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Mobile charging robots in China convert any parking space into an EV charging point
(carnewschina.com)
It needs legs.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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This, I want an R2D2 battery pack.
R2 is an astromech for navigation. R2 should be the GPS for your car. The GNK droid was for mobile power delivery.
And when computers get more powerful, you'll get a rounded one, not boxed like this.
Who charges the chargers?
Quis onerat onustores?
It is chargers all the way down
I think it makes more sense to build a large gantry and hang a power cable from it but what do I know.
That is an interesting question. Wires are expensive, and so that gantry isn't cheap - probably you want to run high voltage which implies transformers everywhere (and in turn more poles to hold them up)... Batteries are not cheaper either though. Of course we also don't know how many systems we are talking about - if only 1 car in a large parking lots needs charging that is very difference costs from every car.
I don't know where to find the numbers to work with. (I probably could). Does anyone have some real world numbers for what the costs of each are so we can compare?
Looks like any two. If you like to park near the doors like most people this isn't for you. If you live where the lot is full this isn't for you. (The article says it is but the geometry doesn't work)
You can already do that with portable battery generators. This is just the big boy version that gets you more than 10 km range with it.
Given that you need to plug it in manually, is there any benefit to it being automated? A battery on a trolley would do the same job.
The robot weighs 2t. So pushing it around is not going to be possible for a lot of people.
But also you can just install charging piles next to the parking spots or use fast charging.
It has a 100kWh battery in it. I'm sure some of that could be used to move it around.
Installing charging piles in every parking space is way more expensive. That's the point of this thing.
Are they diesel powered? :P
I'm not sure if you're aware of the concept of electricity powering vehicles, or the concept of things that move around about provide fuel to other things - like a fuel truck at an airport.
I think they are rolling battery packs that get charged at their home base:
The device—about 1.5 meters tall and equipped with a roughly 100‑kWh battery pack...
Yeah it even says CATL on the box :D (CATL being the worlds leading battery manufacturer)