CharIN Academy publishes Request for Proposal

CCS Basic has been established as the global unifying standard for interoperable charging across many different implementations and regions. As charging technology advances, so do the underlying common standards and their capabilities ensuring a more convenient, faster and safer charging experience.

Therefore, CCS Extended features are now making their way into the market at large scale, requiring commonly accepted testing requirements and procedures to guarantee global interoperability and efficiency of product development processes.

CharIN is a non-profit organization and open to any company worldwide involved in the business around e-mobility. CharIN´s next goal is to define requirements for the conformance testing of CCS related standards and for the certification of CCS based products. CharIN Academy GmbH is the organizing party of the CharIN association.

Under the CharIN umbrella, cross-industry stakeholders like automakers, charging station manufacturers, component suppliers, energy providers, charge point operators, and many others continue moving towards interoperable charging, where vehicles, chargers, and software systems work together and to make the user experience reliable, easy and smooth.

CharIN’s holistic approach is not limited to passenger cars. Its international community is comprised of leading global companies representing every link to the e-mobility value chain and multiple experts who have been working together as a team to drive the requirements of charging all kinds of electric vehicles.

Besides several further topics and activities, CharIN has been instrumental in developing the standards and requirements for CCS charging according to the CCS Roadmap comprising Basic, Extended and Enhanced capabilities. As Basic capabilities have already been widely established and adopted in EV products, the focus is now on the roll-out and certification of Extended CCS capabilities. It is the purpose of this RFQ to develop the prerequisites for that.

About the requirements

Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging Communication in the form of the Combined Charging System (CCS) is a core enabling technology for rapid charging of EVs as well as for future back-end as well as smart grid integration. Its universal interoperability between all types of electric vehicles and electric vehicle supply equipment is key for user acceptance and economies of scale, but at the same time a major technical challenge due to the huge number of different implementations, individual use cases and requirements on a diverse global market. In order to guarantee such interoperability, the conformance of each system to a generally accepted technical standard is to be tested and verified, especially under the conditions of incremental changes of required specifications and ongoing updates (e.g., OTA) of implemented software.

The CharIN Implementation Guides, Test Cases and Requirements for CCTS (CharIn Conformity Test Systems) enable companies from the smart charging community and their technology experts to conduct conformance tests for electric vehicles and charging systems, respectively Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and Communication Controllers, as well as related test systems and processes. Upon passing such tests, CharIN-labelled certificates shall be issued as well as product labels shall be applied to products.

The offering party will be tasked to draft, present, iterate and finalize all required documents for the Conformance Testing of electric vehicles, electric vehicle supply equipment, conformance testing equipment and testing laboratories according to CCS Extended specifications under supervision of CharIN Academy, and in close cooperation with technical Focus Groups and standardization bodies, as well as other third parties as indicated by CharIN. Remuneration will be based on approval of the specified documents by the executive board of CharIN e.V.

Legal and commercial conditions

Quotations to be submitted in writing in English language. Please submit your quotation to the contact person indicated below by January 31st, 2024. We recommend using the provided table for your quotation.

The applicability of the general terms and conditions of the bidding company or any other terms and conditions will be expressly excluded. ln case the bidding party is a full merchant, it is mandatory that the contract will be subject to German law excluding the conflict-of-law provisions.

We would highly appreciate to receive third-party contacts for references in the same or similar topics as well as personal experience with regulatory processes.

The following person serves as primary point of contact and shall be the only person to receive the quotation: 

CharIN Academy GmbH
Christoph Stürmer
Kurfürstendamm 11
10719 Berlin
Germany
Email: christoph.stuermer@charin-academy.global

Please find all required information on the RFQ in the download section of this page. To simplify the processing, we would highly appreciate if you would send your detailed quotation by e-mail as well as use the provided quotation table.