Entrepreneurs hidden away in two Leinster suburban business parks are plotting their way to launch services in the coming weeks, which they hope will lift barriers to the adoption of electric cars by Irish motorists and create scalable businesses.

Their full interviews are available as a podcast – listen above or on our podcast page.

Behind a small door and rolled-down shutter at St Kieran’s enterprise centre in the Dublin suburb of Sandyford, I meet DC EV’s co-founders Paul Clifford and Adrian Slattery. Inside, the industrial unit is larger than meets the eye. There is room for around 10 cars, from the low-cost Citroën Ami two-seater (not yet available from the manufacturer in Ireland) to the six-figure Porsche Taycan.

Since moving here in August, they have painted the showroom an elegant grey and built a media studio where they can take photos and record videos professionally. Clifford says a mural telling their story will soon be added to the decor.

He and Slattery average 50 years of age and, after 15 years in the motor trade, they are not your typical start-up founders. They started Dreamcars (DC) in 2006 to source cars that discerning customers wouldn’t find in an ordinary Irish dealership – think high-spec German models. In 2009, they acquired a similar business. “Obviously, after the recession, our timing wasn’t great. So we started to export cars,” Clifford says. “We were knocking on doors in Dubai in 2013,” Slattery adds.

Helping motorists get rid of expensive cars allowed them to keep their business going while continuing to build their customer base. When the recovery came, it was accompanied by a new type of hard-to-get cars: electric vehicles (EVs). “In 2015 or 2016, we got approached to provide Teslas to a technology company here,” Clifford says. DC claims the US brand’s first registration in Ireland.

The request prompted DC to seek a franchise from Tesla, but Elon Musk’s company wanted to do everything in-house. Still, Clifford and Slattery got an early taste of the developing demand for EVs. In 2018, they started supplying them under the specific brand DC EV, later adding car chargers and solar panels to their offering.

Now DC EV is getting ready to do what nobody in Ireland has done before: Supply electric cars as a flexible subscription service. 

“Over the last 18 months, there’s been rafts of cars coming in, different levels. What’s happening now is that they’ve depreciated a lot because the manufacturers were testing the market. The market now knows what it’s doing, which means that when someone bought a Tesla for €55,000, or an ID5 for €60,000, suddenly that car is €20,000 less,” Slattery says. Yet he points out that those buyers remain tied to the same monthly payments for another four years. 

To address the resulting frustration, DC EV decided to offer a monthly subscription instead. “It’s being able to get a car, without the ownership hassles, finance implications, and being able to change the vehicle whenever you want, in a minimum of 30 days,” Clifford says, describing the service as a “try before you buy” offering. It falls between traditional short-term car rental and longer-commitment leasing, he adds.

Slattery says DC EV worked backwards from customer feedback to design this model. “One of the few things they want is ease of access: to get the car quickly, sign up quickly. But the other thing is they don’t have to think about anything – they just get in and drive, end of the story. So our pricing includes the car maintenance, tax, insurance, so all they have to think about is getting the car and driving.”

I push the two entrepreneurs on the flexibility of the service: Can I upgrade to an SUV just for the summer when I have family visiting for the holidays? The answer is yes. Will DC EV have the fleet to meet such seasonal demand? Clifford is confident it will: “We’re in this automotive industry since 2006. So we have partnerships and connections where if we need to get a specialist vehicle, we have the contacts where we can go and source that vehicle.” And where a subscriber hands back a car, the company has other customers to rent or sell it to.

Clifford and Slattery have allocated half a million euro of DC EV’s own funds to build its starting subscriber fleet of 10 electric cars. To go further, they say they will need to raise external funding. “The plan will be to have five per cent of the market. So it could be up to 700 cars within three years, and then doubling if not trebling in five years,” says Slattery. “So it’s quite aggressive planning that we do have. Because with the Netflix and Spotify model, and people moving from ownership to usership, it’s just the way the world’s going for everything.”

Prices currently on offer range from €395 per month for a 2023 Citroën Ami to €3,000 per month for a 2022 BMW iX. The starting price includes 750km per month and additional mileage is charged at €100 per 250km.

There is a cost to the convenience and de-risking DC EV offers through subscriptions. For a given car, such as the MG 4 Long Range, the Sustainability Energy Authority of Ireland’s calculator estimates the total cost of ownership over 10 years with 1,500km monthly mileage (purchase, maintenance and tax, but excluding electricity, insurance and finance costs) to be €356 per month. I got a quote to insure this car in Dublin (no claims, no penalty points) for €60 per month, bringing the total to €416.

