Hooman Shahidi
- Electric cars are huge right now, but they can make road trips nearly impossible.
- Hooman Shahidi, the CEO of the EV-charger firm EVPassport, said 5G could help change this.
- A test with 5G chargers showed EVs charged faster and more efficiently than 4G-powered chargers.
- This article is part of "5G Playbook," a series exploring one of our generation's most important tech innovations.
Hooman Shahidi is a self-described "car guy." He sees them as pieces of art, moments in history. He drives an all-electric BMW i3 that takes him from his home in Santa Monica, California, to his work in Venice, the Los Angeles neighborhood nestled within a region known as "Silicon Beach."
"It's so fun — it's zippy," Shahidi told Insider. "The range could be better, even if it works perfectly for me. Needless to say, I think there's definitely not enough charging infrastructure."
Shahidi is also an infrastructure guy. As the president and CEO of EVPassport, an electric-vehicle-charging company that makes chargers and charging software, he's especially interested in infrastructure that will allow people to embrace electric vehicles more broadly and, in turn, embrace the EVPassport platform. He views "education and enablement" as the primary challenges to electric-vehicle adoption.
Hooman Shahidi
A bad road trip inspired the company's founder
Using the EVPassport system, as Shahidi describes it, is simple. Users find one of the company's chargers through a navigation system such as Google Maps, gain access by scanning a QR code, then pay digitally with Apple or Google Pay. There's no app to download, and you don't have to create an account or add funds to a wallet.
The inspiration behind this approach was an experience that Aaron Fisher, a cofounder and the CTO of EVPassport, had on the road before the company's launch in 2020. The story is now part of company lore: Fisher was driving his own BMW i3 from New York City to Hartford, Connecticut, to visit his grandmother, and the two-hour drive turned into a seven-hour saga after he ran into issues charging the car.
It was a mess of struggling to find stations and having to download apps, create accounts, and add funds to use them. Convinced there had to be an easier way, Fisher met Shahidi through a mutual friend and they devised a business plan to "remove the economic and technological barriers" around electric-vehicle charging, Shahidi said.
"I joke that when Aaron and I met, we fell in love, because I was obsessed with the way he saw the world and vice versa," Shahidi said. "We see the world through a more software-centric vantage."
The company got a 5G boost in 2021
Roughly a year after the company's founding, something new augmented the EVPassport system: 5G. In May 2021, 5G Studio, a project spearheaded by Verizon and Newlab intended to support 5G applications, selected EVPassport to participate in the project. EVPassport installed three chargers at Newlab, in turn creating the "world's first 5G-powered EV-charging platform," according to Verizon.
5G is the fifth generation of cellular wireless technology — it's the tech that powers mobile broadband on our cellphones and other internet-enabled devices. While most US cell towers currently broadcast 4G to our devices, which is itself fast and reliable, 5G has even more capacity; it is faster, has lower latency, and is more reliable. This is important for electric-car charging — greater capacity means more EVs can charge at once, and lower latency means chargers can communicate in real time to do things such as shifting power to vehicles with the lowest charge and ensuring a speedy user experience.
According to Verizon, the 5G tech helped EVPassport "reduce latency in charging sessions and to orchestrate the chargers in near real-time to rebalance load based on EV charging levels, for example, by prioritizing power to vehicles with lower charge."
The 5G Studio "was the genesis of the 5G full-on deployment and commitment," Shahidi said. He added that, for now, of the over 5,000 EVPassports available, just a "handful of chargers are powered fully by 5G," though "it's incredibly likely that you're going to come across a charger that is wired for the future." This means that some chargers are equipped to handle 5G when it becomes more widely available.
The majority of EV chargers are currently operating on WiFi, ethernet, or 4G because 5G isn't yet available everywhere across the US. But wireless carriers are expanding 5G access regularly, and when it becomes available, many of EVPassport's chargers will be ready to connect, Shahidi said.
5G is just one part of the growth plan
Shahidi said he views 5G adoption as another infrastructure investment: Frictionless connectivity is crucial to the experience EVPassport wants to facilitate, and that's something 5G promises. The goal is not to become the biggest network, he said — it's to be the most reliable one.
Nimbleness is also part of the process: EVPassport pivoted away from the direct-selling model originally planned, where EVPassport would sell chargers directly to consumers for installation at home, and now concentrates on partnerships with businesses in different industries, including hotels, retail stores, restaurants, parking garages, and apartments.
The hope is that availability and reliability will convince more people to drive electric vehicles. Shahidi is interested in this future as a person who's excited by innovation — and reducing carbon emissions.
"Investing in the health of our planet is the most important thing we can do for society," he said. "And so often people don't realize that business can be an impactful platform for change."