PM-Professional Switzerland - Programs and Projects for Innovation

    The market of the EV (Electric Vehicle) is growing every year, Bloomberg  reports  that by 2040 the 54% of new cars will be EV.  For this market, the main problem is still the infrastructure. In fact, the number of charging stations is limited and prevent a potential buyer to make the decision to enter the club of EV owners.   Echarge  is a startup company based in Zug (CH) that will roll out the charging stations in hotel parking lots. In this way, the customer can recharge the car while using the parking place. Echarge has designed the infrastructure has a smart-grid, therefore every EV can trade energy (buy/sell). The basic technology is the blockchain and its associated cryptocurrency (ECHG). Every customer uses an app to book the place and his/her wallet to “trade” energy. The first rollout will start in May 2018 at Dubai.

SONO Motors is a young startup from Munich (Germany). They have developed the Sion, a 5 seats electric car with a range of 250 Km and that cost only16 KEur, battery excluded. Like some other competitor, the user can buy the Li-Ion battery pack (35-45 KW) for 4000 Euros or lease it for about 100 Euros a month. Till here nothing special, however, there are some interesting items to underlining: There are 7.4 square meters of solar panels mounted on the body of this car, they can provide up to 30 KM of charge per day;  The car is a power station, in fact, it is provided with plugs to provide energy to another car or to other electrically powered objects (e.g. a PC, a pump, ... ). This “power-sharing” feature is controlled by the user through a mobile application; The car is manufactured with standard components (e.g. some parts of the interiors are taken by the BMW i3); The maintenance concept is quite interesting: user manual, tutorials, 3D models are all av...