Entrepreneurial Marketing

CHAPTER 3Rethinking Competition: Collaborating for Sustainability

If you travel in your electric Renault Zoe across major roads in Europe, you might be able to readily recharge at stations in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. These countries are leading the way in terms of the number of charging stations available in the continent. Other nations have lower numbers but are looking for ways to respond to the growing demand for electric vehicles. Overall, the European Union has more than 300,000 charging stations, with plans to substantially increase that number in the coming years.¹

In places with the right charging infrastructure, it may be easy to drive up to a station and plug in. If we pull back the layers, however, we'll see that great efforts have been made to get the battery rechargers in their place. This is especially true in Europe, where plans to build efficient battery‐renewing stations started long before the charging units popped up.

Interestingly—and of significance for our discussion—the power behind these recharging places didn't come from a single player. This is because the resources required to construct an ultra‐fast, high‐power charging infrastructure are enormous. The project was simply too much for a single company to take on.

Therefore, several years ago, auto manufacturers from various parts of the world got together. They decided to collaborate to install a charging infrastructure in Europe. The BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ford, and the Volkswagen Group, ...