Deep Dive: Electrifying the Future: Opportunities in the EV Industry’s Regulations and Supply Chain

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Today’s Deep Dive: ⚡Electrifying the Future: Opportunities in the EV Industry’s Regulations and Supply Chain🔗

Electrifying the Future: Opportunities in the EV Industry’s Regulations and Supply Chain

In last week’s deep dive, we delved into the pursuit of EVs by three businessmen, Duncan McIntyre of Highland Electric Fleets, Mitch Lee of Arc Boats, and Gregory Davis of Eviation Planes, and the issues they have had to deal with during their products’ management and development.

Being an industry that is still in the process of regrowing following its rise in popularity, the ways in which EV hardware can be further improved were discussed, with batteries being the main center of it all.

Based on said discussion, it is concluded that to make the electrification of school buses, boats, and aircraft happen, an insane expansion of hardware production is required, and this sets the gaps in the market that more entrepreneurs and businesses can fill in.

The question that can be asked next is, is hardware the only answer to further push efficiency, making the EV industry thrive once again?

It seems our three electric-positive businessmen beg to differ, and the areas of improvement we will now be focusing on are regulations, supply chains, and the concept of interoperability, to once again drive the industry to reach an even finer state of quality.

Regulations

Different from the production of common gas-fulled vehicles, some of these businessmen have had to make plenty of modifications, adjusting to the regulations and traditional industry standards set upon their products.

Eviation Planes’ Davis has managed to find a sweet spot in making electric aircraft. Davis has turned the need to build products certified under existing standards to be his company’s strength instead of an obstacle. By creating products that luckily fit traditional standards and regulations, his company has had no need of changing aircraft certifications, which, if imagined, would probably be a much more complicated matter.

Unfortunately, the same luck has not been met by Highland Eletric Fleets’ McIyntre. In the case of electrifying school buses, McIntyre has had to integrate with 15 to 20 utility companies, with each of them having discrete and different regulations, complicating and slowing the process significantly. McIntyre believes that the production of electric school buses and other municipal vehicles would be greatly simplified if the right team of entrepreneurs in the industry could navigate the system and put better, simpler regulations and standards in place.

Luckily enough for Arc Boats’ Lee, there wasn’t much obstacle when it came to the regulation of boat electrification, mainly due to the fact that boats are often seen as vehicles of entertainment, different from school buses and aircraft’s more municipal and formal manner. However, one barrier Lee has faced and finds to be room in the industry that can still be very much improved is the supply chain.

Supply Chain

All three sectors in this EV discussion have faced drawbacks from the supply chain still having to adjust to the needs required by electric vehicle productions.

One thing all three businessmen have agreed upon from the very beginning is how power-hungry EVs can get, and thus a gargantuan amount of electrical components are always needed to build their products. According to Lee, an issue his company still faces often is how costly said electrical components can be. Lee hopes that high-voltage electrical powertrain components can someday cost them less, which is something that entrepreneurs at the base supply chain level can see as an opportunity to work on.

For McIntyre, the problem isn’t getting the selling cost down so more affordable products can be produced, but it is being able to deliver products at all. His company’s demanding production has led to it being one of the largest buyers of medium and heavy-duty components, reaching hundreds of millions of dollars per year of equipment purchases, and yet it is still tough for the company to get the products they require sometimes.

This has led to plenty of his company’s manufacturing sites having thousands of completed vehicles with missing components, making them fail to deliver products to customers at times. McIntyre finds the lack of access to components as a problem that shouldn’t have existed in the first place, and it is being solved all too slowly. He views streamlining and creating supply chains of better standards as an opportunity for entrepreneurs looking to pursue the EV industry.

In the aircraft sector, Davis believes that supply bases are already aware of what they have to work on. With the market for electric aircraft already existing, many suppliers are already launching new manufacturing programs, and all that needs to be done is creating established one-tier, two-tier, and three-tier supply bases. Davis trusts that a forward-looking supply chain can be done by simply creating more demand for and attention to sustainable electric aircraft.

Interoperability

Lastly, the three businessmen discussed how interoperability between different sectors could bring a big advantage to the EV industry.

The design criteria for aircraft, school buses, and boats are, without a doubt, quite dissimilar from one another. The three businessmen all agree that it would be extremely difficult to, say, tailor an entire battery pack that would work for both boats and airplanes, as each vehicle has very different objectives out of said battery packs.

However, what can be done is to develop a shareable component or a connector of sorts that would make the development and creation of battery packs simpler, a connector that would play a mutually beneficial role for all sectors in the industry.

Aside from component interoperability, McIntyre discusses an interoperable system with better standards. He imagines an ideal world where every time your boat or any of your electric vehicles is unused and has extra power, its battery can be used to charge your house’s power grid.

Developing interoperable components and systems such as these are viewed as an opportunity by the three businessmen that other entrepreneurs could take in. Said developments, combined with stronger supply chain management and more supportive regulations, could create the most ideal environment for the EV industry, and that is an opportunity worth fighting for.

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