The common quality of all engineering professions is solving problems. These problems may sometimes be challenging and require thinking outside of the box. If you think about it, you may notice that many engineering problems (even from completely different areas) have similar structure and similar approaches to solving the problem may be applied. Getting to know a story of a company that managed to get success by solving a particular problem may broaden your vision on that matter and improve your problem solving skills, even if it would seem to be a completely different area.
In this article we would like to present to you a story of a British company called Connected Kerb.
This company was founded in 2017 by Paul Ayres, Richard Clements, Nick Dobie, Peter Howe and Stephen Richardson. They have noticed the ongoing progress in the market of Electric Vehicles with simultaneous lack of existing infrastructure that would be able to efficiently support the needs in terms of charging the vehicles. This situation was making it harder to decide to buy an electric car, especially for people who did not have a dedicated parking spot in front of their building.
In 2018 they received a London Civic Innovation Award. They have started mounting first charging points in 2019. They started spreading their network across Great Britain signing contracts with local city councils, property owners and fleet operators.
By 2022 they have installed 3200 charging sockets, with 1700 public charging points at over 550 locations around the UK. By that time more than 14 000 drivers had used their network. In 2024 Chris Pateman-Jones, CEO of Connected Kerb has been appointed new Chair of ChargeUK – association of companies that install and operate charging points, enabling the UK’s transition to electric vehicles
Current availability of the charging points is presented in the picture below (state at 31.07.2024) and also available at Conncted Kerb’s website.
Their portfolio includes such products as:
Gecko
Chameleon
Limpet
Scarab
Connected Kerb focuses on designing the products in a way that will smoothly blend in with the existing urban architecture. Apart from their support in creating a path towards Net zero, they try to make their products environmentally friendly using recycled materials in their production (i.e. one of the products presented above – Limpet – is made from two recycled tyres).
Connected Kerb attempts to make their products ‘future-proof’. Their products consist of data packs installed within a protective box that contain sensors and charging solutions that can be used in future. Thanks to that their products can be easily upgraded without a need to interfere with the underground infrastructure – that would require long construction work. It also takes into account possible damages that may happen to this infrastructure – the most crucial hardware is installed in a protective box under the road, while the part on the surface is easily replaceable, making it much easier for maintenance work.
The charging process can be monitored and configured using Connected Kerb. One of it’s recently added features is smart charging – it lets the user leave the car connected to the charger and it will be charged during off-peak hours (midnight – 7 AM). It helps to reduce the strain on the power grid and lets the user to have lowered charging rates
If we look more closely through the Connected Kerb’s website we can find a tab describing this company’s values. One of them was added with pretty inspiring few sentences:
Lead the charge.
Our company is built on innovation. That takes bravery. Brave enough to make decisions but brave enough to fail. We stand still if we live in fear of doing it wrong. So we keep going, falling over, learning and growing each time. Moving one step forward on our journey to a more sustainable planet.
I believe that is an important takeaway that all of us can gain from the history of this company. As Embedded Software Engineers we are facing a lot of obstacles on our way, sometimes even most of our work consists of fighting our way through them. But we cannot live in the fear of failing, we cannot let our obstacles define us. The way in which we manage to overcome them and find solutions – this is what should define us.
If you would like to get to know more about the Connected Kerb and their history, please visit their website.
Want to learn more about their monetization model? Please check our Shorts:
The source of information for this article was generally available on the Internet. If you see something non-factual please contact us at info@wizzdev.pl
