Sometimes you just need to get home and decompress after work. Sure, your car is low on fuel and needs to be topped up, but who cares? When you wake up the next morning, it will magically be full, and you can watch TV guilt-free, right?
Abdel Ali, Kiwi Charge
“It’s white-glove service: you park your car, you go upstairs, you come back, and your car is fully charged.”
That’s the tiny utopia Toronto-based Kiwi Charge is trying to create with its electric vehicle (EV) charging robot— the “R2-D2 for EV charging.” According to Kiwi, the robot can help multi-unit housing complexes and car dealerships do away with the need to install dedicated charging infrastructure for vehicles. Instead of tenants competing for EV charging spots, a building could have a single charging zone for the Kiwi robot, which knows when a car needs a charge, what parking spot the car is in, and can roll up to fill it outside of active hours.
The robot takes about 30 minutes to charge itself and 30 minutes to charge a vehicle, Kiwi Charge co-founder and CEO Abdel Ali told BetaKit in an interview on Friday.
“It’s white-glove service: you park your car, you go upstairs, you come back, and your car is fully charged,” Ali said. “It’s like magic.”
This week, Kiwi is unveiling a $1.7-million pilot project with automotive manufacturer General Motors Canada and Pfaff Automotive, which owns 15 automotive dealerships across Canada. The project, which has been ongoing since the summer, is helping Kiwi rapidly prototype and test its flagship robot at Pfaff’s Porsche dealership in Vaughn, Ont., where it will charge vehicles all day and all night without the need for an attendant to rotate which cars are in the designated EV charging spot.
RELATED: Ontario invests $56 million to power “homegrown” automotive and mobility companies amid trade war
The project is supported by a $500,000 grant from the provincial government’s Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network (OVIN), $250,000 of in-kind contributions from Pfaff and GM, and capital from Kiwi itself.
The autonomous charger is a big step up from Kiwi’s 2023 beginnings, when Ali and his co-founders, Aamir Abubakkar and Jumana Fathima, were manually providing the service to apartment complexes just to see if the concept had value. They would haul a giant mobile battery around, charging people’s cars in the dead of night, just to see if the demand was there.
“From the customer perspective, they don’t really care if it’s a robot that charged their car, or someone came at night and charged their car,” Ali said. “They just want it at a good price, and they want that convenience.”
It was successful enough that the team found people in the buildings they served became more likely to buy an EV.
“Once you solve that big barrier, charging at home [and] access to charging, people started flocking and reaching out to us and asking us ‘what cars do you recommend?’” Ali said.
Ali said that Kiwi has secured an undisclosed American lead investor for a $1-million seed round, which he expects to close sometime in March. For now, he’s excited to showcase Kiwi alongside Project Arrow, which will be on display at the Canadian International AutoShow this week. Arrow is an all-Canadian EV from the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association (APMA). Prime Minister Mark Carney sat in the vehicle after announcing Canada’s reformed EV incentives last week.
APMA head Flavio Volpe has said that Project Arrow is supposed to show that Canada has the technology and the people to build an all-Canadian car. On the show floor, Kiwi will be charging it.
“There’s gonna be a lot of press coverage around this, and here is this little startup,” Ali said. “The team at APMA took a chance with us … they saw the potential, they saw past the duct tape [of the prototype], so we’re very grateful for the team.”
“The exposure that they’re providing us is incredible,” he added.
Feature image courtesy Kiwi Charge.