A giant green car kiss to Element Hotels for becoming the first hotel in the United States to hook up a charging station for the growing number of guests arriving in plug-in electric cars.
This kind of forward thinking partnership is exactly what we need to help extend the range of electric vehicles and make them more than just something limited to trips of 100-miles or less, whatever the range of your particular EV, whether it's the tiny Smart EV or the hot plug-in sportscar the zero-emission Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG gullwing street legal sportscar just announced. .
This first hotel recharging station opens July 21, 2009, at the Element Lexington, in Lexington, Massachussetts. Element Hotels is a green hotel chain that also offers preferred parking to guests arriving in hybrid or electric cars. So, this charging station is a natural extension of that green thinking. Notice, please, that I’m not calling it an extension cord.
The charging station is manufactured by Carbon Day Automotive, which calls these neat devices ChargePoint Network Charging Station, but you can call it just ChargePoint, or recharging-station, for short.
Guests and local residents simply swipe a keyfob, plug in and charge up their electric vehicles. Another first for the hotel industry – as well as electric car owners – is that you will be able locate the charging station, and even determine whether it is in use or not, by using Googlemaps.
Elements is one of the hotel brands of Starwood, whose name you might not recognize, but you know their brands, which include Sheraton, Westin, W and St. Regis.
Plug-in electric cars and other PHEV vehicles cannot become fully acceptable without an infrastructure to recharge them. Ditto refueling stations for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles such as the Honda FCX Clarity , named Green Car of the Year at the New York Auto Show in April 2009, and Chevrolet Equinox fuel cell model. It’s chicken and egg – which one comes first? We can’t have one without the other.
Carbon Day and Element Lexington are sharing the installation cost for the ChargePoint Charging station, which is equipped with a universal plug-in for all kinds of electric vehicles. These include cars, buses, Segway scooters and bikes..
Again, kudos to Elements Hotels and Carbon Day Automotive. I hope this is the first of many, many more.
source: examiner
