Update on our new no-charging option ⚡

[Rob_at_Onto]

Good afternoon everyone,

I wanted to share an exciting update today about the roll-out of our new subscription option that excludes public charging for a reduced monthly price - bringing you even more flexibility to your Onto subscription.

After a successful initial trial, we’re pleased to now offer the no-charging option across all of our 25 electric car models to both new and existing customers.

Why have we launched a no-charging option?

At Onto we’re always looking to give our subscribers ultimate flexibility and choice. For some people we know that will mean opting out of public charging for a reduced subscription price, as they may prefer to charge at home or use alternative charging networks.

What are the no-charging subscription prices for new bookings?

From the 25th April, the new no-charging subscription option will be priced £40 lower per month for new bookings, including car swaps.

What about for existing customers?

For customers who joined after January 9th 2023 and currently have public charging:

• You can opt out of charging for £40, as per the option for new subscribers.

For customers who are already on a no-charging subscription from the initial trial:

• If your current subscription is more expensive, then you will automatically be migrated across to the cheaper rate.
• If your current subscription is at a cheaper price, you will be price-protected on your current tariff until you change your car. If we need to refresh or retire your car and offer you an alternative, then we will honour your existing price until at least the end of 2023.

For customers currently on a price-protected subscription:

• You can opt out of public charging for a £20 reduction to your next subscription renewal going forward.
• If you opt out of charging, you will lose access to both the Shell Recharge and Tesla Supercharger networks, as well as (if applicable) BP Pulse & Instavolt networks
• If you want to continue using public charging - great, nothing will change for you.
• As a reminder, we’ve extended the price protection on any cars that are refreshed and retired until the end of 2023.
• If you are an Onto for Business customer and opt out of public charging before the end of the month, then this will come into effect for your subscription in the next calendar month, May.

Can I add the public charging bolt-on to my subscription, now or at a later date?

• If you would like public charging included as part of your subscription, it can be added as a bolt-on at the point of booking or via “My account” at a later date (please note it won’t be possible through our app just yet, but we’re working on it).
• For existing subscribers that decide to opt-out for now, it will also cost £40 for you to re-add public charging at a later date.
• Customers that subscribe to any Tesla model will also have the Tesla Supercharger network included with the public charging bolt-on, in addition to the Shell Recharge network.
• Public charging with Instavolt can be added as a charging bolt-on after the initial sign-up for £120 a month, as it is today. Just email us at [email protected] to request it.

We appreciate there’s a lot of information here to digest, as there are many different scenarios within our community of Onto subscribers. Rest assured you’ll receive an email with further information on exactly what this means for you and next steps if you want to switch to no-charging.

If you have any extra questions on this update, please ask us below or contact our customer service team at [email protected]

Kind regards,

Rob & the Onto team

[dolores1976]

@Rob_at_Onto I have a question re price protection if you are in the Renault Megane, I am interested in the no charging option and have the Megane but am price protected so currently get BP and Instavolt too which I understand I would lose all charging options if I opted out. However, the car price is the same whether I’m price protected or not so if I opted out of the charging option would I still only save £20 instead of £40 a month?

[E7EV]

As @Rob_at_Onto says, many different scenarios, so you ask a good question. As you have three charging cards, I’d say you fall into the price protected category, even though you don’t get your Megane any cheaper.

Whether you could potentially save £20 or £40, I’d recommend doing your calculations carefully.

If you do the full 750 miles each month, and your vehicle achieves an average of 4mpkWh, you’d have to source your electricity at less than 11p per kWh to make any savings. Obviously charging at home is more convenient, and that time may be more important to you than money. Any en route rapid charging is likely to cost dearly, at least 70p per kWh, so if you do a lot of trips longer than the vehicle’s range, this needs to be taken into account.

[Dan_at_Onto]

@dolores1976 If you remove charging from your subscription, the price would go to the new prices listed on our website on the car page

so If you’re currently paying £799 for your Megane, it would drop to the new advertised price of £759 by removing charging.

The £20 discount is for our price protected customers who are already below the new advertised pricing.

as @E7EV mentioned, we’d recommend reviewing how often you charge with us and the overall cost compared to if you paid for it yourself and going for the option you feel is best suited to your circumstances or requirements.

hope this helps!

Dan

[BlackDave]

£20 that’s it?

I was assuming it would be around £100 tbh

I used 184 with shell in the last month and that’s not counting Instavolt and BP, I’ve used Instavolt about 4 times and BP twice.

No point taking it off if all I’m saving is £20.

The protected price til December is decent i guess.

But why not bring in longer subscription for less? 6-12 months?

[Dan_at_Onto]

@BlackDave Hey! Hope you’re well!

To add some context on the pricing, the bolt on cost on the site is reflective of the average cost across Shells network plus a discount we provide to our customers should they wish to use our public charging card. This is why we’re charging £40 for the bolt on which would have otherwise cost someone £184 a month if they’re charging a similar amount to yourself.

Due to this, lot of our price protected customers, such as yourself are already on a better deal than the new pricing which is why we decided it would only be fair to provide something should they wish to opt out of public charging with us.

