In many ways, an electric car would make an ideal city car. The lack of car-generated pollution, both noise and emissions, has the biggest benefit in a dense city environment, and the trips tend to be shorter, well within most EVs’ range. Yet for most urban apartment dwellers with street parking, there’s just no good way to charge an EV. I think I have an idea that can help.
First, let me make clear the problem I want to address: the electric car charging infrastructure sucks. Most current EV owners get around this by having houses with driveways that allow for overnight charging of their cars. For daily commutes and normal driving, they can usually get by without having to hunt down an EV charging station.
For the millions and millions of people in cities all over the world that live in dense, urban areas, in apartments, and who park their cars on the street, home charging is simply not an option. Because the charging infrastructure in most cities is still so rudimentary, that also means that for these millions of street-parkers, electric cars are simply not an option, even if every other aspect of their lives would make such a car ideal.
Sure, maybe one day there will be a charging point at every parking meter and street side parking place. But nobody has even started any large-scale infrastructure project like that, and if they did, it would take years to finish.
As much as I love the idea of battery swapping, nobody is close on getting that going on any scale, and while Tesla has had some patents surface regarding that, no major carmaker seems all that interested in pulling the trigger on that.
The public infrastructure for street side charging is not there, and the major carmakers don’t seem to give a shit. We’re on our own here. If we can’t charge EVs on the street, what can we do?
We can bring the charging to the cars.
What I’m thinking is that we need a solution that would work with what’s available in the very near future, and won’t require waiting on utility companies or carmakers to agree to help out. The way to do that is with autonomous mobile battery tender vehicles that come to the cars, instead of taking the cars to the chargers.
(More details at the link)
