Why smart fleet charging should start with the vehicle.

When people talk about smart charging, the conversation usually starts with the charger.

At TOGL, we think it should start with the vehicle.

That distinction may sound small, but for commercial fleets it matters. The objective is not simply to control how much power a charger delivers. The objective is to make sure the right vehicle receives the energy it needs, at the right time, at a practical cost, without compromising readiness for the work it needs to do.

The charger only knows part of the story

A charge point can tell a management system a great deal about a charging session.

It can tell us that a connector is occupied, how much power it is delivering, how much energy has been transferred and, depending on the equipment and protocols being used, potentially additional information about the connected vehicle.

But the fleet does not operate around chargers.

It operates around vehicles.

Truck 24 might need to leave at 04:30 with enough energy for a 300 km duty cycle. Truck 31 may not leave until midday and can therefore wait for a cheaper electricity period. Another vehicle may return late, have a lower state of charge than expected or have a different route allocated the following morning.

Those are vehicle decisions, not charger decisions.

The vehicle-to-charger association problem

When charging is controlled entirely through the charger, one additional problem appears.

The system needs to establish which vehicle is connected to which charger.

That can be solved in several ways. RFID, ISO 15118 vehicle identification, driver input, telematics and other techniques can all help.

Newer charging standards can provide more vehicle information than earlier generations. OCPP 2.x, for example, supports ISO 15118 integration and can expose information received from a connected vehicle. But availability depends on the vehicle, charger and implementation, and identifiers are not necessarily consistent enough across every fleet to treat the problem as universally solved.

For a depot with a handful of vehicles this may be manageable.

For a fleet operating tens or hundreds of vehicles across multiple depots, it becomes much more important.

If the system incorrectly associates a charger with a vehicle, the charging optimisation can be perfectly calculated and still be applied to the wrong truck.

That is a problem we would rather remove than manage.

Talking to the vehicle changes the problem

Where TOGL can integrate directly with the vehicle, the relationship becomes much cleaner.

We know which vehicle we are talking to because the vehicle itself is the asset in TOGL.

If that vehicle can provide information such as state of charge, charging status and other relevant telemetry, and we can combine that with fleet or transport management data, TOGL can understand both sides of the equation:

What does this vehicle need?

and

When does it need it?

The charging decision stays attached to the vehicle rather than having to be transferred to whichever charger it happens to be using that evening.

That becomes particularly valuable when duty cycles change.

If a transport management system changes tomorrow morning's assignment, TOGL can use that change to adjust the charging requirement for that specific vehicle.

There is no separate question of whether we are applying that revised requirement to the correct charger.

We are already talking to the correct asset.

The vehicle is the constant

Chargers are infrastructure.

Vehicles move.

They change depots, use different connectors, operate different routes and have different energy requirements every day.

The vehicle is therefore the logical place to anchor the charging strategy.

That does not mean charger-based control disappears.

OCPP remains extremely important, particularly while direct vehicle control is not available consistently across every manufacturer. TOGL will need to work with both approaches.

But where direct vehicle integration is available, we believe it offers an important advantage.

It removes one of the uncertainties between the fleet plan and the charging action.

Our principle is simple:

“The charger is the control point. The vehicle is the operational asset.”