DETROIT – For anyone who has gone on a long road trip across any number of Midwestern states (especially before the advent of smartphones), not knowing exactly where, when, and if the next gas station would show up, it’s a terrifying experience.
The looming “E” on the dashboard starts to stand for more than “Empty,” and instead represents an “Exacerbated Emotional Emergency,” as thoughts and images of the car sputtering and leaving you and your traveling companions sitting on the side of the road hoping that anyone will come along, and pray that if someone does, they won’t be an escaped serial killer.
That’s what “range anxiety” was before electric cars came along. Now, microbursts of that same anxiousness terrorize almost every Tesla, Lucid, and Rivian outside the Bay Area. But thanks to an innovation from researchers at Pohang University of Science & Technology, we may not have to wait much longer for those fears to dissipate faster than water on a hot Nevada road.
While stations with electric chargers are propagating around the country at a steady rate, they have not become as accessible as every Mobil, Sunocco, and BP station littered from sea to shining sea, so instead of trying to find ways to recharge sooner, Professors Soojin Park and Youn Soo Kim of POSTECH got together with Professor Jaegeon Ryu of Songang University and found a way to make it so that our cars can last longer between refueling, or rather, recharging … a lot longer.
To read more, click on The Manual
