How to end battery fires in New York City
It’s 2024, and NYC’s battery-fire crisis is getting worse by the day. There have already been more fatalities this year than all of last year – and that year was much worse than the year before that. There are a lot of ideas being thrown around about how to address it, but very little in the way of meaningful traction to solve things yet.
At PopWheels, we’ve created the solution that can rapidly and meaningfully solve the crisis (and every day dozens more delivery workers agree). In doing so, we’ve identified a few key principles that we believe are necessary for anyone trying to address this critical issue.
1. The fire crisis won’t be solved as long as people are charging at home. The main reasons battery fires keep happening is because of damaged batteries and chargers that are mismatched with the batteries they are charging. Improving the caliber of the battery people buy won’t matter if the batteries are poorly-maintained and the chargers are not compatible – even UL certified batteries catch fire in those circumstances.
2. If it doesn’t make financial sense for delivery workers, it won’t work. It’s a gross oversimplification to say that delivery workers only care about the cheapest solution – but on balance, that’s definitely a priority for many of them. Solutions that increase their total cost such e-bike rental or mandating UL certification will only have the effect of pushing them to grey-market batteries or other available solutions such as unlicensed gas mopeds – a dynamic we are already observing.
3. Listen to delivery workers. There are a lot of subtle dynamics to the needs of delivery workers, and there’s simply no substitute for being out in the streets every day, listening to their perspective and advice. Understanding how far they’ll travel to swap a battery, their need to keep a second battery charged, how many hours they’re not working because of battery issues – all of these need to inform how anything works. If nothing else, understanding the challenges that many of them had to go through just to get here will provide a newfound respect for their daily struggles.
At PopWheels, we believe our battery swap network honors these three principles to their core. Our company is intensely delivery worker-focused; every product decision is informed by our daily interactions with delivery workers. We prioritize cost-efficiency to ensure our cost to delivery workers is less than they currently spend on batteries. And because we are a closed-loop system, our customers no longer charge batteries at home.
We’re excited to continue building to make battery fires a thing of the past in NYC.
Want to learn more? Drop us a line at info@popwheels.energy