The convenience of wirelessly charging your electric vehicle while it’s parked – this is the proposed vision of Watt concept. Thus, making it seamlessly easy for EV owners to have a hassle-free commuting experience in the city or on highways.
You have the luxury of charging mobile devices wirelessly, and soon juicing up your vehicle with no strings attached is going to be possible. In fact, vehicle manufacturers like BMW are already working on this technology with prototype testing underway. Currently, electric vehicle owners have to plug in the charging port manually to recharge the vehicle battery, no matter how bad the weather outside is. On top of that additional infrastructure is required in parking lots or other places where such EV charging stations are installed. This calls for the wireless charging possibility of EVs while they are parked.
Designer: Cheolhee Lee, Na Gyeong Lee, Junsik Oh, Kyoung-Seo Park
That’s the idea behind this intuitive concept dubbed Watt. It is a wireless EV charging stopper for parking spaces – eliminating the need for setting up separate charging station infrastructure in cities and highways. Watt (Wireless Advanced Transportation Charging Tile) is an EV charger and a car stopper in one, bringing the convenience of seamless charging to the fore. The solution also addresses the problem of finding space for parking vehicles when other EV owners are also in the queue at a busy charging station.
Designers of this concept want to end another problem with EVs that bugs users at times. Yes, I’m talking about the discharging of the battery when the vehicle is parked in colder regions or other specific circumstances. This happens because lithium-ion batteries just like those on our smartphones discharge rapidly in colder conditions.
Coming on to this novel idea, the proposed product comes with an accompanying app for initiating the charging cycle as soon as you park the vehicle in the bay. The current charge levels, time to full charge, and other metrics can be tracked on the phone while you go shopping in the grocery store. The user just has to register once with the Watt services, and everything following that is pretty much easy. Things like charging history, the location of nearby Watt-enabled charging locations, and payment methods can be viewed in the app.
Watt is truly a convenient and space-saving solution for the future dominated by electric vehicles, wherein, we’re going to have to deal with the problem of having enough charging stations for EVs. Even more so, the issue of building the infrastructure that requires ample space to accommodate vehicles in line for charging.
