Electric bikes are selling but there is nowhere to charge outside your own home
My workshop in Lahore converts petrol bikes to electric and sales inquiries have tripled in a year. But every serious buyer asks the same question: what happens if I run out of charge at Liberty and I live in Valencia? Right now the answer is: you push. There is no public charging for two-wheelers — not at markets, not at offices, not at parking stands. The chargers themselves are cheap; a 10-point station costs less than a single car fast-charger. Shops and parking contractors would host them for a revenue share. What is missing is someone to build the network layer: standardized sockets, an app to find and pay, and deals with plazas and petrol stations. Two-wheeler EVs will be a mass market here far before cars. The charging network for them is sitting unclaimed.
A high-conviction problem with strong founder-market fit signals. The combination of severe price asymmetry, accessible demographics, and existing infrastructure makes this buildable within 9 months by a small team.
Solutions · 2
Battery-swap cabinets at plazas and petrol pumps instead of charging points
Charging a bike takes hours; swapping a battery takes ninety seconds. Cabinet stations at petrol pumps and plazas — rider docks the depleted pack, takes a charged one, pays per swap through the app. This is the model that won in Taiwan and is winning in India for commercial riders. Standardize around 2-3 pack formats with the conversion workshops (mine included) and delivery fleets as anchor customers: a rider doing 120 km/day will pay for reliability. Petrol pump owners get footfall as fuel volumes decline — they are surprisingly eager when I pitch this.
Start with fleet depots, not public charging — delivery companies will pay for guaranteed uptime
Public charging chases a consumer market that barely exists yet. The paying customer today is fleets: courier companies and food delivery riders who lose money every minute a bike is dead. Sell depot charging installations plus overnight-charging contracts to fleet operators first — predictable utilization funds the hardware — then open those same depots to public riders during off-peak hours. My rickshaw fleet would sign for this today if the per-km math beats CNG.
Discussion
I looked at converting my bike last month and asked exactly one question: where do I charge at the office? Nobody had an answer. Sale lost.
Delivery riders would convert en masse if swap stations existed on our routes. Fuel is our biggest cost after the bike itself. Fleet demand is the real market here.
Petrol pump owners are surprisingly open to this — a family friend runs two pumps and keeps asking what to do with his extra forecourt space as volumes decline.