Built to last EV chargers

Welcome to Fueling the future with Koen Elands, Product Owner at Peblar. We ask Koen how they designed the Peblar to perform in different conditions, and what makes it so rugged.

How do you test a Peblar charger's durability in different conditions?

At Prodrive Technologies we have a lot of testing facilities to test the production throughout the whole development phase on multiple aspects.

We have climate chambers, endurance tests, and even test chambers for electromagnetic compatibility, to see how rigid the product is.

So, with these lifetime tests also, we wanted to ensure that the product is durable for high temperature and low temperature on high power charging. We also went to multiple notified bodies to gather official type certificate for safety and radio directive to ensure that our product stands out in terms of endurance and durability.

What makes a Peblar charger so rugged?

We chose, during the design phase, a very vertical design. This means that, usually in other chargers, you see a lot of modules that are assembled together with cables. We chose to put all the functionalities on one printed circuit board - a PCB, which leads to higher quality standards because there are no loose cables. It's all integrated into one design. This makes it very compact and appealing, and we can assure the quality of the product in this way because you can more easily automate the production process.

How did you balance form and function when designing the Peblar charger?

During the development process, we had quite some challenges of course, which also makes development a lot of fun.

One of the challenges that pops into my head is the socket. We were busy with the development of a shorter socket for markets like France, and with a shorter socket you typically have quite a big mechanical component, but as you have seen, our product is quite small. We needed to fit a big mechanical component into a minimal volume product.

Eventually, we made that happen with one of our suppliers, and came up with a new design of a socket that can be fit into our charger