Cloudcharging  

Alex Steffen is an electric car skeptic who slowly seems to be seeing the light - Cloudcharging.

People who’ve followed my writing will know that I’m deeply skeptical of electric vehicles as a solution, not because I don’t think they lower emissions (they do), but because

a) so much of our lack of sustainability stems from the direct and indirect effects of auto-dependence as a system, from the roads and infrastructure to the sprawling land use to the health and ecological impacts; and EVs do little to fix any of that;

b) at current rates of adoption, there is simply no way to electrify the global car fleet in the scant two or three decades we have to create carbon zero societies.

That said, where we do have cars, they should clearly be EVs. And since a large barrier to wider adoption is EVs’ limited range, PlugShare is a pretty cool idea for an ap: a tool that maps available charging stations, shared private outlets and so on, helping drivers with vehicles that have limited ranges to plot out longer trips.

This might be, it seems to me, a step towards a more general availability of charging stations for EVs misted over the landscape, a sort of cloudcharging function.