“Welcome to McDonald’s may I take your order…”
“Yes I’ll have a Big Mac, fries, and some electricity please…”
Perhaps it won’t work quite like that, but a McDonald’s restaurant in Cary, North Carolina, will become the first location in the fast food restaurant chain in more than a decade to offer electric car recharging.
A ChargePoint charging station has been deployed at the site as part of the restaurant’s efforts to go green. Ric Richards, who is the independent owner of the McDonald’s, is hoping to turn the new restaurant green with a host of eco-friendly materials and technologies.
According to Richards, customers have a dedicated place to park and recharge their vehicles. It’s not the first time McDonald’s has gone down the electric car route either – a site in Phoenix, Arizona, also installed an electric car charging station in the late 1990s and there are said to be plans to install plug-in car charging stations at various locations in Sweden.
ChargePoint and other providers are installing the sites in anticipation of a wider adoption of plug-in cars and electric vehicles, even though they are not expected to reach significant numbers until 2011 or later. Analysts suggest that there will be as many as one million charging stations installed throughout the United States by 2015.
For now it seems the charging spot at McDonald’s is likely to empty for a number of years.
