Andrew Rutgers: Why Fleet Electrification Needs Better Planning, Not More Equipment
Updated: Aug 28
I spoke with Andrew Rutgers, CEO of ChargeSim, about the evolution of fleet electrification and the increasingly important role of planning, simulation and software in charging infrastructure. We discussed why fleets continue to oversize charging systems, how charging will become more deeply integrated with fleet management, the impact of changing U.S. EV policy, the importance of interoperability standards, and where Andrew believes AI can have the greatest practical impact.
Tell me about ChargeSim, its history, what the company does today, and the types of fleets and organizations you work with.
ChargeSim is about seven years old. Our focus is simulation tools for serious electrification: how do we electrify fleets better? We have two major product areas. The first includes our eDepotPlanner and eYard Planner, which are simulation tools for yard operations and can also look at things like layover charging. We create virtual vehicles and virtual chargers, figure out what the infrastructure and charge management are going to look like before you've put a shovel in the ground, run it through, see if it works properly, and decide whether it is actually going to work well for the fleet.
A lot of early fleets significantly oversized and put in too much equipment or the wrong sizes. Like other engineering simulations, it is much better to do this cheaply and easily in a virtual environment, iterate, and then build. Our customers vary depending on who is responsible for developing the charging plan. It can be OEMs supporting their clients, transit agencies and other fleet operators directly, consultants, or charging-as-a-service providers. We initially did some consulting to get into the market, but today we basically focus on delivering software tools and supporting the people who use them.
Our other major product area is OCPP testing. If you're developing smart charging algorithms, testing them by driving trucks or buses around in circles to burn off energy and then seeing how they charge is very difficult. We use the same simulation engine with an OCPP interface that can talk to charge management software, pretend to be the vehicles and chargers, and allow users to test, validate and train on those systems before deployment. We are focused on the design and testing phase rather than day-to-day charge management.
Tell me about your own journey to becoming CEO of ChargeSim and how your experience led you to fleet charging and transportation.
I got involved in electric cars a long time ago. I did solar-powered car racing as an undergraduate while studying engineering physics. That ended up getting me a job working on solar-powered aircraft, so I was doing electric vehicle operations and charging, and I built lithium battery packs myself. In retrospect, a lot of the things 22-year-old me was doing were probably quite dangerous and slightly older me would definitely not do them.
I later did a doctorate in electrical engineering, worked in power electronics research at a large lighting company, and completed an MBA while I was there. I also started doing a lot of software work on analysis tooling and factory automation within a venture inside the company. That gave me a strong background in power electronics, batteries, electric vehicles and software.
I then became a product manager at a charger OEM and started doing these calculations to help clients. We found the analysis was really useful and clients genuinely needed it. But we also realized that if we were selling independent advice to customers, it could become difficult to sell them the equipment. The equipment represented much more revenue than the analysis tools, so the company essentially said, "This is useful for the industry, but we can't really do it in-house." They made me a great offer to split it off, and that's where ChargeSim came from about seven years ago.
What is the biggest change happening in fleet charging infrastructure today, or the biggest change you expect over the next several years?
First, there is simply significant growth. If you look at transit fleets in places like the Netherlands and the Nordics, procurement is almost 100% electric. When I think about the transition, I look at procurement numbers rather than the percentage of the existing fleet because these heavy vehicles have six- to 15-year lifespans. The business case for throwing out a vehicle halfway through its life or retrofitting it can be very difficult. The important question is: when do you get to 100% electric procurement?
Beyond the overall growth of the market, I think the biggest change will be integration with the rest of the fleet management system. To be really smart about charge management, you need to know when a vehicle is leaving and what it is going to be doing. In transit, bus scheduling can be fairly straightforward because buses may be scheduled six months ahead. Trucking can be much more of a day-to-day operation using route-planning software, and it varies enormously by fleet. In highly automated fleets, charge management can become a relatively small addition to a deeply integrated fleet management system. In other cases, operators are still working with pencil and paper or Excel for dispatching and planning, so charging becomes an entirely new system they need to add.
