FUELSERVICE: Making EV charging accessible

After an incident that left him paralysed, Niall El-Assaad founded fuelService in order to help drivers refuel and recharge their vehicles. Speaking on The Everything EV Podcast, Niall discussed the journey of his company, the importance of accessibility within the EV sector, and what more can be done to make the EV industry more accessible.

In 2013, Niall El-Assaad’s life changed forever when he was involved in a bike crash that left paralysed. As part of his rehabilitation, Niall learned to drive again using hand controls, but one experience at a fuel station sparked the idea for a business that would help disabled drivers all over the country with refueling and recharging their vehicles.

As the fuel light on his vehicle pinged, Niall pulled into a service station to refuel and pressed the button at the pump to request assistance, but that help never came. After a lengthy wait, Niall drove to the next station only to experience the exact same thing. Having now travelled 45 minutes away from his home, Niall began to panic before someone eventually came to help him and explained that the button to request assistance never works.

“I thought there must be a better way of doing this,” Niall said on The Everything EV Podcast. “So we started fuelService which is an app-based solution where people can search for stations that may be able to help them nearby before they even go to the station.”

As the EV revolution gathered momentum, fuelService began to offer help to drivers that needed to charge their vehicles, and Niall explained the specific difficulties of plugging an electric vehicle in as a disabled user.

He said: “The biggest thing is that, even if you were going to go there to a station and you were going to fill up a fast charger from empty to full, there’s a lot of people who don’t have the hand capacity to be able to do that, so they can drive the cars with hand controls, but they wouldn’t have the dexterity or maybe even the ability to plug the cables in. Even if you do have the hand capacity - I know because I’ve been to these stations, and these cables are really heavy - there is no way that I can move that cable in my wheelchair. So even with all sorts of other adjustments that may be put in place, you still probably need someone to help you.

“By people having fuelService, they’ve got people there who are willing to help and.by using fuelService, it makes it really easy for someone to be able to ask someone to come out from the comfort of their vehicle.”

Accessibility is one of the biggest areas of discussion within the EV industry, with chargepoint operators all over the country rolling out accessible charging hubs and updating existing charging bays to make them user friendly. But what exactly makes a charging point accessible?

“If I was to do it myself, it would be the space so that I can get out of the car, I could connect, get the cable from the unit easily and that I could connect to my car,” Niall explained. “Things like making sure that there’s not a curb in the way because that makes it harder to do to get up and down in a wheelchair. The height of the unit, where the controls are, can you see the screen? That’s not a new thing either. The amount of cash machines I’ve been to over the years where I can’t see the screen properly because I’m not high enough up. “All of these things do add up into making it accessible for someone who would struggle to actually do it themselves. There’s always going to be a need for something like fuelService.”

As the EV movement continues to gather pace, and with charging hubs becoming more accessible, Niall accepts that, one day, there will be no need for fuelService, and it is, in fact, something he welcomes in the industry.

So we started fuelService which is an app-based solution where people can search for stations that may be able to help them nearby before they even go to the station. ”

“We’re in a company that shouldn’t have to exist,” he said. “If all the challenges were solved and ten years down the line we’re not using cables and everyone’s got access to wireless charging, then we don’t need to exist anymore, which is actually a good thing that companies don’t need to exist to provide additional facilities. That’s not a worry for us in the slightest. OK, we wouldn’t be able to give as much money to charity for research, but in the general population of people with disabilities, they can access charging in exactly the same way as every single other person. They don’t even need to think about it.”

The full episode of The Everything EV Podcast with Niall is available on all streaming platforms. Scan this QR code to listen to the full episode and be sure to subscribe!