Electric cars may very well be the face of future transport, but they’re not without their drawbacks. Besides a low fuel economy and a lack of places to recharge, actually powering up your vehicle is one hell of a time-consuming event. But it seems that Volvo may have finally found a way past that.
Volvo has come up with what it calls the world’s first three-phase charger, that can juice a car up in around 90 minutes. That’s a massive improvement over the current chargers, which can take far more hours to get a vehicle up and running.
With that improvement on the horizon, Volvo says that a half hour charge can deliver 80 km worth of driving, while a full charge triples that in an hour and half. In addition, Volvo says that an overnight charge will get users around 8-10 hours of drive-time.
“The user can ‘top up’ the battery pack with electricity one or more times during the day,” Lennart Stegland, Volvo’s vice president for electric propulsion systems explained. “This means that the total daily range is significantly extended, yet with the same low operating cost compared to a car with a conventional power train.”
Volvo is planning to test the fast charger out on a fleet of C30 Electric cars first, before it goes into fulls-scale production.
