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Infrastructure, Discoverability & Speed of Adoption

At what point does infrastructure become, well, infrastructure - the stuff you can rely on being out there?

Would you buy an electric driven vehicle when there are only a few public recharging points scattered around your regular stomping ground? To what extent do technologies such as personal access to accurate location positioning and real-time status updates mitigate the need for blanket coverage of infrastructure such as this Elektrobay charging poing in London's Covent Garden? (This charging point is aimed at council workers not the general public so the argument is moot in this exact context).

Knowing a charging point's location, availability, quality and cost can go some way to support early adopters. Being able to reserve it ahead of time takes some risk out of the process - though it could introduce a hedge market for access to that particular power stand. Value added? Self driving vehicles that hook themselves up to the nearest power source will remove the end user hassle of having to remember (in the same way that in the domestic context keeping personal devices charged and otherwise maintained is something that can be delegated to autonamous machines).

And yes you could argue that to maintain a higher degree of consumer environmental awareness you don't want to make the re-charging process seamless. Will we see the fuel equivilent of warning signs on cigarette packets?

Writing from London | February 5, 2007 | Permalink