Keep your eyes peeled.
The transition to an electric vehicle infrastructure is pacing steadily into our daily landscapes.
Sign posts with little electric icons speckle neighborhoods, highways, and parking lots, creating a wave of new behaviors. But the only personal thing at stake with shifting to electric is your habits.
Habits change when something else catches our eye. When we’re promised something bigger and better, and when we see through the things we’ve known to be true.
We’ve been relying on petrol stations (oil and gas monopolies) for major parts of the industrial and modern technology age. The reliability and convenience of gas powered vehicles and petrol stations are simply habitual; we have developed dependence, which is why the shift to electric produces tentative feelings like range anxiety. These oil and gas companies are at the top, and we predict they will be pulling strings to remain at the top in the imminent energy transition.
For example, a little over ¼ of all petrol stations in the UK are owned and operated by multinational oil and gas firms BP & Shell. With these powerhouses controlling centralised real estate in most big cities, we predict their stronghold on these spaces isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, as electric becomes more prevalent.
What does this mean for consumers?
Instead, it would be more likely that these same big oil and gas players monopolize and use their influence to shift these sites to electric charging points.
Effectively, holding out their palms for your cash at the convenience of their central locations, modeling what Tesla has implemented with their exclusive charging stations. This is an unideal end scenario for electric vehicle owners.
Understanding your EV charging options:
There are four sectors within the EV charging infrastructure market: home charging, workplace charging, rapid charging, and destination charging.
The first three are suited to public sector funding and will benefit from the UK Government’s “Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution,” announcing, this past November, a “£2.8 billion support package commits £1.3 billion to accelerating the rollout of charging infrastructure in homes and on streets and motorways.”
The final sector – “destination charging”, is most suited to private investment. It’s clear that the future of the EV charging infrastructure is dependent on how well the public and the private sector work together to roll out regulatory measurements and distribute funding.
Noticeably, charging infrastructure and real estate go hand-in-hand. Some electric companies have also foreseen this relationship. In response, they’ve begun rolling out our their own solutions to the spatial domination conundrum.
‘Battery-swapping’ is a plausible solution here, whereby you never truly own the battery that powers your vehicle. Instead when the battery is nearing empty, you swap it for a fully charged battery at one of the battery docking stations. But this solution is very dependent on hardware and a surplus of docking stations. What if you’d like to drive off into the countryside where there’s only one café for miles?
Our solution? Give the customer control.
Well, within all these predictions for the future of electric transportation, Zapp decided that you should be able to do such a thing. We made sure each of our batteries is completely portable, and completely yours. Meaning, you could easily be charging your battery from your home or your work.
You could also treat it like your phone. Simply plug it in with its universal charging cable while enjoying coffee in the back of a café.
No additional charging fees, no further perpetuating the spatial domination of the big boys.
