Often, charging your electric vehicle outside of your home involves either sitting in your car and staring at your phone or parking and wandering around aimlessly. It's not ideal, but Audi thinks it can do a whole lot better with its pilot charging hub program, which it announced on Friday.
The first Audi Charging Hub is located in Nuremberg Exhibition Center in Germany and is set to open on Dec. 23. There are six chargers capable of charging at up to 350 kilowatts, and they're available only by reservation. That's all reasonably normal, but where the Audi setup differs is in its lounge space.
The lounge is a sleek, modern indoor space with plenty of seating as well as self-serve coffee and vending machines and, of course, Wi-Fi, with the idea that these charging hubs would be set up in urban areas and allow people to work comfortably while their EV charges.
The other cool part of this is that Audi wants to keep the cost of charging down, so it's allowing those drivers who have an E-Tron service contract to charge for about 35 cents per kilowatt (31 cents in euros).
The pilot charging hub is accessible only by E-Tron owners whose vehicle has Audi's Plug and Charge functionality and an active E-Tron service contract.
