Transportation technology has been evolving continuously ever since the invention of the wheel. The newest in the transport arena are electric vehicles, and despite numerous challenges, their success has been spectacular. The biggest issue with the electric automobiles is their range and the long charging time. Despite the fast charge options, the amount of time an EV takes in getting charged is disruptive and significantly more than the traditional fossil fuel powered cars.
As EVs become widespread, regular cars continue to become slowly redundant, reducing the need for traditional gas stations. Ennead Lab was asked to develop a concept for an electric charging station for the city of Shanghai, and they came up with an EV charging tower for the urban roadside of the city.
Electric cars sometimes require hours to fully recharge their batteries, unlike the gas fueled cars that hardly take two minutes to refuel. Traditional charging methods require about five hours for a hundred mile charge, but the newer ‘supercharge’ techniques reduce this time to about 25 minutes by utilizing both alternating and direct currents. While 25 minutes sounds like an alright time for charging, the bigger question is where to park the cars while they recharge. A charging station with a design similar to traditional gas stations would have very limited capacity. The Shanghai charging tower concept plans to solve all these problems.
The Shanghai charging tower maximizes the number of cars that can be parked at the station to utilize the small space of a pedestrian area efficiently. The concept uses stack-parking techniques to build a multistory charging port making use of existing charging technologies. The towers are enclosed in perforated metallic canopies.
Shanghai, a global financial hub is also China’s biggest city. The city’s skyline features some of the world’s most amazing skyscrapers including the world’s second tallest Shanghai Tower. The city is one of the most urbanized and technologically advanced in the country, and it is highly likely that we will soon see the futuristic Shanghai charging tower there. It is just a concept at the moment, so we do not know just when.
