Powering Europe’s most reliable car charging network
Fastned uses Databricks SQL and Hightouch to keep charging stations running efficiently
Charging stations streaming real-time data into Databricks, enabling better customer service
Data syncs via Hightouch on Databricks powering critical operations
Most reliable charging network in Europe
Fastned was founded in 2012 with the mission of accelerating the transition to electric mobility. More than a decade later, the company operates over 2,000 electric vehicle chargers at more than 320 stations across Europe (as of October 2024), successfully delivering over 1 million charging sessions each quarter. Fastned has always played an accelerating role in the transition to electric mobility by offering a premium user charging experience, ensuring high network reliability and minimizing equipment-related issues. The company implemented the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to ingest streaming data from all of their stations and Hightouch to enable less technical users to take action after reviewing that data. Now, Fastned’s team can self-serve access to their unified data in Databricks and generate impactful automation, such as creating tickets for field engineers and sending charger usage updates to customers. Thanks in part to the collaboration with Databricks and Hightouch, Fastned was named the #1 most reliable charging network in Europe, according to EV resource provider Chargemap’s customer reviews.
Multiple data streams make analysis challenging
Fastned is powering the shift to electric vehicles (EVs) by building a network of fast-charging stations in high-traffic locations across Europe. Providing an outstanding user experience is crucial to accelerating the transition to electric mobility, ensuring EV drivers can rely on Fastned and continue to frequent their stations. To meet these goals, Fastned needs to be able to rely on up-to-the-minute data.
“Unfortunately, the overall charging experience for many European drivers is often an unreliable one, posing a barrier when it comes to people making the switch to electric,” Romane Persch, Head of Data and Insights at Fastned, explained. “We’re working hard to change that. Each of our chargers constantly supplied us with the latest data — and it’s up to us to interpret that data in ways that help us to detect, prevent and resolve problems quickly.”
Fastned initially tried to combine and interpret multiple sources of data by building a Redshift cluster and creating Tableau dashboards on top of it. However, this setup could only read internal databases and batch-ingested sources. Lacking a streaming-capable data warehouse at the time, the company looked for a way to let analysts access near real-time data in a scalable manner.
The company needed to build a data intelligence platform that could support dashboards and machine learning use cases while providing traditional data warehousing capabilities. Any solution had to be able to handle streaming data from Fastned’s charging stations. “Integrating streams of data on Redshift was always challenging,” Antonio Ruby Barreto, Senior Data Engineer at Fastned, recalled. “We struggled to keep our data pipelines running reliably and ensuring that our data was up to date.”
Streamlining operations and enhancing customer experience
After evaluating multiple solutions, Fastned implemented Databricks as their new data lakehouse. Databricks allows using streaming tables right out of the box, supporting incremental data processing for the Fastned team. The streaming tables are registered to Unity Catalog, which streamlines organizationwide access. Fastned uses dbt Labs to orchestrate data transformation workflows on Databricks SQL. Fivetran connectors simplify the process of moving data from sources such as Salesforce and NetSuite into Databricks SQL.
“With Databricks, we could immediately ingest data from more external sources,” Antonio continued. “We finally had a central lakehouse we could use for reporting and operational tasks.”
The next step was for Fastned to enable less-technical people to tap into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to build automation with very little effort. Rather than requiring data teams to export CSV files from Databricks for each business use case, Fastned onboarded three business teams to Hightouch, a composable CDP that works directly inside Databricks SQL.
So far, Fastned’s business teams have built 338 ongoing data syncs with Hightouch. These power some of their most important data use cases. After data streams into the lakehouse from Fastned’s charging stations, Hightouch sends it out to their asset management software that creates repair jobs for the company’s field engineers. “Right within Databricks SQL, we’ve created algorithms for detecting problems with our equipment,” Romane said. “These models automatically send valuable information to our internal asset management software so that our engineers can take prompt action.”
Fastned also uses Hightouch to export data to systems such as Google Sheets, Slack and Zapier (enabling further connections with other systems). An export to Mailchimp lets Fastned include usage statistics in their end-of-year newsletter to each customer. “This is a service we wanted to provide to enhance the customer experience, but we didn’t want to spend weeks setting it up,” Antonio explained. “With Databricks SQL and Hightouch, we were able to avoid any heavy engineering work.”
Leveraging data to drive growth and reliability
With Databricks SQL and Hightouch, Fastned’s data analysts and operations teams can easily build automations. Whereas in the past they were reliant on enlisting data engineers to retrieve information from databases, today, they can automate their most common data tasks and build their own dashboards, allowing data engineers to focus on complex problems.
Fastned’s more effective use of data is helping the company to improve their standing within the industry and, at the same time, provide excellent service to their customers across Europe. In 2024, Chargemap’s customers rated Fastned as the most reliable charging network in France, while in 2023, the company was selected as the most reliable network in all of Europe, with the second-best charging experience. “Part of our success is a direct result of using Databricks SQL and Hightouch to detect and address problems in our chargers,” Romane said. “That leads to greater uptime and a better customer experience.”
Customers are also very positive about Fastned delivering renewable energy at their stations, with the roofs featuring solar panels. As they enhance their product and maximize team efficiency, Fastned looks forward to continued growth. “Customers see that our chargers work consistently, so they come back more, which translates to higher revenue,” Antonio concluded. “Thanks to Databricks and Hightouch, we look forward to delivering greater value to customers each and every year.”