Random EV thoughts.....

Okay, robots are cool and all, but am I the only one thinking this is dumb?

They could literally install 4 changers in the space needed by this thing

One thing it does seem good for is accessibility, but there's easier ways to make chargers more accessible surely?

Yes, and you book the charger in 1 hour time slots, so can book the slot closest to your arrival home...

What other cars have auto opening flaps like the Model 3/Y?

Or does this device have a finger for pressing, then opening flaps? edit: No, I see the guy still had to get out of his ID.3 and manually open the flap... showing how utterly pointless this robot is!!

'Flaps'

Yeah, but is that better than just having several dozen low powered chargers?

I get there's a queueing theory part to it where as cars finish charging they'll move on and free up spaces, which you don't have with slower chargers

But, people will do that themselves anyway for free, so why get an expensive robot to do it?

I think the cigar is for you, Sir!

Yes, it’s about throughput, but there’s also the utilisation of the charging equipment to consider. Ignore the gimmicky robot arm - that’s not really important. The idea here is that you move a smaller number of very expensive high-power chargers to where they are needed rather than fixing them in place and having them blocked or unused for long periods of time. For something like park+ride, putting even twenty chargers into a parking yard of five hundred spaces isn't going to provide much benefit - the first cars to arrive in the morning will be fully recharged by mid-morning, and then they will block use of a valuable resource for another five hours until their owners return. If you instead move the chargers between the cars that need to be serviced, you can provide much higher utilisation of the equipment, and a much fairer distribution of the benefits (e.g., you could book your P+R ticket to include however many kWh of recharging you need).

That said, I’d personally implement something like this differently: give each parking stall a "cold" charging port (basically a cable-joiner), and bring the mechanical charger “robot” to the other side of those ports: this has the advantage of standardising the interface that the mechanical system sees, which would make the whole thing far, far cheaper to implement. The cost of the moving “robot” is offset by not having to electrically wire each station back to a supply.

I agree to an extent, but I think it's important to match a charging point to it's intended use. If we take the example of a park and ride, throughput doesn't really matter if most cars are going to be there for 8 hours or longer

You're correct that charging is a resource that must be managed, but let me offer a counter proposal. Instead of viewing the charger as the resource, take the grid connection as the thing to be managed instead

So you can decide how best you "spend" your kilowatts of your connection

Taking your park and ride example, let's say the owners are looking to install chargers. Now they could install 2x 150kW chargers, with some method of queueing multiple cars (could be a robot, could just be a guy to drive the cars around). 150kW chargers seem to cost something like €100k in this country, from what I've heard. So maybe €200k total cost including a 300kW grid connection

Assuming a 20mins charging session per car, you can clear 6 cars per hour or 48 cars in an 8 hour period

Now, maybe instead of using those 300kW for 2 chargers, what if we used it for 40x 7kW AC chargers? AC chargers seem to cost around €1k these days. You'd need a lot more ground works, but I imagine you can also get a bulk discount on chargers, so let's say €40k total, plus the grid connection costs which seem to be around €15k. Let's call it €65k total to cover any extra costs

So for the half the price you can charge almost the same number of cars in the same 8 hour period. It doesn't make much difference to the end user since they're gone for the full day and their car gets charged anyway

If we take the idea of cold plugging (I really like that concept) then you could install more AC chargers than your grid supports and operate on a first come first served basis

Let say we increased to 80x chargers, and limit the session time to 4 hours. You'd deliver a bit less energy than our earlier example, but 28kWh is probably enough to get most people home (probably enough to get a lot of them back to the park and ride too) and it doubles your throughput

Someone call John Hinde.

Shame they don't know the difference between V and W...

My main idea wasn't HVDC charging: the use of a coupler pretty much means it'll be AC only anyway, as for safety reasons, DC charging can only be done on uninterrupted cables, and DC charging cables are also a very expensive thing to be providing at every station. The big advantage I see is in the cold-plugging, and making mechanical connection as needed. Don’t forget the cost of electrical cabling when you’re working out how much even a 7 kW charger per parking bay would cost: the bigger the car-park, the more expensive this gets.

The specific example I was thinking of was airport parking. Here, you’ve a thousand or more cars, parked up for at least three or four days, maybe two to three weeks. As you get more EVs on the road, more people would like to have their EVs charged up while they're away on holiday, thus avoiding the need to re-charge on their way home, perhaps. The only way you could offer this service at a reasonable price is by cold-plugging every bay, and then have a robot/dude hook up the cars as needed until they're charged. A computerised booking system would make it easy to figure out where and when each car gets serviced, and the advantage is that you can use mutliple high-power AC charging (22kW) feeds. Ten or twenty such chargers could be used to electrify hundreds of parking spaces.

The same principle applies in a different way to daily park+ride: very few commuters need their car fully recharged to 100% in order to be able to go home (you wouldn’t buy a car with just 200 km range if your commute to work was 180 km!) - drivers who do need a charge top-up may only need 5-10 kWh; but despite only needing the 22kW charger for 30 minutes or so, they actually prevent anyone else getting a charge for the whole day. Being able to attach and detach the same charger to different vehicles is a big advantage, regardless of the charger’s rating.

Or, far more simply - provide 3kW charging at each bay .. Enough for a day-trip replenishment for many cars, and easily enough to charge even the hungriest of the current bunch of EVs over the span of a few days ... heck, 2kW per bay would be plenty in airport carparks unless it's the short-term carpark.

I get what you're saying, but I feel like cabling every spot would be fairly cheap compared to some sort of hot plug system. Reliable mobile robotic systems aren't cheap after all

You could still have a load balancing system which queues the cars, it would just be software controlled instead of a physical robot moving around

For something long term like Dublin Airport, you don't even need 7kW, 2-3kW is probably enough for most people staying a few days

I mean, if nothing else you'd have to tarmac the Blue car park in Dublin Airport for it to work 😁

The solution already existed at quickpark (now closed) where you booked a premium parking space and left charging card on seat. Car would be recharged near return date and moved to express collection point.

There is big money to be made and at Dublin airport many airport own vehicles including plane movers are 100% electric.

Start off with 20 premium spots and increase based on demand. Already the ferries charge a premium to book the EV charger.

I do agree the financials for profit making on AC chargers do look problematic if you are not billing crazy prices or not getting other income such as hotels a few of which still offer free charging.

I heard a comment from easygo that in street AC chargers all need a separate esb supply and esb meter which makes them crazy expensive as esb networks are the only ones who can run power lines under public footpaths. The monthly meter cost alone would make these unviable in scale particularly if chargepoint is not in daily use.

Same old nissan

Abject crap that can't cool/heat itself and cant use CCS

LOL, you never know. If you had told me today 6 years ago that I was about to buy a Hyundai. A brand new one at that. I would have laughed. Or that I would ever own a Tesla. I have just ordered my 3rd one.