You own an EV.  You live in a big apartment building with a big parking lot.  The lot has 4 Level 2 chargers, but they are usually full.  You are low on charge and need to make it to work.  You didn’t plug in last night. What do you do?

That dilemma is one of several a clever company in the Bay Area is trying to solve.  On August 22, Evan Kirchoff, CEO and Co-founder of Open Road Technologies, joined a Perspectives webcast to tell us about it. He starts with a very compact (8” tall x 18” on each side) but smart battery box that can hold 3.4 kWh and can charge at a 25 kW per hour rate (delivering those 3.4 kWh in about ten minutes).  Those boxes are stackable like AA batteries. Stack up 6 and put an electronics box on top and it is a 150 kW DC fast-charger that can be re-charged from an AC outlet at a rate of 1.5 to 10 kW per hour, depending on the voltage and amperage of the outlet.

How can they be used?   Go back to the apartment situation.  Think of that stack of 6 boxes on a wheeled cart, sitting in something like a Roomba home base charging station, plugged into a 220 V wall outlet.  Pull the cart out and roll it over to your EV.  Charge 15-20 kWh in ten minutes, giving you 60-80 miles of range. Boom!  Return the cart to its home base, run back to the car and zoom off to work.

How many stacks and how many home bases would you put in an apartment building parking lot?  It’s a lot simpler and cheaper than putting in L2 or L3 chargers, it doesn’t require special wiring and the home bases need a space only about 2 feet wide. It would be easy to put in a lot of them.  Inherently, there is no one camping out on them so they get more use. 

Or put a six-back in a stationary cabinet outside a roadside retail location and you have an instant 150 kW DC fast charger. Hello, Tesla?  Cancel my order for your super charger.  I have a better idea for my little shop.

Or for those with a nagging range anxiety, put a couple of the boxes in your trunk and you have an emergency 25-mile booster. 

Evan said they are targeting a very attractive price/performance spot in the market, much less costly than the alternatives and much less costly to install.  That is very important because the available fast DC chargers are ridiculously expensive..  

This session has been very popular on our YouTube channel.  Please take a look at it there.  For more information, look at this slide presentation from OpenRoad.  It is very good.

There are others that have developed portable battery packs to solve some of the same problems, but Open Road has come up with some nice features that put them in a class by themselves.   Keep an eye on these innovations. They’re not just about making charging faster—they’re about making it smarter, less expensive, more flexible, and more inclusive.