Tesla Motors is a major electric-car company. They helped make EVs more mainstream, and they’re often central to discussions about how electric driving is changing transportation.
The Chrysler New Yorker is a car model from Chrysler that was made to be comfortable and more upscale. It’s a name people recognize, especially when talking about older cars or car history. In the podcast, it’s likely mentioned because the guest is a fellow New Yorker.
The Porsche 911 is a sports car made by Porsche. It’s famous for its classic design and for being built in many versions over the years. People talk about it when they want to reference a car that’s closely tied to engineering and design changes.
The charging unit is the actual charger machine you plug the car into. How the cable is stored and managed matters because it changes how easy (or annoying) it is to charge.
DC fast-charging is the “quick charge” style for EVs. Instead of charging slowly, it sends higher power to the battery so you can get back on the road faster.
User experience (UX) for EV charging is about making charging feel easy and predictable. It’s not just the charger’s power—it’s also how the cable, parking spot, and steps work together so you don’t have to struggle.
Term
Gen 1 charging
“Gen 1 charging” means the first wave of public EV chargers and how they were set up. The speaker is saying those early setups weren’t great for real-world driver convenience, so they’re trying to do it better.
Concept
designing the charger vs designing the placement
They’re debating whether you build the charger first and then find a spot for it, or whether you plan the parking spot and driver behavior first. In real life, where the charger sits and how the cable reaches can make charging much easier or much harder.
A detachable cable means the cable can be removed from the charger. That can make it easier to replace if it gets damaged and can reduce problems in public charging areas.
Flow is the company being discussed that sets up EV chargers in public curbside locations. They’re described as having a program that works with the local utility and city agencies.
Con Edison is the local electric company for New York City. If you want an EV charger to work reliably, you need the utility to provide and connect the electricity.
Instead of charging only at home or in a private lot, a curbside program puts EV chargers along public streets. That means the city and the power company have to help make the power and placement work.
DOT is the city agency that manages roads and curb space. If you want to put chargers on the curb, you usually need DOT approval and coordination.
Concept
reservation systems on public spaces
They’re saying you can’t easily “book” a public charger like a parking spot. So drivers may coordinate in other ways to avoid showing up when someone else is using it.
A direct utility connection is when the charger gets power straight from the power grid through a dedicated setup. It usually costs more because it involves more electrical infrastructure work.
Instead of running new power lines from the street, the idea is to use extra unused electricity capacity already available in buildings. That can make public charging cheaper and faster to roll out.
The Dodge Charger is a larger sedan from Dodge that’s known for strong performance. In the podcast context, it sounds like the discussion is about how charging works and how an electric version would use different charging “levels.”
Level 2 charging is the faster kind of home/public charging that usually uses a 240-volt outlet. The “cable” is the part that plugs into the car and carries electricity from the charger to the battery.
Concept
CAC
CAC is being used as a strategy term for how they get customers to start using the chargers. In this context, distributing cables is part of that growth plan.
They’re saying the cable is usually the part that gets damaged first at public charging spots. People may drop it or leave it exposed, and weather can make it wear out faster.
In winter, temperatures can freeze and then thaw repeatedly. That can be rough on outdoor charging cables and connections because moisture gets in and materials expand and contract.
Public charging refers to using charging stations outside your home, typically at workplaces, retail locations, or along highways. The episode frames it as a reliability challenge, where chargers may fail or be inconsistent, affecting real-world EV ownership.
A 120V charging cable is the basic charger you can plug into a normal wall outlet. It charges more slowly than Level 2, so you may need public charging more often.
Uptime requirement means the chargers are supposed to work a certain percentage of the time. The hosts are saying the real-world results may not be hitting those targets.
Arizona is used as an example of a hot climate where outdoor EV charger touch interfaces can fail. The episode suggests that environmental conditions like intense sun and heat can directly impact charger usability.
Concept
Eschemorphism
This is a design idea where something new looks like something old so it feels familiar. Here, the charger looks like a gas pump because that’s what people already understand.
The episode discusses how early (“gen one”) EV chargers were designed to resemble gas pumps, and why that matters for user experience. The speaker emphasizes designing charger placement and form factor around real-world charging behavior and locations like parking lots.
Tap to pay means you pay by bringing your card or phone close to the charger’s payment reader—no swiping or typing needed.
Term
direct to vehicle coordination
This is the idea that when you plug the car in, the car and charger work together so charging starts with less hassle. Instead of you doing lots of steps, it’s more like “plug in and go.”
CEC is mentioned as a group helping standardize charger hardware so bi-directional charging can work smoothly. The goal is fewer compatibility headaches for drivers.
Bi-directional charging means your EV can act like a battery you can use both ways. It can charge from the grid, and later it can send power back out to help your home or the grid.
V2G means your EV can send electricity back to the electric grid. Instead of only using power, it can also help the grid when there’s high demand or shortages.
Volkswagen is included in the brands that support bi-directional charging. That’s important because it suggests V2G could scale beyond just one company.
Honda is mentioned as one of the automakers with EVs that can support bi-directional charging. That means the car could potentially help power the grid later.
Over-the-air updates are software updates that you install remotely, like updating your phone. Here, the idea is that cars could gain new charging features through those updates.
Concept
EVs as "batteries on wheels"
They’re saying EVs aren’t just cars that use electricity—they’re also like big storage units. If a lot of EVs are parked, they can help move energy around when the city needs it.
Depot charging refers to charging EV fleets at centralized locations (depots) rather than relying only on public chargers. The discussion connects it to fleet operations where vehicles drive to depots off-hours and return to service in the morning.
They’re talking about large groups of cars used for rideshare. When you have thousands of them, charging planning becomes a logistics problem, not just a “find a charger” problem.
They’re saying you can’t just put charging far away and expect fleets to handle it. If too many cars have to travel to charge, it wastes hours and disrupts service.
Waymo is a self-driving taxi company. They run robotaxis in several cities, and the number of cars they have affects how much charging infrastructure those cities need.
