Allison interviews Scott Bolt and Thomas Varghese from Danlaw about their CleverCharge home EV charging system. This level 2 EV charger can be installed indoors or outdoors. It is hardwired or plugged into a 240V outlet and can deliver 46 miles per hour or 38 miles of range per hour of, charge respectively. It can charge any EV with a J-1772 or NACS port.
CleverCharge comes with a mobile app connected to your car and the CleverCharge system through your EV’s OBD-II port. The app displays your battery level in miles, delivers reminders to recharge your EV, and provides other key EV charging information. It can also time your charging sessions to avoid peak electricity rate periods and reduce charging costs.
CleverCharge should be available in the Spring of 2025.
Learn more at https://clevercharge.com
Transcript of Interview
Allison: Well, I’m from Michigan, so I decided I had to stop by and talk to the folks at Dan Law. I’m with Scott Bolt and Thomas Varghese, and I think we’re going to be talking about EV charging. Is that right?
Scott Bolt: Absolutely. So the product that we’ll be introducing today, it’s just released, is Clever Charge. Now Clever Charge is a level two charger, but what makes it unique is the Clever key.
Allison: So charger, I don’t know if any of us said it yet, we’re talking about electric vehicle charging.
Scott Bolt: We’ve got electric vehicle charging here. So what happens is Clever key plugs into your vehicle and it allows us to get the vehicle data from the vehicle, combine it with the charging data from the charger through some AI algorithms, and then we’re able to do some really interesting things for the customer.
Allison: I’m going to explain one thing. It looks like that’s going to be an onboard diagnostic plug. Is that right?
Scott Bolt: That’s exactly right.
Allison: Not all cars have those anymore, but I think it’s coming back.
Scott Bolt: Currently it’s legislated for model year 2026. All vehicles sold in the United States have to have it.
Allison: Interesting, because we used to have one in my old cars, but I got a Tesla and it doesn’t have one. Older Teslas didn’t have it. They’re coming back.
Scott Bolt: Well, only if they want to sell them in California, I guess.
Allison: Okay, there you go. Okay, so you’ve got the OBD adapter here called Clever key, and that’s going to give all kinds of genius information to the Clever charge, which is a home charger, correct?
Scott Bolt: It is. It’s a home charger. One of the things that you can do with this Clever information is, as an example, let’s say Clever charge has figured out you drive about 50 miles a day on Sundays, and it’s Saturday night, and it knows your vehicle has 30 miles in it, and it’s in the garage, but it’s not plugged in. It’s going to give you a smart alert. Now keep in mind, this smart alert would be different range on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays, depending on how that vehicle is driven on an average for those days. So it’s a very smart alert.
Allison: That’s actually really interesting. Steve is asking about electricity costs. Does it take into account peak timing? And I don’t know if everybody else has this, but in California, we’ve got peak pricing that’s double what our regular pricing is.
Scott Bolt: Yeah, a lot of states have that. So what Clever charge does is it allows you to set up smart charging, or you can do a manual charge schedule. And what it does is it takes the types of schedules that are in different areas. It figures out how many vehicles you need to charge, tells you when you should charge each one. So Clever charge imagines a future where there’s more than one EV and more than one charger in a household. And maybe you have a cabin up north that you go to on the weekend, and you have a charger up there. Clever charge is a charge management system for all your vehicles.
Allison: Interesting. So what are your connectors types? Are you supporting the North American charging standard, NACS?
Scott Bolt: We support NACS and J1772.
Allison: Okay. And level two. So level two is the 240. So this is like your dryer outlet level.
Scott Bolt: Yeah, your dryer outlet. Exactly. That’s what we like to go with.
Allison: So is this product available from DanLaw yet?
Scott Bolt: This product is being manufactured now. We should have availability for sales in a couple of months.
Allison: All right. This looks pretty cool. What is your price point going to be on that?
Scott Bolt: We haven’t announced pricing yet, but it…
Allison: Come on. We’re from Michigan. You can tell me.
Scott Bolt: Okay.
Allison: I won’t tell anybody. Just whisper it in my ear.
Scott Bolt: Just because we’re buddies, I’ll let you know. It’s going to be very competitively priced with the other L2 chargers that are already on the market.
Allison: All right. That sounds good. Thomas, did you have anything else? Are you just the pretty face?
Thomas Varghese: So this product is well differentiated from the marketplace by the fact that you’re able to manage multiple charges, multiple vehicles within different locations. So it’s built with the future of home EV ownership in mind. And I don’t think there’s anybody out there who has actually designed an app that accounts for scalability. So the app is actually built and designed for scalability in mind.
Allison: I like that. I like that because we need all of the cars to be electric. We need to get there.
Thomas Varghese: That’s right. And the charger, the vehicle app is very vehicle focused. It’s not charger focused. Whereas this is focused on the charger, your vehicles, and all of your households that you could probably, that you own. You could have a summer home, you could have other properties that you probably own where you’d want your charges and it all manages seamlessly integrates into your mobile app.
Allison: I love it. I love it. This sounds really interesting. So if people want to learn more, are you busy here? You’re playing on your phone. What are you doing?
Scott Bolt: I was trying to bring up the app, but as you know, the network connection here in CES is not on.
Allison: Oh, I hear that all the time. No, he’s absolutely right. This is a nightmare. Oh, he’s got the app up here.
Scott Bolt: So as you see what we were talking about here, here’s the first household, three chargers, five vehicles. This vehicle’s charging. This vehicle’s blue. It’s scheduled for a charge.
Allison: I do like the names you chose. Dad’s car. And the third one is spare Tesla.
Scott Bolt: And then imagine that you’ve got a whole nother household, a place up north, right?
Allison: On Lake Michigan, as one would.
Scott Bolt: On Lake Leon, with one would.
Allison: Maybe up in Petoskey.
Scott Bolt: Petoskey would be great. It’s a beautiful place. And now you’ve got two chargers up there and two vehicles that are currently up there charging. So as you can see, what Clever Charge is attempting to do is become a one-stop shop charge management system for the entire household.
Allison: I like this idea. This is very cool. So if people wanted to learn more, where would they go?
Scott Bolt: So they could go to clevercharge.com and there’s a web page there. You guys can get all the information that you want. Or if you’re like media and you want to have a more in-detail interview with us or something later, we have the media press kit here and we’d be happy to give you guys as much time and information as you want in the future.
Allison: All right. Very good. Thank you, Scott and Thomas, for telling us all about Clever Charge. All right.
Scott Bolt: Thank you, guys.
Thomas Varghese: Thank you very much.