Featured Electric Roads

ICE will probably come on...........anyway

 

I think it's probably like maglev trains, it all sounds good and a few miles of test road will be built, but it will be decades before it becomes practical. Maglev for example has been around for decades but so far there are less than 40 miles of total operational maglev passenger lines worldwide.

 

I'm hoping the NIMBYs here don't derail the plans for the Dallas-Houston bullet train. It's all privately funded, the trip will take 90 minutes one way, and one of the partners is JR Central, one of the world's most experienced bullet train (shinkansen) operators.

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I give it a 50% chance of being built and if it is I bet it will be working well before california high speed rail is done.
Full speed ahead for a Texas bullet train? Lawmakers let the market decide — for now | Transportation | Dallas News

 

There is one inductive recharger manufacturer already making deliveries for plugins such as the leaf, volt, Tesla, Fords Etc.

Meet Plugless | The Wireless EV Charging Station

Problem is, they have a decent amount of loss 10%-12% .... & in areas with already straining grid infrastructure, that amount of wasted juice is not tolerable enough to offset the convenience. Additionally the units are way more than 2X as expensive as a good old-fashioned wired L2. iirc, the inductive units I'm thinking of can only output up to almost 7kw. The dual 240V Model S's can receive up to 20kW's ... so inductive tech is almost a full ⅓ the capability of a wired L2's potential. Considering all that, yeah, it's still quite a ways off.
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I'm definitely loving our inductive cooktop! It'll interesting to see how the industry delineates between capacitors & solid state batteries once/if they're brought to market.
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If it's anything like wireless charging, it'll mean you just lose charge less quickly.
Seriously, let's consider in one hour. Maybe 10,000 cars on the highway, each using 10 kW. Break even would require 10^5 kW. At 100 V, that's 1 million amps. Even with perfect 100% transfer and perfect weather, at 25c/kWh, my calculations give me a minimum municipal cost of $25,000 per hour. More realistically would be double that. So, tactfully, that's about $5 per car per hour. Presumably electric cars would pay a higher fee for charging on the road. Thoughts?

 

They don't have to run on the grid - except for the time they're saving their own traction pack running on the inductive streem. As soon as they jump to other streets they could be using their own reserve. But it might be way more economical in quantity, to do like trolley cars & have some type of retractable electricity pick-up shoe. Ahh - the future .... now if we could only get that crushing trillion-dollar national debt under control.

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I agree that we are likely to see this in major corridors someday. Would allow for smaller batteries.

 

It means the authorities having jurisdiction would have to start taking infrastructure seriously and maintain it properly.
Seems they have a hard time even keeping lines painted on the roads around here and let's not talk about tire swallowing size potholes.

Great idea, almost impossible to execute at this time with the lack of maintenance our roadways see.

 

How long before the road is penetrated by salt and the wiring deteriorates? We know what salt does to rebar already.

 

I imagine we will first see it in places where salt doesn't need to be put down and probably on toll roads, which is a good thing since it will be kept up better.