One of the major disadvantages that electric cars face is the charging infrastructure. Although you can charge your EV at home, there still aren’t that many stations set up around the country dedicated to charging your car, especially when you compared to gas. But VW wants to help with mobile power banks.
Just like a power bank for a phone, VW is proposing a small scale charging station that can be easily set up and moved based on need.
“Our mobile charging stations offer a further crucial advantage,” says Mark Möller, Head of Technical Development at Volkswagen Group Components. “Our charging station is the first to offer the possibility of temporarily storing sustainably generated power.”
The stations can charge up to 15 vehicles when the batteries are full, can charge four vehicles at once, and they can be set up relatively easily. Further, it’s 100 kW DC fast charging enabled, so charging only takes an average of 17 minutes.
So if you’re having, say, a car show, and you want some charging points for those newfangled I.D.s that are showing up, you can have them.
Perhaps more intriguingly, though, they can be plugged into the mains and found via an app. That means that existing apartment or office buildings (or whatever building) can install one of these with (relative) ease. That means that VW can supply major cities with a charging infrastructure that doesn’t cost quite as much as setting up gas stations all over the place.
“The mobile charging stations are a decisive step toward an efficient network of charging points,” Thomas Schmall, Chairman of the Board of Management of Volkswagen Group Components. “They can be set up anywhere as required – with or without connection to the power supply. This flexibility enables a completely new approach for the rapid expansion of the charging infrastructure.”
And there’s an added bonus to this. Volkswagen claims that batteries from EVs can be installed into the charging stations, giving them a new home. While that’s a laudable goal, the nature of a charging station means that there will be fewer of them than cars, so it’s less than a solution to the problem of discarded batteries. Still, kudos to VW for working on it.
Volkswagen also claims that this will be an important step for getting renewable energy into its EVs because these stations could potentially be powered exclusively by wind or solar power. It provides little information on the actual logistics of setting these up to solar panels or windmills.
What may interest our dear readers the most, though, is that this is actually evidence of how racing is genuinely improving EV technology on the road. A power bank just like this one (albeit smaller) could be found in Colorado last year at the Pikes Peak Hill Climb.
That power bank was only intended to charge the I.D. R once but was crucially important because if the car had to restart its run it only had a few minutes to get back to the start line.
These new power banks do basically the same thing, but on a larger scale, charging at off-peak hours (after you’ve gone home if your office were to buy one, say) and charging your car quickly when the power is needed. So racing does still matter.
Production on these mobile charging stations is expected to start in 2020.
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