Hello friends,
A few weeks ago, I rented an all-electric vehicle to drive up from Marseille into the Massif Central — north on the A7, then west through the Monts d’Ardèche, up onto the Mézenc plateau, and then into the Livradois-Forez. After leaving the A7 with its profusion of charging stations, I entered the mountainous plateau in the centre of France and an entirely different operational regime.
This volcanic plateau is in the middle of a band of low-population departements running from the northeast to the southwest — the empty diagonal. The plateau has few inhabitants and sparse charging infrastructure, barely any of it high-speed.
Renault’s predictive range analytics proved unreliable when confronted with these steep mountain roads, repeated elevation gain and loss, and sharp temperature changes. The range estimates changed so dramatically that I might as well have been planning the route around an infrastructure of phantom charging stations. Under these conditions, optimisation is a mug’s game. I was glad, as a believer in excess capacity in times of uncertainty, to have planned the route around much more range buffer than the charge-planning apps suggested.
EVs change the logic of long-range trip planning. With a combustion engine, you can be cavalier about fuel and optimise routes for speed or distance — it’s hard to run out of fuel because gas stations are everywhere and refueling takes five minutes. But with an EV, refueling locations and times become a central consideration. Charge now at this slow 22kW charger and add an hour to the trip, or use the fast charger 80km (and a 45 minute detour) away that might be occupied or broken? Having a lot of excess capacity is crucial.
The UX of the charging ecosystem is also still astonishingly bad. The charging network apps know where and how fast charging points are, but are terrible for optimising charging around anything else you might want to do while the car charges — like stop in a hardware store or find a swimmable river. The handoff between apps and in-car navigation systems is terrible; planning a route and actually driving it requires juggling several different apps and systems, none of which talk to each other properly.
Here’s an underexploited business opportunity: A decent rural restaurant with a few moderately fast chargers (22kW, which are more likely to be feasible with existing rural electrical supply infrastructure) would clean up. Not fast food or fancy food, and it has to be far from the autoroute — but make it a real sit-down place, a classic routier or bistrot with a formule, where spending 45 minutes to an hour would be a pleasurable obligation.
Public value and public strategy. Why borrowing private sector strategic thinking and values undermines public strategy — and a practical tool for using tradeoffs to develop robust public strategy that serves diverse stakeholders over long time horizons. 13 November, 2025.
Now-ish. It’s been over 3 months since I updated the now page. At the end of July, I went back in Singapore for a Centre for Strategic Futures Fellows visit to think about overlooked strategic issues. Adelaide in August, where I installed a temporary exhibition on experiencing not-knowing, and ran strategy workshops for Adelaide University leadership and SA Water. Singapore in September for a top secret futures project (embargoed until early 2026); then Tunis to run a tradeoffs-focused strategy workshop for UNDP Tunisia. Japan in October for business development, to see my old supervisor, and to walk part of the Kumano Kodo; then Berkeley to present my research on reasoning scaffolds. Auvergne in November to retrieve tools from the barn at the old house, then London to run a masterclass on how to think about AI deployment in traditional industries. 15 November, 2025.
See you next time,
VT
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