How to cram EV fast chargers into tight urban spaces

Volts

NYC’s Revel is trying to build urban EV fast chargers and demand for those chargers (in the form of its own EV rideshare network) simultaneously. In this episode, Revel’s Tobias Lescht discusses the challenges of urban fast charging and the company’s plans to expand beyond NYC.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

The NYC company Revel began life as the owner and operator of an electric-moped rideshare network, but it kept running into trouble finding reliable fast charging in the urban environments where it operated.

Share

When it looked into the urban-charger business, it found a classic chicken-and-egg problem: no one would make the substantial upfront investments to build urban fast chargers without sufficient demand; at the same time, few urban consumers or fleets were willing to bet on EVs without sufficient charging infrastructure. Who goes first?

Tobias Lescht

Revel has come up with a distinctive answer: build the chargers and demand for the chargers at the same time. So it shifted from mopeds to cars, developing a rideshare network in which all drivers drive EVs and all the EVs charge at Revel facilities. It is the chicken and the egg.

Subscribe now

Revel has begun building a network of urban fast chargers in NYC, and along the way, it has done a good deal of thinking about where to locate them, how to operate them, and how to expand the model beyond NYC. Today I’m excited to talk with Tobias Lescht, head of EV charging infrastructure for Revel, about what the company has learned, the role of urban fast charging, and the prospects for more cities getting these chargers.

Okay, then, without further ado, Tobias Lescht of Revel. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Tobias Lescht

Thanks, David. Great to be here.

David Roberts

So, just to orient people a little bit, I want you to start by just talking briefly a little bit about the history of the company because you've kind of — there are twists and turns involved. The company has pivoted and is doing a couple of different things. So, maybe just briefly tell the story of where you started and where you are now.

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, definitely. Revel has lots of twists and turns in its history, and it's pretty amazing that we've ended up where we are now. I don't think that was premeditated, but sometimes we like to say it was because it sounds like a good story. But anyways, Revel started in 2018 as an electric moped company in Brooklyn, New York. The co-founders scraped every dollar and cent they could together from friends, family, themselves, and basically bought 68 mopeds and launched them in Brooklyn. And it really just took off. So, a year later, they then raised some more money and bought 1000 mopeds and put them on the road in Brooklyn.

And that's really where I joined the company, about a year after it started. Then from there, you know, we were launching in DC, Austin, Oakland, San Francisco. We really tried to scale it up, and it was going really well. And then COVID hit, and that was pretty hard for a micro-mobility platform that required you to share helmets, as you could imagine, so —

David Roberts

I didn't even think of that aspect.

Tobias Lescht

The stats from before COVID to COVID obviously went to zero. But then, even after a lot of the restrictions were lifted, people just changed the way that they did things.

David Roberts

Interesting. I would almost think that trying to avoid subway cars or trying to avoid crowded public transit would send more people to an individual —

Tobias Lescht

And that did definitely happen in New York. So, summer of 2020 was absolutely crazy because no one was taking the subway. People were not taking Uber and Lyfts. So, really, the only way to get around New York was on these mopeds. So, we were doing 100,000 miles a day, and I was kind of in charge of making sure that operation worked at scale. And it was pretty awesome. I mean, we really had that thing humming, and then there were a few incidents later, and even during that summer, we had really decided that the moped business was great.

It was super fun. Definitely the most fun I've ever had in a job, but it wasn't super scalable, and it only really worked in, like, two cities in America. You know, San Francisco, New York, where you have the density.

David Roberts

Interesting. Is that because of density or something else? Something cultural?

Tobias Lescht

I think a bit of both. It's density. Car ownership is a big component of it. There's also just like, the cultural piece. Anyway, so it's just not something that we could really expand to a lot more cities. And then even in those markets, there's only a certain number of people who are willing to go get on a moped, I guess. It isn't like Milan or Paris or, you know, somewhere else where everyone's riding around, or Vietnam. That's the only way to get around. So, yeah, it was a really fun business, but I honestly, we just decided that we needed to get into four wheels, and there was so much going on with electrification at that time.

We just had so many tailwinds there that that's really where we wanted to focus. So, essentially, I came over with one of the co-founders of the company, and we sat in the basement of our office all through COVID, trying to plan out how we would launch a rideshare service in New York that was all electric. And that was a really interesting time, because we essentially didn't know anything about charging. Zero. We were looking up, googling, "What's an L2? What's a DC fast charger?" But then we got through that, and we were thinking, how are we going to charge — that time we wanted to buy about 50 EVs — how are we going to charge those in New York? And there was no infrastructure. It didn't exist. So, we thought about installing Level 2s, the pros and cons of that.

Public Level 2s, you mean that's what you were thinking about, just for our fleet?

We honestly were just thinking, "How do we charge our fleet?" So, we kind of had this light bulb moment when we realized, why is there no fast charging infrastructure in New York? Because with a rideshare fleet, you could try to do it with Level 2s, but it's really hard to basically get through a duty cycle in a day with one charge on these vehicles. So, we knew we needed some DCFC, and there just wasn't any. I mean, outside of some Tesla stations, which have pay to park to get in, there's like one site at the airport.

There really wasn't anything out there in the whole of New York City, which is the biggest city in America.

David Roberts

So fast charging, Level 2, specifically?

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, Level 3 fast charging. And then Level 2. I mean, everything is in a parking garage. You have one or two chargers, so you can't run a fleet off that at all. And that wasn't something that was scalable for us. So we looked at the Level 2, Level 3, and realized that there's a chicken-and-egg problem. The reason there's no fast charging in New York City, at least a few years ago, is because there are no EVs in New York City. There are very few. I think it was, like, 10,000 EVs in the entire New York City area, which is not many.

David Roberts

So, this is the famous chicken-and-egg problem that everybody's having right now that's afflicting all cities everywhere: no one wants to invest to build the chargers until there's enough cars to demand them, to utilize them, to make them pay off, but no one wants to get the cars until there's enough charging to support them. And so, this is the standoff we're in everywhere right now.

Tobias Lescht

Definitely. It's everywhere. And, most acute in the densest urban areas, where the cost of real estate is the highest and the cost to install is the highest.

David Roberts

Right.

Tobias Lescht

And, you know, the first wave of people who bought EVs had garages and access to home charging, and then they would use fast chargers infrequently, but sometimes. But because there were enough people, you had, say, in California, who had access to their garage to charge overnight, it kind of let some of these fast charging stations actually get built. It kind of wasn't as big of a chicken-and-egg problem. But New York City doesn't have garages. None of the garages really had Level 2 chargers in them at all. So there's, like, no way to own an EV in New York.

Pretty crazy. So, we decided, okay, this is not just a rideshare play where we're going to put cars on the road and drive them and charge them at our own sites. We wanted to break that chicken-and-egg problem by providing the demand that was needed to build these large, fast-charging stations in urban environments and do that with our fleet. And most of the time, our fleet was charging overnight. So, it was this really great complimentary duty cycle that allowed members of the public to come charge during the daytime. And us use a site mostly overnight, but allowed us to build out this large-scale infrastructure that otherwise wasn't economically possible.

