As New York City begins the process of “going electric” with its fleet of 80,000 TLC-licensed, high-volume for-hire vehicles (HVFHVs), entrepreneurs are seeing an opportunity – among them, a professor named Moshe Cohen, who quickly understood that faster, more streamlined electric vehicle (EV) chargers are an essential component to the success of a project this massive. According to Cohen, who launched a company that is currently designing, manufacturing and installing EV chargers in Manhattan parking garages, drivers should ideally be able to get 200 miles after five minutes of charging – about as long as it takes for a fill-up at a gas station. The chargers should also be able to accommodate “any and all types of plugs.” It is one thing to live where it’s easy to plug into a charger in your own garage, he said, but most people who have cars in NYC do not have their own garage… they pay to park in one or they park on the street.
Cohen, who was an assistant professor of finance and economics at Columbia University, attempted to create an EV taxi fleet in NYC several years ago but quickly realized his timing wasn’t great. The taxi business was still reeling from the pandemic, with revenue dropping 81%, according to city data. In the process, he found that operating taxis is a low-margin business where success depends on maximizing time on the road, so his focus shifted to EV chargers in 2021, when he launched a charger-manufacturing company called Gravity. His goal: to put them in garages that taxis could pull into for rapid refills.
This past spring, NYC’s Transportation Department and the New York Power Authority announced plans to install as many as 13 fast-charging hubs – each able to accommodate 50 vehicles – in municipal parking garages and lots in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. The Transportation Department has already installed 8 fast chargers in garages in Manhattan and Queens, and, separately, some 100 curbside chargers in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens – but one would not describe them as “fast.” The Transportation Department reported in May that some 7,200 users had plugged into the curbside chargers 49,250 times from July 2021 through December 2022, with the average session lasting just over three hours.
Source: New York Times
