London to get EV charging post network
Recharge units to be sited in former filling stations
'Leccy Tech Californian company Evoasis has announced that it's going to build a network of electric vehicle charging stations in and around the central London.
The charging stations – called UpStarts - will all be placed on the sites of disused petrol stations, the first being a 12-bay layout destined for Grosvenor Road in Pimlico, SW1. It and five others will be up and running be the end of the year, according to Evoasis, with another six following soon after - which should bring a warm glow to the hearts of the capitol's electric motorists.
Evoasis' charging post: 'leccy out, not mail in
Currently, Westminster City Council currently has 60 charge points in central London: 48 in car parks and 12 on street. That's quite a few less than Paris, a city that has recently posted the locations of its entire EV charging system on the web.
Evoasis said it is having talks with WCC about upping that number. It's also talking to Tesco about putting charge posts in shop car parks.
The company said that it would want about £2 of your hard earned to charge a vehicle like a G-Wiz or Th!nk City, and that the charging time will be in the order of 20 minutes, which suggests some pretty serious amperage.
The charging posts themselves will be able to work out the model type and battery capacity of cars plugged into them and will be painted post-box red, presumably in order to tie in with the general US tourist's belief that London still looks like it did in 1940.
Stansted Airport Evoasis' re-charging site
Each post will also have a built in 360° LCD screen to bombard users with advertising while they get their 20-minute juice fix.
The stations themselves are altogether more modern looking, having been designed by one Richard Barrett of EPR Architects to look like a modern airport lounge. With luck they will come with free Wi-Fi and coffee!
Certainly, other services will be available besides recharging, including on-site auto diagnostics, battery chemistry testing and content delivery for on-board MP3-based entertainment systems.
Come the winter, Reg Hardware will pop down Pimlico way to see how much of this is actually true. ®
COMMENTS
Can I hope
That the connectors on this thing *might* match those on the planned roll out in the North East? In fact can I hope for a national design that matches all over the country?
Infrastructure development can be incremental, even piecemeal, provided its compatible.
@Luis Ogando
"What we need is some frigging UK investment" The bulk fo the UK banking system is geared to 2 kinds of customer. Large numbers of apathetic personal customers and foreigners. "Set up a new chip company in the US (LSI logic in fact). No problem"
In one case I am aware of having a monopoly on the market with an 18 month lead on the nearest known competitor was still not enough to raise funding. For a UK company.
@Edward Miles
Only me and yourself I'm afraid, but that was my first thought as well... somplete with some schmuck sitting up agianst it because it was warm and reading tales of the black freighter ;o)
Aliens, coz they too got written out of the movie :D
Only cars then ...
... and zero thought for EV PTWs. Effing typical then. Just when the metropolis cannot take any more congestion, of any kind, the golden opportunity to further PTW use in lieu of The Car is missed yet again.
In respect to that 20 minutes for £2 - that would be of limited, if any, use to today's batteries. We do not yet have access to the new MIT battery technology that requires mere seconds or minutes to charge to full capacity from empty. Its coming, but not yet a while. So 20 minutes would seem to be a bit premature.
Ditto the earlier poster about why the Brits cannot manage this without having to go outside of the country to find backing and capability. Maybe it is time we burned Parliament down to the ground, put our politicians heads on pikes across Westminister bridge and got down to some serious regeneration. All of our incumbents are completely incapable so we're doomed ..
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