Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

Where are we on charging-from-underneath-the-car? I live in a city center, where I can't hook up to my own charging unit, curbside units are scarce and a pain in the ass having to plug in your car every time anyway (my neighbour's charging cable is always across the sidewalk, an accident waiting to happen, especially if more people would start doing this)

The obvious (to me) future is small-ish in-ground base stations in the center of all parking spots, with 'prongs' that come out and automatically plug into a car parked on top of it, presumably with some sort of communication between car and charging plate, and some way to 'guide' the prongs so that you don't have to park exactly in the right spot. There are technical challenges wrt reliability etc, but I wouldn't think those to be unsurmountable. Still I haven't heard of any advances in this field in years. Is that still happening or is manually plugging in the way of the future?

Curbside parking in city centers should go away. So much space is given to those tons of metal blocking the sidewalk and the streets, taking freedom to move from pedestrians, cyclists and also moving cars. Underground parking and parking further away from the city center can take its place.

In my city all new apartment buildings (here that's 5-7 floors) have underground parking with at least 1 parking space for every unit. I'm not sure if that's by law, but it makes good sense. The parking spaces cost an extra €20,000 on top of the apartment price, so it makes good business sense for the developer to do this too :-)

Opposite me (literally 10m from my window, across the street) there is a new development being built that used to be a dirt patch of private parking for an office. It's going to be a mixture of office, retail and residential units. For the past year it's been fun to watch them digging out the plot - around the size of a medium supermarket - to 20m or so below ground level, which will be used for parking.

The "prong based" approach is never going to happen, in my opinion. Inductive charging is already a thing for EVs (it's less efficient, and not at all widespread), and my guess is that where we'll see investment.

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