Telekom Austria has decided to turn its public telephone boxes , which are in danger of becoming obsolete anyway thanks to mobile phones, into battery recharging stations for electric cars.

At the moment they have not got a lot to recharge. There are just 223 electric cars currently registered in Austria at the moment, plus 3,559 hybrid cars. But the Austrian motor vehicle association VOeC is predicting that the number will rise to 405,000 by 2020.

In a bid to find new uses for its 13,500 phone boxes around the country, Telekom Austria has therefore come up with the idea of turning them into recharging stations for electric vehicles: cars, scooters and bicycles.

Telekom Austria chief Hannes Ametsreiter unveiled the first such phone box in front of the company's headquarters in Vienna . He wants to convert 29 more phone boxes by the end of this year.