ChargePoint CEO Pasquale Romano on When American Cars Will Go All-Electric

Pasquale Romano, CEO of ChargePoint Credit - Sam Willard, courtesy of ChargePoint

(Miss this week’s Leadership Brief? This interview below was delivered to the inbox of Leadership Brief subscribers on Sunday morning, Feb. 28; to receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and business decisionmakers, click here.)

Where you and I might see a vacant parking spot, Pasquale Romano sees opportunity. Romano is the chief executive officer of ChargePoint, a California-based company that runs one of the world’s largest electric-vehicle charging networks, having installed over 130,000 charging stations throughout North America and Europe. In Romano’s business, each parking spot is a potential home for a charger. For every car in the U.S. there are eight parking spots, which gives ChargePoint a total addressable market of 2 billion locations.

Even before the election of President Biden, which is likely to greatly speed the adaptation of electric vehicles in this country, interest in EVs was higher than ever, Romano insists. He says the primary drag on adaptation thus far is the limited number of makes and models of EVs being produced by the car industry. Until there is a broad range of models in all shapes, sizes, colors and prices, consumers will be slow to convert. Although the pace of adoption is likely to accelerate, ChargePoint expects it to take about 20 years to replace the 250 million cars and light trucks currently on the roads with electric vehicles.

So where do the chargers go? Juicing your car is a different ritual than filling up at the pump. It’s more akin to juicing your phone. And since cars sit idle 96% of the time, much of that time parked at work or in a garage, that is largely where chargers need to be.

The electric-vehicle space is extremely hot now, and ChargePoint is going public through a deal with a special-purpose acquisition company, SPAC, raising about $480 million.

Romano, who is on his third Tesla, recently joined TIME for a video conversation on why big, ongoing subsidies for EVs are a bad idea, why charging stations are the hot new employee benefit and why he’s suspicious of statistics.

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(This interview with ChargePoint CEO Pasquale Romano has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

You are about to go public through a merger with a SPAC, a process thats sweeping Wall Street.

It’s a capital-raising event. I liken these companies to some symbiotic form of plant life that looks to basically attach to a company and then turn it into a public company. (The interview took place Feb. 19; the company’s stock is expected to start trading on the NYSE on March 1.)