Photo: Nissan
In today’s world, owning an electric vehicle means that you kind of need to plug it in every chance you get. That basically means that when stopping for a few minutes, you’d better do so close to a charging station, so that electricity could flow from the grid into the battery. But what if it did the opposite?
The last thing that crosses your mind when plugging a vehicle in is that it would be drained of electricity to some degree, including as a means for you to pay for something. Sure, you probably heard about bidirectional charging, but that is supposed to feed energy back into the grid when it needs it.
Nissan, maker of one of the world’s first mass-produced EVs, announced this week it is accepting electricity as payment for parking at its Pavilion exhibition space in Yokohama. That’s right, if you don’t have money on you, just plug the car in, and some kW would be deducted from your battery.
Nissan does not specifically say how the system is supposed to work, or how much energy you must take out of the car to pay for your stay at the Pavilion. And since that’s in Japan, we’ll probably not get to experience this ourselves any time soon.
But given how the venue is the place where whatever good things are left of Nissan would be present, a World Expo of sorts, this is more of a “look what we could do" affair. So no, don’t expect it to become norm.
“The Pavilion is a place where customers can see, feel, and be inspired by our near-future vision for society and mobility,” said Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida. “As the world shifts to electric mobility, EVs will be integrated into society in ways that go beyond just transportation.”
The idea might not be that bad though. Who’s to tell decades from now people won’t be paying for coffee with the solar energy captured by their clothes and stored in their pockets?
Nissan, maker of one of the world’s first mass-produced EVs, announced this week it is accepting electricity as payment for parking at its Pavilion exhibition space in Yokohama. That’s right, if you don’t have money on you, just plug the car in, and some kW would be deducted from your battery.
Nissan does not specifically say how the system is supposed to work, or how much energy you must take out of the car to pay for your stay at the Pavilion. And since that’s in Japan, we’ll probably not get to experience this ourselves any time soon.
But given how the venue is the place where whatever good things are left of Nissan would be present, a World Expo of sorts, this is more of a “look what we could do" affair. So no, don’t expect it to become norm.
“The Pavilion is a place where customers can see, feel, and be inspired by our near-future vision for society and mobility,” said Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida. “As the world shifts to electric mobility, EVs will be integrated into society in ways that go beyond just transportation.”
The idea might not be that bad though. Who’s to tell decades from now people won’t be paying for coffee with the solar energy captured by their clothes and stored in their pockets?
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