Telephone booths for cars

If you own an electric vehicle in Austria, in the future you can drop into any public phone booth on the street to recharge.

Artwork: pbase.com.

Turning public phone booths into charging stations for cars, scooters and bicycles is the project announced by Austrian telekom Austria on May 7. AFP said that the popularity of mobile phones has made the use of public phone booths less and less used. So Telekom Austria thinks that turning them into electric charging stations will help them continue to exist.

Currently in Austria only 233 electric cars plus 3,559 cars use both gasoline and electricity and 4.36 million gasoline cars. Telekom Austria acknowledges their project is in its first phase. However, the Austrian Motor Vehicles Association predicts that the number of electric cars in the country will increase to 405,000 by 2020.

According to AFP, 13,500 public telephone booths exist throughout Austria. The phone booth in front of the headquarters of Telekom Austria in Vienna is the first to be selected to convert into a charging station. Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO of Telekom Austria, opened this electric charging station during a press conference on May 4. The group's goal is to convert 29 phone booths from now until the end of the year.

Ametsreiter said during the trial phase Telekom Austria will not charge. An electric car takes about 6.5 hours to load enough electricity. Charging time for scooter and bicycle is 80 minutes and 20 minutes respectively. After the testing period, customers will only have to pay a few euros for each load. Payment can be made via mobile phone.