Ford Motor Company has filed a patent for a charging assistance system that may be used in future autonomous Ford EVs, Ford Authority has learned.
The patent was filed on February 1st, 2022, published on January 21st, 2025, and assigned serial number 12202364.
The Ford Authority Take
Ford has published a number of patents in recent months aimed at various ways its future autonomous EVs might be able to charge and navigate themselves – an important development in a burgeoning market. Those filings include ideas for an AI assisted travel routing system, a system capable of using robots as charging assistants, charger reservation capability, and a charger success monitoring system. Now, this newly published patent keeps that trend going with a new idea for a charging assistance system that may be used in future autonomous Ford EVs, too.
The success of future autonomous Ford EVs is largely dependent on the ability of those models to operate largely on their own, without a human driver behind the wheel. As such, it’s obviously necessary for those models to have the capability to locate charging stations and complete that process autonomously, too, which could take place in between transporting customers from one point to another.
If this particular system comes to fruition, those autonomous Ford EVs would be able to request charging services when the battery pack reaches a certain state of charge, but instead of driving itself to a charging station, the vehicle could instead pair itself with another autonomous vehicle that could provide it with a charge on the go. Such an idea makes sense for a number of reasons – particularly, the fact that these future ride-sharing A/Vs will need to remain in service as long as possible, coupled with the fact that riders won’t want to have to wait for them to charge while out on a trip, which makes this kind of idea quite feasible.
No Comments yet