101–104 of 104 posts
When I saw the title I thought it was going to be the first deployment of the Qualcomm system featured on fullycharged[1] back in November. What they've actually done looks... kinda flakey. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t0E4AcVu6o
Just watch how the prices will increase over time, after all, somebody has to pay for that $3/4 million per kilometer track in the road . . . and then of course there is the reliability question, which in my city we loose central power every month.
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Even on highways, you wouldn't need this to be on 100% of the roads to be useful. You could have, say, a mile of charging rails for every ten miles of road and on lanes that go uphill. I guess the limit comes down to how much power the rails can produce and how fast the vehicles can charge. If a vehicle can charge at N times the rate they use that energy at highway speeds, then it needs to have at least 1/N of the ro…
You can get by with significantly less than 1/N I think. The goal doesn't need to be infinite travel distances, just enough to get to the next destination. Personally, I'm unlikely to drive more than 1000km in a day. Any more than that, and I need to rest for longer than it takes a car to charge. If electric rails are placed in the road frequently enough to extend the range of an electric car from 400km to 1000km, th…
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I guess this would be very costly and have too many risks of damaged cars and/or injuries by a broken cable.
SanFrancisco-style cable-car has a cable in a slot. It is 200 year old technology, safe to pedestrians and horses. It could be made even safer with magnetic coupling. The cable has strong permanent magnets and you can attach to these or use alternating magnetic field to generate energy.
I don't think cars going 70mph and frequently linking in & out of the cable would be safe.