Electric car drivers on their travels are familiar with the situation: the battery is slowly running out of charge and the search for a charging station begins. Several anxieties often arise when the nearest charging stations are displayed:
- Is there a free charging station at the location?
- Does it allow fast charging?
- Is it also not defective?
The search for the next feeding opportunity for the hungry battery can quickly turn into a nightmare and, above all, a long odyssey. We recently had such an experience where we had to rely on Electrify America. This US charging station network had to be set up by Volkswagen by court order due to the diesel scandal. As a result, Volkswagen only took a half-hearted approach, complying with the judge’s ruling and nothing more. You regularly find 3 or 4 charging points, one of which is broken, the display doesn’t work or the car or charging card isn’t recognized, one or two only charge slowly and a queue quickly forms, which can take two hours before you get there and have charged your car. If you are also unlucky enough to have an e-vehicle from an older manufacturer or from an equally half-hearted manufacturer that can only charge slowly, then charging quickly becomes a nerve-wracking game of patience.
Only Tesla drivers know about such problems from hearsay. The charging stations are often equipped with dozens of charging points, some, like at Kettleman City, even have almost 100 of them. Only twice in my five years of Tesla ownership have I had to wait, and that was for five minutes each time, until a full charging station had a charging point free again on a public holiday.
The free charging points were already displayed on the touchscreen in the Tesla, but now a new function has been added: it also shows whether other vehicles are on the way to the Supercharger station. Tesla knows this as soon as you set the navigation to this charging station, because the vehicle preconditions the battery to the correct charging temperature. And this makes it easier for Tesla owners to decide whether to drive to this or that station.
For Tesla owners, the fourth fear is therefore superfluous:
- Will a charging point be free when I get there?
KREATIVE INTELLIGENZ
Über ChatGPT hat man viel gelesen in der letzten Zeit: die künstliche Intelligenz, die ganze Bücher schreiben kann und der bereits jetzt unterstellt wird, Legionen von Autoren, Textern und Übersetzern arbeitslos zu machen. Und ChatGPT ist nicht allein, die KI-Familie wächst beständig. So malt DALL-E Bilder, Face Generator simuliert Gesichter und MusicLM komponiert Musik. Was erleben wir da? Das Ende der Zivilisation oder den Beginn von etwas völlig Neuem? Zukunftsforscher Dr. Mario Herger ordnet die neuesten Entwicklungen aus dem Silicon Valley ein und zeigt auf, welche teils bahnbrechenden Veränderungen unmittelbar vor der Tür stehen.
This article was also published in German.
The Last Driver License Holder... 
1 Comment