan [00:33:28]:

No. No, because it was still recording, so I'm assuming it was still doing it while you were on. I think so, yeah. So that's fine. Sorry, Tom, when you're watching, there was a glitch, then it just kicked me out.

Chris Chamberlain [00:33:44]:

So I think in general, the high usage vehicles range is still somewhat limited. But how do you get these high usage vehicles to adopt, whether it's kind of private hire vehicles, the Ubers, the Lyfts, those kind of things, or the light commercial vehicles that are returned to home. I heard a horror story in the US recently where the guy was his vehicle, used to take it home at night, couldn't take it home at night anymore, had to go back to the depot, and then he had an hour and a half commute from the depot and to get to the depot in the morning. So it doesn't happen in every instance, but I think in general, put the charging assets at places where it's likely to be convenient, certainly in the US. And I know we touched upon that when we first started speaking, but they're behind us at the moment. There's a lot of public money available through the Nevi, the National EV infrastructure, and also the CFI for the fuels, but the municipalities there seem to be taking a greater level of interest. Most of the money is federal that states then need to apply for, but they seem to have taken a much more proactive approach on social inclusion, which I think is probably the right thing, where areas that are already disadvantaged don't become more disadvantaged. And I think probably that we don't polarize society even more than it already is.

Liz Allan [00:35:25]:

Okay, so I was just give me 1 second that being knocked at, being kicked off has just thrown me in the first place. Now.

Chris Chamberlain [00:35:37]:

That'S all right. I'd started speaking. I told you I wouldn't stop.

Liz Allan [00:35:45]:

So I saw on your LinkedIn feed you had an article on there about Greenwashing, and I just wanted to know what your thoughts were.

Chris Chamberlain [00:35:56]:

Yeah, that's an interesting one. I think that the whole kind of badging as sustainability is a tricky thing. I think carbon offsetting and the veracity of that kind of carbon offsetting. And there's some guys that we've been partnering, actually they're part of the same Cohort that we're in in the US. Through innovate UK, but they're saying not all carbon credits are created equal. It's like, okay, where are you planting the trees? Is it not going to help? I think there was a government, a UK government initiative. I kind of skimmed an article at the weekend, and they said, oh, the UK's kind of reforestation know, it's great, and it's this and that. And it turns out that they've planted trees in the area equivalent to Regents Park. And that's really kind of not doing not making a huge amount of difference. So yeah, I think it's important people have marketing departments in large corporates, especially some of those that are perhaps more most guilty, certainly magnifying a small kind of sustainable policy within their organization and kind of sweeping everything else under the car, which is not great. I won't name any names because I won't try and avoid the lawsuit, but.

Liz Allan [00:37:37]:

Yeah, let's leave that where it is. So, finally, if people want to find you or want to check out how, what do they need to mean?

Chris Chamberlain [00:37:52]:

Reach out to me on LinkedIn. There's probably not too many Chris Chamberlain, so you can search for me on there, just drop me a connection note and or a note with that, you can pretty much connect with anyone. So, yeah, I'll accept the invite and then we can take it from there. You can visit our website. But it's like the Cobbler's children with wearing shoes with holes in and technology companies tend to have some of the worst websites and I honestly don't think that really serves its purpose. I think, realistically, this is also a journey that we're all on and it's a dialogue and it's not one size fits all. So reach out to me. Happy to have a discussion.

Liz Allan [00:38:42]:

Have a conversation. Have a conversation. Brilliant. Well, listen, thank you, Chris, you've been an absolute star. Much appreciated. And yes, we did manage to talk quite a lot, didn't? But listen, I really appreciate your time. It's been lovely talking to you. All right? And to everybody else, I'm going to say thanks a lot. See you later, everyone. Bye. Ah.