As a means of easing “range anxiety” for electric vehicle owners, this startup plans on making car charging as easy as ordering a pizza for delivery.
Sparkcharge is a company that is developing a service that will allow EV drivers to order small, portable charging units to their location at the press of a button. They just need to open an app, ask for a charger delivery, and wait for a driver to show up for $20 worth of electricity that would get them approximately 100 miles.
Additionally, the battery pack can produce 1 mile’s worth of charge every 60 seconds, which is reportedly 14 times faster than standard home-based charging units.
Sparkcharge, which is based out of Buffalo, New York, was recently awarded a $1 million prize in a tech competition. The company plans on using the funds to hire staffers and manufacture the charging devices so they can ship out at least 1,000 units by 2019.
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Though they will initially be partnering with road maintenance companies, they hope to one day partner with platforms like Uber and Lyft as a means of making the service more accessible.
“We’ll have this really good landscape, so EV owners can have a charge delivered to them wherever or whenever they want,” the company’s CEO told Forbes.
“It’s the way the infrastructure should be,” he added. “If you want a pizza, you open up your phone, you hit a button and it’s delivered. We thought, ‘Why can’t we do that for electric vehicles?’”