David Roberts

Right. So, this is the big insight, this is how you break the chicken-and-egg problem: you produce the chicken and the egg, basically.

Tobias Lescht

Yeah. At the same time.

David Roberts

You make the chargers and you make the demand for chargers via your own rideshare company. This was the biggest —

Tobias Lescht

This was it, yeah. So this was like, you know, two guys in a basement coming up with this idea. And then essentially, we went out and looked for sites, and then we were like, "Oh, man, there's no, there's no power." I mean, we knew this when we were looking at moped locations to run our mopeds out of, as we needed some power to charge those batteries, albeit, you know, 600 amps or 800 amps of power. We thought that was a huge amount of power.

David Roberts

Right. And when you say power, you mean just like utility capacity, basically?

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, because that's the big problem in urban environments. I mean, it's across the entire country. But interconnecting with the utility is very, very difficult and takes a long time. You're talking two years.

David Roberts

I want to just probe a little bit here at the beginning about the relationship between the rideshare and the chargers. Would you say at this point in the company's evolution that chargers are the main thing now, the main revenue generator, the center of the business? Have you pivoted that far?

Tobias Lescht

I'm on the charging side of Revel, so I'm a little biased. It's definitely not the main revenue source for the company at the moment. Rideshare creates more revenue. But if I think about scalability, applicability to multiple markets, anything about the future of Revel: the rideshare business is great, it's doing really well, but I think that infrastructure is definitely the primary focus for us.

David Roberts

Let's talk a little bit about the deal with Uber. Because the alternative to having your own rideshare company that uses your chargers is there are existing rideshare companies out there, and they are making concerted efforts to electrify. So theoretically, like if you're going to a new place that's not New York City, a new town, and you could just make a deal with existing rideshare drivers to use your chargers, could you then just abandon the rideshare half of this and devote yourself to chargers? Like, is that, do you see that as the kind of the end that you're heading toward, or do you think rideshare is going to be half the equation everywhere you go? I hope that question made sense.

Tobias Lescht

I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think one of the things that we've realized after operating the rideshare business for a couple of years and the charging business for a couple of years. Just rewind, about a year ago, the charging business really was not a real business. We were having maybe 30, 40 people show up every day. It was tens of thousands in revenue. We've way over tenfolded that in the last year due to a couple of things that happened in New York City. One is the TLC basically limits the number of Uber and Lyft vehicles on the road through licenses.

David Roberts

What is the TLC?

Tobias Lescht

The Taxi Limousine Commission in New York City is the regulator.

David Roberts

Quite powerful in New York, more so than in other cities. They're old and they've been around.

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, and similar to, you hear about medallions for yellow cabs. They have a diamond system for black cabs, which is essentially Uber and Lyft vehicles. So that had been capped at a certain number of vehicles, but last fall they opened that up again and issued 12,000 new licenses, all EVs. And since so many of these Uber and Lyft drivers were just desperate to drive their own vehicle, not rent from a fleet operator, they all went and purchased EVs. So we went from having basically no revenue, no real business — it was great, we were providing a service people could charge there, we had really loyal customers, it was great — but went from tenfold that business basically overnight to the point where now it's a multimillion-dollar revenue business in New York, and we have three public sites open.

David Roberts

Note for listeners, the Limousine Commission did not issue all those EV licenses out of the goodness of their heart. Right. It's a new law in New York City, is it not?

Tobias Lescht

Exactly. So, this is the Green Rides Initiative. Essentially, by 2030, all Uber Lyft trips have to be electric. This is part of their way to kickstart that. We really look forward to seeing that progress over time. But 2030, people used to think, was a long time. We're talking five and a half years. So, it's crazy fast.

David Roberts

Don't remind me, man. It's coming right up. So, in other words, the New York City rideshare fleet is rapidly electrifying, thus providing a tenfold — I saw the little graph on your website. It's remarkable, like, literally a tenfold increase in the use of your fast chargers overnight as all these new EVs came online. So, this gets me back to my question: Like, do you still need your own rideshare company in New York City? If all the other rideshare companies are going electric and using your chargers, and you're making most of your money now off the chargers, do you still need your own rideshare company in New York City?

Tobias Lescht

From a charging perspective, we don't. We can be profitable without our rideshare fleet. That being said, the rideshare fleet is doing really well, so we have no plans to abandon that at all. That's great. What may happen is that these businesses become somewhat bifurcated versus attached at the hip. But that's not really for me to comment on too much. But I will say that, yeah, we can be profitable without our own rideshare business providing — previously, it was 80% of the utilization of the sites, and now we're way less than half. So that's so cool to see that there's now other sources of demand that we can rely on to then go build out more charging that's not attached to our own fleet expansion plans.

Because one of the things that's hard is scaling the rideshare business quickly.

David Roberts

Yeah, the reason I'm asking all these questions is just that, like, running a rideshare business seems to me like, I don't know, you know, from the inside, but just from the outside, it looks hard. Like a lot of soft costs, a lot of hassle, you know, maintenance, dealing with drivers, everything else, it's just a lot to take on, whereas just like building infrastructure and running it seems a little bit simpler.

Tobias Lescht

So, I won't say infrastructure is simple, but rideshare is very hard. Infrastructure is very hard. Doing both of those at the same time really well is even harder. So, just to close out your question there, these two things are going to exist maybe independently from each other, maybe not. But our plans on the infrastructure side of the business don't rely on our rideshare expansion. And we're looking at other cities to go to imminently. We have leases signed in San Francisco, LA, Chicago are places we're looking at right now. So, we're moving really quickly in terms of fast charging development in urban centers.

And that is entirely based off of basically other rideshare sources that are not Revel, being able to provide that demand.

David Roberts

Can you make it work in a new city without your own rideshare company and without a mandate like New York's? Right. Because now, you don't necessarily need your own rideshare in New York City because all the other rideshares are electrifying. But that's not — there's no such mandate in San Francisco. Could you make it work in the absence of that mandate?

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, so in California, they actually have a rule on the books that wants 90% of all Uber and Lyft rides to be electric by 2030. So, there is legislation that actually is going to push us along. But outside of the legislation, Uber has committed itself to 100% electric by 2030. Lyft has done something similar. We see adoption in places like Chicago, which is a very cold, hard place to own an EV, actually go pretty well. So, we're very bullish on these large urban centers actually transitioning to electric Uber and Lyfts, TNCs as well as we do think that legislation similar to what has been pretty successful in New York over the last year, are likely to happen in these other cities as well.

David Roberts

Oh, you think other cities are going to follow New York's lead on this?

Tobias Lescht

I would imagine. You know, you can't, you can't say for 100% certainty, but they have been really successful in doing this, that I expect that other cities with the same kind of political leaning are going to try to copy it. Maybe not exactly the same way, but they've seen that there are carrots and sticks that really can push the electrification of these TNC miles along. And one of the things that, you know, still blows my mind is how many miles are traveled every day by these TNC vehicles.

David Roberts

Yeah, it's crazy.