What do you think fleet operators, policymakers or other stakeholders are getting wrong about charging infrastructure?
The big challenge that we originally set out to solve, and one that is still there, is oversizing. Fleets put in more equipment than they need.
You do need significant grid upgrades in many cases, but figuring out exactly what you need at the beginning is very important. Being able to give your electric utility an initial estimate that is underpinned by data and analysis, and doing that as early as possible, means you can start building it into deployment plans and identify sites with appropriate grid capacity.
Which policy or regulatory issues are having the greatest impact on fleet charging deployment, and what would you like to see change?
That is complicated for us because we operate globally, with clients across Australia, Europe, Canada, the U.S. and Japan, so there is a very diverse set of regulations.
One issue in the U.S. that stood out to me involves working-time regulations for truck operators. Charging time is currently treated similarly to fueling time. If I have to stand there with a diesel pump filling up my truck, saying that counts as working time makes sense. But if I've plugged in an electric vehicle and the charger is going to sit there charging while I can safely walk away, have lunch, use the restroom or take recovery time before getting back on the road, that's a different situation. The technology and safety characteristics of charging are different from diesel fueling, and regulations need to account for that.
How are recent shifts in U.S. EV policy, funding and fleet-electrification timelines affecting the market?
We are definitely seeing the U.S. market going slower recently. But in the long run, the way I put it to most people is that by the time we retire, fleets are going to be almost fully electric. There may be homeopathic quantities of remote mines that still use diesel vehicles or something like that, but over a reasonable time horizon it is all going to be electric. The question is how fast that curve gets there.
Look at how quickly the technology is evolving and what is happening in China, where everything is switching toward electric. Production volumes are growing massively, creating an excellent experience curve and bringing costs down substantially. The diesel engine has been developed for roughly a hundred years, with probably a trillion dollars of investment behind it, and the electric drivetrain is still catching up.
There are still incremental improvements possible in combustion technology, but electric is starting from a much lower base, so the improvements can be significant. A lot of it is also about the supply chain. We need battery manufacturers capable of making absolutely vast quantities of batteries. If you think about the metals, lubricants and all the other industries that developed over a century to support traditional gasoline and diesel engines, we're now building that ecosystem for electric drivetrains.
Fundamentally, I think electric will win out as the better technology in the long run.
Which organizations do you think are making the biggest difference in fleet charging and transportation electrification?
One I would definitely call out is the Open Charge Alliance, which handles standardization around the OCPP protocol. It started in the Netherlands and has become a global standard for how chargers communicate with charge management systems. That has helped accelerate the industry because interoperability is getting much better.
You can now buy from a variety of charge management systems and charger manufacturers, and standardization between the charger and the vehicle is also evolving. Certifications have improved to the point where, in the vast majority of cases, you can buy a vehicle, a charger and a charge management system and expect them to work together. It is still worth double-checking on a large procurement, but in most cases it works well. Some countries are also beginning to make this kind of standardization a regulatory requirement for charging infrastructure, which helps remove the small interoperability headaches that fleets otherwise encounter during deployment.
Where do you see AI having the greatest practical impact on fleet charging, infrastructure planning and transportation more broadly?
AI can be helpful in predicting energy requirements, but the actual mathematics of how you sum up those requirements can already be handled quite well using operations-research techniques that have existed for decades.
The area where I've seen some of the most interesting applications is technical-support augmentation. When chargers have issues, diagnosing the problem can become very artisanal technical work. That doesn't scale particularly well, and it can make it difficult to consistently replicate and fix problems.
That is also a fairly attractive problem for AI because being 95% certain when you're augmenting a technical-support person is reasonable. Saying you're 95% certain an infrastructure design works is a different kind of tradeoff. I've seen interesting work using AI to read logs, diagnose problems, suggest fixes and, in some cases, automate fixes. That can streamline support and improve overall charging uptime for real users.
I’d like to thank Andrew for taking the time to share his perspective. His experience across charging infrastructure, simulation and fleet electrification gives him a particularly practical view of how better planning can improve the transition to electric fleets.
-Adam
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