Toyota Develops Tool to Support Easier EV Charging

Nov 17 2011

Japanese car manufacturer Toyota in partnership with Toyota Media Service Corporation, its customer service IT company, has developed a tool to support home-based electric vehicle charging.

The tool will work with a variety of electric vehicles, including the Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid Vehicle, which will become available in 2012. Car owners will simply use their smartphone, home PC or even a television set to connect to the home-to-vehicle (H2V) Manager. Once logged in they can set or adjust the start time and also check their residential electric power usage.

A very handy feature of the H2V manager is its ability to interrupt the EV charging process whenever there is a spike in household power demand and then resume it again when there is excess capacity. This will help prevent circuit breakers from shutting off the power supply when too many household appliances are used at the same time.

Earlier plans were outlined by the Toyota Housing Corporation to start producing a range of household plug-in electric and hybrid vehicle chargers. The good news is that the H2V Manager will work with all these chargers.

The H2V Manager will debut at the Tokyo Motor Show, which takes place from the 30th November to the 3rd December. It will cost slightly more than $2,000, including installation and tax, and will be on sale in Japan as early as January next year.

It is a pity one won't be able to add one of these to your next car loan, it will make life substantially easier for any EV owner.

Author - Louise Hutchinson

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