The German chancellor confirmed last week a plan to have one million electric vehicles on the road in Germany by 2020. That calls for cars, charging stations, and electricity—and some kind of organization to connect the parties behind them— with as little fuss as possible. It's an important issue, because Germany's energy sector is very decentralized. The country has more than 1,000 utilities. Many are small local businesses, with most activities only in one city. What matters here is that the driver of an electric car should be able to charge anywhere in the country without signing a thousand contracts.
Enter Hubject. It's a poor name when a German says it because it sounds like abject, but it's a great idea. Germany is good at setting up organizations, so it should work well.
Hubject is a joint-venture between two car manufacturers, BMW and Daimler (Mercedes and Smart), two of the largest utilities, EnBW and RWE, and two huge conglomerate companies, Bosch and Siemens. Hubject invented a protocol (OICP, Open InterCharge Protocol) for exchanging information between an electric car and its driver, a charging station and a utility. If it works as good as expected, drivers will never need to know a thing about it.
Hubject just launched the Intercharge network, and what's relevant to drivers is that with a single Hubject subscription, they will be able to use any charging station in the network. Plug in anywhere as much as you want, and receive one single bill at the end of the month. The Hubject scheme has been several months in the making, but there was a big surprise last week when news broke that the Intercharge network had spread across Germany's borders. Several hundred public charging stations in Belgium, in Austria and in Finland joined the network. France is also working on something similar, with the name of Gireve, but Germany's clearly doing it bigger and better having chargers from several countries right from the Indoor Positioning System.
Volkswagen hasn't made any official statement regarding Hubject yet, but with some of the biggest German companies supporting it, there is a strong possibility that Hubject will become dominant in some areas. And that could change many things. Today, EV drivers are happy to go to the first charging station they manage to find. Sometimes they are unable to use it because a registration or a RFID card is needed. In the future, EV drivers might look for an Intercharge charging station, where they will be certain that it's compatible with their car and that they can charge without trouble (because they will be identified in the system). Nothing's for sure yet, but the idea is that since BMW is one of the founders of Hubject, the upcoming BMW i3 could be Intercharge-ready, with all cars sold with a Hubject subscription (on the German market at least), and all Intercharge stations loaded into the navigation system.
Some people may not like the idea of a single electricity supplier recording all their charging sessions, but the idea of being able to use thousands of chargers in several countries with a single monthly payment is certainly nice. With most drivers still unsure about EVs, the idea of a continent-wide single payment system backed by well-known brands should give added confidence. So electric vehicle owners and shoppers should probably hope the Intercharge network grows fast and big.
Where the S500 comes into its own is with the ports. On an Ultrabook, you'd be stuck with just a few meager sockets, but here there's a full-sized HDMI port, along with VGA, USB 3.0 and a proper Ethernet port too. On the other side, there's a pair of USB 2.0 ports, combined headphone and microphone socket and an SD card reader. This is a great spec for any machine, and is something you just can't cram into the smaller and lighter Ultrabooks.
We do think it's worth noting though, that once an SD card is in the reader, it protrudes from the side of the laptop, and while that's no problem when the PC is sitting on the desk, you could damage the card and the computer if you catch it when moving it about. Small point, but worth remembering.
What's more, typists will like the solid-feeling keyboard which has decent-sized keys and a proper numeric keypad. This all gives the machine a feel that it's really designed for business users who need a solid, dependable PC, rather than something that's the lightest machine on the market. We found accuracy on the keyboard to be reasonable, although it took us awhile to learn the key positions and adapt to the slightly different layout. This is something that you'll soon get used to though.
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