Emojis promote EVs

EV and charging station emojis on every smartphone and instant messenger is what a Polish organisation developing the electromobility market proposes.

The Polish Alternative Fuels Association (PSPA) has submitted pictograms to the Unicode Consortium – an organisation responsible for standardising signage – to promote global zero-emission mobility.

Emojis are used daily by billions of people, the PSPA team says.

“Simple pictograms help to quickly convey content or emotions. We like to put them in Messenger or WhatsApp messages, as well as in text messages, emails, and social media posts.

“Most platforms such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Samsung use emojis. They are divided into various categories of symbols, such as facial expressions, objects, places, animals, vehicles, and activities.”

“The new pictograms will enable us to easily emphasise our support for zero-emission technologies in transport,” European Association for Electromobility (AVERE) vice president and PSPA managing director Maciej Mazur says.

“They will also express our social responsibility and concern for the natural environment.”

Innovative technologies can help fight climate change, provided that people use them on an appropriate scale, the PSPA adds.

“To do so, they need to be popularised and promoted, which is the aim behind our initiative of submitting to Unicode the emojis of an electric vehicle and charging station.“

PSPA operations director Łukasz Witkowski says if the emojis make it through the verification process they will become available to more than 3.5 billion smartphone users and more than 4.5 billion Internet users worldwide.

”Once they have been positively verified, the new emojis can be expected to become available along with the introduction of Unicode 14.0. So, the ideograms denoting an electric vehicle and charging station are likely to be part of the Unicode repository and become available to users in the second half of 2021.”