Tobias Lescht

It's crazy. There are 100,000 vehicles in New York that are yellow cab, TNCs. I think it's even over 100,000. They do about 75 miles a day, and that includes, you know, that's average over the year. So some days they're not doing any. So on the days they're actually driving around, it's more than that. And if you think about how many miles a day, seven and a half million miles a day in New York City alone, that is being done by these TNC fleets. Now, look at all the other cities in America. It's on a scale that's massive.

David Roberts

These are the super drivers. This gets back to the subject of a pod I did a long time ago, which is that driving, like everything else, follows the 80-20 rule, which is that it's a relatively small number of drivers that drive a wildly disproportionate number of the miles. And people are always talking about how we should focus policy on those drivers. It seems like exactly that.

Tobias Lescht

Totally. And the turnover of these vehicles is much faster. So, someone who buys a gas car in 2019 is probably looking for a new vehicle now because they put over 200,000 miles on that vehicle already doing TNC work.

David Roberts

Just curious, are the cab companies electrifying at all? Are they the caboose of this train? What about yellow cabs themselves?

Tobias Lescht

I have to be careful with what I say there, but, yeah, they're probably falling behind. Most of the regulations are focused on TNCs, which are Transportation Network Companies, Uber, Lyft, and all the other ones there. So they'll fall a little bit behind. Part of it's also in New York City. Like, Manhattan is where all the yellow cabs are. And there's even less charging in Manhattan because it's so hard to develop there. So they need a lot more charging built out before they can really transition.

David Roberts

Interesting. And so, the idea is, you build the chargers, rideshare provides the initial demand, but then you also offer them to the public, so the public gets access to charging as kind of a side benefit of this core business.

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, this is the beautiful part about it. Again, we're solving this chicken-and-egg problem, but instead of using our own fleet, necessarily, to do that, we now have all these other rideshare vehicles that are out there that can scale up a lot faster than we can. And that means that once these, you know, are providing right now, 80% of the utilization for our sites, which is awesome. But over time —

David Roberts

20% is public?

Tobias Lescht

Is it public? Yeah. So, over time, we expect that to kind of switch, and we expect, you know, 60% or so coming from the public.

David Roberts

Oh, really?

Tobias Lescht

40% from TNCs. Yes, it's still obviously a high number from TNCs, but over time, as you get full electrification, and when I say public, it could be other fleets, you know, individual mom and pops that own vehicles, like a van that they need to charge at.

David Roberts

Right.

Tobias Lescht

So, there's a whole public is a big category. And then we have rideshare vehicles, which is, you know, what's called the anchor tenant for our sites.

David Roberts

Right. Right. I want to talk about the chargers themselves a little bit first, just for listeners' benefit. We are talking here about Level 3 chargers. So, Level 1, just so everybody knows, Level 1 is like the plug in your house. Very low power, low voltage. Level 2 is kind of what you can get in your garage when you buy your EV. It's a little faster. And then there's Level 3, which is sort of orders of magnitude faster than both of those. But Level 2 can kind of go in quickly and kind of go in anywhere. It can go on a light pole.

It can go on a curb. It can go wherever. Level 3, then you're talking about more serious electricity infrastructure here. You're talking about pretty high-powered installations here. So, I have a couple of questions. Just sort of, what do these look like if I don't live in New York? Is this like a gas station setup? Is it a parking lot somewhere, or is it a building I drive into? What are these like? Literally, what do these chargers look like?

Tobias Lescht

It is all of the above. So, a lot of the sites we're developing are in old parking lots that we then lease and basically build out these Level 3 fast charging superhubs, we like to call them. Our first site was 25 of these fast chargers in a parking lot. And then you pull up to it, it looks like a gas pump. You interact with it pretty similar to a gas pump. You tap your credit card, plug in, and then you charge. Some of them, we've built in parking garages where we're, again, leasing space. We've built two other parking garage sites, a future one.

We've actually taken down a whole gas station, and we are renovating that entire space and making it an electric-only gas station. So when you think about it, it's really gas stations of the future, is what we're working on.

David Roberts

Yeah, part of what I was wondering is whether you're sort of building alongside the chargers, stuff for people to do while they're sitting there for 20 or 30 minutes. Are you trying to build sort of, like, destinations or do you think when it's fast charging, just the charger is enough?

Tobias Lescht

That's one of the biggest focuses internally that we're trying to develop a really cohesive strategy around. Right now, we're trying a bunch of things out. I think when we first started, it was put chargers in the ground where there's enough of them that someone can find a reliable charge and make sure that those chargers work. That's table stakes, and that is something that the industry —

David Roberts

Not something you can take for granted these days if you're driving an EV.

Tobias Lescht

I think we've done a really good job of executing on that. So again, outside of Tesla, we have the biggest site in the United States, and we built that in 2021, and no one's still passed that. And then that was 25 stalls. Next year, we're building a 60 stall site in Maspeth, Queens, in New York, and a 48 stall site right by LGA airport, LaGuardia Airport.

David Roberts

Oh, interesting.

Tobias Lescht

We're building these mega sites because if you think about the number of visits that you get to a typical gas station and the amount of fill-ups, you need 30 stalls, 25 stalls to even compare to a small gas station. To a big gas station, you need 60 because it takes longer. So when you think about the customer experience, how terrible an experience it is when you show up to a four-stall site, two of the stalls are broken, and then the other two are occupied, and then you wait. But if you have 25, if two are broken — again, we want to have 100% uptime — but if two are broken, it's okay.

There's going to be a stall available. Even if every stall is taken, it turns over really quickly. So our queuing, when we've had queuing on certain days, has been super busy. People are waiting five minutes. They're not waiting an hour to charge, which is really important for making sure that the customer knows they can get a reliable charge. You don't want to show up and then run out of juice because you couldn't get to the charger.

David Roberts

So, you're trying to build out ahead of demand, basically make sure that you sort of have demand plus.

Tobias Lescht

Exactly.

David Roberts

You have a little surplus.

Tobias Lescht

And I think we've been successful in that. And that goes back to the Uber deal that we signed earlier this year, where they are guaranteeing us a certain level of utilization for these sites. In return, we're providing their drivers a discount, but they're not doing that in the hope that we're building out charging stations because we already have them open. And I think a lot of this industry has been plagued by promises that have not been fulfilled. So people say, "Hey, we're going to build all of these amazing sites," and then it doesn't happen. So, like, we're really trying to put the sites in and say, "Hey, look at this massive site we have."

We want demand, and they want to guarantee it.

David Roberts

Just to be clear here with the Uber deal, the idea is Uber drivers will use your chargers instead of alternative chargers. Like, they sort of pledged to charge X amount in a week. Or like, what is, what is — you're giving Uber drivers a 25% discount on the price of charging in exchange for what exactly? Like, what exactly are they promising?

Tobias Lescht

The individual drivers do not have to promise anything. They can charge wherever they like. We are confident that they're going to charge at our sites because they're the biggest, best, fastest, and cheapest. So, that's a pretty compelling offering to those drivers. Uber agrees with us and therefore is willing to put their money where their mouth is, if you want to say it that way, and actually guarantee that 15% of the utilization from our sites is actually coming from their drivers because of the discounts.

