StreetLight Data Partnership Aims to Help Expand EV Chargers

With electric vehicles slowly gaining momentum toward becoming the dominant form of transportation in the U.S., two startups have struck up a partnership to help cities and utilities figure out where to put more car chargers. StreetLight Data, which sells transportation data to local governments, will offer Volta Charging's PredictEV tool to its customers. The tool uses AI to generate suggestions about where electric charging infrastructure would be most useful -- an urban planning consideration that is becoming more important as more electric vehicles hit the streets. Today, electric vehicles make up only around 2 percent of new vehicles sold in the U.S., but that number is rising rapidly. In 2020, Pew Research found that the number of EVs sold in the country had more than tripled since 2016.