Mobile charger by Nimble Energy comes on-demand

Nimble Energy has come up with a mobile charging solution for electric cars. The Czech startup, specialised in energy storage and charging stations, is building an on-demand service called Nimbee for drivers seeking to charge on the go.

The Electricity-as-a-Service model (EaaS) as Nimble calls it, sees said drivers parking their car somewhere and order the mobile charging stations to where they are with an app. The company compares the booking process to ordering an Uber and claims it would take no longer than two minutes to order a charger. The arrival time depends on the preferences of the customer and/or the distance the transport vehicle needs to travel, a spokesperson told us. Trials will begin this summer.

At the heart of the Nimbee system is a 42 kW battery that delivers a max charging capacity of 40 kW at 900 Volt for CCS and CHAdeMO chargers. Enough, says Nimble, to recharge a smaller electric car like the VW e-Up or Tesla Model 3 in an hour. They have yet to specify prices and for now speak of “reasonable cost” and that charging will be cheaper at night and also dynamically changes depending on whether it is pre-booked or ad-hoc.

In their description, Nimble compares the power pack to a monolith from Space Odyssey. We leave that judgement to you but it is pretty slick. The company has developed a specific trailer with which the operator can move the charger to where it is requested and will have to connect the plug with the hydrualic arm as there are no robotics from what we can see.

Speaking of operators – it remains unclear where Nimble will charge the mobile batteries and how exactly these move around. Looking at similar services like Freewire, they usually resorted to a semi-mobile model with chargers moving around a campus, pit stop or parking lots. For Nimble, founder Jan Šamal stresses that the company is a service provider foremost and open to third-party operators. “Like Uber’s ‘shared rides’, it will be possible to offer your mobile recharging capacity in the Nimbee network,” he says. The start-up hopes that this way they would not need to shoulder high input costs alone, while it would be “easy to get involved and have your own charging business under one service.”

They have not mentioned any partners yet but offer registrations of interests online. The company also says to have had help from Swiss e-mobility experts when developing the solution and that the Nimble team is part of the European Union’s EIT since December 2020. Nimble Energy was founded in 2017.

For Nimbee, Nimble will run a pilot in Prague in early summer and simultaneously launch the app for iOS and Android. The company also set sight to other cities such as Hamburg and Copenhagen or Munich, Berlin and Amsterdam, which already serve a growing number of electric cars.

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nimbee.me (company website)