Headline & intro
New York’s latest climate experiment doesn’t look like a shiny Tesla charger or a new subway line. It looks like a quiet taco cart on a Manhattan corner that no longer reeks of petrol. Brooklyn startup PopWheels is using the same batteries that power delivery e-bikes to run food carts, replacing the small gas generators that have long been part of the city’s smellscape. On the surface it’s a neat climate story; underneath, it’s a provocative blueprint for how cities might electrify thousands of small businesses without digging up a single street.
In this piece, we’ll look beyond the demo cart and unpack what PopWheels is really building: an ultra-distributed, multi-use battery network that could matter far more than the tacos it currently powers.
The news in brief
According to reporting by TechCrunch, Brooklyn-based startup PopWheels has started testing whether its swappable e‑bike batteries can reliably power New York City food carts.
PopWheels today operates around 30 fire-safe charging cabinets across Manhattan, primarily serving gig workers on e‑bikes (notably Arrow and Whizz models). Riders pay a subscription — about $75 per month for unlimited swaps — instead of the roughly $100 per month many had been paying bodegas for charging, a cost that could approach $2,000 a year when battery wear is included.
The company raised a $2.3 million seed round in 2025 to build out this network. Each cabinet holds 16 batteries and draws power comparable to a single Level 2 EV charger.
After New York City signalled its intent to decarbonize food carts, PopWheels built an adapter to run a cart entirely from its packs. Four batteries provide roughly 5 kWh of energy — enough for the lower end of a cart’s daily demand. A full-day pilot with La Chona Mexican at 30th and Broadway ran successfully, in partnership with advocacy group Street Vendor Project. PopWheels plans a broader rollout starting this summer, aiming for cost parity with gasoline generators while eliminating noise and fumes.
Why this matters
On one level, PopWheels is just swapping one fuel source for another. But this is actually a test of three big ideas that go far beyond a single corner in Manhattan.
First, it reframes who electrification is for. Climate tech deployment has tended to focus on homeowners, car owners and large corporates. Street vendors — often immigrants, often operating on thin margins and precarious permits — are usually an afterthought. If PopWheels can make clean power cheaper and more convenient than gasoline for these operators, it becomes a template for inclusive decarbonization rather than a luxury upgrade.
Second, it proves that you don’t always need mega‑infrastructure to electrify a city. Instead of lobbying for new substation capacity or stringing high‑power connections to every cart, PopWheels is leveraging modest connections (each cabinet is roughly a Level 2 EV load) and spreading them across the city. The “hard work” is in software, logistics and safety design — not in concrete and copper. For budget‑constrained municipalities, that’s extremely attractive.
Third, it pushes the battery‑as‑infrastructure thesis. PopWheels already serves hundreds of riders with just a few battery formats. If the same packs can also power food carts, pop‑up markets, and eventually other low‑power uses, the company suddenly owns a flexible, high‑utilization asset rather than a single‑vertical service. That makes the economics of safety, maintenance and financing much more compelling.
Who loses? Generator sellers and fuel distributors around the curbside economy, certainly. But the more subtle loser is the idea that small urban loads must be noisy and polluting. If New York proves that’s not true, residents elsewhere will start asking why their own streets still sound and smell like the 1990s.
The bigger picture
PopWheels sits at the intersection of several global trends.
Battery swapping is not new: Gogoro built a scooter‑battery empire in Taiwan, Nio swaps EV packs in China, and in Europe players like Swobbee run multi‑brand battery cabinets for micromobility fleets. The pattern is clear: in dense cities, swapping often beats plugging in when you care about uptime and don’t want vehicles idling at chargers.
What’s different here is load type. Instead of just powering vehicles, PopWheels is treating its batteries as generic urban power modules. That matters because many of the most stubborn fossil loads in cities — food carts, festival stalls, market stands, small construction tools — have similar energy needs: a few kilowatt‑hours over a day, with little appetite for high upfront cost or complex permitting.