A robot taxi still has to charge, and curbside charging is tricky because there’s no person there to plug it in. The car and charger have to work together every time, reliably.
Instead of a person plugging in the charger, a robot arm does it automatically. Since it’s used a lot, it can wear out or break, so the system has to be designed to keep working.
Term
EB inductive charging
Inductive charging is “wireless” charging: the road or a pad sends power to the car using magnets. The car has to line up correctly, and the charging spot has to be installed safely in the right place.
A fast charger is a charger that can charge an EV much quicker than a standard outlet. The hosts point out that each fast-charging spot costs a lot to install.
Charging doesn’t stay the same speed the whole time. As the battery gets fuller, most EVs slow down charging, and different cars slow down differently. That affects how long a charger is tied up.
Overstay is when someone keeps a charging spot longer than they need. If their battery is already full (or charging has slowed a lot), the charger is still blocked for other drivers. Some systems nudge or penalize that behavior.
This is a rule in some cities where you have to move your car on a schedule so the street can be cleaned. For charging, it matters because if you’re required to move, you can’t always leave the car plugged in as long as you want.
They’re talking about charging most of the way—starting around 20% battery and going up to full—overnight. The point is to help drivers without tying up chargers during short, busy daytime periods.
Dwell time just means how long the car is sitting there plugged in. If cars stay longer, fewer cars can use the charger each day. That’s why networks care about overnight vs quick daytime charging.
They’re contrasting planned overnight charging with quick daytime top-ups. Quick sessions can still clog up the limited curbside chargers if lots of people try to do them at the same time.
Concept
long term red review
A “long term review” (described here as a red review) is a planning/approval process with the city to understand future infrastructure changes. The goal is to avoid placing chargers where road projects—like bike lanes or bus lanes—are planned soon.
This is an EV charger placed at the curb, near where people park. The city has to approve it because road space is limited and future projects (like bike lanes) can change where chargers can go.
The electric panel is like the building’s power hub. Before installing a charger, they check if the building has enough electrical “room” to handle it.
Capacity approval means the building’s electrical system and the utility/city requirements can support the charger’s power draw. Without it, the charger could be unsafe or require costly upgrades.
They’re talking about how many years the charger can stay in that spot—like 5, 10, or 15. That matters because both the city and the property owner want to know how long the arrangement lasts.
In this context, passive income refers to regular earnings the property owner receives without actively operating the charger. It’s tied to the revenue-sharing agreement rather than the building’s own energy use.
Revenue sharing (rev share) is a business model where the charging operator shares a portion of charger-related revenue with the property owner. In this segment, the building receives quarterly payments as a “sweetener,” while the operator pays the electricity cost directly.
Separately metered means the charger’s electricity usage is measured independently from the rest of the building. This allows the operator to pay the charging energy cost directly instead of reimbursing the building.
Curbside charging means charging your electric car at a charger placed along the street, near where you park. It helps people who can’t install a charger at home, like in apartments.
An RFP is a public request from a city asking companies to submit plans and pricing to do a project. If a company wins, it often gets permission to provide that service in that city.
A greenfield situation means there’s a new opportunity where things aren’t set up yet. It’s like building the first version of a service in a place before lots of competitors show up.
Exclusive rights mean the city lets one company be the main provider for charging in that area. That can make it easier for the company to plan and invest because they’re not competing immediately.
City procurement is the formal process a municipality uses to select vendors for services, often involving timelines, requirements, and contract negotiations. The speaker emphasizes that once a contract is awarded, the city typically doesn’t re-bid immediately, creating stability for the winning operator.
Concept
faster charger distinction
They’re saying people often think of chargers as something you use mainly for long trips. But in a neighborhood setup, the goal is usually convenient charging you can use more regularly.
In some neighborhoods, people park on the street because they don’t have driveways. That means they can’t easily charge at home, so charging has to be available nearby.
A neighborhood charger is a shared charging spot for people who can’t charge at home. The idea is that EVs don’t always need daily charging, so one shared charger can help a lot of neighbors.
Topic
EV adoption differences by city (SF vs Boston)
They compare two cities to show that EV adoption isn’t the same everywhere. Where charging and supportive policies line up, more people buy EVs.
They describe a “chicken-and-egg” dynamic: chargers get installed, but if EV adoption is low, utilization stays low; conversely, if chargers aren’t available, adoption can’t grow. This feedback loop affects how successful charging deployments are in different cities.
S&P Global is referenced as the source of data about EV owners and their likelihood to buy another vehicle and choose gas, hybrid, or electric. In this context, it’s being used to support a data-driven argument about what drives repeat EV purchases.
Concept
West Coast vs East Coast EV adoption
They’re talking about how EV ownership seems to “stick” more in one part of the country than another. The idea is that better charging access makes people more willing to buy and keep EVs.
EV infrastructure is basically the charging network around you. If there are more reliable chargers nearby, people feel more confident buying and keeping an EV.
A charging plan is a clear plan for where you’ll plug in your EV. Instead of hoping you’ll find chargers later, it helps you know what to do before you buy.
Brand
Mercedes Starbucks charging network
They’re describing an earlier strategy where EV buyers were told to use a particular charging network. The speaker’s criticism is that it didn’t guarantee the buyer would have convenient charging where they live and drive.
Public chargers are EV charging stations you can use even if you don’t have a charger at home. They’re important because not everyone can install charging where they live.
Concept
utilization backstop
They’re describing a way to make sure the charger gets used enough to be worth installing. It’s like having a safety net so the business doesn’t lose money if usage is low.
They’re saying that with a slower charging setup, it can take a very long time—like about a day and a half—to fully charge. Faster home charging can cut that time a lot.
They’re talking about sharing chargers in a neighborhood instead of everyone buying their own. That can make EV charging more affordable, especially for people who don’t have a driveway.
They mention rules in New York (and similar efforts in LA) that aim to get most ride-hailing cars electric by 2030. That matters because electric cars need charging infrastructure to support all that driving.
