Manhole covers are definitely pieces of street décor that we often take for granted and just step on or drive over them without a second thought. However, in the future, we may start hunting them down in order to charge up our electric cars, if parking meter-style chargers are phased out by wireless ones. They won’t actually be manhole covers, but they’ll look like them, and you won’t be able to damage (vandalize) them in any way.

Furthermore, humans are driven by habit and generally don’t like change, so keeping things looking familiar does help some.

They also bring the benefit of doing away with plugs and cables completely, enabling parking your car along the sidewalk just like you do now, interacting with the manhole cover wirelessly (through a smartphone app, for instance) and initiating charging.

The company behind the initiative is called HEVO, which stands for Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Optimization, and the tech they’re pushing is called Power.

“Drivers forget to plug in all the time. Drivers will also back into kiosks damaging the units. There’s vandalism and theft of the units themselves. And sometimes there’s faulty connectors, and these can damage vehicles, with average repair costs of $14,000,” HEVO Power co-founder Steven Monks told Discovery Channel.

“What we have found is we are able to charge vehicles at the same comparable rates as plug-in stations, at the same efficiencies as plug-in stations,” says Jeremy McCool, HEVO Power’s co-founder and CEO.

The company’s focus is not on passenger cars, though, at least not primarily, and they’ll be keen to attract interest from those who (want to) operate fleets of all-electric commercial vehicles. Estimates say that there are around 100 such vehicles currently operating in New York City, but that sales are still expected to boom within the confines of this decade. This, says the company, will give them a huge market to operate on – the end goal is to “build a community where there’s no more cords, cables or wires” at all.

By Andrei Nedelea

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HEVO Power from HEVO Power on Vimeo.