Portable Electric Car Chargers Travel to Where They’re Needed Most [Electric Cars]

Electric car ” range anxiety?” Real, says GM, anyway. So, to limit the possibility of mass hysteria as future commuters’ e-tank gauges slide slowly towards E, a solution is needed. Mitsubishi’s portable, networked charging stations is usually a start.

The portable prototype networked charging stations are the work of Zafer Sahinoglu, at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they’ll do in general what you can think:

To determine where the stations are needed, in-car sensors would monitor the level of charge within the battery and periodically report this to a central operations centre, which would flag areas where most cars run low on juice. The stations can then be deployed wherever the low-charge ” hotspots” are at that time. Just five mobile stations can be needed to cover 100 electric cars on a 100-kilometre stretch of highway, the team says. – New Scientist

To reduce strain on the grid, the portable stations would top off with juice at night, when demand is low, and then dispense their energy goodness to thirsty vehicles in the course of the day. [ New Scientist , Image ]

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This post is tagged: cambridge massachusetts, central operations, mitsubishi electric, mitsubishi electric research, research laboratories