DC EV offers the same new car, same mileage for a monthly subscription of €1,275 including insurance. This is triple the monthly cost involved in a long-term cash purchase but without the need to fork out over €30,000 upfront to buy the car (finance would add significantly to this), nor the 10-year commitment to stick with it until it dies. Slattery points out that the depreciation of an electric car is much costlier than that of a petrol or diesel equivalent as constant technology updates make it obsolete faster: “Ten years in the EV world is a long time.”

“We tried to do it all as a digital experience.”

Paul Clifford

Then there is the hassle-free aspect. DC EV’s digital marketing specialist Tramy Le took me through the online subscription process. It took about 15 minutes and was similar to the verification of a new payment card with a fintech like Revolut or CleverCards. “If you’ve ever rented a car, you know you get nearly a book of what you need to sign, etc. So we tried to do it all as a digital experience,” Clifford says.

There may be cases where additional documents are required. Then a final contract must be signed, but DC EV accepts Docusign and email for that. Customers may then pick up their car in Sandyford or have it delivered for an extra charge.

DC EV is launching its subscription service with a white-label software platform running in the background. Clifford, however, has examined similar businesses from Norway to the UK and Germany, identifying strong points in the various pieces of technology used across those markets. He thinks there is scope for the Irish company to develop its own software.

“If we consolidate some of the good things with some of the experience we have, I do see this build coming into something that could be scalable,” Clifford says. “We could maybe push it on an international level in terms of platform or technology.”

The barrier to this so far has been that, unlike pure-player start-ups, he and Slattery are running an existing car trading business in parallel and simply don’t have the time to spend full-time on development before launching. They say they currently employ four full-time and two part-time staff.

The price point and digital model target a section of motorists who are prepared to pay more to take the paperwork and financial risk out of going electric. “We have to be narrow at the start, we’ve been very focused,” says Slattery. Based on their EV sales business since 2018, he says the starting core target for subscriptions is cars between €45,000 and €65,000 and drivers aged between 30 and 55.

“I don’t even want to say young professionals, it can be anybody,” Slattery says. “As the fleet grows, and as we have real-life subscription history, we’ll be able to target more customers.”

After trialling a soft launch with two corporate customers, DC EV is preparing a marketing campaign to reach a wider audience in the New Year. 

A marketplace for home charging 

This, too, is the time frame for GoPlugable to roll out its service. As I meet its 24-year-old co-founder Maebh Reynolds at the Mill Enterprise Centre in Drogheda, Co Louth, I realise that she has already been in touch with DC EV. 

The two companies have a similar approach. Motorists may take the electric leap with a subscription from DC EV, but this will be no good to them if they can’t charge their car. This is where Reynolds steps in.

“Essentially, GoPlugable is an Airbnb for electric vehicle private charging,” she says. “If you decide to buy an EV but you don’t have your own provision to charge from home – for example, if you live in a home with no driveway or an apartment or rent accommodation – someone in your community can rent out their home charger to you. So they make passive revenue and you have a way to schedule and access EV charging more easily.”

GoPlugable is the marketplace proposing to connect charger owners and electric car drivers. Much like on Airbnb, the hosts set the price they want to charge for access to their plugs. GoPlugable puts them in touch with motorists, provides the terms and conditions for the deal to go smoothly and charges a 15 per cent commission plus a flat fee of 30 cents for payment processing.

Reynolds says prices may be higher near a concert venue, for example, with parking alone feeding into the price. At the same time, a rural dweller may be happy to charge a lower price and get value out of a home charger they use only occasionally. “Domestic electricity is far cheaper and charging from home is far cheaper than what it would be on a public network, so ultimately, there is a position where someone can make money from doing this. But at the same time, as a user, you have somewhere more affordable to charge,” she says.

“We put our heads together and thought that we could really make a business out of this.”

Maebh Reynolds

The idea for GoPlugable came during Reynolds’s final year while studying for a master’s in mechanical engineering at Queens University Belfast. She joined the Co-Founders start-up accelerator programme at Catalyst in the city and met Andrine Mendez. (She is cautious about naming him on our podcast interview until he joins the business full-time in the New Year, but he appeared on public documents establishing their companies in Northern Ireland and the Republic earlier this year).

“He was going through this exact same experience where he owned an EV and was so excited to buy one, asked his landlord if he could install a home charger, and his landlord was like: ‘No’,” Reynolds says. “So, he ended up paying his neighbour cash to borrow their home charger. We put our heads together and thought that we could really make a business out of this and use this to help a greater number of communities across Ireland.”

Except for a one-year experience at the global energy engineering firm Danfoss in Denmark, this is her first job. 

Community is a word that comes back regularly in our conversation. GoPlugable is targeting suburban estates and rural areas where people know each other and live away from concentrations of public charging points in city centres or on motorways. Reynolds is also leveraging groups of electric car enthusiasts: “The electric vehicle associations in both Ireland and Northern Ireland are really strong as well. And they have a really passionate group of EV drivers that love the experience, love new updates in the sector.”

