The Price Drop You Can Feel…

Rafi leans back at 8:03. The depot is all soft electric whirr, none of the old rumble. His dashboard is bursting—on-time %, kWh, cost per order, stops per route—but the numbers don’t sing yet. What’s the story behind these figures? He opens a fresh Excel file and, before he draws a single chart, decides to listen.

First, he writes a sentence at the top, like a headline he owes himself: “Calmer weeks and costs you can plan for.”That’s what he wants the data to prove—or disprove—without drama. Then he makes a tiny tab called Params: the per-kWh tariff, the on-time target he’s willing to defend, the start/end battery buffers he asks riders to keep. Numbers with names. If the story matters, the units matter.

He resists the urge to plot. Instead, he tidies the cast of characters. Only delivered orders. No test runs with two stops that bend the averages funny. He brushes the sand off “Area” (Al Barsha ≠ Al-Barsha), and gives each route a clean date, shift, rider, and vehicle class. He’s not hunting outliers yet—he’s building a quiet room for the numbers to talk in.

Now he adds context the dashboard never had. For each route, he lets Excel whisper: How far did you actually go? How much energy should that cost? Did you keep your start buffer and finish buffer? If a route used a top-up, he flags it, not as a failure, but as a decision they planned for. Because what the city built—a map sprinkled with chargers—means buffers can be planned, not feared. The map, finally, is on their side.

He still doesn’t chart. He marks the season instead: summer heat weeks, evening windows, the days with school traffic. He adds a soft label for right-sizing—e-bike, bike, compact van—so the numbers can tell him if the fleet matches the street. He adds downtime minutes from maintenance, because a quiet whirr is cheaper partly for what doesn’t break. Each column is a nudge: Tell me who you were when you worked well.

Only then does he let himself drag fields into a pivot. Week on columns, Area on rows, On-time % and Energy cost per order in values, Vehicle class as a slicer. The heatmap blooms. In dense neighborhoods, e-bikes out-calm vans without sacrificing time. Evening windows behave better when start buffers are kept. Cost lines stop wobbling when top-ups happen inside a planned window instead of after a panic detour. It’s not magic—it’s the city’s grid doing quiet work for you.

He drafts a caption before he formats a single axis: “Evening routes in dense zones: on-time holds when riders start ≥80% and finish ≥25%, with one scheduled top-up near chargers.” Then he builds the chart to match that sentence—simple, legible, human. He repeats the ritual for costs: “Energy cost per order steadied after battery prices fell and routes shifted to more e-bikes.” Chart, then sentence; or sentence, then chart. Either way, the story owns the visuals, not the other way around.

Mid-morning, he checks the one thing spreadsheets can’t fake: does the pattern feel true on the ground? Riders confirm: fewer emergency detours since they started routing for time and state-of-charge. Finance grins: per-kWh tariffs are posted and boring (the best kind). Maintenance shrugs: regen braking is saving pads, and no one misses oil changes. Rafi makes a final note on his sheet, a little smile in eleven words: “The hard part got quieter; the easy parts showed up.”

By afternoon, the dashboard plots look…polite. He didn’t massage the truth—he named it. Cheaper batteries turned “someday” ideas into “this week” decisions. A denser charging grid turned “what if” into “when.” Right-sized vehicles made the fleet fit the city, not the other way around. What used to be noise is now a plan you can point at: start here, top-up there, finish strong, sleep better.

He closes Excel and writes one last line for the team chat: “Same promise, fewer maybes.” And for once, that feels like the most accurate number on the page.

Sources: Dubai now has 1,270+ public EV charging points (DEWA, Aug 2025). Electric car sales exceeded 17M in 2024 (IEA, Global EV Outlook 2025). Lithium-ion battery packs fell ~20% to ~$115/kWh in 2024 (BloombergNEF).