They’re suggesting letting Uber drivers use your charger for a fee. The goal is to make the charger get used more, so it’s not sitting idle.
Concept
fair use
“Fair use” here refers to the practical rules and norms that determine how shared EV charging access should be allocated. When there’s a high concentration of drivers (including rideshare drivers), the question becomes how to prevent one group from monopolizing limited charging spots.
The episode describes a reliability/availability strategy: placing at least two chargers on a block to reduce the chance that a single charger is occupied. This is essentially capacity planning for user access and minimizing “waiting for a free plug” frustration.
Concept
choosy
They use a special term for how they pick where chargers go. The goal is to choose spots that work well for both daytime use and overnight charging.
They call certain street corners “juicy” because they’re in neighborhoods where lots of people live nearby and also near businesses. That mix helps charging work during the day and again overnight.
This is charging that happens during the day when people are already out doing things. The idea is to make it convenient, not just something you can do overnight.
Consistent overnight charging refers to EV charging demand that repeats nightly, typically when vehicles are parked at home or nearby. The hosts use it to justify location planning that supports predictable usage.
The episode discusses distributing chargers across neighborhoods rather than concentrating too many in one place. They argue that too many chargers on a single block can create a “weird experience,” implying a balance between accessibility and local impact.
Concept
knowledge share
Knowledge sharing here refers to how the startup helps cities learn from pilots and share lessons learned about curbside EV charging. It’s an organizational concept about scaling infrastructure by transferring operational know-how.
They mean EVs need more than cars—they need supporting systems like charging locations and the power setup behind them. That takes planning and coordination.
They’re saying EV charging isn’t only about building the hardware. It also depends on how communities plan, make rules, and get people to work together so charging is actually usable.
Level 1 is the slowest way to charge most electric cars. It usually uses regular home electricity, so it’s great for charging over many hours, like overnight.
Range anxiety is the fear that your electric car’s battery won’t last long enough to get where you need to go. Better access to chargers nearby helps reduce that worry.
LIVE
And then there is one example where we deployed in an old school neighborhood in Boston and
we literally had like that one older senior resident come out with a folding chair and
like sit there and protest our existence because she did not like the idea of there being this
new fangled technology that she paid for her tax dollars paid for on her block.
NIMBY is going to NIMBY like it doesn't matter what it is you can put a ice cream stand and
the NIMBYs will NIMBY. The NIMBYs are going to NIMBY.
Hello and welcome to the Atonicast. I'm Kirsten Korosek, transportation editor at TechRunch.
And I'm Ed Niedermeyer. I'm the author of Ludacris the Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors
and Elon Take the Wheel which is now available for pre-order.
Is that all you are Ed?
At this moment that has summed up my entire being, yes.
Great and I'm Alex Roy, co-founder and general partner at New Industry Venture Capital and
the founder of the Human Driving Association. And I'm thrilled to have today's guest on
because she's a fellow New Yorker. We have hundreds of mutual contacts. If Ed and Kirsten
weren't here, we'd just talk about our mutual friends, Tia Gordon, the co-founder and COO
of It's Electric. Welcome Tia.
Thank you guys. I'm so happy to be here.
Before we get started, can I just ask you about your time at Parsons? What was your
degree? You went to Parsons? That's right.
Yeah. So I work in energy and transportation with a design degree which probably should
not be legal, but I do it anyway. And that's our big differentiator. So I went to Parsons
way back in the day. Shout out to obviously New York City there. And it really started off me
off on my career of designing hardware for public space. So I was there during a really
interesting transition time. It was a year before 9-11 when I graduated. And then there is career,
career. And one of the biggest things I did before co-founding It's Electric was design
all of the public-facing technology for the 9-11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center. So
there's a direct line between putting hardware in a physical space that's designed for 50 million
visitors to touch and abuse, and then translating that into work for transportation and tech.
Okay. I want to talk all about It's Electric. So I'm going to stop you right now. I have to say
this. First of all, as a 9-11 survivor myself, I got hit in the head. I appreciate the 9-11
Memorial is one of the, is incredibly well done, incredibly well done. I lived downtown for 25
years, well done. But this thing about the design aspects of your experience really appeals to me
because last night I was in a shopping center in North Scottsdale and there on one side were the
Tesla EV chargers. And anyone, even enemies of Tesla could be blindfolded, could draw what a Tesla
supercharger looks like. It's the height of simplicity. And then on the other side, I forget
what brand it was. Maybe there were two brands of other chargers. And the Tesla chargers,
unless they're broken, you hook the charging unit right back into the cradle. These other chargers
across the way were dirty. The cables were triple the length of the Tesla charger, which make it
seem really great. And yet they were not looped around the, I guess, holding handle or whatever
it's called. And instead, they were lying on the floor such that if you wanted to park there,
you literally had to get out of your car before you parked, move the cable and then park and then
plug it in, which is why two out of three stalls, the cables were dirty and disgusting and I wouldn't
want to charge there. That's my rant. Now, tell us all about its electric and then we'll come back
to this at the end. Well, you couldn't have set me up any better. So thank you for that. Again,
for its electric, we are working on charging and we're solving it for what we call a laser focus
on cities. And going back to my design background and all the things that you talked about, you're
talking about what is basically called a user experience or the experience of actually design
and how that plays into using a charger. And this is what we really wanted to understand
and what we felt everyone and what we call Gen 1 charging did wrong. So the question is,
do you start from designing the unit and then figure out where you're going to put it?
Or do you start with where the unit needs to be and then design the unit into that?
And that's exactly what we did. And all of our decisions follow that framing. So when we first
started this, it goes into a pandemic story where I live in New York City, I live in an apartment,
I never had a car. Sorry, Alex, I didn't. I had a bike. And like a lot of people in New York City
who had little kids or had parents who were older and before vaccines and masks, I got a,
I want to get a pandemic car and I wanted to get an electric car. And when I went to see
where I could charge that in 2021, the answer was basically nowhere and flash forward to 2026.
