EV Charging

A year after Volkswagen unveiled its mobile charging robot concept designed to make the charging of electric vehicles a completely autonomous operation, the company has given us a glimpse of the robot in prototype form.

If electric vehicles run out of juice while traveling, drivers can't just walk to the nearest refueling point for a can full of charge. This is where mobile EV chargers could help, and the latest comes from Colorado's Lightning Systems.

If aeroplanes can refuel each other mid-air, then why not electric cars? What if EVs could share energy on the move? Could the whole traffic ecosystem become one giant battery dedicated to getting everyone where they're going without stopping?

One of the world's major EV charging standards has released its 3.0 specification, harmonizing with China's GB/T plug and using liquid-cooling to deliver monster charging rates more than double what Tesla's V3 Supercharger is currently doing.

A street in the City of Westminster in London has been dubbed Electric Avenue, W9 after Siemens and Ubitricity installed EV charging points in streetlamps, making it the first in the UK where all of its streetlamps have been given double duty.

A couple of years ago VW showed an all-in-one mobile robot concept that could autonomously charge EVs by bringing its integrated battery pack to the vehicle. Now there's an updated version that is able to tend to multiple vehicles at once.

Many people don't like the limited range of EVs. If their batteries could be recharged quicker, though, that range might not be so off-putting. That's where GBatteries' new tech comes in – it may one day be capable of recharging an EV within minutes.

Chevrolet has put some work into its little Bolt electric car, and is aiming for a big payoff as a result. To showcase this effort, the automaker asked us to drive it along America's Northwestern coast.

People will stop complaining about EV range the minute fast charging is a reality, and startup Piëch reckons it's got the goods to deliver an 80 percent charge on a 500-km-range battery in 4 minutes, 40 seconds, vastly quicker than anything else on the market. Why not just launch the battery, then?

This electric grand tourer will be a ton of fun to drive, with three motors combining for 450 kW (603 horsepower) and a lightweight body built for beautiful handling. But its biggest contribution could come from its high-capacity battery, which takes fast charging to new extremes.

​Despite the ever-increasing battery life of our mobile phones, many of us carry around a portable power bank just in case. In a similar vein, VW is developing a mobile quick charge station for electric vehicles, which can juice up as many as 15 EVs before its cells need charging.​

​Car makers in Europe have been working together for a while now to develop and roll out a network of fast chargers for electric vehicles. Now Porsche has announced that one of its research cars has received a 400+ kilowatt charge from a prototype charging station in Germany.​