OEM Charging Partnerships
💡 OEM Charging Partnerships: Key Highlights
- Three commercial shapes, not one: a co-branded app inside the OEM’s vehicle app, a bundled home charger sold with the car, or a pure roaming agreement — each splits revenue and liability differently.
- The identity layer decides who owns the customer: an OCPI token you issue keeps you the eMSP of record; an ISO 15118 contract certificate the OEM provisions makes the OEM the eMSP.
- Plug & Charge is a hardware-generation ask, not a feature toggle — the Open Charge Alliance states that OCPP 1.6 does not support ISO 15118 messages.
- You inherit first-line support for chargers you do not own: OEM programmes publish one app and one helpline across several independent operators.
- Scrutinise ultra-fast demands: the IEA puts cars able to use chargers above 250 kW at under 5% of the vehicle stock.
OEM charging partnerships usually arrive looking like a marketing exercise — a logo inside a vehicle app, a press note, a launch date — and end as an operating commitment: someone else’s brand promise, running on your network, measured by their customer-satisfaction score. This post is for the platform side of that table: CPOs and eMSPs being approached by — or approaching — a vehicle OEM, plus charger OEMs bundling software with the box. The pressure behind the ask is real. The IEA reports that electric car sales grew about 20% in 2025 to exceed 20 million units and a 25% share of the global car market, against more than 43 million private light-duty charging points. In India, the Ministry of Heavy Industries has put ₹2,000 crore behind roughly 72,000 public charging stations under PM E-DRIVE. No OEM can ship a car with a charging question mark attached — so it goes looking for a partner, and what it wants is more specific than the first conversation suggests.
What A Vehicle OEM Actually Wants From A Charging Partner
OEM charging partnerships take one of three commercial shapes, and the first job in any negotiation is to establish which one is on the table. They get discussed as if interchangeable. They are not: they differ on who owns the driver relationship, who books the revenue, and who answers the phone when a session fails.
| Partnership shape | Who owns the driver | What the CPO earns | Who carries a failed session |
|---|---|---|---|
| Co-branded access inside the OEM’s vehicle app | The OEM — account, payment instrument and app analytics | Wholesale energy plus service fee, with volume; little pricing freedom | The CPO, on the OEM’s SLA, even on a roaming partner’s charger |
| Bundled home charger plus public-network access | Shared — the OEM sells, the CPO operates and supports | Hardware margin, installation, a capped public-charging allowance | The CPO for the wallbox; the OEM for the showroom promise |
| Pure roaming or access agreement | The CPO keeps its retail relationship; the OEM is another eMSP | Wholesale roaming tariff per kWh — lowest revenue, zero brand risk | Each side inside its own domain, per the roaming contract |
Most real deals start as shape three and migrate toward shape one as the OEM’s app ambitions grow — negotiate for that drift in advance.
India has a worked example of the first shape at scale. Tata Motors’ Tata.ev “Open Collaboration” framework and its 2.0 expansion put several independent charge point operators and oil marketing companies behind one driver experience: a single payment app, a unified RFID credential and one 24×7 toll-free number regardless of which operator owns the charger, against a stated ambition of more than 400,000 charge points. Cited factually, it makes the point — the OEM sells one promise, and each partner operator is accountable for delivering it on assets it only partly controls.
Which segments to serve at all is a prior decision, covered in our overview of EV charging strategies and their use cases; the constraints on the other side of the table sit in the challenges facing EV manufacturers. This post assumes the OEM conversation has started.
The Integration Surface: Table Stakes Versus Negotiable
Four technical surfaces come up in every OEM conversation. Two are table stakes. Two are negotiable — and treating those as mandatory is how operators sign up for capital expenditure they never priced.
Table stakes: the app handoff and network access you do not own
The OEM will not rebuild charging inside its own app. It expects an SDK or documented APIs returning live location, connector, availability and tariff data, remote start and stop, and a charge detail record it can reconcile. Beyond your own sites it expects coverage — which means OCPI roaming integration into networks you do not own. OCPI is maintained by the EVRoaming Foundation, now at release 2.3.0 and aligned to EU AFIR reporting, with modules for tokens and authorization, tariffs, CDRs, remote start/stop, reservations and smart-charging profiles: effectively the OEM’s feature request, already standardised. Our guide to roaming and interoperability across networks covers the mechanics.
Buried in that module list is the most consequential clause in any OEM deal, and it is rarely treated as a commercial term. Whoever issues the driver’s credential is the eMSP of record. If the token in the OCPI Tokens module is one you issued, you hold the account, the tariff and the CDR, and the OEM is a channel. If the driver instead authenticates with an ISO 15118 contract certificate the OEM provisioned, the OEM is the eMSP, you are wholesale supply, and the customer data is theirs. Comparable engineering effort; opposite commercial outcomes.
