Slashdot Mirror
Austria Converts Phone Booths To EV Chargers
separsons writes "Telekom Austria, a telecommunications company, aims to convert obsolete public phone booths into electric vehicle recharging stations. The company unveiled its first station yesterday in Vienna and hopes to create 29 more stations by the end of the year. The stations may not be super popular now, but they should be soon; Austria's motor vehicle association says the country will likely have 405,000 electric vehicles on the road by the year 2020."
Why, at that rate, they'll be able to simultaneously recharge 0.06% of the electric cars in the country!
And with the usual 30 milliamp analog phone line current, it will only take about a dozen years to recharge each car.
Phone booths in my country have lights for nighttime use so I suppose they have mains supply as well.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
As a customer of Telekom Austria, I can assure you that nothing about that company is quick and efficient. They're the former state-run monopoly.
People love to say this scornfully, but they seem not to realise that if "Telekom $SOME_COUNTRY" _wasn't_ a "former state-run monopoly" then if they didn't live within a hundred metres of their nearest neighbour they wouldn't even _have_ a phone service, and the mere idea of a practically free phone standing on the street would be absolutely laughable.