David Roberts

So, this is not like a mandate on individual drivers. This is just something they feel confident predicting is going to play out. And they'll pay you if it doesn't.

Tobias Lescht

Exactly. So then that gives us enough confidence to go build out more big sites like this because we're sure that we're going to have demand, or we're guaranteed demand, actually. So from a business perspective, it offloads a lot of the risk of building out these massive projects. And they are really massive projects, and they take multiple years and millions of dollars of capital to get done.

David Roberts

Kind of a side question, but this came up in my discussion about public charging a few weeks ago. Are you designing the chargers themselves, or is this, or are the chargers themselves sort of commodified enough at this point that you're just sort of buying off the shelf? Like, are there design features of the actual chargers themselves that set them apart from other chargers? Or is it just like a Level 3 charger is a Level 3 charger?

Tobias Lescht

I can geek out on this for hours, but the answer is, we do not design or manufacture chargers ourselves. That is a very hard problem, and we are already focused on enough problems.

David Roberts

You have a lot of hard problems on your plate already.

Tobias Lescht

Tesla is vertically integrated. They're also a massive company. So, they've been really successful in having that vertically integrated setup where they design. That is one of the reasons they've been super successful, and I'll talk about it in a little bit. But there's a lot of other companies out there that produce chargers. We've been using Tritium for a while. They just went bankrupt. So, we've been looking for new options as well. The next site we open in New York is not going to have Tritium chargers. It's actually going to have Kempower chargers. They're a Finnish company.

One thing that we like about them, as well as others like SK Signet, is that they're building a distributed power sharing setup within their chargers. Essentially, you have a rectifier cabinet which takes the AC power from the grid and turns it into DC power at a large scale. These cabinets are 600 kW of power, and then it sends it to six or so actual charging stalls, posts. So, you basically get 100 kW per post if everyone's plugged in at one time. But we can go up to 320 kW per post.

David Roberts

So, a little bit of intelligence there. It's like power management.

Tobias Lescht

Exactly. And this is different from other competitors in the market that build what I like to call an all-in-one charger. So, a company like Electrify America, they go out and put in a 350 kW all-in-one charger. And that's great. You're never going to use all that power, but it requires a lot of upstream infrastructure that becomes very expensive and very hard to build these large sites that we are building.

David Roberts

Because then you're dealing with peaks, right? Then you're managing around peaks like you have to. If you put in a 350 kW charger, you have to have the electricity infrastructure and the capacity to deliver 350 kW. Even if it's the case that that's never actually going to happen in practice. Whereas, if you put a little management in, you can shave your peak, basically, I'm guessing.

Tobias Lescht

And one of the things, again, back to the chargers we're choosing, is that it is done by hardware. So, a lot of utilities. So, you say, "Hey, I want to put in 10 350 kW chargers." They'll say, "Okay, you need three and a half megawatts of grid connection." And you're never going to use that because not all the cars charge at 350. And the ones that do charge —

David Roberts

Certainly not 10 at once.

Tobias Lescht

Absolutely not. And they maybe do it for five minutes of their charge cycle and then they go slower. So, you know, we have this 25 stall site in Brooklyn. Our peaks are like a megawatt, 25 stalls. So, you think, you know, look, obviously cars are going to get faster and that's going to go up over time, which is why we're putting in faster and faster chargers. But it really limits the size of the sites you can build. And this is something Tesla really pioneered way back in the day, is that they built these distributed architecture systems. And that's why their sites are so big. They don't need massive utility connections.

David Roberts

And so, utilities are to some extent familiar with this and trust this. Right. C ause I imagine that they want some assurances that you're not gonna overtax a particular spot.

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, totally. And this is a big question for utilities that they've had, as they don't necessarily trust software-based management of the loads. But some are getting more comfortable with that. Like PG&E is launching a new program, which we are enrolling some of our sites in, which essentially allows certain times of the day, "Hey, the grid is more constrained. And therefore, if you want to build a site here, you're going to have to wait four or five years so we can upgrade that line. But actually, now we can just tell you, hey, reduce your load during this hour. That maybe happens once a year, and you can have a site today."

So, we have a site that we're actually building in PG&E territory where they said, "You could have less than a megawatt today," but we need three and a half megawatts to make that site work. And then we got this load study back from them that said, "Okay, if you manage your power," I think it's like one or two hours of the year, "you can have all that power today."

David Roberts

Amazing.

Tobias Lescht

Like, wow, this is amazing. This unlocks infrastructure for us that we couldn't have before. We would have had to wait three or four years. So, that's a cool program. But back to the actual chargers that we're installing, the hardware is limited, so there's no way that the, you know, the cabinet 600 kW, then each of the posts can go up to 320. There's no way that it could pull more than 600 kW off the grid. So, the utilities are very comfortable with that. That's just very basic for them. So, that's one of the things we're doing that I think is innovative in the industry.

Outside of Tesla, of course, which has done really cool things with their vertically integrated system.

David Roberts

It's cool that you're doing this, but it is like, there's no other option, right? There's not — you can't electrify the entire vehicle fleet and install these chargers without power management. You're just going to crush every grid everywhere. Like, when you get up into the hundreds of thousands of EVs, you gotta manage this or you're screwed. It's good that you're doing it on the front end. Just out of curiosity, is there a vandalism problem? Because I hear this about Seattle fast chargers all the time that sort of, like, half of them at any given moment are broken or have been cut or like, somebody stole the copper out of them or spray-painted, whatever.

Is this something that's on your mind a lot?

Tobias Lescht

Definitely on our mind. We have never had a vandalism problem at our site.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Tobias Lescht

With one exception. Somebody got mad at the credit card reader and punched it, potentially, and it cracked the screen. But part of this, we — it's so busy, so we've had our fleet there. We do think about this when we're opening up sites that don't have any of our fleet presence, maybe are going to take a little bit more time to ramp up. What we could do there is definitely a challenge. I will say we have recycled our cables before. They are less than $20 in value per cable. So anybody who thinks they're going to go cut these cables and make a lot of money off it, I hope everyone listens to this.

It's not worth your time and effort. There's not very much copper in there. It's very, very low value. So, I hope everyone hears that who's thinking about cutting cables. But, I think people think these things have massive amounts of copper in them and they're worth hundreds of dollars.

David Roberts

I do think it's interesting, though, the strategy of just eyes on the street, just having lots of people around, is sort of an anti-vandalism strategy in and of itself. Just having high utilization.

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, and you get that from having bigger sites. If you have a four-stall site somewhere, people don't want to go to that because they're not sure that it's going to be free.

David Roberts

Right.

Tobias Lescht

So, there are these four stalls that are in the back of a parking lot, and somebody can just go by and cut. But if I have a 60-stall site, I can guarantee that there's people there pretty much 24/7.

David Roberts

What's your smallest site?

Tobias Lescht

That we have open right now is 15 stalls.