Historically, cities tackled these problems piecemeal. You’d see a pilot project to electrify markets here, a separate initiative for micromobility there. Every scheme came with its own hardware, contract structure and regulatory headache. A shared battery backbone offers a more modular approach: once the network exists and safety is proven, new use cases are mostly a question of adapters, software and pricing.
It also aligns with a broader trend in climate tech: right‑sizing. Rather than pushing big batteries and fast chargers everywhere, innovators are asking what the smallest reliable, shareable asset is that can decarbonize a particular slice of usage. For short trips and carts, the answer is often not a 75 kWh car battery, but a 1–1.5 kWh pack you can carry with one hand.
Finally, this experiment nods to a future where temporary, distributed storage helps stabilize urban grids. Thirty cabinets at roughly Level 2 power are trivial for New York. Three thousand cabinets, across multiple cities, start to look like a dispatchable resource — provided regulators eventually allow aggregation and grid services. PopWheels isn’t there yet, but its architecture is compatible with that world.
The European / regional angle
For European cities, PopWheels’ pilot is less a curiosity and more a mirror.
Europe is ahead on many regulatory fronts — from the EU Green Deal to the new EU Batteries Regulation — but implementation on the street can be painfully slow. Meanwhile, familiar problems persist: noisy generators at Christmas markets in Germany and Austria, diesel‑powered food trucks around stadiums in Spain, polluting backup generators at construction sites in Italy or the UK.
The idea of a shared, fire‑safe battery network that can serve couriers by day and vendors by night fits neatly with EU priorities: cleaner air, quieter city centres and better working conditions for platform workers. Berlin‑based Swobbee is already building battery‑swapping hubs for delivery fleets; extending those hubs to power markets or kiosks is technically straightforward, but needs policy support and clear liability rules.
Regulators will look closely at safety. New York’s e‑bike fires have their European equivalents — from improvised charging in cramped flats to warehouse fires. The EU Batteries Regulation and national fire codes are moving in the right direction, but they still largely assume batteries are either inside a product or in a static storage site, not constantly moving between vehicles and micro‑businesses.
For European vendors and municipalities, the lesson from PopWheels is simple: don’t wait for a perfect, centrally planned solution. Start with the assets your city already has — e‑bikes, cargo bikes, courier networks — and ask how their batteries could do double duty. The technology is here; the missing piece is coordination.
Looking ahead
PopWheels’ food‑cart project is at the “clever pilot” stage. The real test will be scale.
Technically, several questions loom. How many full charge‑discharge cycles will these batteries endure when they serve both riders and carts? Does mixing use cases shorten battery life enough to erode the business case? Can software predict and position inventory so that riders never arrive at an empty cabinet, even when carts are pulling dozens of packs off the network on a hot summer weekend?
On the business side, PopWheels will need to choose its identity. Is it a niche NYC operator fine‑tuned to local regulations and vendor culture? A franchise model it can export to other cities? Or an infrastructure company whose core asset is data and software, with hardware and operations licensed out to local partners?
Watch three indicators over the next 12–24 months:
- City partnerships. If New York agencies formally endorse or co‑fund this approach as part of their decarbonization plans, it will unlock similar conversations in London, Paris, Madrid and beyond.
- Standardisation. Expect pressure to support more bike brands and perhaps interoperable battery formats. Fragmentation could kill the economics; common standards would supercharge them.
- Copycats. The strongest validation will be when logistics giants, energy utilities or European swapping players run parallel pilots. If no one copies PopWheels, it’s a red flag.
The upside is large: a new infrastructure layer that quietly cleans up some of the dirtiest, most overlooked corners of our cities. The risk is that it stalls in pilot purgatory — good press, little impact.
The bottom line
PopWheels’ move from powering e‑bikes to powering food carts is more than a cute climate story. It’s an early glimpse of a city where small, shared batteries replace a surprising amount of fossil noise and fumes — without waiting for heavy infrastructure. If New York can prove the model at scale, European and global cities will have a hard time justifying the status quo. The real question is who will own this new layer of urban power: nimble startups like PopWheels, or the incumbents that show up late but big.
