In other words, you can’t get close to an EV ARC and not be imprinting on our patents. And that was really deliberate on our part. We are about halfway through the life of the earliest of those. And we will, of course, pay attention to that and endeavor to make such improvements and changes as we can to the product in the future to allow us to roll new patents into it as it seems like that’s the right idea to do it. So — and we will rigorously defend our patent portfolio. I mean, the great news is we don’t need money to do that. This is America. There are plenty of people out there that would happily take that on spec, because our plans are well written and they will they’ll fight on our behalf for a piece of the proceeds, of course. Again, it’s America, no one is ready for free.
But I think we’re well defended where that’s concerned and certainly for the foreseeable future. As far as competitors are concerned, you said if — you asked me if there’s any sort of like — I think you said well yield or at least larger capable competitors. I don’t know if any competitor has anything like what we have rapidly deployed, transportable. We’ve seen no hint of it except that there are a couple of smaller companies out there who are making things that might look a bit like it, but they can’t really compete with it. For example, on here, I’ll all the negative. We actually lost a contract last year to a company that takes 20-foot shipping containers and fixes solar panels on the roof of those containers, put some batteries inside of them and then attaches EV charging to the outside of the container.
Now, they can compete with us almost on speed to deploy. They’re still not as fast as we are. There’s certainly nowhere near as elegant as we are from a point of view, because they still have to kind of bolt it together. Their units don’t hold out hydraulically like our view on their site. And I again, I encourage you to watch the video on our product section, the EV ARC product show you exactly how this is done, and it’s really elegant. But there are several things wrong with container-based solutions. First of all, a shipping container does not fit into a standard legal side parking space, which measures 9 foot by 18 feet in United States, you are going to stick two feet out into the dry vial. In many instances, that is illegal because dry vials are often also violent.
A shipping container will render the parking space unusable. Unlike our product which allows you to park on it, a shipping container will prevent you from parking that space. And most jurisdictions that we care about have a minimum requirement for the number of parking spaces which are required for the use on the property. Taking away, even just one of those spaces will knock the property out of compliance. You might get away with that for six weeks or six months, but you’re not going to build a business out of it. And then, from an energy density point of view, the shipping containers can’t compete with us because they don’t have our patented tracking solution following the sun as it moves across the sky and generating a measured 25% more electricity, which just means more miles into the electric vehicle.
