Has anyone told you not to buy an electric vehicle because it takes “too long to charge”?
Sure, we’ve heard the arguments against electric vehicles taking hours to recharge instead of minutes to refuel like a conventional vehicle. Let me ask you something: Do you remember the brick phone? Did anyone look at the first Motorola mobile phone, with its ten-hour recharge time and 30-minute battery life and say “There is no future in mobile phones.”? What are you reading this post on? Portable laptop computer? Tablet computer? Mobile phone?
Today if you ask anyone if they can even live without their mobile devices, well, you know the answer to that. Electric vehicles are the same. The first had to be charged for a day before they could be driven just a few miles, and now we’ve got electric vehicles that can be fully charged in an hour and drive three hundred miles. We love the fact that Tesla Motors’ Supercharger Network is expanding, as well as other public-access charging stations.
What could be better than a Supercharger? In Switzerland, the Trolleybus [Trolleybus Optimisation Système Alimentation – TOSA] project unveiled the world’s first Flash Charger for a fully electric bus, which makes even the Tesla Model S on a Supercharger look like a brick phone. Flash charging stations are placed at strategic points along the bus route and can fully charge the bus in just about the same amount of time that it takes to pick up and drop off passengers at a typical stop, or about 15 seconds. You can check out the video [en Francais] here.
The TOSA electric vehicle Flash Charger is mounted on the roof of the bus and is rated at 400kW. By charging at such a high rate, the bus operator can keep charge times to a minimum, as well as eliminate the need to overhead power lines that feed conventional electric buses. When will we see this kind of technology in an electric vehicle that we can buy, who can tell? Imagine if you could charge the Tesla Model S in just 15 minutes? [Supercharger is rated at 120kW]