Through those associations, GoPlugable put out an all-island survey in July to get details of the existing fleet and the charging habits of its owners. With three-quarters of respondents saying they charge mostly at home, I put it to Reynolds that maybe people do not experience so much difficulty getting their own charger and the market for GoPlugable might be restricted.

She reads the result in the opposite way, replying that those early adopters who have already switched to electric cars were those with the option to install a home charger in the first place: “Anyone who’s bought an EV has bought it because it’s convenient for them to charge from home,” Reynolds says.

“But when you look at Ireland proposing to ban sales of petrol and diesel cars in 2030, that will mean when someone goes to buy a new vehicle, it will have to be electric. And by that point, people will have to find options and alternatives for their charging if they can’t charge from home. So we are probably very early to this curve.” She points out that one in four new passenger cars in the Republic are now electric.

While GoPlugable was only formally established this year, it has raised €120,000 through grants and competitions to develop its products. It is part of Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers Programme and Queen’s University Belfast’s QUest Programme and has won prizes including the Impact Shakers Urban Impact Pitch competition, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile’s (FIA) Start-up Award and Catalyst Invent 2023.

Reynolds and Mendez have contracted out IT development to Codezend, an Indian company that initially held an equity stake in their business to ensure it had “skin in the game,” Reynolds says. They now get help from three marketing interns at Drogheda’s DKIT to build the GoPlugable brand.

“At the minute, we are live on app stores but we haven’t fully launched yet,” she says. “We’re hoping in the next few weeks, we’ll have our first paying users. But for now, we do have 250 people on a waitlist that have expressed interest in wanting to use it. Every week, I get emails like: ‘Is it out yet? I’m excited to use it!’ It’s really helpful to see.”

GoPlugable will initially focus on suburban Belfast and Dublin, targeting hosts who work from home a few days a week and are around to give access to their chargers. Future plans include small businesses like gyms or cafes, which could generate additional income from chargers, as well as office buildings where employee chargers are idle at the weekend.

Reynolds’s next move is to raise funds to employ an in-house chief technical officer. “We have a fundraising round that we’ve now launched. We’re open to VCs or angels. We just want people that are passionate about this space and see our vision for electrification. And perhaps see a future where this marketplace B2C model can really work and be leveraged towards making EV adoption easier for everyone.”

Competition as a “motivating” factor

I asked the founders of both GoPlugable and DC EV about the fact that they are not the only ones with these business ideas. Car-charger sharing is on offer from Co Charger in the UK, which overlaps with GoPlugable’s home Northern Ireland market, and Renault has similar international ambitions with its Plug Inn app.

“It’s really motivating for us to see competition come out of it,” Reynolds says. “It proves to us that there is value to be had in this market. It proves to us that there’s a need, and people want it.” She says GoPlugable stands out as a “ground-up, bootstrapped start-up from Ireland that really wants to focus on the Irish market”.

She is confident that its community focus and ability to forge partnerships with communities of drivers, utilities and providers of home chargers will help it expand. “These hardware providers that install home chargers know where the home chargers are. With those data points, we can collaborate with them, but also give an incentive for installing a home charger,” she says.

At DC EV, Clifford names the Norwegian EV subscription leader Imove among the like-minded companies he has studied across Europe. “I’ve spent some time in the UK looking at the platforms, the different subscription models,” he adds.

I ask him and Slattery whether they fear the introduction of Irish subscription offers by such international players, including car manufacturers themselves. “You can never say that the bigger people can’t come in and do what they do,” Slattery says. “But we’re still talking about big corporations where we’re small, will always feel small and nimble and be able to change.” 

Clifford adds that subscriptions would conflict with the manufacturers’ current objectives of selling cars, after investing in sales teams and big showrooms for that purpose. By contrast, he says DC EV’s flexibility as an independent business allows it to work outside the global strategies set by corporate HQs in Germany or China – including by offering a channel for car makers that are not yet present in Ireland to “dip their toe in the market here”.

Over three years ago, after buying my first electric car at a steep initial cost both financially and in terms of hassle, I wrote a column to share the view that this was too much for the average motorist to take on – not to mention bigger climate action decisions like retrofitting a family home.

“The best way to make such transformative changes accessible to consumers would be to deliver them as a service, just like specialist firms have been doing for business customers,” I wrote at the time. Since then, the government and the building industry have stepped in with the one-stop-shop scheme for home retrofitting.

DC EV and GoPlugable are now giving this a try on the motoring side. Best of luck to them.

Further reading

Miners and farmers: Crowley on the decarbonisation drive behind CoolPlanet’s recovery