A look at the state of sustainable transportation in 2024 and beyond. I joined GreenBiz in May 2022 - a decision that profoundly changed my perspective on transport decarbonization. In my role as the director of transportation, I sat at the intersection of many subsectors within transport, able to survey the industry across on-road vehicles and electrification, aviation, maritime shipping and freight rail. From this vantage point, it has been a privilege to learn from those leading the efforts to decarbonize transportation and share my learnings with you. Sadly, all good things must end as I have already stepped into a new role in the EV industry. My final piece explores just a few of the trends I’ve seen develop over my two years tracking the sector. During those two years, the electric vehicle subsector has made the most progress toward decarbonization compared with the rest of the transport industry. The industry is aware of and is addressing the public EV charging hurdles that plagued it for some time. Tesla’s North American Charging Standard has received industrywide approval as automakers now roll out adoption, and dozens of EV options exist for consumers and fleets to purchase. It also appears, while still in the early days, that the heavy-duty vehicle industry is learning from the pitfalls of the light-duty market and deploying EV trucks and charging infrastructure more intelligently and thoughtfully with providers working diligently to get infrastructure on the road and into the ground. However, the road ahead is not without hurdles. The next one to two years will be a key inflection point that may shape the next chapter of the EV industry. A primary focus will be how industry leaders overcome the difficulties of deploying large infrastructure projects at scale to match EV adoption and address the reality that utility challenges still exist because of the complexity of getting power to charging stations. During the... |