What happens when the future of transportation depends on infrastructure that still fails one out of every five times?
Brad Crist, co-founder and CEO of ChargeMate, is tackling one of the least glamorous—but most important—problems in EV adoption: broken charging experiences. Before founding ChargeMate, Brad spent more than a decade in climate tech, working across energy, automotive, and EV charging at companies like Accenture, Faraday Future, Volta, and Spring Free EV. After helping scale EV charging networks from hundreds to thousands of stations, he saw the real problem up close: chargers may look “online,” but the driver experience often tells a very different story.
ChargeMate is building an AI operating layer for EV charging reliability—combining chat, voice agents, backend charger diagnostics, remote commands, and human escalation to help operators resolve issues faster, reduce support costs, and recover lost revenue. In this episode, Brad breaks down why charging failures are often not about broken hardware, but about payments, apps, user confusion, software glitches, vehicle-charger handshakes, and fragmented operating systems.
In Today’s Episode We Discuss
- 00:01– Brad Crist, ChargeMate, and the EV Reliability Gap
- 00:34– From Utilities to EV Charging Startups
- 01:16– The Rivian Road Trip Problem
- 02:39– Tesla, Non-Tesla EVs, and Market Fragmentation
- 04:07– Why Public Charging Fails
- 05:55– ChargeMate’s AI Support Layer
- 06:18– Why Incumbents Struggle with Reliability
- 08:09– AI-Enabled Support and Call Deflection
- 09:33– The First Design Partner Breakthrough
- 11:16– The Pivot Away from Consumer Route Planning
- 13:39– Why Zendesk and Intercom Are Not Enough
- 15:38– Complexity, Protocols, and Charging Standards
- 16:42– Autonomous Vehicles and Future Infrastructure
- 18:11– Natural Language Interfaces for Energy Assets
- 19:25– Early Decisions That Nearly Killed the Company
- 20:55– Contrarian Beliefs About EV Infrastructure
- 21:37– Enterprise Sales Challenges
- 22:38– Starting with Voice First
Brad also shares the hard lessons of selling into EV infrastructure, the danger of building too much before finding a painful wedge, and why the next decade of mobility will depend not just on more chargers—but smarter, self-healing infrastructure.
“The charger can look online, but the actual driver experience is very different.”
“People don’t necessarily want to talk to a human. They want to solve their problem.”
Brad started as an early EV believer trying to impress friends with a Rivian road trip. Now he’s building the AI layer that may determine whether the rest of the market trusts electric vehicles at all.
Follow Brad Crist on LinkedIn: LinkedIn