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With the holidays now a month behind us, the big of pile returns finally processed, the financial books closed for 2019, and your planning for 2020 (hopefully) completed, it’s time to take a look at 2020 and share a few thoughts on what we see as some trends to expect you’ll hear about this year.

Batteries That Ruin Vacations?

About 7-8 years ago during one of our first annual Customer Satisfaction Surveys, one of our early and loyal customers was selected for an interview which is something we do to get some more qualitative insights to go with the quantitative results we get from the online survey. At the time this customer said something that we’ve always kept in mind as challenge we knew we would always need to devote our energy to solving a bit better every year. This was well before we had even conceived of creating our Lithium battery, the PowerSwap Nucleus, and at the time every cart we sold came with a rechargeable SLA battery similar to the ones still available today. Depending upon the configuration, most users would get 6-10 hours from a single charge, and then bring the entire cart to a power source for it to get recharged, usually overnight. One of the challenges with SLA however, has always been recovering them if they are left to run down completely without being recharged. Along with the relative weight this chemistry brings to a power source, this was the most common support issue we’ve traditionally had with SLAs.

Back to the survey. When the customer was asked in our interview “what is your biggest concern about your Newcastle carts?”, he responded “Going on vacation. Because I lose sleep wondering if someone made sure they were all plugged in at the end of the day.”