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Range Anxiety Reducer: AAA Unveils Mobile EV Charging Trucks

By Jason Udy | Motor Trend – Wed, Jul 20, 2011 1:32 PM EDT

In an effort to reduce range anxiety for owners of electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf, AAA announced it will offer North America’s first mobile charging roadside-assistance trucks. The announcement was made Monday at the Plug-In 2011 Conference and Exposition.

The roadside-assistance trucks will be equipped with the capability to provide Level 2 and Level 3 charging for auto club members when their EV's batteries become discharged. The trucks will be able to provide 10 to 15 minutes of charge time, which should provide enough juice for the EVs to travel three to 15 miles to a charging station to top off the charge, according to AAA.

“As the electric vehicle market continues to emerge, AAA is ready to help alleviate some range anxiety with the ability to provide a charge to electric vehicles on the roadside that gets drivers back on the go quickly,” said Marshall L. Doney, AAA Automotive vice president.
 

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Initially AAA will offer the mobile electric-vehicle charging trucks in six metropolitan areas across the U.S. Starting this summer AAA will begin testing its pilot program in the Portland and Seattle areas; the San Francisco Bay area; Los Angeles; Knoxville, Tennessee; and the Tampa Bay area of Florida.

According to AAA executive John Nielsen, AAA intends to expand the new service to interested members across the country. The pilot program will be used to research multiple technologies to determine which is best for different environments.

The roadside-assistance truck showcased at the conference uses a removable lithium-ion battery pack from Green Charge Networks, but other AAA vehicles will use generators powered by alternative fuels as well as other power sources.

Unlike mobile charging vehicles recently announced in other countries, AAA says its charging trucks will be similar to its other roadside assistance trucks and be able to provide traditional services including battery testing, jump starts and replacements, tire changes, fuel delivery, and lockout service.

“AAA’s mobile electric vehicle charging is intended to be a service similar to what AAA has provided to motorists with gas-powered vehicles for nearly a century,” Nielsen said. “When your vehicle runs out of fuel — whether it is traditional gasoline or electric fuel — AAA can provide you with a limited amount to help you safely reach a location where you can fill up your tank or your battery.”
 