It's not that much better. So we wanted to design a charger that could go again where it needs to be
and then work backwards from everything there. So we designed a sleek charger. It looks like a
little fire hydrant. It sits on the curb. It has no attached cable. So we're importing the European
standard of a detachable cable. So we don't have the issues that you described. And there's so many,
we could talk for just an hour about detachable cable, but we'll wait for that. And then the sort
of main, you know, secret sauce about us is that we were like, well, how come there's not
thousands of chargers that are already in the ground in cities like New York?
And it's because the infrastructure, the energy infrastructure isn't adequate. So Flow has a
curbside program with Con Edison and DOT here in New York City. It has astronomical utilization,
89% utilization across these chargers. There's WhatsApp groups, drivers messaging each other.
I'm pulling out, you can pull in right now because you can't do reservation systems
on public spaces. And each one of those chargers costs Con Edison about $180,000 to install
because they're all doing a direct utility connection, basically 10 feet down below street
level, initially connection, high voltage, downstep that to 220, 240, and then you've got your level
two charger. What it's electric did instead is you said, well, what is everywhere that has
adequate power that we could just tap into? And the answer was buildings. So we use spare
capacity and buildings to power public charging infrastructure. And then are you working with
then the property owners and are you targeting specific types of buildings?
So our work with the property owners, they say, yes, we'd like to do this. We do it at no cost to
them. And then we give them rev share. So they're getting a free charger in front of their building
where typology agnostic, we've installed in front of a single family home, we've installed in front
of a 16 story, sorry, eight story apartment building and everything in between. And again,
most buildings have spare electrical capacity. It's sort of this
ununderstood entity in cities that we're very excited to be tapping into right now.
So with the detachable cables, is that mean that you're relying on the car owner having
like a home cable or who's supplying the cable? Where does that come in?
Yeah. So you can't see, but we have on video. So I've got my tote bag here and I've got my cable
inside my tote bag. And if you were in Europe, the cable comes with the car that level two cable
comes with the car. But here in the US, it does not yet because we don't have a network of detachable
cable chargers. So it's electric right now distributes the cables to drivers when they sign
up to use one of our chargers in the neighborhood. It's part of our CAC. And we've distributed
close to 600 cables to date, not a single loss or damage cable. And the benefits to go back and
yeah, not a single one. People treat that really nicely because it's your cable. You keep it clean.
It's not covered in dog pee. It's sorry. It's really just a nice thing to have. And the cable
is the first component that breaks on a public charger to your point, Alex. People just drop it.
They might drop when they're done charging. They don't recoil. They just drive away. And then so
you have basically just you have negligence, you have wear and tear, and then you also have
environmental factors such as weather. So we just went through multiple freezes here in New York
City over the winter. Montreal has a lot of problems in regards to winterization and freeze and
thaw and that's impact on those cables. So you got to think about it like if you have a single
charger where there's an attached cable, and let's say that chargers, let's be really generous thing,
let's say it's doing it's 100 sessions of charging per month. That's that same cable that's doing
that work every single time, but for different drivers. But when you're bringing your own cable,
that's you're doing 10 charges, maybe a month. So that one component, just the lifespan of that
extends and that also extends lifespan of that actual charger. So it's a really, again, we're
not pioneers here. This is a European model that's highly proven out. We're just bringing it to the
I'm a relatively new EV owner myself. I'm starting to experience the
Which one do you have again, Ed? What do you have?
I have a BMW i3, which I love. A great little car.
It's not an EV though.
It is. Yeah. Mine doesn't have the range extender. It's a pure EV.
Oh, it is. Okay.
Oh, it is. Yeah. I'm beginning to experience like the relatively unreliable reality of a lot of
public charging. So this idea, and you know, I have I have a little 120 cable that we haven't
gotten to level two yet. But but seriously, I'm, you know, we've got places that we we go to
regularly. I'm gonna have, you know, a dryer plug installed in my parents house so I can put a
level two and plug straight in there. I'm curious, is the cable you mentioned that's the the number
one thing? Is that really the source of unreliability? Is there is our broader issues around this
reliability problem? Because I know like government policy has sought to address this,
right? The the Build Back Better Infrastructure Bill like tied incentives to I think it was
like 80% uptime or there was an uptime requirement, which in my anecdotal experience,
it feels like we're still not meeting. Is there a bigger problem here? Or is it really just about
that about that cable? Well, you know who is the media, right? You know who is media, right, Ed?
You know, go on, Tia. I'm gonna mute myself. No, I mean, I don't mean to oversimplify, but
yes, statistically, the cable is the first fail point on a public charger. And then there's a
whole bunch of other issues, which goes again back to design. So touch pads on exterior locations.
So anything that's basically a touch pad in the sun. Yeah, Arizona, a big problem. Nothing,
nothing works there. Exactly. So you just and so that goes back to my background, like literally
when I again, don't don't let a designer into a new category, because they're just going to tear
everything apart. But my first words, and it's still on our website to this day, I'm like,
why is everything so big and bad and ugly? And that's what we wanted to change. It feels like
there's there's the term is escaping me right now. Eschemorphism. Are you familiar with that?
Okay, oh my god, three people just nodded yes. That is a first. So that's exactly like, why does
the folder on your desktop look like a folder and not like a cookie? It's because you put things in
a folder, you don't put things in a cookie. And so for my reasoning here, I feel like all of these
gen one EV chargers look like gas pumps, because the engineers were like, well, people in the US
go like this, I'm gesturing to take a gas hose out and to put it into my car with fuel, why wouldn't
they want to replicate that for charging their car when we all know it's a lot more equivalent to
just plugging in a phone. And so this is really where we kind of came at things very differently.
And again, thinking where do chargers need to be and then designing for that condition,
as opposed to just designing a random charger and then figuring out where they can actually go,
which is in this case, in gen one's case, the answer was parking lots.
