Interview with Colette Rückert-Hennen (Member of the EnBW Board of Management)

What does "Experience Connected Mobility" mean to you?
Experiencing a holistic mobility solution that makes sense in people's everyday lives and enriches them - without breaks and detours. For EnBW, the motto of this year's IAA speaks from the heart. Because it describes the seed of success for us as the operator of the largest fast charging network in Germany and leading e-mobility provider: With customers and their needs at the center, we need smart digital networking of mobility solutions, vehicles and charging infrastructure. After all, e-mobility works differently in everyday life than driving a combustion engine car. People charge their vehicle while doing other things - whether at home with their own wall box or at a fast-charging station. To make this convenient, all the elements need to be seamlessly interconnected.

What are you hoping for IAA MOBILITY 2023?
Nothing less than the joint creation of a breakthrough, and now we're in the hot phase of change. Concepts, strategies and visions must turn into customer experiences. The vehicles that manufacturers are presenting here today will be on the road tomorrow, joining the more than 1 million electric cars already registered. We have to regard and treat e-mobility as an overall system. Digital solutions and interfaces are the answer, since they enable interaction between vehicles, apps, e-mobility providers and charging infrastructure operators. In dialog with our partners, this results in holistic, customer-centric and more sustainable mobility.

What essential future topic receives too little public attention?
Fast charging in public spaces. After all, it's not charging that determines the pace of people's lives. It's their everyday lives that determine how and where they charge best. In public spaces only with fast charging. We already understood this in 2016 and this is the guideline we are consistently following in the expansion of our charging infrastructure: Part of everyday life on a long-distance trip is to take a break after a few hundred kilometers, have a bite to eat or stretch your legs. Now, at our long-distance charging stations, you can charge while doing other things. They can easily be found and included as a destination along the route using the EnBW mobility+ app, which rounds off the user experience.

If you don't own a wallbox, you can easily charge your car at one of our many fast chargers in the retail sector to recharge your car for the next week or two – at a supermarket or drug store. That's why we consider our many retail partners to deliver the important infrastructure to us, and that's

why we're relying on such versatile partnerships. And these locations can also be found in our app. Car manufacturers are also increasingly focusing on faster and faster charging and are equipping their vehicles accordingly. At the same time, we consider when expanding what offers customers added value during their short stay, if this is not available due to local conditions: Whether it's a supermarket, Lekkerland vending machine store at our fast-charging location in Bispingen, Germany or a cleaning facility for the vehicle at the Großburgwedel site. In addition, fast charging ensures that we do not have to cover the country with 1 million charging points by 2030. Instead, we need 130,000 to 150,000 fast charging points. However, these will offer around twice as much capacity in total as the 1 million charging points, which are mainly slower charging points. We are continuously developing our fast-charging services. On behalf of our customers, we are constantly setting new standards in fast-charging infrastructure and at IAA we will be presenting a new milestone in the design of our charging parks, especially in terms of accessibility and sustainability over the entire life cycle.

In which area of mobility do you see the greatest potential and where the greatest need to catch up?
I see both the potential and the need to catch up in the smart, digital networking of the constituents that will shape our mobility world of tomorrow: A seamless interconnectedness for the people that does not end at the boundaries of industries or even of individual companies .

"Connected Mobility" in the literal sense. Good examples of this are Apple Carplay, which connects your vehicle and the mobility and charging services in an optimized way, or AutoCharge, which makes the charging process more convenient, based on the interconnection of charging infrastructure, vehicle, and digital mobility solution.

And that's just the beginning since external networking between the systems is becoming increasingly important. This offers versatile opportunities to develop additional customer-friendly offerings. Let's think, for example, of map applications that combine vehicle information, real-time charging infrastructure information, and the payment for the charging process. For this, we need open systems and standards. These, in turn, require a general openness of data, supplemented by the appropriate regulation, which will enable us to act in a customer-centric way and counteract the trend toward isolated systems.

IAA MOBILITY is the leading global mobility platform. It brings together innovators from all spectrums of mobility. Who do you want to network with this coming September and why?
As a representative from the energy sector and the leading fast charging infrastructure operator in Germany, I am personally looking forward above all to exchanging ideas with the many manufacturers. They present their concepts here for the vehicles that will soon be charging at our infrastructure and will be listed in the user profiles of our customers' charging apps. The joint look into the future and the exchange of ideas on how we can interconnect our offerings and work together to make our services even better for our customers is particularly important.

The world is changing more than ever. The innovative strength and efforts in the mobility industry are greater than ever before. What is your vision of the world in 20 years from now?
Mobility will become more and more important for our lives - but what will fundamentally change is how it will be perceived in everyday life: Paradoxically, it will play less and less of a role. Today, mobility is generally associated with an expense - with a break in our daily routine. We interrupt something to be on the move. Thanks to seamlessly integrated digital solutions and increasing automation, we will simply take our daily routine with us when we travel. We continue to live our lives unhindered, regardless of our location or whether we are on the move - we are working, entertaining or relaxing.

The mobility of tomorrow will combine sustainability, flexibility, speed, convenience of travel and use, and affordability. This will, of course, radically change the roles of market players. Anyone who does not have the necessary flexibility and foresight will have a very difficult time competing in the mobility market of the future.