Hyundai Presents Another Useless Robot, It Does Things Humans Can Do Just as Well

With most carmakers now switching to electric drives, the uncalled-for need for gas station employees to fill your tank will probably die out. Gas stations themselves will probably begin installing chargers en-masse soon enough, and then they’ll most likely won’t need a human on the payroll tasked with plugging and unplugging cars. After all, those operations last only seconds, and they can easily be performed by almost anyone.

You see, the biggest problem with charging an electric vehicle is not the actual connecting of the cable, but the still uncomfortably long times needed for batteries to reach a reasonable charge level. That will have you think carmakers and other interested parties are investing heavily in trying to cut those times down. Some of them are, but a lot of resources do seem to be wasted chasing useless technologies.

Kind of like something called the automatic charging robot (ACR), in the works over at South Korean carmaker Hyundai for several years now. It’s a piece of tech whose sole purpose is to pair the charging station’s cable with your car’s plug, and keep the two mated until charging is complete.

The robot is not meant to detect when the car is running low on electric juice, move to it with a cable in tow, no matter where it’s parked, and give it what it needs. That would have probably been kind of useful.

No, this one still requires you to park close to the robot, which holds in its one arm the cable from whatever charger it is installed next to. From there, it will take over and open the plug door, connect the cable, and unhook it as soon as charging is complete.

This whole approach saves you, at best, a minute or so of your time, and makes the whole thing kind of useless from where I’m standing. But this isn’t stopping Hyundai from going ahead with the project.

The ACR was first shown as a digital animation last year, doing its thing on a rendered Ioniq 5. This year however the carmaker is getting the robot out into the world, and it will show it at the end of the month at the 2023 Seoul Mobility Show.

In the meantime, the ACR was tested in real-world conditions using a Hyundai Ioniq 6, and we’re told it proved it can “operate reliably in all environments, regardless of charger location, weather and potential obstacles.” More importantly, the thing is rated IP65 for water and dust resistance.

The ACR works with any and all chargers currently available, and I’m pretty sure there will be people out there who will find it useful on some level (like they will all other similar tech now being researched elsewhere). But in the grand scheme of things, it’s likely to remain a marginal piece of tech, just like automatic gas stations or the use of human employees to fuel a car’s gas tank.