Yeah, I suspect the wireless charging roadways will have limited uses. But even just a way for waiting taxis to charge is helpful.
It seems wasteful to do this on the interstate where the number of miles of roadway required to get a certain level of charge would be much higher than a roadway where people drive slower.
It could even hypothetically be negative… like driving 10 miles at 75 mph might only give you 8 miles of range such that you finish the 10 mile stretch with 2 miles less range than you started with. I have no idea if that’s a where the numbers are falling which is why I was asking for the details.
I had the opposite thought. You only need range when you’re road tripping on highways and interstates. So if those were electrified then you could build cars with 100 mile range.
But it may cost way more to electrify highways, so probably pie in the sky.
No idea of the cost involved, but it would (as you say) mean many vehicles would only need a 100 mile or less range, so that would be a cost/weight/resource saving there. For remote locations too far away from interstates, they might install a static charging station every 40 miles or so.
Well in order to truly fix the road trip problem you’d have to electrify every highway in America before it becomes particularly useful. Not just interstates but all the US highways and the state highways too. I assume that’s prohibitively expensive. Although depending on the charging time you could maybe do something like only electrify one mile out of every 10 or something. That’s why the details on how much range for how many minutes of charging are hugely important.
Does 1 minute of charge time give you half a mile of range or 1 mile or 10 miles or 20 miles or 50 miles?
If it’s at least 20 miles then you could probably do 1 mile of roadway every 10 miles and be sufficient. You’d need a lot of excess because what if I want to go 8 miles on Highway A and then 8 miles on Highway B towards the end of my trip? Obviously I need more than 10 miles of range to do that. I’m not even sure if 2-1 is sufficient, but I can’t imagine a reasonable number less than that.
Kind of as @knoath said, I assume there’d be a stitched together network of charging stretches and static chargers. More static stations currently as we presently have and perpetually more of them in rural areas as we won’t be electrifying the mountains.
But it could let you plan on, “Okay we take this charging route for 4 hours, then get off the wireless and go north an hour, stop for dinner while we charge, then another 30 minutes north we hit the other wireless stretch which takes us most of the way there.”
States might compete to become the new “drive-through” state, putting funds to get tourists to come through there.
Not all, but certainly some critical mass. I’m still noodling on it but I suspect one more generation of battery tech and another 2-4 years of added charging will probably solve for most issues. It was a fun thought but unless there’s some cheap way to retrofit highways, it would be one of those things that might only happen when roads got replaced, so slow.
We have enough infrastructure to work on as it is. Sigh.
Goof thing the batteries are light enough to do it. One’s Tesla batteries are a little heavier. Now, if they compartmentalized them into, say, 20lb bricks, and placed them someplace convenient on the car (an e-bike’s batteries are accessible), swapping some or all might work.
IMO the ONLY reason for an electrified highway to exist would be in a desert with lots of sun and lots of solar panels. I mean, if the electricity exists from other sources, charging stations are far less expensive than rebuilding a highway, and would be a faster charging option.
I could imagine this on the road to Vegas (from L.A., obviously). There is a rather high pass after Baker (4700’), and one certainly has to charge at or before Baker in order to make it to Vegas without anxiety. Have a separate lane for electric vehicles to charge at some low speed while climbing up, then batteries recharge on their own on the way down to Primm. Only 20 miles or so. It might add an extra hour or so, but at least it would be on the road instead of in Baker (a truly dismal place, and hotter than hell in summer).
The other possibility, of course, is to build the solar panels right into the car body so it can recharge itself during daytime driving. That would help a lot.
I believe there are some vehicles with a panel now, though it is not enough to sustain movement. Perhaps on top of whatever a truck is hauling could work. Some states allow triple trailers. But again, not enough to sustain travel. Work a nice audio system, sure. Open and close windows.
You’d think these would be ubiquitous, but no.
Swedish company has a prototype:
Even if all they did was extend the range, that would be something. If they charged at a rate of 1 mile of range every 10 minutes then if your car has a 350 mile range and you’re on a road trip where you’re averaging 60 mph and you don’t want to let the range drop below 30 miles, that increases how far you can go between stops by 10%, which isn’t nothing.
Sure, it would be awesome if they charged faster than the car was using electricity, which would essentially give you infinite range during daylight hours, but even just bumping the range helps.
Oh man, it’s been a minute. I think high-quality panels are about 30% efficient? And the theoretical limit, based on physics I don’t understand, is like 45%. So we could boost current numbers by 50% and that’s it, unless we alter how we extract the energy to bypass the current limit (no pun intended). Even at 100% efficiency, if Arthur’s math is correct that’s 10 miles per day.
Unsure on cost of panels and integrating them. My Tesla uses around 300wH per mile, so ten miles is 3kWH, which costs me about $0.35 at today’s prices. Rates are cheap here, let’s call that $200/yr worth of solar charging - which assumes a lot of sunshine, and that the car is parked in said sunshine. I doubt it’s worth installing panels for something on the order of a $1k lifetime benefit.
the same article has some future vehicles shown with much higher theoretical ranges. I quoted the Ioniq range as it’s a current car where the manufacturer made an explicit estimate of the added range.
the aptera claims a solar range of up to 45 miles a day. It has a cd of .13. It’s also technically an enclosed motorcycle, so very light weight. Supposedly manufacturing in 2024.