David Roberts

15. Do you know enough now to have kind of a lower bound, like the minimum number to make a site viable?

Tobias Lescht

We really try to stay above 10, but there will be some sites that we develop in the future that are maybe eight, because that's what we could fit on that location, w e really like that location. But our sweet spot is 15 to 30.

David Roberts

And so, when you're looking for new spots because, you know, you're in the midst of like, you've got a bunch of sites in the pipeline now, you've got big expansion plans, not only in New York City and several cities building these biggest charging installations. So, as you are going to whatever, San Francisco and looking for sites, what are you looking for? Is it mainly electricity infrastructure? Is it mainly power? Or are there other kinds of desiderata? Are there other things you're looking for in this? I mean, obviously, like traffic, I guess, you know, being in a place where there are lots of cars.

But like, what are you looking for in a site?

Tobias Lescht

Location number one needs to be your demand source. So, airports, big roads, areas with high rideshare demand, areas where drivers live. Which is an interesting piece of why we think that this rideshare first kind of strategy is really cool. You're actually building these in places where rideshare drivers live and then set very close to location is access to power. And that's kind of like the secret sauce, I would say, of acquisition of sites is where is their power? Where can you bring the power in? How do you work with the utility to get as much information?

How do you do this quickly, where you can take a look at a site and throw it away if it doesn't work, instead of spending months on it and then finding out it doesn't work? So, we've been trying to perfect that. It's super hard. A lot of these utilities have maps online that are not super updated. They try to hide that information because it's critical infrastructure. They don't want people to mess with it. So, that is like the hardest thing.

David Roberts

Dealing with utilities specifically.

Tobias Lescht

The utilities have actually really improved. And, you know, I think maybe five years ago, a lot of the complaints, at least the ones that we worked with, were super valid. But all of these utilities have really got their act together. Con Ed in New York is an incredible partner for us. They've set up a whole EV team and they really just streamline the process. I'm not going to say everything's perfect. It's not. It's a big company, but they've been a really good partner in basically helping us through the web of what needs to happen to get a site energized.

To put it in perspective, we're essentially taking the amount of power you put in a skyscraper in Manhattan, putting it in a parking lot. And so, we come to them and say, "Hey, we want this much power." Like what? "And we want it, by the way, we want it in like a year." This is not something that they're used to because they're used to bringing this much power into a development that takes six, seven, eight, maybe 10 years.

David Roberts

Right.

Tobias Lescht

So, like, they are not the problem when you're building a skyscraper. Con Ed is like, "Yeah, check the box, they'll bring you the power in time." But when you're building an EV charging site, well, actually that is the main reason that it takes so long, is there's so much that has to happen to get that much power. And it is so expensive. I think people kind of think that there's just genies working behind the plug and it just happens automatically. But getting that much power or any power and digging up the roads and building the infrastructure, it's a lot of work.

It's not something that just happens.

David Roberts

Did the utility pay for that or do you have to pay for that new infrastructure for your parking lot?

Tobias Lescht

Depends on the utility. So, every single utility will be different. So, in New York, Con Ed would pay for it normally, but there's also now a new Make-Ready incentive, which is an amazing local incentive for us, which helps with our customer side cost. But then also say I wanted the utility connection around the block instead of the cheapest place for Con Ed, it will pay for that. So, for example, we're building a site where we have to pay them a million dollars to move the utility line, because that's where it makes sense for the site. The Make-Ready can help pay for that.

In San Francisco, PG&E and any actual investor-owned utility in California, there's a Rule 20, I think Rule 29 is the name of it. All EV interconnections up until 2025 are covered by the utility. And that's new.

David Roberts

Oh, that's a law in California?

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, it's a law. That's investor-owned utilities only. So in LA, there's Southern California Edison, which is an investor-owned utility. But then there's LADWP, which is a city-owned utility.

David Roberts

Oh, how fun.

Tobias Lescht

Those who pay for the integration, pay for it there. So, if you look at LA, most of the charging sites are in Southern California Edison territory, because that is a free interconnection and it's a little easier than the city-owned utility. But we are like, "Okay, we're going to build the best sites in the best location." So, we're working a lot with LADWP and they've been pretty good to work with so far. But anyways, it's different all across the country. Any other city you go to, I can't comment on it, but it depends on the location.

David Roberts

So, this all sounds hella expensive. Everything you're doing, like fiddling with infrastructure, securing a site, digging up, installing maintenance, running. How much, like what level of utilization, do you need to sort of ensure payback of all that upfront investment? How are you thinking about that?

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, so a cheap site, relatively cheap site to build with a decent rent, maybe you need ten sessions a day per stall. I like to think of it in that term instead of utilization, because utilization is just time. And that makes a lot of sense for Level 2s. But we care about kilowatt hours because we sell kilowatt hours, but essentially ten sessions per day per stall. And if you wanted to convert that to utilization, it's 25-30% utilization.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Tobias Lescht

A more expensive site may require higher.

David Roberts

Right.

Tobias Lescht

So, that's the key: how do you find the sites that are cheapest to build and cheapest to rent? And that's, like, not an easy thing. And, you know, the cost to build these chargers can range from industry best installation, around $20,000 - $30,000 per post or per stall. That's like the Teslas of the world, and that's, you know, where we're headed. And then there's the non-Tesla world, where some of the other big players spend $100,000 to install a charger. And that's partly because they're building four-stall sites, so it's more expensive. But also, there's a lot of things that Tesla has done in an incredible way.

Their team is really amazing at keeping costs down, building at scale. That's one thing that we're really focused on, too, and what we're doing is when you're building 10 sites in one city, you get a lot better pricing from local contractors. You get a lot better at working with utilities, at working with the Department of Buildings.

David Roberts

So you can see how costs could come down over time.

Tobias Lescht

Versus building a nationwide network. That's really hard because every site is a different beast, and it's only four stalls. It's going to be really expensive. So, scale is important in this business.

David Roberts

Do you worry at all about eating your own lunch the more stations you install? Does that have the perverse effect of lowering the utilization rate at a particular station? Or do you think demand is going to be out ahead of you no matter what?

Tobias Lescht

"I'm not worried about demand. We've built more stations; it just gets busier. If you think about, again, just the TNC, the Uber, Lyfts in New York City alone, we're talking about a billion kilowatt hours a year by 2030. It's hard to even understand how much that is. But that's a $500 million business if you're charging fifty cents a kilowatt hour."

David Roberts

Yeah, this is. Well, I wanted to ask about this directly, so I want three numbers from you. One is, how many sites are you building in New York City currently? Then, I want to know how many would be needed if the entire New York City rideshare fleet electrified. Finally, I want to know how many would be needed if all passenger vehicles in New York City electrified. I just want to get a sense of the scale of where we are versus what will eventually be needed.

Tobias Lescht

Really hard question to answer, but I'll start with the easy one: how much we're building. Currently, we have 54 publicly available stalls in New York City. This time next year, we'll have 200.

David Roberts

Oh, wow.

