Quick and easy without cables

Quick and easy without cables: Hager Group develops a new charging station for the e-car

Imagine your electric vehicle could park itself. This is already true for certain top of the range vehicles and could even soon be part of everyday life. If my car can already drive itself, why couldn’t my charging station and electrical vehicle automatically connect to each other? Gone are the days of having to wrestle with tangled cables in the boot of the car to connect to the charging station, gone also having to try and roll them up neatly to fold away. The charging process could practically start by itself. Sounds pretty easy, doesn't it?

At Hager Group we are working to provide total ease of use with our automatic charging system, and we want to be the ones shaping the future and comfort of electromobility.

Docking instead of plugging in is how the automatic Charging System (aCS) from Hager works.
It is conductive, automated charging. Unlike the inductive, or rather, wireless charging via high-frequency magnetic fields, the advantages of conductive charging are many: efficient, emission-free & direct transmission of electrical energy from the charging infrastructure to the electric vehicle and no loss of conversion or scattering. These features enable safe, comfortable, fast and ecological charging.

The charging performance is not restricted by strict emission limits and allows slow charging at home, as well as fast charging at a service area. Fast charging brings another advantage to the conductive connection, as it even allows the charging system to efficiently cool the active vehicle components using its external cooling circuit, without having to install additional cooling components in the vehicle. This saves both space and weight.

All this is made possible by a ground station, which communicates with the vehicle even prior to the parking process. The system directs the vehicle to the exact parking position above the ground station before the actual docking process begins. Then a contact head comes out of the ground station and connects with the vehicle’s electrical circuit via a coupling on the underside of the vehicle. The system can also assist the driver to park with the aid of the parking assistant, or it can even park itself.

Why aCS is important for the energy revolution

Electric vehicles can only benefit from cheap wind and sun generated electricity if a charge is available and the vehicle is connected to the grid. With the charging system, this happens automatically whenever the car is on the parking space.

And we’re thinking ahead even further. With the development of such a charging system, we want to enable bi-directional (dis-)charging from the vehicle to the home (V2H) and from the vehicle to the grid (V2G). This can be done at home, in a public area, in a car park or at a petrol station.

Does aCS sound interesting to you? Do you have other application ideas, or an idea for a project? Great! Network with our experts!

Our engineers look forward to sharing ideas with potential business customers and partners to take the next steps from concept to series production.

If you have any questions, please contact innovation.obernai@hagergroup.com