One of the areas where IoT is very functional is in tracking moving pieces over a wide geographical area. It is the reason why we have a strong market in logistics and overwhelming visibility in manufacturing. In sectors that combine mobility and time sensitive operations, real-time data is the winning ticket. What about dense, urban, environments?
We know that there are seismic changes underway in the EV markets. One noticeable things about electric vehicles is their strange urban flocking behavior. Charger hogs huddle around a single charging station in the exact center of small cities. Like three listless afternoon drunks to one barman, these symbols of chic mobility un-ironically became static architectural art installations. Is there a social mobility issue within EV ownership aside from rich, entitled, people wanting free parking?
It’s not chic, it’s a real thing…
People without home charging are disproportionately rentier class (can’t install a Level 2 charger in an apartment or rented house).
Lower-income urban dwellers can’t afford the upfront cost of a home or the vehicle itself. In apartments or dense urban areas you don’t control the parking. In neighborhoods where public charging infrastructure is underfunded, you’re stuck in the least effective scenario: no home charging and sparse public options.
This creates a genuine barrier to EV adoption for lower-income communities. An EV only makes economic sense if you can charge at home cheaply overnight. Without that, you’re dependent on public infrastructure that’s still sparse in many areas. And paying premium prices per kWh at commercial chargers.
The very places where EVs would have the biggest environmental impact (dense urban areas with the worst air quality, highest concentration of people, most congested traffic), are the places where EV adoption is least viable because of the home-charging barrier. To bang the nail in; you’re deploying a solution to those who need it least.
The extension of the argument lies in the principle of “down-time charging.” Last-mile delivery economics depend on constant motion and vehicle utilization. A van sitting at a charger for 30-40 minutes (even DC fast charging) isn’t making deliveries. Dead time kills profit, which deflates the uptake incentive far faster than ambient air temperatures.
Batteries can charge at centralized depots outside city centers (no urban space consumed). Vehicles can swap in 3-5 minutes, no dwell time, no congestion, no lattes. Supply/demand becomes an inventory problem, not an infrastructure distribution problem Peak demand = more pre-charged batteries queued, not gridlocked chargers Off-peak = batteries cycling through charging slowly, cheaply, at the depot. The economies of scale for light electric vehicles are even better.
We’re making the argument here, in big leaps, that battery swapping tools might be a far more valuable resource that gas pump type installations. It might even be that the “gas pump” is a hive mind metaphor for “refueling,” so it’s hard to reorient city planners outside of that archetypal infrastructure. They only know what they know.
So, the infrastructure choice locked users into a suboptimal path for dense urban last-mile delivery, in some cities. But being a “mistake” depends on whether optimizing the existing system or building swapping infrastructure from scratch is actually “cheaper” and faster.
I don’t know that answer confidently. Do you?
