ABM_1 - Flipbook - Page 22
Q&A
Generational
hen considering shifting
to an electric vehicle (EV),
many buyers – whether
consumer or fleet –
are concerned about
the difficulty assessing battery health,
particularly when it comes to used
vehicles. This has been a considerable
barrier to uptake, but one that
Generational is looking to break down.
With a plug-in tool, dealers can
perform a State of Health (SoH)
diagnostic and produce a battery health
certificate to share with buyers, while
fleets and finance companies can use
the data to help predict residual values
and manage asset risk.
To find out more, Jessica Bird sits
down with CEO Oliver Phillpott, to discuss
how this tech is playing its part in the
electric transition.
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How has your own working experience
fed into the idea behind Generational?
I started out life building software in the
leasing industry. I worked for a company
whose customers were the likes of
Mercedes-Benz Financial Services and
Toyota Financial Services. That was a
fantastic experience.
Later, I spent a few years in startups,
where I found myself managing an
electric fleet. That’s really where the seed
for Generational came from. We were
managing a business that depended
on deliveries, with an electric fleet. We
were working with early generation
electric vehicles, and battery issues
were constant.
When delivering is your business, it's
super important that you maintain that
uptime and you don't have issues with
your vehicle.
That set the scene for the idea. Not
long after that, I met our CTO, who's had
incredible experience from his PhD, and
his time at Red Bull Racing.
We decided there had to be a super
simple way to assess the health of EV
batteries, and we knew how important it
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AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS Q4 2025
Oliver Phillpott,
CEO of Generational,
on battery health and
the electric transition
was to the transition to be able to assess
the residual values of EVs. We launched
the business in 2023.
Our core target is dealerships at the
moment – giving them a super simple
way to assess the health of the batteries,
that they can integrate into their business
processes and give them the edge in a
growing market.
What does this tool mean for
dealers looking to help buyers
make the EV transition?
Battery health is the number one
barrier and the number one concern for
consumers. By offering a super simple
tool dealers can integrate into their
operations – and which gives them a
certificate they can use to market the
vehicle – they can bring in more leads.
They can also close more sales and
sell the vehicles faster, because they’re
turning that major barrier into a powerful
selling point that they can lead with.
Instead of answering consumers’
questions about whether the car has a
good battery with ‘we don’t know’, or
avoiding the question altogether, they
can sell transparently.
The other part for dealers is de-risking
part exchange. If you take an EV on that
has an excessively degraded battery,
that can be a painful hit for a business
that relies on fast stock turnaround on
relatively thin margins.
Are customers demanding this
transparency in automotive retail, too?
Transparency is necessary for any
market to operate correctly. By our
maths, there's going to be about $1tn
worth of EV batteries in circulation by
2030. This is an asset class that's bigger
than the GDP of the Netherlands. You
need a way to be able to understand
what you're buying and selling. You
wouldn't buy an ICE car without knowing
the mileage, so why buy an electric car
without knowing the state of the battery?
