Best Way to Charge an Electric Car May Soon Be a Robot Named Ziggy
By: Originally published in Car and Driver on July 5, 2022.
If you’ve driven an electric vehicle, you know the struggle of arriving at a parking lot only to find the sparse EV charging spots all filled up. Worse yet, one of the cars hooked up to the charging port is fully charged with no owner in sight! Oh, the horror of underdeveloped EV infrastructure. A Los Angeles startup named EV Safe Charge thinks it has a solution: Ziggy, the EV-charging robot.
Ziggy is intended to be a solution for parking areas looking to implement EV charging but struggling to overcome the limitations of stationary charging systems. The way it works is this: Drivers enter the parking area and reserve a numbered parking spot through an app. When they arrive at their spot, Ziggy is there, ready to charge their car.
The robot is essentially a refrigerator-sized battery with four independently driven wheels and cameras on all sides, allowing it to autonomously navigate from its home base to parking spaces at speeds slower than a walking pace. Though it can’t plug in and unplug your car for you, the usage cost of Ziggy can be based on time to discourage people from monopolizing the robots. Alternatively, parking areas can provide Ziggy’s services for free. It also has two screens with optional touchscreen capacity on the long sides that can display advertisements or parking structure maps.
Parking areas will be able to lease Ziggys, so maintenance is taken care of by EV Safe Charge, and fleets of the robots can be deployed temporarily for events. While a Ziggy charging station will need to be installed, the system is supposed to eliminate some of the hassle of stationary chargers for both drivers and property owners.
