Coulomb rivals Better Place in charging station design
As talk of electric cars and plug-in hybrids continues to grow, the issue of public charging stations is getting more press and more providers. Charging your car at home is an obvious choice but what about when you are driving further than planned and need a charge?
Better Place has been around for a few years and even has an impressive list of investors including Google. A new company, Coulomb Technologies Inc. has popped up in San Jose, California.
Coulomb’s charging station model is similar to Better Place in that both expect to place charging stations in gas stations. Gas stations, also known as filling stations are already used as fill-up stops for cars. Adding electric charging is simply continuing the basic premise of the station.
Coulomb breaks with Better Place in one significant area. Better Place not only would have a plug-in option but would also provide exchangeable fully charged batteries. Rather than wait for your car to charge, you could simply replace your battery for a fee. Since there are so many different standards used and projected for electric cars and plug-in hybrids, Coulomb decided to pass on the battery exchange idea.
San Jose has teamed up with Coulomb to provide curbside charging stations. Coulomb calls this the ChargePoint Network of Smartlet Networked Charging Stations. These stations are controlled by offsite software that can easily be upgraded to allow for future needs.
Subscribers would have a smart card or key fob from mychargepoint.net that would be swiped at the station to start and end the car charging process. Subscriptions can be for a specific number of charges, or time of day like night time charging. The subscriber can also find the closest charging stations along a route or request charging stations to be placed at specific locations for future use.
Overall, the system, which is currently in use, looks to be easy to access and easy to use.
Since Better Place has considerably more capital than Coulomb, this is truly a David and Goliath type rivalry. This looks to be a very healthy rivalry for future electric car owners and promises to spread charging stations throughout California and other parts of the world much more quickly than a single provider ever could.
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