•Control authority in smart e-mobility is usually on the side of charging stations.•Electric vehicle based concept is an alternative where vehicles control charging.•In a proposed concept charging stations are merely an enabling infrastructure.•Electric vehicle based system yields higher revenues for the vehicle owners. The existing models designed to reap the benefits of electric vehicles’ flexibility in the literature almost exclusively identify charging stations as active players exploiting this flexibility. Such stations are seen as static loads able to provide flexibility only when electric vehicles are connected to them. This standpoint, however, suffers from two major issues. First, the charging stations need to anticipate important parameters of the incoming vehicles, e.g. time of arrival/departure, state-of-energy at arrival/departure. Second, it interacts with vehicles only when connected to a specific charging station, thus overlooking the arbitrage opportunities when they are connected to other stations. This conventional way of addressing the electric vehicles is referred to as charging station-based e-mobility system. A new viewpoint is presented in this paper, where electric vehicles are observed as dynamic movable storage that can provide flexibility at any charging station. The paper defines both the existing system, where the flexibility is viewed from the standpoint of charging stations, and the proposed one, where the flexibility is viewed from the vehicles’ standpoint. The both concepts are mathematically formulated as linear optimization programs and run over a simple case study to numerically evaluate the differences. Each of the four issues identified are individually examined and omission of corresponding constraints is analysed and quantified. The main result is that the proposed system yields better results for the vehicle owners.