As you mentioned, the plan you’re currently on includes all charging partners and the protection being extended until December means you don’t need to worry about losing your current deal anytime soon

Longer term subscriptions are something our team have looked at, however after review, at this point in time this isn’t something we’re pursuing, but that’s not to say we won’t re visit this in future if this becomes a viable option for us.

I hope this helps
Dan

[K12Beano]

Just did a “similar” piece of arithmetic on possibility of saving £40 on a Kona, which seems to suggest (turning it all on its head) that I could, on public charging, get about 230 miles……

Which just goes to show what a big proportion of that all-wrapped-up-all-inclusive can be worth it with the On.to model.

Obviously, for some this will be a real winner.

And, whichever, it’s great to be able to sit here and watch Onto developing - might not be what I’ve been asking for, but some subscribers have, so well done On.to

[dolores1976]

@Dan_at_Onto @E7EV, thanks both I will definitely save either way as my company have just installed 50Kw BP chargers and are offering a BP card for £7.85 a month and you don’t pay for any charges on the work chargers and if you are caught short there is a discount off normal BP chargers with it but I will only charge at work so its a win for me

[Dan_at_Onto]

This thread is really insightful to see how both charging and no charging customers benefit from these changes.

It helps us learn, grow and mould the subscription so it has something for everyone

@dolores1976 if you want to remove it just fill in the form on the email and we’ll get that actioned for you asap

£7 a month for charging is brilliant!

Dan

[Jimmi1]

Unfortunately it wasn’t any benefit to me in Scotland as anyone that has been here knows 90% of chargers are ChargePlace Scotland.
With prices in the 70p per kw it makes sense to include charging with your subscription unless yo charge at home overnight only

[E7EV]

@dolores1976

my company have just installed 50Kw BP chargers and are offering a BP card for £7.85 a month and you don’t pay for any charges on the work chargers

I’m not doubting you, but I’d double check that they’ll be no kWh charges on top of the BP subscription. 50kW chargers are very expensive to install and either BP or your company must be paying for them. It would be unusual that either or both don’t want anything in return.

[dolores1976]

I work at a power station so technically we produce the energy so we’ve paid them for the chargers and that’s across all 6 of our power stations in the UK!!

I did check though all through the T&C’s though as I also work in purchasing and work with contracts and its definitely correct as I wasn’t sure to start with.

[Dan_at_Onto]

@Jimmi1 For a lot of customers, it will make sense to keep charging included in their subscription due to the discount we give our members off Shell.

As both you and @dolores1976 mentioned, this will likely be preferable for customers who rarely use our charge card which would likely be customers who :

• Only charge once a month and barely put miles on the car
• Don’t have chargers near them and pay for their charging anyway with another provider
• Customers who have workplace charging at a cheap rate
• people who have a home charger and an E7 electric meter with a tariff that means their electricity costs next to nothing to charge overnight

[Dan_at_Onto]

Just for information as I’ve had a few DM’s asking me about next steps.

For those existing customers who have applied to have charging removed, we have your requests and the team is working through them. These will be actioned and your tariff will be changed by your next renewal date so your next billing cycle should show the new amount.

As always though, any questions in the meantime I’m here to support you all with your queries or concerns, just tag me

Thanks!

[markd]

Hey, can I just clarify if anyone knows how Tesla Supercharging will work going forward if I choose the no charging option?

Does it simply become no longer available to me, or will it charge the card I have registered with Tesla in the app?

I rarely use it, but want to feel like I have the option should I need to.

[E7EV]

Just guessing, but I imagine ONTO will suspend the Tesla account for that vehicle. If you just plug it in, it will not recognise the vehicle. Not sure if you could then set up your own account. Otherwise you may need to use the Tesla charging app as if you were a non Tesla customer.

[burnt_crisps2]

@E7EV

Otherwise you may need to use the Tesla charging app as if you were a non Tesla customer.

I suspect that would be the way to use. Just remember that at present only a handful of the U.K. SC’s are open to non-Tesla cars so you can’t just rock up to any one at the mo. Just use the Tesla app to advise which they are as it’s live.

[markd]

So I’ve already got a Tesla account for the car, Onto are the main driver, and they assign Customers as second drivers. This allows me to add things like Premium Connectivity, so they have my card details but charging is charged to Onto’s account, not mine. Just curious how this works going forward, like was mentioned above, can I use all Tesla chargers still? Tesla offer no way to setup accounts at the charger, so to get this to work I’d imagine Onto need to change the app setup at their side.

Cc: @Dan_at_Onto

[Dan_at_Onto]

hey @markd Hope you’re well!

If you have the charging included, in the background of the Tesla app we set the payment responsibility to Onto but for things like premium connectivity, we set the responsibility to the customer. This means we pay for the charging but you pay for premium connectivity.

If someone removes charging, we would set payment responsibility to the customer for everything. This would require you to upload a debit or credit card to the app (if not done so already) and it would charge that card everytime you topped your car up.

if you added a bolt on, we’d simply switch it back to “Onto” as being responsible for payment.

This is how we get around the issue of Tesla only allowing us to have control of the car so yes you’d be able to still use all Tesla chargers regardless of whether we were paying for them or not.

I hope this makes sense!
Dan

[markd]

Excellent. This is clear, thanks Dan.