Tobias Lescht

And then, call it another year from there, we'll have 500. So, we're building very quickly. How many stalls are required for full electrification of rideshare in New York City? NREL has done a study on this and I can send you the link, David, later that you can share with the audience. But it's somewhere around a thousand stalls only if they were used by rideshare in New York City. So that means no one else is using them. It's only for rideshare.

David Roberts

Right. So, in a couple of years, you'll be halfway to that benchmark.

Tobias Lescht

But we have users from the public using it. So that number, when you include all the other use cases, I've seen a 10,000 stall estimate from the ICCT.

David Roberts

Oh, interesting.

Tobias Lescht

So, that number gets massive. That's why, you know, you could ask me about curbside charging, Level 2s, all the above. Like, if you want to go full electrification, you need everything. And what we're focused on is that gas station experience, which is really important for the ride share drivers because you drive so many miles, but also members of the public, you may not find that curbside charger you need to charge at overnight. So, just go charge it at one of our stations. So, it's "all the above" is the answer because building 10,000 fast chargers in New York is not going to happen.

David Roberts

Well, I was going to say 10,000 fast chargers just to do ride share. And then you think about all the other cars in New York, like, that's.

Tobias Lescht

So, it's a thousand just for rideshare.

David Roberts

This charging problem is mind-boggling, I think, in a way that people don't necessarily appreciate. Like, the amount of infrastructure that's going to be needed just to electrify all the vehicles in New York City is just so much.

Tobias Lescht

This is another thing I think about quite a bit, and it's hard to wrap your head around, but if you take one gas pump, how many fast chargers is that due to the amount of energy that you're putting into the car in miles? Because gas is an incredibly dense energy source. So, it's about 30 to 40. If you think about how fast you can pump a tank of gas into your car, which is how long it takes to charge. So, hopefully, that gets faster. But 30 to 40. So, if you see a four-stall gas pump, I mean, the amount of stalls you need to replicate that exact infrastructure is pretty crazy.

David Roberts

That's wild. Kind of makes you wonder how we're going to do this. We're going to electrify all the vehicles.

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, it's going to be fun.

David Roberts

Tell me a little bit about Tesla, because listeners who are paying attention to these matters will recall that Tesla somewhat abruptly just jettisoned its entire charging team a few months ago. I think it has sort of belatedly hired a few people back. But this means a bunch of Tesla charging talent is floating around, and also means, I think, that a bunch of Tesla sites for chargers that were in development are now up for grabs. Talk us through, from Revel's perspective, the implications of Tesla's very mysterious, inexplicable move.

Tobias Lescht

We took advantage of it. I'll be transparent. The people who build Tesla charging sites have the best experience in the industry, and they're the best at what they do. And finding those people prior to what happened earlier this year was really, really hard.

David Roberts

Right. Tesla had, I guess, snapped them all up, right?

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, they had the best people, and that was a big opportunity for us. We hired a bunch of ex-Tesla people, specifically the ones who know how to build out these sites and do construction. They were making a huge difference on our team already and just making these timelines shorter, reducing our costs, just having that, you know, six or seven years' experience building fast charging stations, that's really invaluable. So we took a lot of advantage there. You know, I think Tesla, you know, they fired everyone, and I think they're hiring a lot of people back.

They realized they needed to retain this program more than they had originally planned. So, a lot of the sites they had jettisoned and people that they had fired are now back. They're back, I guess, is what I would say. That being said, we've looked at a lot of the sites that they were working on that maybe were not signed yet, and we were able to basically take advantage of that. But they're back, which is good for the industry, honestly. It was a big opportunity for us to be the only player in New York City, but we're happy to have a competitor.

I can't tell you why Tesla did that. The only thing that I can think of is that this is an expensive business in terms of capital deployment, and it's not a super high return business. You're not going to be, if you make 20% returns. That's a great sight. It's not like AI or all the other stuff they're working on.

David Roberts

Let me ask you this. The way you're making it work is through this rideshare trick. You're creating your own demand. How's Tesla making it work? How are they making any money?

Tobias Lescht

It's pretty similar. They sold a bunch of cars and built the chargers, and that was a chicken-and-egg for them.

David Roberts

I guess Teslas themselves are kind of their equivalent of the rideshare fleet.

Tobias Lescht

Exactly. We copied them in some ways. Their sites are always the busiest because they have this integration with the sales of the vehicle.

David Roberts

Yeah. Interesting. One thing I wanted to ask about, which you alluded to briefly before, but I'm super intrigued by, is if you guys are two years from now running and maintaining 500 fast charging stalls, you are going to have your hands on a lot of power. And I'm wondering if there are any plans or ideas afoot to kind of do a virtual power plant play where you can start responding to grid signals and maybe either distributing power differently around your sites or just shutting some sites down temporarily in times of congestion. Or even having some of your rideshare fleet feed power back into the grid, do a vehicle-to-grid type of thing.

If anybody has sort of a laboratory where they could make that work, it's you guys. You have the chargers, you have the vehicles. You know, you have the sites. How big a role is this virtual power plant family of things playing in your thinking right now?

Tobias Lescht

This is probably the most exciting part of our business, is the opportunities that building out this large fleet of fast chargers in urban environments where the most valuable virtual power plant signals exist. So, what we've done so far, because I like talking about what we've done versus what we're going to do. We actually did a vehicle-to-grid pilot at one of our sites in Brooklyn. We had three vehicle-to-grid chargers there, and we had that dispatching every day during the summer. That was awesome. It was cool to test the technology. The interconnection with Con Ed was interesting.

They'd never done one before, so that was like a. That was always a fun process, but we got that done.

David Roberts

What about the money, Tobias? Did you make any money on it?

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, so each vehicle made about $5,000 that summer. Which is cool. What I'd say is that the incentives need to be aligned better because, essentially, the grid and Con Ed just think of us as a stationary battery, and a stationary battery has no opportunity cost. It sits there all year round. But what we really need to focus on is, "Hey, what are the five or six days where the grid is most strained?" Because that's where vehicle-to-grid makes the most sense in an urban environment. For example, there's a demand response program in New York, which we also are taking advantage of this summer.

So essentially, this week we had about three times where it's been really hot in New York. Con Ed says, "Hey, we want everyone to reduce load." And we, through software load management, reduce the peak power of our sites so people can still go there and charge. This might take a little bit longer. And therefore, Con Ed then gives us a check at the end of the summer saying, "Hey, you responded to grid signals and you reduced load." That is awesome. And that is something we're going to roll out next year at all of our sites. We did a test this year.

David Roberts

Just to probe that a little bit. One sort of intuitive take on this is just like rideshare vehicles in particular prize time, you know what I mean? Like, how much demand can you move around? Can you, do you know what I mean? Like, what percentage of the power involved is really flexible? I mean, I'm sure you don't know yet on any sort of large scale, but do you have any sense of that?