And just the other thing that I've noticed that seems to be a somewhat common point of
failure, although maybe one that's easier to fix, but is the point of sale piece of it? How do you
handle the point of sale, the transaction? Is that with the physical thing? Is it just through
the app? Because I've seen, I've had both of those not be reliable in my very short experience driving
EVs. Yeah, again, belt and suspenders. So you can transact on our chargers via the app,
you can tap to pay. And then of course, there's going to be direct to vehicle coordination
through proofstanders as well, where you just plug in charge.
Is that how many have you developed relationships then with various automakers to do the plug and
charge? Because that is something that a lot of automakers have had talked about for years and
years and like, just couldn't seem to get there. I mean, obviously Tesla is the sort of vanguard
here. They made it, to me, that's actually the big differentiator between Tesla and other companies
is that you could just roll up and it actually became better than gas because even though it took
longer, you didn't have to get out of credit card, you didn't have to deal with anything.
Old school, like when I would drive like test these EVs across country, you'd have like
a bunch of different dongles like off your key chain. Then it kind of went to apps,
but sometimes apps don't work. So the plug and play is like what everyone wants to reach,
but where are we industry wise with these types of chargers, which is not the company's charger
like a Tesla, which is obvious, but like the chargers that you have.
Yeah, it's a very good point. And you're right that the vanguard of Tesla having it just be
plug and charge is where we want everything to be. But you also kind of bring us back to our
core tenant here, which is user experience. And so for other OEMs and where they're getting there,
we're actually, I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but we're working with the CEC to make our chargers
in the same exact form factor to make these bi-directional over the next two and a half years,
so that we can put energy back into grid back into building. And we are working with a variety
of OEM partners on that. And then part of that is to ensure that we have plug and charge integrated
into that work. So we're trying to get everyone looped together here. Once upon a time, we had a
federal administration, we can actually have an hour talk about that as well. That was helping
create national standards, but now we're back to more patchwork solutions.
So the bi-directional components. So you anticipate that in the future, a critical mass of EVs will
be capable of bi-directional charging or power return to the grid, and that you will enable them
to be selling that power back to the grid at scale. At scale. Yeah. So right now, in terms of who can
actually do that, it's a surprising amount of vehicles that have that capability in terms of
their vehicle readiness for that. So Kia, Hyundai, Honda, VW, GM, Ford support it. And other OEMs
are looking to activate this feature through over-the-air software updates. So this is all in
play. And V2G is very nascent. I'm not going to say that this is happening tomorrow, that everyone's
going to be jumping in. But this goes back to the idea that effectively EVs, especially when you go
back to what are sort of core focuses of cities, they're just big batteries on wheels. And so,
you know, I prepared myself for this podcast, given that obviously there's so much discussion
around EV and trying to understand how EV can play into EV, right? Because EVs, for the most part,
should and will be EVs. And so I think there's a huge opportunity that we can talk about about
underutilized EVs and off-hours being able to just move energy into different areas of cities.
So yes, I do see there's a feature where these batteries are deploying energy back out. They
are moving energy around cities. This is why we have this big grant from California because of
their desire to be able to access the power of the combined effort of all these chart, all these
vehicle batteries together. There's 1.5 million street parked EVs, I believe, in California
projected by 2030. And then when you take all of that together, I believe it's around nine gigawatts
of power potential. Again, not all of those are going to be plugged at the same time, but you
take a small slice of that and it can be really impactful. So would its electric be able to then
be a charging provider to robo-taxis? We would love to do that. Some of the fun
things I was doing when I was getting ready to speak with you all was trying to understand
this idea. I mean, I'd love to hear from you also in all the conversations you have when you're
thinking about how EVs are going to charge in cities. And then these conversations around
depot charging and the EVs driving themselves out to depots and then driving themselves back
into the cities in the morning. I think that's great for cities like Phoenix where you have
sort of less congestion. But I was doing math in terms of, for example, there's 80,000 ride
share vehicles in New York City. And if they all needed to go to Queens to charge up at night,
they would need 16 Brooklyn bridges to get out of the city, just in terms of the number.
Or let's say they had to go to Jersey. If you had to get 80,000 EVs from New York City to Jersey,
that would take them 26 hours to get through the Holland Tunnel. So we actually do need to have
charging infrastructure localized within the cities where the EVs are operating. Because the
numbers of EVs in SF and LA, you guys would know this better than I, but we're still in the hundreds,
right? Well, I mean, Waymo's total fleet that they tell us publicly is like more than 3,000. So
let's just say 3,500. It's possibly much larger than that. But that's spread out over 11 cities
at this point, most of which are in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and then Atlanta, Austin.
So yeah, I mean, each market, if you were to go to certain parts of San Francisco, you would assume
that the fleet size and all the other cities, they've deployed have matched that, but that's not
the case yet. The issue I see, and I don't know, Ed and Alex, if you want to comment on it is,
do you talk about things that could break easily and like repeated use and a robot taxi going up
to a curbside charger, which has some sort of, unless there's a person there to plug it in,
there's a robotic arm situation. So during CES this past year, Hyundai was like displaying a few
kind of charging situations. So they had one that was like a robotic charger that like had a little
arm that came out. And then they also had like, I think it was like a pallet mover. And that made
me think of like a pallet with an EB inductive charging that would go like underneath it,
would you probably be the thing that would make the most sense is the vehicle going over it,
you know, in terms of design and like not having other parts, but then how do you
make sure that spot is free and also put it in the road, which I'm pretty sure like the local
DOTs would have an opinion on. So to me, it just the depot thing is a problem because it's expensive
and you would have to have like spaces within the city. But then again, there's lots of and
Alex could comment on this, lots of like parking garages and lots in New York City, where you
could see small numbers of fleets probably being charged. And I agree with all of this. I think
that what we're going to find ourselves in is a repeat pattern of the lessons that are being
learned for EV charging right now where everyone's saying depot, depot, depot. But when you look at
the CapEx on depots in terms of like a real estate parcel in Brooklyn or San Francisco,
maybe you'll get an open parcel for a million dollars if you're lucky, right? And then you've
got to bring your power in and then each stall for a fast charger, quarter of a million dollars,
right? So your payback on a depot is long and it's problematic. And then there's the opposite,
which is curbs. So right now in New York City, we have 6,300 miles of streets with 3 million curbside
spots. So that's 3 million curbside spots for 2 million registered vehicles. So we've got a million
open curbside locations. So again, are we pushing energy back into the grid? Are we
powering AVs overnight? And yeah, the human factor is definitely at play, but we know that humans
are still actually managing the depots. There's not robots in the depots at this point. So it's
still not known, but it's a good time to be curious about the logistics.
