Hyundai’s EV Robot Presents A Great Way To Make Charging Less Annoying

I’ll tell you what the most ridiculous thing about electric vehicle ownership is: charging. And it’s not even close. Right now, you have all sorts of different EVs with charge ports in different locations—the Hyundai Motor Group, which we’ll talk about in a second, has ports in three different places on various cars, by my count. Some of the ports are for an increasingly outdated standard, like CHAdeMO. And Tesla is just now opening its own proprietary chargers up to other cars, though that will take some time to be universal.

Basically, someone needs to standardize this stuff so that not every car has a different experience and doesn’t have to deal with awkward positioning at charging stations. Or we just outsource the whole thing to robots.

Somebody at Hyundai must think the latter is a good idea, because that’s exactly what it unveiled today ahead of the 2023 Seoul Mobility Show. Meet ACR, the automated charging robot. I’m going to call it ChargeBot for our purposes here because that sounds cooler. It kinda vaguely reminds me of Johnny Five.

Hyundai explains how it works in a news release:

Once the vehicle is stationary, the ACR communicates with the vehicle to open the charging port, calculating the exact location and angle through a camera mounted inside.

The robot then picks up the charger and fastens it to the vehicle’s charging port, thus starting the charging session. Once charging is complete, the robot removes the charger, returns it to its rightful place, and closes the cover of the vehicle’s charging port.

This is great because it means you shouldn’t ever have to get out of the car—an especially potent benefit to anyone who uses a wheelchair or has other types of mobility issues. The robot handles everything. And with today’s fast-charging EVs, you could pull up, hang out for 10 or 20 minutes, then drive off with enough miles to get you where you need to go. The robots also use 3D camera-based AI tech to make sure the port fits correctly.

I’ve tended to be a skeptic of many forms of car-related automation in my career (mainly because I seldom get proven wrong about this) but this seems like a fantastic idea. As someone who has fumbled around with chargers in dark, snow-covered locations in the dead of night—chargers placed in some afterthought parking lot sometimes next to a dumpster—I’d be more than happy to outsource the job to a machine. On the whole, charging is more annoying than filling up at a gas station. That will have to change someday.

Hyundai says Chargebot’s a real tough son of a bitch, too. Since almost all public charging is done outside, it’s built to be waterproof, dustproof and capable of operating in extreme heat or cold. It also has sensors to detect moving and stationary objects so it’s not taken out by unfortunate parking lot collisions.

It’s also worth noting that these days, the Hyundai Motor Group also owns Boston Dynamics, and this charging robot seems far more useful and less intimidating than those damn robot dogs that look like they’d give you trouble in a Metal Gear Solid game.

Kinda looks

I’d add that it’s very likely we’ll see more charging robots or similar concepts like this one in the future. I think it’s less likely Hyundai will be manufacturing them or rolling them out themselves; the news release is cagey on the “who’s actually going to build these” front. But I do hope someone runs with this idea or a similar one.

Look at him go!

I don’t know if Jason will encounter ChargeBot on his drive of the new Ioniq 6, but I hope so. We need to get those two together soon.