Tobias Lescht

I think time is really important to these drivers, and cost is really important to these drivers, maybe even more important. So, one of the things we can do during a demand response time is, prior to that, you know, it's usually three or four hours in one day, five or six times a year. So, it's not like it's every day. And that would be a pretty weird experience. But we can make it cheaper if you show up earlier, and that actually has been shown to shift. Rideshare drivers, particularly, are very sensitive to pricing signals, so doing it that way and giving them a discount if they come at a different time of the day lets us shift a lot of demand. Then say, "Okay, we know 21 hours ahead that this is happening. We're going to give people discounts if they show up before or after that time window when they're asking us to reduce power on the grid."

So, all this stuff is early days, and we're testing it out. So, I can't say it's going to work 100%, but this has to be the future of fast charging, charging in urban environments. Because if you just said, "Just plug everything in," well, that's not going to work, I'm sorry. It's going to break the grid. So, you have to have this interplay between energy and mobility where the vehicles and individuals are able to respond to pricing signals that allow demand to be shifted around the grid.

It's also spatial, so different parts of the grid are overloaded at different times. So maybe instead of saying, "Hey, no one can charge at 04:00 to 06:00 p.m. all across New York City," it's like, "Hey, this certain grid is overloaded four to six. This one in Manhattan, by the way, is actually busiest during the middle of the day." So there's a lot of things you can do spatially in terms of locations, but also temporally with time to shift demand around. And then the next step of that is just. Instead of just responding and slowing down chargers at certain times, it's how do we use vehicle-to-grid technology to actually take advantage of these, be a real asset to the grid, where we are injecting power back into the grid during those times?

David Roberts

And maybe there's no good way to answer this, but I'm curious about the kind of relative importance of those two. There's demand management, which you can do without really any particularly fancy vehicle-to-grid technology, which, as you say, is absolutely necessary for this to work at all. And then there's the other half, which is vehicle-to-grid feeding power back in. Do you think those are both equally important? Because my sort of intuitive sense is that demand management is huge and foundational, whereas the vehicle-to-grid stuff is more of like, maybe like a nice extra, but maybe you feel differently.

Tobias Lescht

I think every kilowatt hour, whether you're taking it off demand or adding it to, is just as valuable. I think if you're a grid operator, it's why demand response programs are becoming more popular. So, they're thinking of instead of just ramping up power plants, just cut demand. It's the same thing. So, number one. Yeah. The integration between the chargers and the grid and having that grid signals allowed, that should be the number one priority because it's easiest to implement. But let me give you some numbers here. So, if there's 100,000 vehicles in New York City for Uber and Lyft, each one of those is a 75 kilowatt hour battery pack.

You're talking about 7.5 gigawatt-hours storage, which is crazy. And look, you're not going to use all of that at one time. That's not possible. But you can see the amount of energy rolling around.

David Roberts

Just for reference, that's comparable to the amount of grid storage extant in the country right now. These are huge numbers.

Tobias Lescht

It's wild. And so we know the grid is getting more unstable over time, and it's crazy not to take advantage of that, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. But we need vehicles that are vehicle-to-grid capable. They don't exist outside of school buses. And yet, the Nissan Leaf is no longer in existence. That's what we used at our first site, the vehicles, I think, the chargers. And that's the easy part. The bi-directionality is a little harder with the utility, but that's probably more solvable if we can just get the vehicle manufacturers to make vehicle-to-grid capable cars.

And you can imagine a world where rideshare drivers, it's like the gig economy. This is what I'm excited for. If the vehicles exist and the charging stations exist that enable this, "Hey, instead of doing a ride, I'm going to go inject half my battery into the charging station here and get paid to do that." That sounds way better than driving around trying to get rides during those four or five days. So, you could actually imagine this world where it's perfectly compatible with that type of driver lifestyle.

David Roberts

You have to imagine that at some point in the development of this market, some auto manufacturer is going to make a car that's designed to be a heavily used rideshare vehicle. You know, that's like focused on resilience, vehicle-to-grid, like all the stuff you specifically need for rideshare vehicles. That's got to happen eventually, don't you think?

Tobias Lescht

I'm surprised it hasn't. And maybe you call a Prius or a Camry designed for that already, but no, I really think it needs to happen, especially on the EV side and making it, you know, we see a plethora of vehicles show up at our sites because we are — one of the other things we do is we do both Tesla and CCS at all of our sites. So we have all the vehicle types and there are some vehicles that are way less suitable for this use case and some that are way more suitable. And what you really want is a very fast charging vehicle that has a decent battery capacity to go through the whole day.

And yeah, it's vehicle-to-grid capable, but it's beefy and doesn't break when you hit a pothole. And that's hard to find in the market right now. So, drivers have a hard time choosing the right vehicle.

David Roberts

Yeah, it's not obvious. If you're a rideshare driver looking for an EV to use in your work, there's not really one obvious answer.

Tobias Lescht

There really isn't.

David Roberts

I guess Tesla.

Tobias Lescht

I mean, it's hard to not choose that given the charging network that exists. But when these 10,000 licenses came out, or 12,000 licenses, most of the drivers went to whoever would give them a good financing deal. So there was actually not a lot of thought, I don't think, put into what is the vehicle. So we have a lot of vehicles that show up. These are brand new cars that are out there that in the winter, charge at 20 kW. That is crazy. So if you'd imagine trying to show up to a fast charging station and you only can charge it at 20 kW because it's cold, those vehicles are not suitable for that use case at all.

And these drivers have now paid for them. So, I feel very bad for those drivers who are stuck with these vehicles where they have to spend two to three hours charging them every day. That's not going to work. So, I hope people do more research when they're purchasing these vehicles for the use case because they need a fast-charging vehicle.

David Roberts

Yeah, all right, well, we're running out of time. I do want to hit on a couple of environmental justice aspects. I think it's worth saying, because you haven't mentioned it yet, that your rideshare service, unlike Uber, employs its drivers as employees, not gig workers. Basically.

Tobias Lescht

I don't have all the answers here, but this is how we started the business. This was originally the reason we did it; we were starting this thing from scratch. So, we had to provide a kind of alternative employment model for these drivers. At first, it was very popular. But I think we got to the point where we had a lot of driver feedback and had a hard time recruiting drivers under that employment model because they're so used to being independent contractors.

David Roberts

Huh.

Tobias Lescht

So, they don't like, you know, as a W-2 employee, you have to show up and you can't be late, and there's a rigid schedule. It's just different. As an independent contractor, you work when you want. And that was, we got to the point where we got big enough where it was having. We were having a hard time scaling under that model. So, we've actually switched the last few months to an independent contractor model. And again, it's not because we think it's, you know, we're not the evil corporation. It simply comes back down to the drivers wanted that.

And we've seen, you know, pretty much all of our drivers switch over to that new employment model. And they've actually been pretty happy with it. And I think they make more money as well.

David Roberts

Well, that's interesting. That's counterintuitive to me. But the other EJ thing is, this connects with the rideshare thing, which I think is sort of clever — it's just nice how it works out. Which is that if you're focused on rideshare as your, as you say, anchor tenant, then you need to put your chargers basically where the rideshare drivers live. And unlike typical EV owners, right, which tend to be affluent and live in affluent areas, typical rideshare drivers tend to be lower income, working class, and live in working class areas. So if you go put the chargers where they live, you are also solving another persistent problem in this area, which is how to avoid this sort of spiraling inequality where you have to be rich to get the EV, and then you have access to chargers, but only if you're rich.