Negotiable: when Plug & Charge has to be live
OEMs ask for Plug & Charge because it removes the second authentication — the driver plugs in and the car identifies itself. Reasonable ask; not a software switch. The Open Charge Alliance’s own whitepaper on the subject states that OCPP 1.6, published in 2015, does not support ISO 15118 messages at all, and exists to describe an intermediate workaround. If your installed base speaks 1.6, Plug & Charge means charger firmware, backend certificate handling and a public-key trust chain across every site in scope; our ISO 15118-2 versus 15118-20 roadmap sets out the sequencing. In a negotiation, the right answer is usually a dated phase two on new and upgraded hardware.
Negotiable: telematics state of charge, and the power the OEM says it needs
Ask for the telematics feed in exchange. Vehicle state of charge, target state of charge and departure time are what make “charge to 80% before 7am” executable; without them the backend sees only what the vehicle reports inside an active session — too late to schedule against a tariff or a site load limit. The power specification runs the other way: when an OEM wants ultra-rapid charging in the bundle, price it against the fleet that exists. The IEA puts cars able to use chargers above 250 kW at under 5% of the stock, even as the first 1,000-volt models arrived in 2025. That capacity is for the OEM’s next platform, and the contract should say who funds it.
The Operational Obligations An OEM Partnership Creates
The integration gets estimated. The obligations get discovered. Three of them change how an operations team is staffed and instrumented.
Uptime becomes the OEM’s warranty story, not your metric. A dealer-sold charging promise is judged the way the car is judged, and a failed session on a road trip becomes a service complaint against the vehicle. Expect a contractual availability figure per site class, a maximum time-to-restore and a right to audit. The Ministry of Heavy Industries’ operational guidelines for public charging stations under PM E-DRIVE already set uptime and reporting expectations on publicly co-funded sites, so there you answer to two masters at once.
You become first line for chargers you cannot reset. Where the OEM publishes one helpline and one app across a group of operators, the partner named in the app takes the call — including for a roaming session on a third party’s hardware. OCPI hands you the session and the CDR. It does not hand you a remote reset on someone else’s charger, or their engineer’s schedule. Close that gap contractually with every roaming partner, with an escalation path and a response clock, before the launch date.
A service-level commitment covering “the network available in the OEM application” quietly includes every roaming partner you resell. Scope the SLA to assets you operate, with a separate best-efforts standard on roamed sessions. Operators who miss the distinction are underwriting other companies’ maintenance teams.
The reporting obligation is heavier than it sounds. OEMs want charging behaviour by model and city, session success and failure rates with causes, energy per customer cohort, and the read-across to their own warranty data. That is a recurring analytics deliverable with a monthly deadline. Building it after launch from raw session logs is how a profitable partnership turns into unbilled work.
Why OEM Charging Partnerships Need One White-Label Software Layer
Put the three shapes and the four surfaces together and the software requirement resolves itself. One set of chargers has to appear as the OEM’s brand inside the OEM’s app, as your own retail brand in yours, and as a wholesale endpoint to roaming partners — with different tariffs, support routing and reporting on each. Three separate builds is the intuitive answer and the wrong one: every protocol change, certificate rotation and tariff revision is then done three times, and any drift between them shows up as a billing dispute.
The practical answer is one platform with brand as configuration, not a fork. eMSP software that runs multiple branded front ends over a single operational core lets you take the OEM deal without forking the business, and a charging platform built for vehicle OEM programmes already carries what an OEM asks for — app or SDK handoff, roaming reach, identity handling, partner reporting. Underneath, a charging management system like YoCharge keeps one set of chargers serving all three audiences. Frame it as architecture rather than features because of timing: OEM launch calendars are set by vehicle programmes and do not move — the same argument made in our piece on why white-label platforms enable faster go-to-market.
Readiness checklist for your first OEM conversation
Co-branded app, bundled hardware or roaming access — plus the trigger that would move the deal to the next one.
Your OCPI token or the OEM’s contract certificate. Whoever issues it is the eMSP of record.
Sites on 1.6 versus 2.0.1 or later. That count sets whether Plug & Charge is phase one or two.
State of charge, target and departure time. Without them, tariff-aware scheduling is guesswork.
Separate standards for owned and roamed assets, with a written escalation clock from each partner.
Treat the monthly analytics pack as a costed deliverable, agreed before launch rather than absorbed after.
An OEM partnership is one of the few routes that hands an operator guaranteed volume and a credible brand with it. It is worth having — on terms where the identity layer, the support boundary and the hardware roadmap are written down before the launch date is announced.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sources: EVRoaming Foundation — OCPI | Open Charge Alliance — Using ISO 15118 Plug & Charge with OCPP 1.6 | Open Charge Alliance — OCPP | Ministry of Heavy Industries — EV PCS Operational Guidelines (PM E-DRIVE) | PM E-DRIVE, Ministry of Heavy Industries. Global sales, charging-point and charging-power figures are from the IEA Global EV Outlook 2026 (iea.org), cited without a link because the report pages reject automated access.
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