Detroit is now home to the country's first chunk of road that can wirelessly charge an electric vehicle (EV), whether it's parked or moving.
Why it matters: Wireless charging on an electrified roadway could remove one of the biggest hassles of owning an EV: the need to stop and plug in regularly.
There’s a lot of details missing here. It sort of makes sense if you are parked on the street, but it says you can also get a charge while driving. How much battery capacity can you realistically expect to get driving down this stretch of road? Like within the limitations of physics. Maybe if the highway system had this installed but it would be outrageously expensive to replace it all. I also have major doubts that a universal standard would be agreed upon by all manufacturers and municipalities.
Money would be better spent installing more frequent charging stations, which I understand is already the plan.
It’s not as bad as solar roadways, but it’s still a meh idea. It works, but it’s not very efficient. You need coils of wire built into the road, which means replacing the concrete. Still need to upgrade the power grid to handle the load. If it’s not 100% tax subsidized, then it has to track where you’re car is in order to charge you properly.
Had to follow a link from OP’s link, but here it is:
Wireless charging can add $3,000 to $4,000 to an already pricey EV, notes Meticulous Research. Electreon, which is working with carmakers to add receivers to their vehicles, aims to get the cost down to $1,000 or $1,500, Stefan Tongur, Electreon’s vice president of business development, tells Axios. Users would likely access the feature through a monthly subscription, he noted.
Right now, it’s just a quarter mile test section. Don’t know either way, but they may not be charging for the initial proof of concept.
Same here in canada, but we also have to deal with winter being 50% of the year here. Charging and batteries need to come a loooong way before we can even think about having one…
Goddamn we can’t even maintain the basic roads we have, much less a much more expensive and complicated one. It’ll be obliterated by salt and snow the first winter and never work again.
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