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The Juicebox and Enel X shutdown: What comes next? [arstechnica.com]:

Earlier this month, the Italian energy company Enel X announced an abrupt withdrawal [arstechnica.com] from the North American market. For its residential customers—owners of the popular Juicebox level 2 home chargers—the physical hardware will continue to work, but from tomorrow Enel X will have ended all software support, including updates and its apps. But Enel X also had commercial clients, and they're even more out of luck—from tomorrow those stations "will lose functionality in the absence of software continuity," Enel X says [juiceboxnorthamerica.com].

Juicebox

For Juicebox customers, the loss of Enel X's servers and apps isn't great—they will lose the ability to remotely manage the charger, or schedule charging sessions from it. But most electric vehicles—both battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs—have their own built-in software to schedule charging sessions, and to hear some owners tell it, Enel X's software was a poor substitute for the original Juicebox software written by eMotorworks, which was bought by Enel X in 2017.

Whether owners still have any kind of warranty support remains up in the air. A community of volunteers called Juice Rescue [juice-rescue.org] has put together a guide on preparing [juice-rescue.org] for the shutdown tomorrow. This includes useful advice like making a note of the device's Juicebox ID and double-checking that the charger's maximum capacity is correctly set for its circuit.

Meanwhile, a number of companies and open source projects are working on offering third-party support for Juiceboxes. Unfortunately, only newer Juiceboxes support the open charge point protocol [openchargealliance.org]; older devices may need to be physically modified, perhaps with open source hardware [openevse.com].

Enel X

As might be expected, lots of charging solution providers are interested in helping Enel X's stranded commercial customers become their newest happy, smiling customers. But it's going to be up to those stranded by Enel X to find a new company and platform to work with.

In some cases that might mean migrating existing hardware over, but as SAE notes [sae.org], Enel X has done little to make that migration simple. And many businesses may find what were functioning level 2 chargers today are just beige-colored bricks tomorrow. For example, with Enel X gone, there are no contracts in place for the SIM cards embedded in each charger that provide the connectivity those devices expect.

"When that goes dead, the only way you can really get those chargers going again is you physically send someone out there, or you ask the person on the property to take out the SIM card, replace it," said Joseph Schottland, CEO of EV+ Charging. "It's a big ask, because they've got to get the screwdriver out, take the back of the charger off... They've got to know where to look."

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why-does-your-charger-need-a-cloud-app? dept.

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