About
Welcome to Motricity.ie. This blog is focused on the market for electric vehicles here in the Republic of Ireland. The government recently announced that it wants to have 250,000 EVs on the road by 2020. This is a big task so it’s time to get started and internet presence will be a big thing.
The site is a spin off of some work I’ve done for GreenAer Mobility Ltd. and SDL Electric Vehicles. I’m already very interested in sustainable development and changing our transport paradigm is an important part of the bigger picture. But it’s also a very exciting part because it’s an area will take huge strides over the next decade.
Technologically, batteries are almost ready. Cost and charge time are the remaining hurdles but waiting for the future to happen is a bad way to go about realising it. We already have highly functional EVs at a decent price, provided we’re willing to accord them their appropriate setting. This is why the Irish government has been on the money with it’s claim that Ireland can become a leader in the roll-out of a global fleet. Our distances are small, our cities are congested and we have a preference for personal forms of transport.
The standard acronym for a quadracycle (today’s most cost-effective EV) is NEV — Neighbourhood Electric Vehicle. In Los Angeles, this is accurate since highway use is a must for anything other than a neighbourhood journey. But in a city like Dublin, this is not the case and so NEV becomes quite misleading. A recent study showed that 80% of Dubliners travel less than 30 miles in a day and that’s no surprise considering the geography of the city. Technically, the vast majority of the population should already be catered for by the speeds and ranges on offer. How this translates into reality leads to an interesting set of questions and this is essentially what motricity.ie is all about.
The is me, Nick... Hello.
Who am I? The simple answer is that I’m a young man trying to start a career in sustainability. I have a degree in philosophy and I’m currently enrolled in Blekinge IT’s distance course on Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainable Development.
A very important principle of sustainability is that it must call economic viability into play. Companies have a right to protect their bottom lines and people should expect to maintain the standard of living they have spent their lives working for. None of this is incompatible with the challenges we face in the future but that means stepping up to them now rather than later, when it’s too late to make a choice about the outcome. I think electric vehicles provide a wonderful example. The loss of mobility on the scale we are used to today would involve a profound reduction in economic and social potential. Whether or not we want to drive SUVs and change them every two years is a concern that will be affected by the same forces, but the loss of this option hardly involves the same kind of consequences.
What I write on this site is probably slightly biased towards GreenAer since it’s their cars that I tend to have the pleasure of driving. This is also part of a wider effort to turn Web 2.0 to the advantage of companies like GreenAer or SDL. As many of you will already know, this is a new kind of marketing and it shouldn’t be confused with a soulless exploitation. The medium is so transparent that all anyone can hope to do it provide good information and readable opinions. If you take issue with anything on this blog then please do comment. By the same token, this blog will end up being focused the context here in Dublin unless anybody would like to join in on my efforts. If you have any interest then please contact me at craig.nick[at]gmail[dot]com.
