Anticipating the onslaught of plug-in and electric vehicles almost everyone's working on, the outfits making rapid charging stations are marketing their products alongside the cars they'll someday charge. The latest announcement comes from EV manufacturer Think, which plans to bring its little EV to the United States later this year.
Think partnered with AeroVironment to build a Level III charger it claims can get a Think City (pictured) electric car's dead battery to an 80 percent state of charge in just 15 minutes. Not at all coincidentally, the press conference announcing the new charger took exactly one quarter hour.
"This is a major leap forward for electric vehicles," company CEO Richard Canny said. "The development and deployment of very-fast-charge stations will speed the electrification of automobiles worldwide."
While Level I "chargers" consist of a cord and a 120-volt household outlet and Level II chargers offer a little more juice from a 240-volt appliance outlet, the Department of Energy defines Level III chargers as permanently wired units rated at greater than 14.4 kilowatts. All rapid chargers fall into this category, though the true speed of a charge depends on the battery in the car.
The Level III charger Coulomb Technologies and Aker Wade announced last week rectifies AC to DC and uses a three-phase 480-volt electric service. The stations were developed in anticipation of the Nissan Leaf EV we'll see at the end of the year and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV we'll see here eventually. The two companies claim their charger can juice up a battery in the same time it takes to bake a frozen pizza.
Aker Wade CEO Bret Aker called the rapid charging stations the "tipping point" for EVs. "Field studies in Tokyo have shown that deploying fast chargers increased vehicle usage by more than 50 percent," he said.
Whether that statistic can be replicated in the United States may depend largely on when and how fast we roll out fast chargers on a large scale.
Photo: Think
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