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Telekom Austria Converts Phone Booths Into Car-Charging Stations

by Caleb Johnson on May 8, 2010 at 01:01 PM

phone booth charging stationIn Austria, a telephone booth might soon be used for more than making a phone call. According to an AFP report hosted on Physorg, Telekom Austria proposed earlier this week that the country's phone booths be converted into charging stations for electric cars and other vehicles. The first car-charging phone booth was unveiled in front of Telekom Austria's headquarters earlier this week. By the end of the year, the company plans to convert 29 more booths. For now, it's free to charge your vehicle, but in the future the company will assess a fee, which ironically, will be paid using a cell phone.

In the age of cell phones, phone booths are pretty much useless (well, except as a changing room for Superman). Right now, there are about 13,500 booths in Austria, but only 223 registered electric cars. However, the country's transportation department expects that number to grow to around 405,000 in the next 10 years. If those numbers pan out, Austrian motorists would need a lot more than 30 car-charging phone booths to keep their cars charged and running. [From: AFP/Physorg and Gizmag, via: Core 77]

Tags: car, cellphone, cellphones, ElectricCar, electricity, Energy, green, greentech, phone booth, PhoneBooth, phonebooths, telephone, top, transportation

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