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JFE Engineering's quick auto charger does 50% charge in three minutes, hits parking lots in March
While range is an unfortunate limiting factor for electric vehicles, slow recharging time is perhaps even more troubling. Going 100 miles on a charge would be okay if you could stop at the corner electron stand and top up your cells while hitting the potty, and JFE Engineering's quick charger gets makes that a reality, able to charge an EV's batteries to 50 percent in just three minutes. Five minutes gets you a 70 percent charge, but from there things go downhill, with 30 minutes required for an 80 percent charge. The company is now pledging that these units will be ready for installation at convenience shops and the like by March -- in Japan, of course. The "low cost" version is said to go for $60,000, while the standard model costs twice that. Fast-flowing electrons: expensive business.
Europe gets first fast-charging EV station, hungers for more
Epyon, a small Dutch startup, is showing the big boys how it's done with its recently unveiled fast-charging station for electric vehicles. Billed as Europe's first commercially available charger of its kind, this unit will recharge anything up to a nine-seater taxi van within 30 minutes, thanks to its 50 kilowatts of power capacity. It's now installed alongside more conventional petrol and diesel refilling points in a fueling station over in Leeuwarden. That's the capital city of Friesland, a Dutch province that has set itself the ambitious goal of having 100,000 EVs on its roads by 2015. That aim is shared by the wider European Union as well, which yesterday agreed on defining a common electric recharging standard, whose universality might attract skeptical consumers and more cautious investors into the field. They've set themselves a deadline of "mid-2011," though the broad outlines and new incentives for buying greener cars are likely to appear by the end of this year.
