Power management systems will play a key role in the culture shift to EVs.
The shift to electric vehicles (EVs) has turned out to be anything but an overnight revolution. Even as the charging infrastructure expands, sticker prices come down, and sales go up (from 5% of all new cars sold in 2020 to 14% in 2022), we’re still adapting one piece at a time.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, of course. The first modern interstate highway, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, wasn’t opened until 1940, more than three decades after the launch of the Model T Ford in 1908. Meaningful change is never instantaneous.
We’re getting there, but according to a Yahoo finance survey, just 40% of millennial-aged drivers report a willingness to buy an EV, and that number gets lower and lower as you go back through each generation. This survey also reports that 70% of those polled had never been inside an EV in the first place.
That even the youngest car buyers are hesitant to get on board should stand as evidence that some of the biggest hurdles the EV industry faces are cultural.
Normalizing the EV
Generally speaking, all the right numbers are ticking up, and there will be an eventual tipping point where the EV has been totally normalized, wherein the novelty wears off. EVs will become “just another option” and—from there—the preferred option.
Tesla continues to lead the market, reinforcing the impression of EVs as a status symbol despite a long list of practical advantages over conventional vehicles, including lower maintenance and fuel costs.
To persuade more drivers to consider an electric vehicle, EVs need to be presented as a practical alternative to conventional autos, and fleet use stands at the front line of this change.
There are plenty of reasons for fleet managers to consider EVs. In California, the standard mileage reimbursement rate stood at around 0.655 cents at the end of 2023, up from 0.585 cents in January 2022. That may not sound like a big spike, but when you consider that the reimbursement rate was the same in 2022 as in 2008, even this small increase points to trends that fleet owners need to keep an eye on.
On average, drivers can expect to get three to five more miles out of a gallon on the highway than they do in the city, so anytime gas prices see a spike, it will be the last-mile delivery services, couriers and transportation companies that feel the pinch first, with the constant stop-start rhythm of making deliveries in the city.
A cycle of improvement
It is difficult to blame delivery, transportation, and courier companies for hesitating to switch to an all-electric vehicle fleet. For every plus to converting, there’s a minus.
The San Francisco area boasts more than 14,000 EV charging stations, Los Angeles nearly 20,000, and the state of Vermont leads the pack, per capita, with one EV charger for every 703 residents. That’s all good for companies in these areas, but in rural areas and small towns from coast to coast, it’s not difficult to drive a hundred miles without seeing a single charging station. In Mississippi, for instance, you’ll find just one charger per ten thousand residents.
Thankfully, solutions are already underway. Federal funds to the tune of $7 billion for EV battery components and materials and $7.5 billion for EV charging infrastructure have been allocated in an effort to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
What we should expect to see in the coming years is what we tend to see whenever a new technology rolls out: The technology is first championed by a niche group until the infrastructure is built, encouraging more investment into the hardware, which enables greater investment into the infrastructure, and so on. Through this cyclical process, as technology improves, it becomes more affordable, efficient, reliable, and accessible.
Bold but cautious steps
For every example of a business owner who lost out through hesitancy to adapt to changes in their field, there are just as many examples of businesses sinking their resources into hasty, ill-conceived changes in direction.
For instance, selecting a subpar inverter for transforming Direct Current (DC) to Alternating Current (AC) comes with risks like heat runaway. This positive temperature feedback effect causes components to overheat due to insufficient cooling through battery walls. If you’ve ever seen a device melting at the charger port, you’re probably looking at an instance of heat runaway.
When it comes to the motor driver—the component used to manage vehicle speed and torque—you have your usual issues like overheating, as well as any number of potential compatibility hangups. In particular, software issues head the most common problems reported by fleet owners.
Building effective power management systems is key to the coming shift to the EV era. Effective, efficient power management means fewer hazards, safer vehicles, less strain on the charging infrastructure, and further proliferation of electric vehicles, bringing us ever closer to that inevitable tipping point.
The motor driver also manages the actual driving experience behind the wheel of an EV. With multi-gear shifting and effective torque management, you have an electric vehicle that’s easy and intuitive to drive.
New horizons
These are uncharted waters for many business owners. If you are investing in electric vehicles at any level right now, you are an innovator, which comes with a certain degree of risk. But that doesn’t mean that the inherent risks to innovation can’t be managed and mitigated.
Ensuring that you’re working with the right people is critical to moving with confidence. A fleet owner’s job is to manage their fleet; expecting them to become an overnight expert in EV parts distribution is simply unrealistic. Beyond simply selecting the right components for a power management system, supply chain issues need to be considered, including component availability and cost considerations. This is why finding the right distribution partners in the EV field is so important.
TTI is devoted to facing new challenges in the EV field head-on, relying on our network of seasoned transportation specialists to keep their fingers on the pulse of new market and technological trends to secure the right components at the right price for optimal performance. We’re proud to have shipped more than 27 billion units in the last year alone, setting an industry-leading delivery rate and ensuring that our partners have everything they need to stay on the cutting edge of their own respective industries.