Possibly the biggest hurdle to electric vehicles (EVs) spreading everywhere in the United States is the lack of charging infrastructure. Since most EVs have a range that is far longer than the average American drives on a typical day, it’s possible for many people to use one as a daily driver and just recharge at home. But when infrastructure improves, and it’s possible to charge at more locations, range becomes less of a concern.
But building charging infrastructure into lots and parking garages not originally designed for it is heavy work. It requires laying a lot of new electric cables and installing new charging stations. Unless it doesn’t. Volkswagen has proposed a simple solution that works even in older parking garages, where the work of installing new infrastructure is daunting. The idea is charging stations that move. On their own.
VW calls them Mobile Charging Robots. The heart of the system is…well…it’s adorable.
Drivers would use an app, after parking, to tell the system their EV needs a charge. A small, boxy robot on wheels, with digital eyes and a single articulating arm, then tows over a rolling battery unit and plugs it into the car. When the car is full, the rolling battery signals the robot, which retrieves the battery and plugs it in to recharge for the next use.
Oh, and the robot makes adorable beeps and boops all the while.
You might call it an elegant engineering solution. It allows parking garage owners to use a footprint equal to one parking space to store equipment to charge a dozen EVs at a time. And the setup requires wires run to just one spot rather than many.
VW says the system has “successfully reached prototype status,” though, to date, we’ve only seen digital renderings and an animated video.
