When the world is feeling heavy, and like it’s being taken over by robots, it’s helpful to step away from the computer and seek out some real human connection.
That’s what I was thinking when I went up to London last week to the Everything Electric Show – and it didn’t disappoint.
I spoke to so many innovators who are working hard to break down some of the big roadblocks that stand in the way of clean-transport and clean-energy adoption.
Here are my top five favourites:
Solution: Kerbo Charge
Kerbo Charge is one of those incredibly simple ideas that you wish you’d had yourself – it has the potential to have a genuinely huge impact.
Home charging with a smart charger and tariff is by far the most affordable way to power a vehicle, and founders Michael Gould and Ben Whitaker are working hard to unlock that benefit for people who don’t have a house with a driveway.
Michael even gave me a demo of their latest innovation, designed to make sure people with restricted mobility are able to use Kerbo Charge as easily as possible.
I loved this dedication to making home EV charging both affordable and accessible.
The solution: ClearWatt
Also in the theme of bringing EV adoption to the mainstream, I loved chatting to the guys at ClearWatt. They’re helping to make buying a second-hand EV less scary with their battery health-check tools.
ClearWatt aren’t just providing tools to increase buyer confidence, they’re also on a mission to demystify battery health, which can often feel misleading and confusing, with their battery health rating system. It works in a similar way to an EPC rating, giving the customer an easier to understand A+ to D rating.
This is exactly the human-centered shift in communication that the industry needs, to enable the general public to better understand and trust this new technology.
Solution: &Charge
Range anxiety, oh range anxiety. Would you even exist if public charging wasn’t consistently the most frustrating and unreliable user experience to exist in the 21st century?
The potential impact &Charge could have on the future of clean transport can’t be understated. As a UX designer I immediately saw their proposition as more than just a useful tool for drivers to check if a charger is operating before visiting it (invaluable in itself!) but if they can make a success of it, it has the potential to be one of the most impactful user research and reporting tools available to public charging operators.
Allowing them to make some desperately needed improvements.
Solution: Faircharge
Faircharge founder and automotive journalist Quentin Willson, has been leading the campaign to get fairer, more affordable EV ownership and charging onto the political agenda.
They’ve also been doing some brilliant work to combat misinformation around electric vehicles. For example their free download ‘The Little Book of E-myths’ busts some of the common misconceptions heard from EV sceptics.
Solution: Convoy
And finally, with a slightly different focus, I just loved the Convoy E-trailer.
As a parent whose main mode of transport to school/nursery/work and back again for many years was a trusty (and hefty!) tag-along bike, I know just how gruelling it is to try and heave a 7-year-old, who isn’t pedalling, up one of Brighton’s massive hills.
Active travel is by far the healthiest way to get around, but it becomes much harder when you have small children.
This brilliant electric tag-along invention means you don’t have to swap your own bike out for a giant cargo e-bike, you can simply attach the e-trailer to your bike for a much needed electric boost when you’re carrying your precious cargo.
Great for the parents. Great for the kids. Great for the local community (we all hate the chaos around schools caused by parents in their SUVs). Great for the planet.
And to finish off, a couple of special shout-outs;
GreenPower; the education charity focussed on developing careers in STEM, with their electric vehicle kits for schools. Such a brilliant way to inspire the innovators of tomorrow.
And Heatable simply because as designers, we can’t resist a bit of lovely branding. Bravo to the creative team who worked on that, and the wider business for trusting their designers and doing something a bit different – it looks like it’s working.
We hope you enjoyed this article – it was written by the real human Megan Sayers, co-founder of MakeGood, a brand and digital agency for people and planet.
Photo credits: Photo by Francis Odeyemi on Unsplash, Kerbo Charge and Convoy.
