electric vehicle charging

In an effort to expedite the country’s transition toward electric vehicles, the South Korean government is lowering the prices of electric vehicles by 2025. This strategy includes implementing electric battery leases for Korean customers. This would cut their initial purchase costs by nearly half.

Revel has announced plans to build DC fast charging stations, known as Revel Superhubs. The move sees Revel beginning to expand its core business strategy beyond electric moped sharing.

Royal Dutch Shell said today that it is acquiring 100% of Ubitricity, the UK’s largest public electric vehicle charging network. The amount of the acquisition is undisclosed, and the deal is expected to close later in 2021.

But Shell’s true road map to net zero by 2050 won’t become more clear until next month’s strategy update.

The UK’s first electric vehicle service station, known as the Electric Forecourt®, has been opened by GRIDSERVE today near Braintree, Essex, in southeast England.

If you are an EV owner with a dryer in your garage, you’ve probably dreamed up the NeoCharge product already. And if you have a second EV, you’ve surely needed one rather than calling an electrician to run a second 240V line. What is this black magic device, exactly?

Skeptics like to point out that most EV drivers live in single-family homes that make charging easy. And they point to the current lack of charging stations at condos as an impenetrable obstacle to EV adoption. But this viewpoint reflects a lack of understanding of how daily EV charging works.

I recently chatted with Jason Appelbaum, chief executive of EverCharge — the biggest EV charging network you never heard of. He explained several hundred electric cars, all parked in the same condo garage, can easily get their daily dose of electricity.

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Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) announced late yesterday that New York State will spend $701 million for EV infrastructure and other initiatives in the “EV Made Ready” program. That funds 53,773 Level 2 charging stations and 1,500 Direct Current Fast Charging (DCFC) stations by 2025.

The remaining $48.8 million, which comes from a 2017 settlement with Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) over its diesel emissions cheating scandal, will pay for charging stations and electric school and transit buses.

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EVPassport is an upcoming app that promises $39/mo unlimited charging on major EV charge networks. The included networks are Electrify America, EVgo, Chargepoint, Hubject and Greenlots, along with some smaller regional networks on the US West Coast. The app plans to launch in “a few weeks” but is taking wait list signups now.

The app will start with support for iPhone and DC fast charging in the US at first, with initial support for 2,500 DC chargers. It will expand to Android later this year, along with European support (including IONITY). If all goes well, it plans to add Level 2 AC charging support next year.

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Apple’s WWDC keynote included some good electric vehicle news today, when Apple announced that they would add EV charge routing into their next update to Apple Maps for iOS 14.

This allows drivers to navigate to a destination and automatically be told where to charge and for how long, simplifying the process of taking a road trip with an electric car.

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How would you like free power for your EV? That’s becoming the new alternative reality in Europe where grid electricity prices are going negative during the pandemic. The upside-down situation follows a recent period of oil prices falling below zero.

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Imagine a future where your EV was getting low on charge ­on a highway road trip – so you deploy a telescoping charging cable to another EV and borrow a few kilowatt-hours. An engineering professor at the University of Florida believes it’s not far-fetched.

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Imagine parking your EV, pushing a button, and a solar EV-charging cover automatically unfurls to protect your car and add a few miles of range. That’s exactly what a French company that produces thin-film photovoltaics and a French EV startup created. While still in the prototype phase, and presented in a goofy video, the idea is maybe not as far-fetched as it first seems.

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Hyundai Kona and Hyundai Ioniq EV drivers can get some relief from the pain of Electrify America’s opaque billing practices, at least until the end of the year. But you have to sign up with a promo code through the app. And only in the US, not Canada. And your rate will almost double at the end of the year, from $0.35 to $0.69 per minute.

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Washington, DC, has proposed a regulation that will govern electric vehicle (EV) charging on public streets. The contrast with surrounding Maryland neighborhoods shows how forgoing utility-operated and regulated-charging costs residents dearly.

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Electrify America, the Volkswagen subsidiary, announced today that it’s investing $2 million in solar-powered EV charging stations in rural California. The investment in charging stations that are not tied to the electrical grid will expand access to EV charging opportunities for drivers in rural areas.

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Tesla has signed a deal with the New Jersey Turnpike Authority to massively expand its Tesla Supercharger presence at Turnpike Service Areas, as well as build utility infrastructure for non-Tesla charging stations.

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If the 200-plus miles of range offered by a Renault Zoe EV aren’t enough for a long-distance trip, just latch on a 60kWh charging-on-the-go trailer in order to more than double its electric distance. That’s what EP Tender, a French startup, hopes that electric-car drivers will do with its proposed product. The company went back to the drawing board after offering internal-combustion charger-trailers for several years.

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Electric vehicle charging in New York City is going to be expensive, and New Yorkers will pay for it even if they don’t use it. Consolidated Edison (ConEd) wants to build 60 curbside electric vehicle charging stations with its ratepayers’ money, and sell that electricity to ratepayers two times over in the same transaction for prices that would equate to between $3.50 and $10 per gallon of gas.

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Less than a year ago, the Pasadena City Council voted to join Tesla in building the largest public fast charging station in the USA. That station is now live, offering twenty 50kW stalls each with both Chademo and CCS/SAE ports, accompanied by another 24 parking stalls each with their own 72kW Tesla urban Supercharger stalls.

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Is using the building code to promote EV readiness the best approach? An EV group says no. We spoke with them, and also the City of Vancouver, which switched from the building code to zoning law and now has a flexible approach promising a minimum of 12 kWh over 8 hours in every residential parking stall. Welcome to the quantum physics of EV charging policy.

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Representatives Andy Levin (D-MI) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced the Electric Vehicle Freedom Act this week, which would provide federal grants to private businesses to build direct current fast chargers (DCFCs) along US Interstate highways.

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