Emerging Market Megacities Together In Electric Dreams

In the former millennium, if you had a fantasy in overdrive and writing skills, you wrote books. These days, you join a management consulting company, and you author future scenarios. Easier and far more lucrative than coming up with “The Hunt For The Red October.“ Your client will give you the desired finale, along with a lot of money. All you need to write is a halfway logical plot that leads to the desired finale.

Everybody has decided that the future belongs to the electric car. Expensive batteries, high cost, low range, long recharge times, short battery life, these are just distractions. What we need is a halfway logical plot that leads us to the finale where the electric car gets the girl, and the ICE drives over a cliff. In comes Frost & Sullivan.

Frost & Sullivan has a unique perspective of emerging market megacities. It differs decidedly from my former millennium view. If I want to drive someone crazy, I ask “what is the world’s largest city?” They answer “New York? Tokyo?” I say: “Not even close. Chongqing. Population 32 million.” “Chong what?” Works all the time. Some people get aggressive when I insist that a city they don’t know and can’t spell is the world’s largest.

When I look out of my 40th floor window in Beijing, I see daily traffic jams in a city that grows so fast that nobody really knows how many people live here. (Latest version: 20 million, and possibly 3 million more – let’s call it 25 million). Most of the people see huge problems in these monster cities. What does Frost & Sullivan see? An ideal market for electric cars.

In their “360 Degree Perspective of the Global Electric Vehicle Market – 2010 Edition“, the huge megacities that mushroom in emerging nations are the perfect market for electric cars. Offices, apartments and shopping centers will move closer together, said Anjan Hemanth Kumar of Frost & Sullivan to Automobilwoche [sub]. An optimal breeding environment for electric cars. What about range anxiety? What about the money?

“With the lithium-ion battery an innovative financing models, the automakers are ready for a revolutionary business scenario,” promises Kumar.

So there you have it. Problem of bursting megacities solved. Market for electric cars created. Can’t think of a better win-win scenario. BMW already bought into it.

Until I take the elevator down to the basement garage of my building. 3 floors of garage. Lowest floor with heavy blast doors. My German clients who came to visit last week saw there “more S-Class cars than in our whole town.” There are the occasional Rollers, and the rest are run-of-the mill A6es. What’s missing?

Electric outlets.