 
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803 comments

  • Kgunn662
    Kgunn662  •  10 months ago
    why not place a wind sail on the roof to increase range.
    • DOUGLAS B
      DOUGLAS B 10 months ago
      we could stick our head in the sand and not do nothing-yea lets be an idiot like you!!!
    • racefan
      racefan 10 months ago
      It would only work going from east to west. All the wind is coming from D.C.
    • Sonjec Phreos
      Sonjec Phreos 10 months ago
      or solar panels, already do it with boats.
  • Lucas
    Lucas  •  9 months ago
    Is this a part of a car insurance feature?
  • TheOpinionatedBoomer
    TheOpinionatedBoomer  •  10 months ago
    Every advertising claim sounds great, until you run into a problem. Are you willing to risk getting stuck on the highway to be a pioneer? Seems to me that until there are charging stations every few miles all over the country (like gas stations) then the perceived advantage is not worth the risk.
    • rudyj
      rudyj 10 months ago
      People get stuck on the highway everyday in normal cars as we speak. It's not that bad of an idea.
  • mohammed the molester
    mohammed the molester  •  10 months ago
    We all should just work from home and telecommute!
    • Mr Bill
      Mr Bill 10 months ago
      Hey Mo, are you related to Chester? Back to subject. Did you mean teleport? Like on Star Trek!
    • humanist neocon
      humanist neocon 10 months ago
      not all of us have mom's basement.
  • T
    T  •  10 months ago
    I wonder if they will come up with something like solar panels that you can place on your car to charge the vehicle during the day time. That would free us up during the day from waiting to plug in our car's at some charging station.
    • donald
      donald 10 months ago
      I was at a High School assembly in 1963. It was aqbout cars of the future. They brought in a scaled modle of an electric car that ran on a turbine engine and would 60 all day long. The solar panals were built into the trunk and would would have power off the batteries as well as the engine itself. That year A.J. Foyt I think it was ran a turbine in the Indy 500. It didn't finish and was not ran again. This along with a carberator that would get 50 miles to a gallon of gas was bought and put into a warehouse in Detroit. Two mechanics from Florida did the carberator (Rochester QuadraJet) and got 50MPG on a big Cadillac engine, and sold the kits for $5 each. The put one on a car and drove to Washington on a tank of gas.
    • Jim Bob Dandy
      Jim Bob Dandy 10 months ago
      That 50mpg carb is a work of fiction. Never existed.
      A gas turbine is a ICE and is not electric. It burns fuel.
      I read that A.J. Foyt's turbine was banned from the Indy 500. When it ran it was faster than the other cars, thus banned.
  • Henry White
    Henry White  •  10 months ago
    Wonder how much the Government subsidy is on this ??? It's green, so you know the government is paying for it one way or another.
    • Jim
      Jim 10 months ago
      Paranoid much?
    • Ugo
      Ugo 10 months ago
      How do you figure it is green? How do they generate the electricity? THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS GREEN! It takes fuel of some sort to provide the electricity unless they get it from a wind generator or hydroelectric!
  • paulo
    paulo  •  10 months ago
    My son is sick at school oops the car is on the charger, I have to go to the emergency room..ooops the car is on the charger, My wife needs medication from CVS, oops is on the chager.The list goes on.thcharger
  • Kerry
    Kerry  •  10 months ago
    See the only problem with an All-Electric vehicle is that you can only go a short or medium distance in a 24 hr time, let's say for example someone in FL wants to drive to Maine it would probably take them 2+days to drive that distance in all
    Electric but you could drive that distance in gas vehicle within a 24 hrs day or so, but to me an
    all electric is bad option since some people would like to travel longer distances by vehicle.
  • GARY
    GARY  •  10 months ago
    Try going up a mountain road , with the family, loaded into one of these glorified golf carts.
  • Good Sense
    Good Sense  •  10 months ago
    From 1900 to 1912 electric cars were most popular. Several electric car companies lasted into the 30's but the lack of efficiencies made them obsolete.
  • Steve M
    Steve M  •  10 months ago
    I'm curious, the charge will let them run for another 10 to 15 minutes so the can get to a charge station. Where exactly are those charge station as I have never seen one.
  • A Yahoo! User  •  10 months ago
    and what if there's not a recharging station close by?
  • Bill
    Bill  •  10 months ago
    Electric cars are double dipping. First most electricity is created from coal, in coal mines they use gas for the trucks and electricity for the mines. Then there is the fact of creating the batteries and disposing of the batteries. So which one is better for the enviroment?
  • Jeff's Vengeance
    Jeff's Vengeance  •  10 months ago
    15minutes?! WTF.. there are Electric Chargin Stations within 15minutes of anywhere...especially on the highway.
  • Beyer
    Beyer  •  10 months ago
    There are always pioneers who sacrifice for the advance of technology. These people are paying a higher premium, enduring inconvenience, and giving up 0-60 runs to help developing a new technology. When future cars run on batteries, we will have easily forgot that someone had to make it possible first.
  • Sick Puppy
    Sick Puppy  •  10 months ago
    do the AAA vehicles that give the battery charges run on gas? LOL
  • elvis
    elvis  •  10 months ago
    These electric cars are destined for failure unless one can go 500+ miles. AND it's stupid to pay for all the trouble. It is not COOL!
  • Buford
    Buford  •  10 months ago
    Electric cars are almost as stupid a growing food (corn) to burn as fuel.
  • rslip
    rslip  •  10 months ago
    Check out the gas milage on the model T ford.... It got more miles to the gallon than anything on the road today. And granma loved getting humped in those just as your mom did in a 56 chvy. Ha.
  • a Yahoo! user
    a Yahoo! user  •  10 months ago
    Why hasn't some hot-shot engineer figured out a way to install an alternator-fed power inverter capable of creating enough charging power to keep the batteries charged while in use? The alternator concept has been around for as long as there have been cars. It works very well on the internal-combustion engine, so why not put a servo-fed alternator on the electrics, with a 1500-watt power inverter in line to keep the batteries up? Or am I asking the impossible here? It seems that this sort of feature would make the cars even greener, since they won't require plugging into a socket to recharge, using fossil fuels to operate the generating stations to supply the electricity to the grid where the charging stations are. This system would lower the carbon footprint enormously, while keeping the actual costs of operation of the vehicle at nearly nothing, other than routine maintenance.
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