Although few for the moment, electric cars in Japan already have a bright future when it comes to charging, as a consortium made from ten companies want to give beverage vending machines another use: you guessed…. EV chargers.
Panasonic Electric Works will develop the chargers and will implement them inside Forking Co.’s vending machines, which cover about a half of the national total. The project will start at the end of March, according to Reiko Kobayashi.
During the first year of usage, some 10,000 charging units will be deployed, some of them inside retrofitted existing vending machines and others in new ones.
The communication infrastructure will be provided by SoftBank Telecom and SoftBank Mobile, through wireless technologies (3G, EDGE).
This project should satisfy some users angry that if they buy an electric vehicle they won’t be able to charge it. Now there’s only one more parameter we should take into account: for how long will you be able to assist the vending machine until it pours sufficient “juice” into your car…? Provided that the electric grid is not adequate to fast charging (at least in “on-the-fly” mode, without any buffers), they’ll have to find a solution for the electrical connection, too. That’s “also” important.
But what do I know? Maybe they figured that out already…
[via ecogeek/physorg]
