by Gilles Guillaume
AUBERVILLIERS (Seine-St-Denis), October 10 (Reuters) – R enault will set up its own service stations in Europe to charge electric vehicles close to motorways, Mobilize, the carmaker’s new mobility brand, announced on Monday. French.
With the support of financial partners with whom it is in advanced discussions, Mobilize will open the first of these stations of a new kind within a few months in the South of France. It then plans to deploy in a first phase 200 of these fast-charging service stations in France, Belgium, Italy and Spain by mid-2024.
The stations will be installed at Renault dealerships located five minutes from a motorway exit. Escaping the specifications and the cost of a concession on the motorway domain, Renault will be able to develop its own spaces allowing motorists to rest for the thirty minutes that the accelerated charging of the car lasts on average.
“If I put myself in a motorway service station, I don’t have the freedom, I’m in a concession, and suddenly I’m completely breaking everything we could do in terms of experience “, told reporters Nicolas Schottey, managing director of Mobilize Power Solutions.
The amount of investment required was not specified.
Each space, accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, will offer drivers of all brands six charging points with a power of up to 400 Kw as well as a space of 60 square meters with lounge, games for children and vending machines for drinks and snacks.
To avoid having to install new electrical infrastructure and spare the network, service stations will use a stationary electricity storage system the size of a small container.
“This will allow us to load these containers very slowly, without disturbing the electricity network, and it is these batteries that will discharge much more violently in the cars. We will not see this extremely impacting peak on the electricity network at all”, added Nicolas Schottey. (Gilles Guillaume, editing by Kate Entringer)