Charged up?

*Disclaimer: At the time of pushing this piece online, I feel that there's a lot missing in this post in terms of perspective. Most significant companies, or those mentioned below, are most likely two steps ahead of the ideas discussed here. As a result, this post may come off as a lot of wishful thinking mixed with (I hate to admit this) a bit of ignorance. Meanwhile...

Of late, you have surely noticed popular electricity distribution stocks—Adani Power and Tata Power, you're right, of course—have doubled in a matter of months. Now, this is not investment advice or a stock recommendation. Please, do your own research. I'm just fleshing out what I observed.

You'll notice that the angle given for this sudden rise is that these companies are adding firepower to their electric vehicle charging infrastructure game. Logical enough reason, or at least a decent narrative to get people's attention. It pays to look at things from a distance when it comes to news, even when you're personally invested in the story, just saying. 

Tthe good part is that EVs are here. They no longer are 'the' thing of the next decade, and thank you for that, Elon Musk. Of course, the Tesla stock has had a heady trajectory of its own. However, as a newbie investor, there's a ton of reading which we regular Indian retail investors need to do have under our belt commenting on an international stock. I certainly need to. 

However, let's flip the switch on the EV conversation a little. Our quest for efficient transportation may fundamentally change how we look at, and make our vehicles. Not just cars. Trains, aircraft, ships, the works. Construction materials (unprecedented light-weighting, conductive paints), charging and parking infrastructure as a service, contribution to the grid (I believe this already happens in Europe), and goodness knows what all. Except for the god-knows-what-all, allow me to explain. 

Construction materials

The humble car has been getting heavier over time. The lay car buyer may attribute this to the increasing size of our vehicles, because cars these days are generally more spacious than their predecessors from say, the '90s. Remember the Maruti Zen? Sweet little thing. Maruti's Swift is probably the closest spiritual successor to it. However, in about two decades, you see how fat our cars have gotten?

One reason is that of course, carmakers want to make more accommodating cars, so that we can fit more of everything inside. Think more luggage, larger people. However, cars have also had to accommodate more safety gear. We need more crash-protection buffer zones in the structure for the safety of the occupants, pedestrians and other road users. That means a thicker skin for the car, literally of course. Our dashboards have a lot more going on inside them. Airbags, air conditioners, electronics, sensors all over the car and the list goes on. 

With electric cars, the big elephant in the room when it comes to weight (aha), are the batteries. Typically stuffed into the floor of the vehicle, batteries are heavy. That bit is unlikely to change anytime soon, unless we come up with some ultralightweight conducting material that solves all our battery woes. Who knows, graphene batteries, perhaps. However, that too will come around in time. 

Meanwhile, the body of the car is largely metal for now. That's where there is a ton of scope for material science to do its magic. There's probably some affordable alternative to the god-awfully pricey carbon fibre. Which, of course, is just about as strong and unwieldy. Or, maybe we'll stumble into some 3-d printed construction technique that reduces the amount of metal required for making cars without compromising on strength. Just using stainless steel for all you care, or maybe some radical reinforced plastic. Let's allow wishful thinking to take its leaps, shall we?

Double-battery, single power. Nope.

This hideous term 'range anxiety' gets thrown around a lot. It is a thing, though. Say, your vehicle travels about 100km on a single full charge, and your daily commute is about 80km. All's well on a regular day for a trip to work and back. Wait, it's been WFH if you so much so as own a smartphone. Besides the trip to the mistress, where are you traveling? And why's she 40km away? Anyway, I digress. 

Say, it's your lady's birthday. Hoping that we get out of this pandemic-alert situation sooner than later, you want to treat woman to a nice dinner at a restaurant, which is about a 5km, from your regular route. Ideally, book her a cab to the restaurant, and then drop her home. But, say you want to do the 'I'll pick you up from home/work at 7:30pm' routine, you might be stretching your luck on the range front. The last thing you want is getting stranded on the way back home. 

Hopefully, our workplaces and restaurants jump in on the charging infrastructure game and save the day. Mind you, that's already happening. This restaurant called Go-Native in JP Nagar, Bangalore, already has one of those Ather wall chargers for those swanky electric scooters.

However, what if we build the charging element into the car itself? Chuck charging points. Let the car or vehicle charge under the sun. Cover the body in solar panels. Maybe, we'll come up with (or have already figured) photo-voltaic paint that lets your car charge when parked under sunlight. That, right there, is a big "fuck you" to electricity distribution companies, iff we can manage solar charge times quick enough to not need charging ports. Yup, caveats galore. But we're a race of problem solvers. Otherwise, we wouldn't have made self-landing rockets and galaxy-traversing satellites. 

Business park

Isn't it annoying to have some random enthu cutlet run to you the moment you park your car at a street? Bombay people surely relate. Fifty bucks per hour for what cock exactly? However, EVs are probably exactly what parking as a service needed to thrive as a business. Imagine. Commercial real estate will provide parking plus charging as a subscription. Again, must already be a proof of concept. Soon, scale will kick in, in earnest. Wish I could give you stats and figures on this, though. 

Aha, eight million EVs by 2025, says this site called Motley Fool. Nice site, interesting content. The next bit is not made up. Some seven hours before writing this piece, a company in Hawaii launched a charging-as-a-service pilot project. I found out about the article while writing this, so sorry for being so under-prepared. However, we now know how close to the future we are. It remains to be seen whether this business will prove to be a cash-cow or a money pit. 

Come to think of it, the car as we know it hasn't fundamentally changed. Ask a kid to draw a car and she will most probably throw up some version of this...👇👇

Mind you, if this is what your kid drew, he/she's got potential. Don't make them climb the tree if they know how to fucking fly. Coming back to cars and how we've pictured them so far, they need to fundamentally change. Hopefully, this plague of a thing called the SUV will make way for more practical, more efficient vehicles. That notwithstanding, you sure will be able to pick up, and drop your date on her birthday without having to bite your fingernails off over low charge. Soon.