Electric vehicle ‘appetite is well and truly surging,’ EVgo CEO says
EVgo CEO Cathy Zoi joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss electric vehicle adoption, plans to expand the company's charging network in the U.S., and partnering with brands like Wawa and Chase.
Video Transcript
AKIKO FUJITA: Shares of EVgo, by the way, are charging up despite its recent Q1 earnings miss. And with a number of key partnerships in the works and a solid push from the Biden administration, the electric vehicle charging company may be looking at a bright future. Joining us now is EVgo CEO Cathy Zoi. Cathy, good to talk to you today.
Before we get into the numbers for your company, I'm just curious what you have seen in terms of EV adoption with gas prices so high. I know you're on the charging side of things, but the thinking here, I have to say, every time I drive by a gas station, in my head, I think, why would you pay that amount of gas when a full charge is so much less? But obviously, there's many things at play here. What are you seeing?
CATHY ZOI: Well, you're not alone. Apparently, the most common Google search over the past four weeks or so has been, in the United States, has been people looking for, where can I buy an EV? So the appetite is well and truly surging because of gas prices, in part, but also because there are so many new offerings. I mean, we've now got, in the next 24 months, 50 different models of EVs are coming to market. So no matter whether you want to drive an SUV or a pickup truck or a little compact car, you have a choice now with EVs. And they're coming from many manufacturers. So yeah, there is just a giant appetite for EVs.
BRIAN CHEUNG: Hey, Cathy, Brian Cheung here. So I want to highlight some numbers for your company. Your network has a throughput of eight gigawatt hours. And then you also have the-- the amount of stalls you have is about 2,000. Now we know that demand is outpacing the supply right now. So give us a scale of how much further you expect to grow your network, given the fact that there are just a lot more EV drivers that are going to be expected over the next few decades.
CATHY ZOI: Yeah, look, this is early innings of this game, as you know. I mean, it's a once in a century sectoral transformation of a major sector-- transportation. Everybody's going electric. So we expect to deploy at least 10,000 fast chargers over the next several years. And as you say, we're sort of now at about 1,700, 1,800 fast chargers. So it's a very, very wonderful, fun, interesting accelerating part of the growth curve for us as EVgo.
AKIKO FUJITA: Cathy, how are you thinking about where to deploy some of your chargers? I mean, you've got some big partnerships in place with the likes of GM. How much of that deployment is happening in conversation with the car companies, with the utility companies? How are you thinking about that infrastructure?
CATHY ZOI: Yeah, so we only invest where we can achieve a double digit return. So we, like, historically, we've had a lot of our investment income in California because that's where, historically, most of the EVs have been in the United States. But now we've got the car companies who are excited to sell their vehicles everywhere, so we're building everywhere. We talked yesterday about our new growth in Michigan, in Florida, in North Carolina, in Indiana. I mean, we are deploying everywhere.
And as you've heard the Biden administration say, we want ubiquity of charging infrastructure, so that that idea of being able to get a charge anywhere you are is never a gating item for drivers as they consider their next car purchase.
BRIAN CHEUNG: Yeah, Cathy, I was going to say, I mean, the fiscal policy side of things seems to be such an important part of the story because this is a national need. So when you hear the Biden administration's kind of posturing on all of this, it seems like they seem to agree with you in principle about how to do all of this. How much help is going to be needed from the government for not only EVgo, but the other types of companies that are in this space as well to make sure that the network nationally is there for this?
CATHY ZOI: Yeah, so what we try to do with EVgo is like kind of the Wayne Gretzky thing. We try to build infrastructure just ahead of demand. And right now, in much of America, the demand is growing, but it's low. So that federal funding can help support companies like EVgo to do that, to build ahead of when there's enough EVs on the road for the projects to pencil, particularly in rural areas, particularly in corridors. There are companies that specialize in multi-unit dwellings and apartment buildings where there are no-- where there's no charging. All of those sorts of things are going to be helped and aided by federal money that's going to come through the infrastructure bill.
