Prepping for our big new EV charging conference — November 6–8 in Warsaw, Poland — I’ve been interviewing EV charging leaders and general EV leaders coming in to present and participate in panel discussions all about EV charging. You can find all of the interviews here if you’re concerned you’ve missed some.
Prepping for our coming CleanTechnica + GreenWay 1st annual EV charging conference in Warsaw, Poland, I’ve been interviewing leading thinkers and doers in the EV charging world and in the Central & Eastern Europe EV industry who will be presenting or sitting on panel discussions during the conference*. This time, I peppered one of my ELMO Carsharing and Tesla Shuttle co-founders, Jacek Fior, with some questions. Check out the discussion below.
What’s the hottest brand in the world — or at least the luxury world? Tesla, of course. So, what’s one of the best ways to boost your own brand? Link it with Tesla!
Jakub (Kuba) Stechły and I recently enjoyed a looooong, long, long drive to Paris (France) from Wrocław (Poland) in a Tesla Shuttle (a 2015 Tesla Model S 85D, to be precise).
Jakub Stechły and I are a little more than halfway (~9 hours) through our drive from Wrocław, Poland, to Paris, France. We’ve taken a few photos of our erratic driving patterns and average Wh/km. More or less, we’ve driven with the flow of traffic, but have at times driven at extreme speeds (more on that at the bottom) and at other times slowed down a bit to not cut our battery range too close.
Autonomy starts in just a few days. I will be headed over there (to Paris) with my smart and funny cleantech pal Kuba Stechly. I will be moderating two panels at the conference, but it would have been somewhere at the top of my list of “conferences to squeeze out some time to attend” anyway due to the integrated, full-picture, and insightfully future-focused approach it brings to the world. It’s not just about electric cars, not just about cleantech, not just about alternative transport, and not just about city planning. It’s about bicycling, walking, city planning, robotaxis, electric cars, electric scooters, EV charging, mobility as a service, the internet of things, and much more. Bringing his own strong commitment to personal action to my inbox, Kuba suggested that we take a Tesla Shuttle to Paris instead of flying.
For years, it has been clear — electric car customers want superfast (not just “fast”) charging available for long-distance travel. It has also been clear that only Tesla has looked out for its customers in regards to this. It wasn’t until this year that any other charging companies really started offering products capable of this, and there still aren’t any electric cars on the market that could charge more than 100 kW anyway — hence the lack of supply of non-Tesla superchargers.
CleanTechnica’s conference season never ends, and aside from conferences this autumn in Dubai (UAE) and Paris (France) where we lent or will lend our face and thoughts, we are also hosting our next Cleantech Revolution Tour conference in November, this time alongside co-organizer and regional EV charging leader Greenway.
Tesloop has been hitting the road to an absurd degree since it launched in 2015. Averaging approximately 17,000 miles per month on each car, it offers perhaps the best case study yet of what happens to a Tesla vehicles after a lot of driving.
We’ve had the first Tesla Model S in our Tesla Shuttle fleet for 3 months now. We’ve put 17,000 kilometers (~10,500 miles) on it. One of several reasons the business idea originally made sense to us was that we’d have almost no operational costs for the car itself. Most of the charging stations in our home city are free and Tesla’s Superchargers are of course free (for vehicles up to a certain production date).