And then, you know what I mean, the poor people get excluded from the whole thing. Was that planned? Or is that like you just sort of discover at some point, as you're thinking this through, like, "Oh, that's, that's nice, too."

Tobias Lescht

I think the beautiful part of this is, it's like, it's not a. We don't have to compromise on the financials to do that. So, it's just a pure capitalistic play to put these chargers in that area because it actually makes money. And that's because the rideshare business is really cool. If you think about the strategy of building chargers in the areas where drivers live, well, that naturally tends to be, you know, what is called an EJ community. And we're doing that all across New York, San Francisco, LA. So, I would say way over half of our sites are in what is defined by the government as EJ communities.

There's obviously different incentives and stuff that help there.

David Roberts

Yeah, I was going to ask, do you get paid or do you get incentives, government incentives or special rebates or whatever for doing that?

Tobias Lescht

Pretty much everything we're doing is state and local. And there are different state and local — like the Make-Ready program, for example, has an adder if it's in an EJ community, but there's tax credits. There's a bunch of stuff around that now. But I wouldn't say that's the main driver of our decision. We want to make this business work on its own and putting chargers in high — like in the South Bronx, for example, we're building a site there because there's a lot of drivers. 25% of drivers live in the Bronx. So if you don't build any chargers in the Bronx, you're missing out on a big piece of the market.

So, this is something that is just naturally happening for us, and we're excited about it.

David Roberts

Are the mopeds still around? Are you still doing that?

Tobias Lescht

So, going back to what I said earlier, it's just not super scalable, really fun business, but in the end, we have to focus. So, that was wound down at the end of last year. So, no more mopeds, unfortunately. Very sad to see them go, but —

David Roberts

And nobody's taking that up or buying that from you or trying to make that work, the mopeds are just going to go away?

Tobias Lescht

I don't think so. I mean, we had a lot of copycats when we were operating, but I'm not aware of anybody who is doing that now.

David Roberts

Yeah, it's hard to make that work. Okay, the final question is, tell us a little bit about your expansion plans. So, as I understand it, a lot of other people aren't making large investments in these fast-charging locations because there's not demand yet. So, your sort of trick here is by generating your own demand, you can go into a market that's fresh, you can go into any market and basically ladder yourself up. So, is that the business plan, to go to new markets and gobble up the best public charger sites? Like, is that the expansion plan here?

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, I mean, pretty much, you know, power is scarce. So, if you could find a good, well-located site with access to power, that's going to be very valuable in the long run. Tons of times, we're looking at locations and a whole neighborhood. "Oh, sorry. Five years. We have to put a new substation in," and that's going to get more and more difficult, not only because so many EVs are going to happen over the next 10 to 15 years, but also building electrification.

David Roberts

Yeah, everybody wants the electricity.

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, electricity is like the new oil. I like to think about it in urban markets. Again, outside of urban markets, I don't know as much about it, but these urban markets that are really dense and have really dense grids. I mean, yeah, building a new substation in New York City is a really big project and hard to get permitted and approved. So, finding the locations where you can lock that power down and build charging stations and generate income off of that can be really valuable. So that's why our leases, when we do leases, are 30 years with options. So, we're long term in this business.

David Roberts

Interesting. And where is that? Where are you coming from? Right now, you've got sites built in New York City and a couple in San Francisco. Where are you now and where are you going?

Tobias Lescht

Yeah, we're operating in New York City. That is going to be our biggest growth market still. It's the biggest opportunity for us. Outside of New York City, we have leases signed in San Francisco, and we actually signed a lease in LA recently. So, those are the next two markets. And then you can think about the largest, most dense urban markets in the country after that. I can't share exactly which ones those are going to be, but it's not rocket science when you come and look at what these are.

David Roberts

Chicago, whatnot.

Tobias Lescht

And then, just specifically in New York, a couple of sites I want to highlight. We are building a 60-stall site in Maspeth, Queens. It's going to have 400 kW charging. We have a 4.5-megawatt interconnection there. And we also have another one coming at LaGuardia Airport. Again, these are both about to open in a year. This is 48 stalls. They're all 400 kW chargers, SK Signet chargers.

David Roberts

Can any vehicle charge at 400 kW? Can any vehicle accept that?

Tobias Lescht

I think some of the new Hyundais and Kias could get pretty close. Or a Porsche. Again, we're not focused on the Porsche people, but some of the Hyundais and Kias can get there. And I think, you know, everyone's moving to 800-volt architecture, which allows those really fast charge speeds, like Tesla did that with the Cybertruck. So you can imagine this is going to happen with all the automakers.

David Roberts

Yeah.

Tobias Lescht

So, the speeds are going to increase, I think, exponentially for them. The average speed right now is like, even at Tesla sites, it's like 70 kW. "Oh, this is super fast." No, but we want to provide the super fast charging speeds while also doing the intelligent load management that we do to make sure that we're not putting a strain on the grid so that people can show up, get fast charge speeds, the next person can show up. And then, while that person's speed is slowing down naturally, because their car doesn't charge at 400 the whole time, the other person gets 400.

So, the time you're at the site is little, but the impact on the grid is also small.

David Roberts

Yeah, I meant to ask, is there? I assume you have like an app or something that'll tell drivers what charging stalls are in use and which ones are free. That kind of thing?

Tobias Lescht

Yeah. So, that's actually pretty funny. We decided to launch this business with no app.

David Roberts

No app?

Tobias Lescht

No app.

David Roberts

You're like the only business left in America with no app.

Tobias Lescht

It has treated us very well. Where you show up and it's like a gas station, you swipe your credit card, there's never a problem, and you charge. It's simple. Don't explain to anyone. But we need to get more information in the hands of our drivers. So we just launched a new web app that allows us to do that, but we're going to continue to improve on that and, you know, try to get something really, really, really intuitive that allows us to tell drivers, "Hey, we're doing demand response, go to this site" and give different discounts, different times, and make this as good of an experience as possible.

And again, one of the ways we're able to do that is because so many of our drivers are recurring customers, so they might actually want to download an app. Unlike someone who shows up to a site, "I have to download this app to use it once?!" These guys come here every day at our site, so they're super valuable customers to us, and we want to make sure they have as much information as possible.

David Roberts

Well, Tobias, this is all fascinating. Such a fascinating puzzle to solve, all this.

Tobias Lescht

We're just one little piece of it, but we're trying.

David Roberts

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think. I mean, I mean, I think you're doing awesome work, and I think the main work you're doing is just like, hacking through some of this fog and uncertainty and just answering some of these questions, you know, just like, demonstrating some of this stuff. I mean, a lot of it is just showing what can be done. You know, somebody's got to go first. So it's fascinating what you're doing. So thanks so much for coming on and talking through it with us.

Tobias Lescht

Thanks, David. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes my guests and I sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review or telling a friend about Volts, or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.