TomTom has launched a range of APIs designed to help developers combat the ‘range anxiety’ users have with electric vehicles.
A forest in one of the coldest places on Earth, Siberia, is currently on fire. Experts say temperatures are around 10 degrees higher than usual due to climate change.
Such headlines have raised awareness of the need to reduce our carbon emissions. However, realistically people are only going to make changes that have minimal impact to their lives.
The uptake of electric vehicles has been slow for multiple reasons, but one major factor is that people are concerned about their range and the lack of infrastructure to get charged up when needed.
Anders Truelsen, Managing Director of TomTom Enterprise, says:
“The future of mobility is connected, shared, automated and definitely electric.
This electric revolution poses new challenges like range anxiety which require a new generation of location technology. TomTom offers developers the perfect toolkit to create innovative and useful location-based services for electric vehicle drivers that will help lift the practical and psychological barriers to wide-scale EV adoption, helping to work towards a world free of emissions.”
A new Long Distance EV Routing API provides the functionality to users of calculating a route from A-to-B beyond a single charge. TomTom’s API will automatically determine where charging stations are, the optimal route to include them, and provide an ETA which also includes the charging time.
Another API released by TomTom is the EV Charging Stations Availability API. No prizes for guessing what it does, but one cool feature is that it can provide the availability of a charging station per plug type to provide any nasty surprises.
Only time will tell, but hopefully TomTom’s attempt to reduce one of the psychological barriers preventing the adoption of electric vehicles will help to increase their uptake.
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