McCharge on the menu for electric cars

Fast food chain McDonalds is to open a ‘green’ restaurant that uses solar tubes to pipe natural light into the premises, sunflower-seed board and bamboo fittings and a re-charging facility for the drivers of electric vehicles.

As the world’s largest franchise, with restaurants in 120 countries and 1.5 million employees, McDonalds’s demand on natural resources is huge and as such it is regarded as a bête noire by many environmentalists. However, its decision to offer facilities for electric cars illustrates a solution to one of the problems faced by vehicles of this kind; namely how to offer a nationwide network of easily accessed recharging points.

The first of McDonald’s restaurants to offer the recharging service be in Cary, North Carolina.

Drive-thru charging for electric vehicles

The car port of the future is likely to double as a solar-powered charging station for electric cars.
The Romag ‘PowerPark’ canopy uses its entire roof area to house photovoltaic cells that have a 1.7kW capacity, which equates to about half the amount of energy used by an average household.

The canopy could be used to charge the batteries of an electric or hybrid car, provide energy for a building or even feed electricity back into the National Grid.

Self-sufficient cars

A spokesperson for the Environmental Transport Association (ETA) said: “A charging station like the PowerPark system could allow a household or business to be entirely self-sufficient when running an electric vehicle – it could even be the case that such a car could plug in to and sell power to a charging facility such as the local McDonalds.”

What is the ETA?

The ETA is an organisation providing motorists and cyclists with carbon-neutral breakdown cover and insurance products – including a car warranty for electric vehicles.