So I'm curious about the relationship between, I guess, a landlord or a building owner
and your company and also the logistics of just becoming a user. So let's start there.
I go to your website, I sign up and you guys send me a cable. Is that right?
You'll sign up because you'll see a charger in your neighborhood. So if you're in Chattanooga,
we're not going to send you a cable right now because we're not in Chattanooga. But if you're
in Boston, if you're in San Francisco, if you're in LA, again, we map it and make sure that you're,
our goal is for you to be within a quarter mile walkshed of one of our chargers. That's the distance
most people are willing to walk to get to a charger. And right now, for example, in San Francisco,
we had to stop just moving cable because we had too many people wanting to charge in the same
location and creating this condition where it was not ever available for anyone.
So cars have radically different charging curves. How do you manage that? Do you manage the way
Tesla does? So like after a certain period of time, if charging is maxed out, you penalize them or
there's like an overstay. In New York City, there's so many alternate side of the street parking
spots. Do you service those? Like what are the mechanics of this?
Yeah, our goal is to be able to allow drivers to charge their battery from 20 to 100% on a
long dwell time overnight charge. So we really want to encourage those long time chargers. We're
not looking for do we're not looking for opportunistic two or three hour daytime charges. And so for
that long overnight dwell time, we make sure that we don't penalize them. So for example,
let's say their battery is full at 3am, they're not going to get notification to come move their
car. There's a grace period until around eight or nine in the morning. And then they have to move
their car then. And if not, then there's lowering fees that follow. But people are very good about
turning over once they understand the rules and regs. Your other question was
the relationship with the building owners. Building owners are what we call partners in this.
We have an inbound waitlist where drivers sign up. This is we can kind of talk about this in
regards to how we help rideshare. We'll make sure we get to that. Building sign up on our waitlist.
We then do a desktop evaluation, make sure there's not a tree pit or a fire hydrant in front of
their building that would just be a red flag. We then push it to the city that we're working with
for them to do a long term red review, which means are they going to have a bike lane
planned in a year? Are they going to have a bus lane planned in three years,
in which case we don't want to put a curbside EV charging spot there. But if it passes that
city's review, we then do really quick evaluation of the electric panel in that building.
And then once they are approved for the capacity, they sign an agreement with us that mirrors the
terms in terms of the number of years we are allowed to be in a particular city. So five,
10, 15 years. And then that's all they have to do. We do one day of interior work,
one day of exterior work, then there's a charger in front of their building and they're earning
passive income every quarter. Right now our SF chargers, our last payout to our building properties
there are around $1,300 across two quarters. So really a nice way to offset some electric costs
for that building. Our goal is to be able to offset one family or two family homes entire
annual electric bill by just revenue sharing back the use of the charger. Answering your next
question because I see what it is, the charger is separately metered, so we're not reimbursing
the building for energy. We pay that cost directly. That building is just getting that
sweetener of rev share every quarter. And what you just mentioned, I think your exact phrase was
whether or not you can be in that location or city for five, 10, or 15 years. Can you unpack
that? What is your, you have agreements with the cities and what duration and out of that is that
work? Yeah, so I mean, that's our mode. We've been working diligently on this effort for about
three and a half years. And whereas, first we had to convince people that curbside charging
made sense in their cities. And then from there, we started to see a few RFPs heard to come out.
So of the four RFPs for curbside charging that have been released in the United States, we've won
all four of them. It's a pretty amazing greenfield that we're in right now. Again, we're not going
up against Gen 1 charging. We did beat, this is for you, Ed, we beat Tesla when we won Boston.
And that was a, that's one of our boxes. It can't be done then, because Alex and Ciss otherwise,
but it's good to know. Yeah, that was, that's, that's one of our team's flexes. But yeah,
so what we do is we build agreements with cities wherein we have rights to operate. In some cases,
it's exclusive. And that becomes a massive moat for us, because I don't know if any of you have
ever been through a city procurement or a city contracting process. It's usually about a year
from start to finish. So once that's signed and the ink is dry, the city is not like,
hey, I know what we should do. Let's do another procurement process for the same exact thing.
No, they're done. They're moving on to whatever their next project is. And that is the time in
which we are then now building this incredibly sticky relationship with all of our drivers.
We're becoming that reliable overnight neighborhood charger. We joke, we're very, we're all like
weird Sesame Street fans, because we're older as a startup. And so we always say,
these are the chargers in your neighborhood. Like we're, we're trying to kind of evoke this idea
of this being a neighborhood amenity and something that really people feel a great deal of pride.
They take care of these, they use these, they tell everyone about them, they tell people how
to sign up for them. So it's really changing the entire approach to urban charging.
And, and so do you're, I assume you have, you know, pretty good user data. It sounds like
this is mostly being used, right? So like, like when most people think of the, of the charger,
especially a faster charger, which I guess is the distinction, right? They think this is something
you use once on a road trip far from when, you know, on those trips where you take the car far
from home. Is your user data showing this is, this is really being used by people who live in
that neighborhood? There's, it's designed for the people that live in that neighborhood. So we're
not for like the bridge and tunnel people that are coming in for a show from out of the suburbs
and the place to charge. We're in the neighborhood where there's on street residential parking.
Where people rely on the street as their, as their garage.
