Where Will We Plug In?

autoembedded — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 03:44:52 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by autoembedded on 10/8/2021 3:44:52 AM

Electric cars, which have come and gone at least twice since the dawn of the automobile era, are back. The first mass-market EVs are here and more are rolling silently over the horizon. The Obama administration loves cars with cords and wants 1 million on the road by 2015.

That’s an ambitious, but not impossible, goal. Most major automakers promise to have an electric vehicle or plug-in hybrid in showrooms by then. Their commitment seems solid, and some are making big promises. General Motors just announced its second plug-in hybrid, for example, and Nissan says its factory in Tennessee will be able to crank out 150,000 EVs annually by 2013. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn boldly predicts battery electric vehicles will comprise 10 percent of the global market by 2020.

So where will we plug them in?

This is not an insignificant question, but neither is it the major hurdle some suggest. We’ll plug in mostly at home, often at work and, if we need to, at a growing number of public chargers. Some bet swappable batteries will alleviate our range anxiety, while others envision fleets of quick-charge trucks rescuing stranded drivers. Optimists say we’ll soon see batteries that can take us hundreds of miles, making the issue moot.

“There are a lot of possibilities coming, and it’s not just about home charging, or quick-charging, or removable batteries,” Ghosn told Wired.com. “It’s about a lot of pieces of technology coming together to make charging much easier.”

These pieces are falling into place as big players like General Electric and NRG Energy join smaller outfits like Coulomb Technologies, Ecotality and Better Place in rolling out the infrastructure. We’ve already got more than 1,300 public charging stations nationwide and thousands more coming. Uncle Sam is spending more than $100 million to help install 22,000 residential and public charging points nationwide by 2014, and ABI Research says we’ll see more than 1.4 million residential and public chargers in the United States by 2016.

For all this investment, the charging station you’ll use most already is here...

SOURCE: www.wired.com/autopia

Tags: transportation, electric_cars, electric_vehicles, automotive, auto