10 years of electrification of transport and 10,000 smart poles

Did you know that eTolppa was born in the student apartment of a Master of Science (MSc) student in automation technology from Tampere? The idea for a remotely controlled heating post came about when the student's own parking space was 300 meters away and the car was often stuck due to irregular travel times, as the post's timing did not correspond to the actual departure time.

A remote-controlled pole was one of the visions when the student and his friends set out to promote their ideas. The students shared their ideas with a few acquaintances, through whom they gained suitable contacts. The idea also aroused interest, and the students received encouragement from the business world, as a result of which IGL-Technologies Oy was founded in late 2009. The first poles were made manually by adding intelligence to existing poles. In the early years, the company focused purely on product development and demoing, but the first customer and cooperation relationships have remained from the early days.

It was recognized very early on that the posts could also be used to charge electric cars. However, electric cars were still very few at the time, so the company focused primarily on marketing the product as a premium heating post from the perspective of smart energy management solutions and energy savings. The company's real growth only began to be seen when plug-in cars became more common.

Good references were obtained early on from Oulu Airport and Tampere Electricity Company. However, the biggest change came when Tampere University of Technology decided to replace all its thermal bollards with eBollards. The matter was discussed with the client, and it was discovered that there was also a lot that could be digitized in their parking management. The development work resulted in eParking.fi, which allowed the client to save a lot of their own working time. Manual work, maintaining tables, laminated permit slips and invoicing were digitized. It was clear that there would be demand for the service elsewhere as well.

eTolppa and eParking have gone hand in hand ever since. Tolppa is managed on the eparking.fi service or alternatively in the app. Today, eTolppa is more of a brand name, and digital management of charging and parking is at the forefront.

In October 2019, we crossed a significant milestone: 10,000 eTolppi have been installed ! A big thank you goes to our customers and all our partners!

In addition to these, our service has 85,000 users and we manage approximately 40,000 parking spaces.

The picture shows installation work at Oulu Airport in 2010. 20 degrees below zero.