And, and I, you know, in dense urban areas, oftentimes, you know, not a driveway that you
can just put your car in and, and, and charge in overnight, right? Like, like to me, this is,
and we've talked about this on the show for, for years, that this is like,
like such a huge adoption issue, right? That, that you focus on the, you know, in terms of
making this technology comparable to gas cars, that, that side of the freeway fast charger
is, is super important. But in terms of how people, like the vast majority of miles, and again,
like even being relatively new, you realize you get even an EV with, with, with a small battery,
you don't need to charge every single night. You know, we charge maybe once a week, right? And so,
and so a neighborhood charger could really with, with one charger that is shared. I mean, you could
be boosting adoption for a huge number of people who otherwise don't have any way to charge, right?
Yeah. I mean, that's our other flex. So in some cities, like SF has our highest utilization,
because it just by, by, by sheer number has the highest EV adoption rate of any city in the country.
But then you have Boston, which was our first city, and they have just like a powerhouse of a
mayor who's incredibly progressive in terms of clean energy policy, Michelle Wu, she wants to
have a public charger than a five minute walk of every Bostonian. And that makes sense. But
EV adoption is much lower in Boston. So what happens in Boston, again, is we get the chicken egg,
all egg effect, basically the chargers go in, and either we get great utilization like SF,
or we get lower utilization like Boston, but when we get reports of EV adoption,
people will write to us and say, I always wanted an EV I could never get one, because I have nowhere
to charge. I just bought my first EV. Or I was getting rid of my EV because I was going to pull
my hair out because public charging is so miserable. And now I'm going to keep it because of you.
That's the scale effect that we're looking to build out.
So I was just chatting with some folks about this, some numbers from S&P Global where they
looked at EV owners going back to buy another car and whether they go gas or hybrid or electric.
It's fascinating data. What was really most interesting about it was how much the West
Coast stands out in terms of EV buyers. They rebuy EVs at a much higher rate on the West Coast.
And it was like having this really interesting conversation about what may be going into that.
And the most data-driven answer that I got was infrastructure. That's the key differentiator
in West Coast cities, from East Coast cities in terms of that EV infrastructure.
So that leads me to the question. It's great that Uber's an investor and you all have been,
why aren't OEMs investing in your company? Or are they? Because it seems like as a matter of
adoption, what your company is doing to me seems really laser targeted at the low
hanging fruit in terms of really enabling adoption and also preventing people from
buying an EV because they're excited about the idea and then having a terrible user experience
because it turns out they don't have the infrastructure in place to support a good
user experience. That's exactly right. So yes, no. I mean, my constant sort of
CTA to OEMs is like, who's going to be the EV for cities? You get a lot of people out there
saying that it's great for offers, great for this, it's great for that, it's great for family,
but who is the EV for cities? So we are going to be doing a partnership which I can't name yet
with an amazing OEM that is doing things a little bit differently in that when they're
selling their EVs, they're making sure that the buyer has what they call a charging plan.
Either they check off the box, it says, I have a home charger, I'm good to go.
Or if they don't have that home charger, they make sure and it's not what it was five years ago
where it's like, oh, here uses the Mercedes Starbucks charging network. It's not that.
It is where are you going to charge? We're going to specifically map out where your
public chargers are near you and because of our ability to literally put a charger anywhere
where there's a building and a curb, there's a really great relationship for us to be able
to work with them because we can help them sell more cars and they can help us ensure that we
have that utilization backstop. I'm about to bite the bullet on it. We have to get a whole new
service to the house. We have to get a whole new circuit put in. I can't wait. It's going to be
awesome. Being able to level two charge at home is going to be a game changer. It is.
But it's not an insignificant cost. EVs already, I mean, I bought a used one so I got a screaming
deal. So that makes the math work for me as a recent used buyer, but for a lot of people,
it's a big cost to get a new EV. You got this additional cost on top of it.
And then again, the reality is I know making this investment going in, I'm not going to use it that
often. Honestly, I almost feel like if there were some way I could get on next door and let my
neighbors know and charge them to share it, I would be open to that because I'm barely ever,
like I said, we literally only charge once a week or so. And with this right now,
it takes like 36 hours to do a full charge. This will cut that dramatically. And so the idea that
you have to, it's nice to have it yourself. But the idea that every EV owner has to have their own
charger, I think, is also something that we can reexamine, right? And I think this neighborhood
model is a really provocative way of doing that. Yeah, you're experiencing the gold standard of
just being able to go home and charge. That's the best. And we're just bringing that to everyone
who wants to do that, but they park on the street. And to your point, yeah, you're not charging every
night, except if you are a rideshare driver. So we can kind of like back into the whole Uber
thing. So rideshare drivers put five times more VMTs on their car than anybody else. 80,000 rideshare
drivers in New York City, New York City has Law 104, Green Rides Initiative, LA has something similar,
which requires here in New York for Uber, Lyft, TLC to be majority electric by 2030.
And the barrier there again is infrastructure. I'll tell you what, talk to Uber. Let's figure
out a way where I can rent my charger out to Uber drivers. They can come in and then, you know,
I'll like sell them like sodas at a markup too. And I'll just be like a little mean,
I work from home. It'd be great. I have like a little mini little gas station here for Uber
drivers. I would be down for that. You don't need to get Uber involved. You can literally like go
build yourself a little app. You can vibe code it. You can have that thing up and running and like,
you know, in the time that it takes that level two charger to be installed. I do have a question
though about like the human dynamic in neighborhoods because neighborhoods are can be amazing,
wonderful places, but they can also there can be conflicts about really silly stuff,
including like who gets to use the EV charger and when and when you have a high concentration of
certain neighborhoods of maybe Uber drivers, you can start seeing like what's fair use.
So when you were looking at where you're going to put these, like in what neighborhoods,
how are you thinking through that and have you also employed an idea like we have one on one
side of the street and then we have one on the other side of the street because I lived in Chicago
and I didn't have a car, except for a couple of times I did have a car and I knew based on how
I entered the street, like I was never going to park on the other side of that street. Like it just
like it's the flow of urban living. So how do you decide where to place these and do you concentrate
like two on a block or, you know, every other block? If you see, I don't know, a lot of EV
owners in an area. I love these questions. Okay. So first, people are, neighbors are weird.
