This is EA’s momentary attempt to have an electric vehicle emoji approved through the consortium in charge, suggesting the fuel pump and lightning together.
It’s not genuine until you have an emoji. This is the world we live in, is it rarely? If so, be prepared for electric cars to make genuine progress once the Unicode consortium indicates that what we really want right now is an EV emoji.
Electrify America, the organization designed to spend the $2 billion Volkswagen had to spend to advertise electric cars after Dieselgate, has proposed a new EV icon to the Consortium for inclusion imaginable in the group’s upcoming emoji update. The icon is an undeniable EV charger, similar to the gasoline pump emoji that already exists, but with a plug instead of a pump handle.
Last year, the Consortium rejected EA’s first suggestion of a new EV emoji, saying that smartphone users, instead, only use the fuel pump emoji and a flash to designate an electric vehicle. EA says this is not exactly a smart solution and believes that “the Unicode solution of proceeding to form the charging of electric cars with an Emoji fuel pump is not a forward-looking approach”. However, EA’s new emoji proposal took into account the consortium’s suggestion and added a lightning icon to the charger.
To get online help for the new icon, EA has created a request. This explains why Electrify America needs to do more than just give Elon Musk something new to tweet. Along with the structure of an electric vehicle charging network, the organization announces education and awareness of electric cars and, “with millions of text messages sent every day, we discover that an electric vehicle charger emoji can help announce the adoption of electric cars.” At the time of writing, about 800 more people have signed.
Earlier this year, the consortium approved a new van emoji, but it will be some time before an EV icon has to be sent. Like everything else, COVID-19 delays the appearance of new emojis on our screens. The next main edition of the emoji (which is a component of the Unicode standard) will be Edition 14, which will be released in March 2021, but will now be released for corporations to join in September next year and then be released to be available on smart devices in 2022.
Fortunately for EA, this means that all the new emojis on offer also have more time to send. The Consortium’s emoji subcommittee said it would settle for new proposals for emoji characters until September 1, 2020.