Amazon patents that might give electric car a boost someday
LET’S say you’re cruising down the highway in your electric vehicle when you notice the battery running low and you’re in a place so desolate it makes the Badlands look good.
The day may come when you might just be able to summon a drone to juice up your battery.
At least that’s the idea behind a new patent obtained this month by Amazon.
In its application, engineers from the retail giant sketched the idea of creating robotic recharging vehicles that would manoeuvre their way to a person’s electric car and give them a charge.
Whether that means that Amazon might someday add electric vehicles to an expanding online retail catalogue that includes books, groceries, computer cloud storage, entertainment and other goods isn’t known. The company declined to comment last Tuesday.
But Amazon is known for pursuing strategies and technology that it thinks its customers might want or need in the future. (The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder.)
The patent comes as the nation is increasingly prepping for autonomous vehicles and environmental advocates are pushing for more infrastructure to support electric vehicles.
Both developments suggest a future in which people get where they need to go in self- driving electric vehicles and self- driving electric vehicles get to them with goods and merchandise.
The Sierra Club says in a recent report that even big investor- owned utilities have shown a growing interest in funding the infrastructure for electric vehicles, at least in California.
The non-profit organisation says three utilities - Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, and San Diego Gas & Electric - have proposed spending a total of US$ 1 billion ( RM4.5 billion) to install 10,000 new charging stations in California, where about half of all electric cars are sold.
Virginia just announced that the commonwealth plans to use US$ 14 million from the legal settlement with Volkswagen to build a network of charging stations, the Associated Press reports.