Ford, Honda, and BMW to partner on another EV charging service

Remember when streaming TV became a thing, and everyone said it’d be the end of cable, but what we ended up was a mess of multiple subscriptions and a sometimes more expensive monthly bill? Pepperidge Farm remembers, but automakers apparently do not. While many of the world’s most prominent automotive companies are switching to the Tesla Supercharger standard to (presumably) improve the customer experience, almost as many are simultaneously working toward separate networks, and several big-name automakers have joined forces to do it. Ford, BMW, and Honda are the latest, announcing a project called ChargeScape, which it claims will revolutionize charging and benefit EV customers and the electric utilities powering them.

ChargeScape bills itself as providing "grid services" to coordinate returning EVs’ battery energy to the grid. EV owners can earn money for sharing that energy, which the company said will help even out the ebbs and flows in electricity supply and demand throughout the day. It also promised that its platform eliminates the “need for individual integrations between each automotive brand and each electric utility,” and will use each automakers' telematics to manage it all.