The Car That Charges Itself
Demonstration of the first completely hands free charging and payment process for electric vehicles at the Mission Innovation Austria Week 2019.
Charging electric vehicles without the hassle of plugging in a cable? Pay without the need for a subscription, contract, credit card or third party payment service provider? Just get out and come back to a fully charged car? No need to ever conventionally fuel up again? A group of Austrian innovators demonstrate the comfort of E-Mobility!
A group of forward thinking engineers comprised of blockchain experts lab10 collective, who build open protocols to foster the transition towards a zero-carbon society, e-mobility pioneers Easelink and the living lab initiative act4.energy show the future of hands-free, fully automated, conductive charging in a live premiere and presentation on the stage of the Mission Innovation Austria Week 2019. The event was attended by the Austrian minister of technology and innovation accompanied by experts in the field of smart energy and mobility. The combination of Easelink’s Matrix Charging technology and the use of smart contracts on lab10 collective’s ARTIS blockchain allows the charging of electric cars at just the tap of a button, while you’re busy shopping or enjoying a cup of coffee without the need to get your hands dirty!
For the dream of seamless e-mobility to become a reality, a lot of innovative technologies are working together in the background. Smart contracts, i.e. digital automated agreements, that are governed on lab10 collective’s public Ethereum sidechain ARTIS address the convenient, instant and secure processing of the payment and allow for a peer-to-peer digital Dollar or Euro pegged money transfer without centralized payment service providers.
As a second piece of the puzzle the Matrix Charging system of Easelink makes sure that the charging procedure itself is fully automated and can function without any interaction from the driver. A connector integrated into the underbody of the vehicle lowers to a charging pad on the ground, thus establishing a powerful conductive connection. The charging pad is extremely robust, suitable for both indoor and outdoor use. It has been specially developed to facilitate the installation of automatic charging infrastructure in parking spaces.
“The combination of Matrix Charging with an automated payment system is an important step in the realization of our vision. We want to enable automatic charging in every parking stop, completely unnoticed by the EV user. This opens up entirely new possibilities in the field of urban e-mobility and smart cities,” explains Hermann Stockinger, CEO and founder of Easelink.
Innovative solutions such as this one will be tried and tested in a living lab in south-east Austria as part of the innovation lab act4.energy, an innovation and technology initiative to accelerate research and development of smart energy solutions that ultimately can be translated into working business models at the lab’s parent company Energie Kompass.
Contact:
Tamas Locher, Community Lead lab10 Collective eG
+43 676 715 74 12
Johannes Steiner, Press-Coordination Easelink GmbH
+43 676 848 741 520
Ing. Andreas Schneemann, MSc., CEO Energie Kompass GmbH
DI Michael Niederkofler, Head of Innovationslabor act4.energy
niederkofler@energie-kompass.at