Interest in electric vehicles might be growing, but there are still several barriers to owning one. Although EV owners living in the suburbs might be able to have a charger installed in their garage, renters, apartment dwellers, or homeowners without a garage or carport don’t have that option. This makes overnight charging difficult in urban centers like New York City or downtown Los Angeles.
Itselectric hopes to fill that gap with EV chargers built for dense cities. Its low-profile Level 2 chargers are explicitly designed for curbs, where they take up less than a square foot of real estate. Itselectric says it shrunk down the charger “by removing the big, the bad, and the ugly” found on the typical EV charger, which—unlike the startup’s design—typically features a touch screen, payment interface, and charger cable.
Rather than keeping a cable on deck, Itselectric’s charger requires drivers to go the European route by keeping their detachable cable in the trunk. While this mainly helps to cut down on bulk, it’s also said to boost reliability for the public, as many EV charger “breakdowns” are just cable issues. The startup will give a cable to each driver that signs up for an Itselectric membership. This membership (managed through a smartphone app) is also what drivers use to pay for each charge.
Because Itselectric can’t just go around sticking chargers wherever it pleases, its strategy is to “partner” with property owners interested in offering a charger to the public. In exchange for permission to install a charger on a property’s curb, Itselectric drips a minimum of $1,000 in passive income per year into the owner’s pockets. The charger connects directly to the city’s electrical grid, which means the property owner’s electric bill doesn’t increase. Itselectric also will be responsible for securing the necessary permits to install on shared ground.
At Level 2, the startup’s chargers can’t restock an EV’s battery in half an hour like a Level 3 fast charger can. But that isn’t Itselectric’s goal, anyway. Without the ability to charge overnight, city dwellers often find EV ownership too impractical to be worthwhile. Because urban centers are more population-dense than suburban or rural areas (the latter of which certainly has its own barriers to EV ownership, to be clear), a lack of overnight chargers presents a major obstacle to achieving the low- or zero-carbon transportation goals set out by some state governments.
Itselectric just installed its pilot chargers at two office buildings in Brooklyn. While most of the startup’s chargers will find their way into residential or mixed-use areas, the pilot offers Itselectric a chance to study how its chargers fare in the real world. Eventually, the startup hopes to provide one EV charger for every ten public parking spaces in New York City; meanwhile, it’s working with city representatives to bring its chargers to other cities in the US.
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