Cars

Axle integrates directly with electric vehicles via your API, enabling smart charging control without requiring a connection to your charger. Your customers can participate in flexibility programmes regardless of which charger they use at home.

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Smart charging principles

We always prioritise the customer’s needs when optimising car charging. Our optimisation satisfies the following constraints, in order:

1. Ensuring the customer’s desired State of Charge (SOC) is met
2. Minimising customer’s bills
3. Maximising flexibility revenue

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Customer propositions

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The “free miles” proposition

Car integrations are particularly well-suited to free miles propositions — where Axle pays the customer per kWh charged, offsetting their electricity costs. The cost of charging is calculated at a flat fee per kWh (e.g. 8p/kWh), and is paid by Axle to the customer’s bank account.

1. Customers opt-in to smart charging, delivered via your app
2. Axle schedules charging via a backend integration, ensuring customer’s needs are met whilst maximising flexibility value.
3. Axle pays customers per kWh of charging, offsetting their electricity costs.

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Custom propositions

Axle’s flexible payment rails allow you to build custom propositions for your customers, mixing up-front and recurring payments. See paying users.

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Geofencing

Axle only controls charging when the vehicle is at home. To determine this, we use a “car is home” signal from your API — we do not require location or GPS data, only a boolean indicating whether the car is at home. In practice, this often means:

• Your API sends plug-in events to Axle only when the car is at home
• Plug-in events at public or workplace chargers should not be forwarded to Axle

Axle treats every plug-in event it receives as a home charge, so the simplest implementation is to filter at source.

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Next steps

Choose your EV flexibility solution and start planning your integration here.