Maybe you can’t get a vaccine, but at least you can charge your electric car!
Brooklyn e-scooter sharing company Revel plans to open a large electric vehicle charging facility at the former Pfizer factory at the Williamsburg-Bedford-Stuyvesant border, the company announced on Wednesday.
The company known for their omnipresent dockless blue scooters calls their new facility a fast-charging “superhub,” which will live at the former pharmaceutical plant on Flushing Avenue between Marcy and Tompkins avenues — with 30 stations that will feed direct current into any brand of electric vehicle, according to its chief.
“Revel is building the infrastructure of the future and we’re building it now – our planet can’t wait,” said the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer Frank Reig in a statement on Feb. 3. “We couldn’t be more excited to bring fast charging to our home borough of Brooklyn and get to work on the first of many Superhubs to come in 2021.”
The chargers will be available to the public 24-7, and are the recently-launched RTM75 models by the company Tritium. The machines can pump enough juice into electric vehicles to travel 100 miles after a mere 20-minute hook-up, and a full charge costs about $20, according to a Revel spokesperson.
The first 10 chargers will go live this spring, and the company will install the remaining 20 by the end of summer, according to the spokeswoman.
The hub is slated to be the largest of its kind in North America, and marks a new business venture for Revel — which plans to expand its product offerings beyond the scooters in the coming months as part of its “mission to electrify cities like New York,” the company’s statement said.
The spokeswoman declined to say how much the expansion cost, noting only that the company raised $40 million in funding during the last few years.
The new outpost is at the former factory of Pfizer — the drug giant known for producing Viagra, Zoloft, and more recently, a COVID-19 vaccine — which lived in the borough for 150 years before moving out in 2007 and selling the old plant to real estate firm Acumen Capital Partners in 2011.
Acumen Capital has since transformed it into a manufacturing space for more than 100 tenants, including artists, tech companies, fashion designers, artisanal food producers, education providers, and media companies.
Revel will not use the new stations to charge its 3,000-strong fleet of battery-powered scooters, which the transportation firm will still recharge at its warehouse, according to a spokeswoman.
The startup first rolled out in Bushwick in 2018 before spreading to more parts of Brooklyn and other boroughs during the following years, and became even more popular this summer with many riders seeking alternatives to subways and buses for fear of contracting COVID-19.
Revel deactivated its New York scooters for a month last summer after three riders crashed and died.
The company returned to the Big Apple in August with a slew of new mandatory safety measures, such as a helmet selfie and a 21-question multiple choice test about the rules of the road that riders must complete before riding the two-wheelers.
This story first appeared on our sister publication brooklynpaper.com.
