Electric vehicles are the future of personal transportation. That can’t be denied. The problem is, it’s hard to make EVs the present. For one thing, a lot of the benefits to owning an electric vehicle when it comes to emissions are obviated by the fact that much of the United States still depends upon coal-based electricity. Leaving aside that fact, though, there’s a more practical problem with replacing your old gas guzzler with an electric vehicle: while gas stations are pretty much ubiquitous across the country, electric vehicle charging stations are not. In fact, not only are they pretty dang rare, but it’s almost impossible to know where the nearest charging station is to you, even if there is one in the area.
Well, until now. Google has just rolled out a nifty new Google Maps feature that will help you find electric vehicle charging stations in your area, before your car runs out of juice.
Here’s how it works. If you want to find the closest electric vehicle charging stations to where you are or where you will be, just search Google Maps by preceding your search term with “EV charging stations near.” For example, if you were near Times Square in New York City, you’d search for “EV Charging stations near Times Square, New York.”
Of course, there’s a catch, and that’s information: not all of the charging stations in the country are listed yet. As the service becomes used more, though, owners of EV charging stations will hopefully start reporting themselves to Google, and Google also says that the US DOE NREL is working to make data on public charging stations moree available, and Google will mirror that database accordingly.
Most of us, we probably won’t use this, but this is just another small step towards more widescale EV acceptance.
Read more at Google
No comments:
Post a Comment