In its quest to take over the world, Volkswagen wants to automate parking and charging your electric vehicle at the mall and other public places where searching for a spot to put your car is an absolute pain.
Dubbed V-Charge, which is short for Valet Charge, it’s a collection of technologies — including your smartphone — that allows you to pull up to the door of your favorite shop, tell your car to go park itself and then have it retrieved automatically with a (nearly) full charge (depending on how many pairs of shoes the missus tries on).
The project has six German and international partners, says Volkswagen, and could be implemented at current car parks with minimal work.
In short, the vehicle is dropped off in a valet area where the driver would then tell the car to drive into the car park and find a spot. The V-Charge infrastructure would then direct the vehicle to a spot with inductive charging if it needs an electrical top-up. Once fully charged, V-Charge would direct the car to another spot within the building to free up the inductive charging space for another car needing electricity.
The concept does make one assumption: that we still value car ownership and we want the same one back.
The whole thing looks chewable. Gummi Tek.
I do think the need for electric vehicle charging, other than to complete a long trip, is a short term one. I suspect all the EVs sold at the end of this decade will have sufficient range to handle nearly anyone’s daily driving.