This is a true story
"But Can It Fly" is a product of the Covid-19 pandemic era. What started as a solo project of building an online application to compare electric vehicles during the isolation phase of that era, would later become a collaboration between a Son and his Mother hundreds of miles apart.
There was a time during the pandemic when my mother became severely ill from Covid-19 and she spent many weeks in the ICU. Incredibly, she survived. Then there was recovery involved. And while much of that recovery was physical there was also mental recovery as my mother suffered from what was known as "Long-Covid".
And so I introduced her to this project and asked for her help with research, as a cognitive exercise, and she took an interest. Electric vehicles were evolving with a fury at the time, and there were new dynamics within this industry everyone was learning about everyday.
Hundreds of the vehicles listed here are because of her work. This had proven to be a great way to learn together, build together, and make something meaningful.
If only that was all of it
About a year after her Covid-19 experience and noticing some improvement from the mental fog of Covid-19, my mother had a fall off of her patio. She was taken to the hospital where they found a tumor near her brain. This was scary for everyone who loved her, but was also hard to make sense of at the time. The fall was serendipitous because it brought on doctors and their examinations which led to the detection of a benign tumor, but then what does it mean to her cognitive abilities when they remove it?
After the removal of the tumor it was very hard for me to talk to my mother. She had a long way to recover and re-learn even a basic vocabulary. But she was determined to fight and always had a positive attitude. All she required from others was patience.
As she built up a vocabulary for a long time there was still long moments of silence in our conversation where she would dig deep in her mind for connecting words. With me she had the space to do so. I had to learn this type of stillness, just being the runway, waiting for those moments when she finally grabs those words and she is then, ready to fly.
The latest
We are still collaborating on this project, taking it further than I had imagined. Though the EV fever has subsided substantially, there is still much to build here to help others stay informed and aware of transportation options to fit their lifestyle. We now have an iOS mobile app and we are tuning machine learning models to improve how we make the connection between researchers/shoppers/enthusiasts - and market availability.
As technology advances further and manufacturers continue to introduce new models with greater capabilities, we'll continue to ask (in a hopeful tone) but can it fly?
Thank you for letting us share this with you.