Electric future: six ways EVs will improve our cities

The shift to electric vehicles is already happening, and it’s happening fast. The change we’re currently experiencing is as important and transformative as the move from steam and horsepower to combustion engines around a century ago.
 
Fuel vehicles didn’t just ignite a revolution in personal and commercial transportation, though. They also profoundly shaped how our cities were planned and, consequently, how they look and work today. 

The rise in popularity of EVs and the phase-out of combustion engines will once again shape the future of our cities. Unlike a century ago, when the environmental impact of cars and CO2 wasn’t part of anyone’s agenda, today we have the ability to drive change in a positive and climate-friendly way. The shift to EVs is our biggest opportunity in more than a century to rethink our urban environment by leveraging smart technology and new forms of interconnected mobility.

While the debate about the global CO2 impact of electric cars on a global scale isn’t completely settled, it’s already clear that having a vast majority of zero-emissions vehicles in our city streets will drastically improve air quality and reduce pollution. It’s not just about eliminating fuel-burning vehicles and the fumes they produce. Cars are also largely responsible for urban noise, another important form of pollution that EVs won’t contribute to. Moreover, buildings will have to become more energetically independent to respond to the urban grid’s higher energy needs. This will contribute to their general energy efficiency, making them less dependent on external energy production for heating or cooling.

With a larger and larger swath of the city population moving to EVs, petrol stations will become superfluous and will inevitably be repurposed. Why should we go to a specific place to recharge our EV when we will be able to do it as easily and as effectively in any parking lot? After all, why should we build an entire ecosystem around recharging based on the legacy concept of refueling when the two operations are so radically different? While petrol stations will probably turn into charging areas in the transition period, there won’t be any need for dedicated charging points in the long run, and replenishing a car battery will seamlessly integrate into the urban environment. As we gradually move away from the concept of “refueling”, we will take back those valuable spaces we now employ to store fossil energy sources.

As many carmakers have already fully understood, electric cars need to be full-fledged technology platforms seamlessly integrating with our digital life. Our future EVs won’t just take us from A to B, but they will talk and interact with a wider digital ecosystem, contributing to an enhanced mobility experience for the user. There will be a radical shift from a serial, transit-oriented model to a smarter, interconnected, and grid-like mobility-oriented system. In a mutually reinforcing fashion, cities will have to inevitably keep up with the pace of technological innovation constantly introduced by newer EV models. This will inevitably speed up the adoption of city-wide smart solutions enabling richer mobility experiences and a higher quality of life in the urban environment.

As they become more similar to mobility devices, electric cars will enable a radical shift from the car ownership model to the car-sharing one. This is why EVs can also ignite a democratization of mobility by blurring the inherent class and status differences tied to owning a car. In the future electric vehicles in cities will be a fluid, adaptive solution that will integrate seamlessly with many interconnected mobility options. As we will gradually move away from the idea of owning a car that we mostly keep parked in the street, unused, we will also free up and reclaim urban spaces that are now occupied by big, inefficient gas-guzzling vehicles. 

In metropolitan areas, fuel cars contribute to the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE), with the center of a city getting hotter than the surrounding areas because of the inability to dissipate heat into the air properly. While the effect is mostly caused by concrete and buildings, combustion engines contribute significantly to heat generation due to their sheer energetic inefficiency. Already ten years ago, a study by Hunan University and Michigan State University modeled around Beijing showed how switching to more efficient EVs would bring temperatures down significantly in city centers. The reason is that bringing down a single factor contributing to the UHIE, namely the heat generated by combustion engines, would result in lower air conditioning usage in a positive feedback loop with compounding effects on urban heat.

EVs will offer the opportunity to reimagine cities by eliminating the clear and strict boundaries between streets and buildings. One of the main reasons for the current separation between mobility and living spaces is that cars can't enter buildings easily because of their fumes. In the future, thanks to zero-emission vehicles, urban design will inevitably shift towards integrating the mobility element with the inside of buildings, with the option to be dropped off or picked up in a closed living space or on top of it, if we throw flying autonomous EVs in the mix.