When you can fill your car up with petrol AND pay for it in a couple of minutes, the half hour charge times common on many electric cars can get old pretty fast. A Canadian utility company with money to burn is already working on the problem, thankfully, by designing a system that can do the same job in five minutes.
Hydro-Quebec is able to do this thanks to a rather hefty annual research budget of about US$100 million, a fund that has already helped to produce the company's one minute Li-Ion cell charger. This project is being worked on in tandem with the US Department of Energy.
The company has also been involved in Canada's Electric circuit, the name for the network of public-use charging stations being constructed in the Montreal and Quebec City areas this year.
While its sounds like they have the gumption to see it through, it still sounds like its very much at the RnD phase - a slew of patents are in the pipeline for approval before the end of this year, but no prototypes as yet.
But if we can get to the point where charging your car is about as easy and quick as filling it up with petrol, that'll be a pretty big step in the right direction for electric vehicles, in our opinion
[Autoblog]