Humans are creatures of habit and people like new things or they don't. So sometimes we come
into a neighborhood and we're warmly welcomed and everyone is very happy for us to be there.
And then there is one example where we deployed in an old school neighborhood in Boston and we
literally had like that one older senior resident come out with a folding chair and like sit there
and protest our existence because she did not like the idea of there being this new fangled
technology that she paid for her tax dollars paid for on her block. NIMBY is going to NIMBY.
Like it doesn't matter what it is. You can put an ice cream stand and the NIMBYs will NIMBY.
The NIMBYs are going to NIMBY. So it turned out that she actually did not have beef with us. She
realized though that there are going to be a lot of people that are saying, oh, I don't drive an EV
yet. Here is my city government quote, taking away my parking spot. We can definitely talk
about that expression as well. To put in an EV charging spot and my tax dollars paid for that
and you get lots of grumbling, right? And we're a startup. We're scrappy. We made the sticker.
It's really cute. It's a big orange cat. It has a dollar sign collar and says,
this EV charger cost tax payers zero dollars. We brandish the chargers with these stickers.
We do like a little proactive graffiti and all of the grumbling kind of stopped because then
they realized that this was not paid for by the city. All of our work with cities are no
cost bids to the city because we keep the revenue. But to your other question around
sharing the spots and using the spots, we always want to have at least two chargers on a block
because it's a frustrating user experience if there's one and it's occupied.
So you want to increase the odds that someone's going to have access to that spot. So you do what
we call a choosy and then we locate them on what we call juicy corners. We like expressions here
at its electric. So a juicy corner coined by our project director Judy Chang is a corner that is
residential high density but then overlaps with a commercial corridor. So this way we can get
opportunistic daytime charging as well as that consistent overnight charge where that
charger is being used every single night. And then what we want to do is always make sure that
we're kind of spreading these out. So we don't want to have 25 chargers on a block. That would be
a weird experience for that neighborhood. We want to have two to three chargers on a block
but then not on the next block after that. It's really planned out. So that ties also to the
fact that it's electric is while we have a brilliant piece of hardware that's well engineered
we're not a team that's built top down from engineers. We're actually built top down from
designers and urban planners and policy experts who think about all of these logistics with cities
because cities also don't have this in their playbooks. This does not exist curbside charging.
So we help socialize. We help pilot. We make sure that they knowledge share what they've
learned with other cities. They compare notes. They come up with processes. They come up with
plans. They come up with budgets because we're really building out a new layer of infrastructure.
I know LA is the one exception. But there's really no other cities that have really just
played around with public charging the way that that we are and the appetite for commercial
capital. It sounds like you're dangerously close to suggesting that like solving major
problems is not merely a matter of engineering and technology that there are in fact other
skill sets that are really important to bring to bear to actually solving these things.
It is a social problem. Charging is a social problem.
And where are you in the lifecycle of the company? How much have you raised?
What's your status? What's going to happen next?
We closed our seed round in summer of 2024. We raised a total of around 9.9 million in equity.
We've raised 7 million in non-dilutive. 5.3 million is in the federal courts. We'll see how
that shakes out. And we're in just this period of immense growth. We have some big new cities
that will be announcing soon. And we've done this all with a really, really scrappy team,
a team of less than 10. So we're really proud of everything that we've done.
And we just do it by sheer force of will of just finding the solutions again through these soft
skills as it were, Ed, of social understanding and comprehension of dynamics that has really helped
us move a lot further faster in regards to just doing something really basic, which shouldn't
be that complicated, which is just making sure you can plug in your car when you park on the street.
Well, I have to endorse the decision to use an orange cat as one of the stickers. I'm sure you
saw the orange cat walk across my screen a minute ago. And then you'll have to talk to Ed about
getting one on his curbside because he lives in an urban area. So if you guys ever go to Portland,
you'll have to do that. Portland just had some advancements in their policy work there.
They needed them. So Kirsten, I'm getting one put in my driveway, but we have about a block away
from the city of Portland was very early in putting chargers in. And I always, when I walk past it,
every time I go to the store, and it's like an example of they were actually too early,
they really thought it was a great idea to get EV chargers in. And they had this quite an early
program. And this charger is, it's like, I think, a blink. And it's like level one. And it's like
broken. And I literally, I walk past it like every other day. I've seen it in use once and stuff.
And so I think there's been, but that was, I can't remember when that happened, but I was like
2011 or 2012. So it was like quite early in all this, but it's been amazing to see how much learning
has happened in this space. And I think that just the whole idea of a neighborhood charger,
to me, it just really feels like such a natural evolution of a lot of the learning that's come
along that process. And if you want to wait to put your charger in,
like, we might be able to help here. Okay, well, let's talk. I'm actually dangerously close to
pulling the trigger on that on that electrical work. So maybe we should chat after the show.
Deal making happening right here on the Atonicast. Tia, thanks so much for joining us today. Ed and
Alex, yeah, thanks for showing up. And to our audience, thanks for listening to another episode
of the Atonicast.
About this episode
Tiya Gordon, co-founder and COO of It’s Electric, explains how her company is rethinking urban EV charging by putting sleek curbside chargers where city drivers actually park. The discussion digs into why public charging often fails, from broken cables and clunky interfaces to bad siting and city politics. Gordon also outlines the company’s building-powered model, revenue sharing with property owners, and future plans for bidirectional charging that could support the grid, rideshare fleets, and urban energy management.
Kirsten, Ed & Alex sit down with Tiya Gordon, co-founder and COO of It’s Electric, to explore how curbside EV charging can unlock electric vehicle adoption in dense cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. We discuss why most public EV chargers fail, how It’s Electric uses spare building power to create neighborhood charging without expensive utility trenching, and why better urban charging infrastructure could be essential for the future of EVs, rideshare fleets, and robotaxis.
