BARCELONA: Spanish electric vehicle charging equipment manufacturer Wallbox is to introduce the first-ever DC electric vehicle charger for the home.
The company is also unveiling speech recognition and artificial intelligence software, which simplifies the management of electric vehicle charging. And adding important upgrades across its range of domestic and public space charging systems, including online payment.
The new DC charger puts energy created and stored in the home, straight into the electric vehicle through a CCS or ChaDeMo connector. Home generation and storage are now becoming much more cost effective considerations as electric vehicle range and battery size increase and reduce ROI timescales.
The charger’s unique bi-directional power electronics reconcile the alternating (AC) and direct (DC) energy that flows between vehicle charging, rooftop PV generation or garden wind turbines, and home battery storage.
The new Wallbox charger is light-weight and compact enough to fit within a domestic setting. And it has all the premium styling cues and brand language of the Wallbox design influence. First sales are planned for mid-2019.
Wallbox is also making it easier to manage electric vehicle charging at home. The company is introducing software that allows spoken commands, and cognitive intelligence that learns about an owner’s charging behaviour and preferences, in order to predict optimum energy balance with home and grid.
This unique two-tier combination of software technologies means that you can speak directly to your home charging system and it will interpret your requirements in the most energy efficient manner.
For instance, you can simply say: "I need my car fully charged for the morning" and Wallbox will take care of the rest, with consideration for all other home energy demands during the same period of charging.
The ability for Wallbox software to automatically manage charging in this way adds another smart layer to dynamic load balancing between between vehicle and the home, and vehicles parked in the same area.
Wallbox operates in 30 markets around Europe, New Zealand and China. It began UK operations in September 2018.
