Waiting for an EV charger sucks, but Hyundai has a concept that could fix that
The convenience that the automated valet and wireless charging concept promises has us pining for the future.
One of the problems with owning an electric vehicle is trying to charge it away from your home. It's not that chargers aren't getting pretty common, but rather that since electric vehicles have gotten increasingly popular, space at chargers can be tough to find. Compound that with people's tendency to leave their car while it's charging and it's easy to understand EV owners' frustration.
Hyundai and Kia think that they have a viable solution to that. The two sister companies debuted a video on Thursday that shows a vehicle using both wireless vehicle charging technology and Hyundai's Automated Valet Parking System (AVPS) to maximize efficiency at the charging station without needing a human to monitor the situation.
The system works first by parking a wireless EV charging-capable car over a charge pad. Computers monitor its state of charge and when it reaches a predetermined level, the AVPS takes over, moving the car to a vacant parking spot elsewhere in the garage. The next car in the queue waiting to charge then automatically takes its space, and the process repeats.
While it's just a concept for now, Hyundai did state that it plans to roll this technology out when Level 4 autonomous capability is available in its vehicles, which it predicts will happen sometime in 2025. Is that a long wait for parking convenience? Yep, but parking convenience is some of the very best convenience, don't you think?
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