At last week’s CES in Las Vegas, Here Technologie announced a service that predicts the likelihood of an electric vehicle (EV) public charge point being available in the future.

EV adoption has boomed across markets globally, creating demand for charging infrastructure and technology for drivers to plan their charging time more efficiently. Widespread consumer adoption, outpacing EV sales may also create near-term scarcity in charge point availability.

The charge point prediction feature incorporates both EV infrastructure supply and real-world user demand, while factoring in variables such as weather, time and day. This addition supplements the existing Here EV charge points offering that has been deployed globally with many car makers.

Here aggregates data from more than 90% of the public charging operators. Big data experts at Here normalise and conflate these diverse and complex data sources to create a dynamic graph model of the world’s supply of public EV charge points.

The prediction capability is powered by an applied machine-learning (ML) algorithm that weights GPS probes, vehicle sensor data and correlated historical time, day, weather and traffic pattern data. This enables a granular view of EV charge point user patterns and surrounding traffic conditions. The volume of real-world data provides a virtuous loop of ML training data to improve the prediction service continually.

“EV drivers are navigating a patchwork of infrastructure, with various plug types, pricing and little understanding of when a charge point is occupied,” said Chris Handley, vice president at Here Technologies. “This feature is focused on delivering a much-needed tool for EV drivers to more confidently plan their day and waste less time on charging.”

Here helps EV drivers mitigate range anxiety through dynamic services for vehicle range, routing and charging. With charge point availability prediction, drivers can not only experience their existing intelligent routing and charge point PoI data from Here, but also have more visibility into whether the charge point will actually be available by the time they arrive for a charge up.

Here location data and software services are used in 170 million vehicles globally. The platform ingests live sensor data from an estimated 34 million connected vehicles to power its ADAS, connected and automated vehicle services.

• Here also announced at CES a cloud-based service that fuses vehicle sensor data from millions of cars on the road with traffic incident data to provide real-time hazard warnings to drivers. This should give drivers accurate and timely information about hazards on the road ahead to make better and safer driving decisions.