CharIN Testival Aims To Improve The EV Charging Experience

Last month in Newark, California, the CharIN Association held its 5th North American Conference and Testival with 230 e-mobility experts from 85 businesses across 9 countries in attendance. 

The non-profit CharIN Association is the leading global association that's dedicated to promoting interoperability based on the Combined Charging System (CCS). CharIN has over 200 members, including 47 global automobile manufacturers, including companies that don't even sell a car that uses CCS, like Toyota and Subaru.

The CharIN Association holds multiple Testival Conferences around the world every year, and for this year's North American event, InsideEVs was granted a very rare opportunity to enter the testing facility and observe what goes on. 

We weren't allowed to take any pictures because there were EVs there that haven't yet been released for sale and some that haven't even been fully revealed yet, so the pictures we used for this article were provided to us by the event organizers and the copyright belongs to them.

Lucid Motor's hosted the event in a facility they recently purchased and hadn't yet begun outfitting it for their needs. Therefore, it was a perfect space for this event. One of this year's main focuses was on Plug & Charge, which we'll soon see included on every new EV offered. 

About 230 international testers gathered to test interoperability between vehicles from a number of different manufacturers and a variety of CCS DC fast-charging stations. There were also five unique panel discussions covering critical topics facing the industry – from federal and state policy to grid resiliency, consumer adoption issues, and Plug & Charge.