Sharad Agarwal

Sharad Agarwal, the senior vice president of EasyMile, speaks to Energy.Media about his hopes for electric shared autonomous mobility – that is, for a future in which the transportation sector is no longer dominated by individually owned and operated vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, but by fleets of self-driving electric cars, trucks, and buses.

In this episode, Sharad makes the case for a new approach to transportation and talks about what kind of infrastructure investments are needed to support his vision of electric shared autonomous mobility:

• The transportation sector is already undergoing disruption in at least two directions. First, electric cars are gaining in popularity. Second, self-driving vehicles are becoming increasingly capable.
• Synergy between these two types of disruption could lead to the emergence of new transportation paradigms, in which individuals use ride-sharing arrangements to gain access to fleets of self-driving cars and buses that can move them from place to place and businesses use autonomous forklifts, trucks, and other vehicles to move goods from factories to warehouses and stores. All of these vehicles would be electrically powered (and therefore less polluting) and outfitted with connected sensors (and therefore capable of using digital technologies to optimize scheduling and routing).
• We’ll need more electricity to support all these autonomous electric vehicles, and we’ll have to think about where to build charging points to support the large fleets of vehicles needed to sustain large-scale ride-sharing and commercial trucking arrangements.
• Building more charging points in urban locations, as the Biden administration wants to do, is a good start. But in the long term, we may need to establish large-scale charging and storage facilities outside heavily populated areas that can give autonomous electric vehicles places to charge up and remain in place until they’re needed again. Airports and factories may be good places to establish such facilities.