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Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?

#101

Post by ashtonkem »

slavik81 wrote: post #94
ashtonkem wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semi trucks are cheaper because they receive a $125B+ yearly subsidy in the form of road maintenance. Semi trucks do 99% of the damage to our public roads, but only pay 35% of the cost. I suspect that rail would be much more price competitive if we took that subsidy away. You’re right about JIT, but we’re also seeing the downsides of JIT infrastructure during this pandemic. I suspect that we’ll see a push for more re…

Assuming we're resurfacing our roads once every 5 years, if we banned trucks it would take 100x longer to accumulate the same amount of damage, so we'd be able to resurface only once every 500 years? I would expect there to be a significant amount of damage done just by the elements, independent of usage.

There’s also the fact that roads are built up to trucking standards. Without trucks the roads would be thinner, reducing cost and pollution (concrete is a major source of CO2).

Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?

#103

Post by lmilcin »

willis936 wrote: post #20
jccc wrote: post #9

Asking sincerely: Why should we not simply pull over to do this? Planes obviously are a different situation, but cars can easily just stop. While cool to imagine, it seems unnecessarily complicated and unsafe to do this in motion on the road. [Edit: The prof and his team are quite serious about it, so I assume there must be a reason and I'm actually curious what it might be.]

It seems like a valuable proposition if we threw out the existing paradigms of road transport. If we throw out concepts such as ownership of vehicles and fuel and treat all road vehicles as one system of controlled individual elements, you could envision is a more efficient solution. Traffic jams would be lessened, trip times would be shortened, total fuel usage would go down, etc. On road-fueling would be one elemen…

If we are "throwing out the existing paradigms of road transport” then why not throw out roads completely. Rails are way more efficient.

Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?

#104

Post by matz1 »

ravenstine wrote: post #38
matz1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the same reason why smartphone battery is not swappable. For various reason we don't have swappable smartphone battery even though it is technically much easier problem to solve.

What reason would that be? I always assumed that was because of the pursuit of slimmer phones and to discourage repair.

even those two reason still make sense for car.

Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?

#106

Post by PhantomGremlin »

simonblack wrote: post #105

Why do that? Incorporate a charging loop into the road. Better still, throw away those heavy and toxic batteries and just collect the car's power directly from the road.

What's the efficiency on something like that?

What's the cost of tearing up every single highway in existence to add a charging loop?

Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?

#107

Post by throwaway0a5e »

ashtonkem wrote: post #101
slavik81 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming we're resurfacing our roads once every 5 years, if we banned trucks it would take 100x longer to accumulate the same amount of damage, so we'd be able to resurface only once every 500 years? I would expect there to be a significant amount of damage done just by the elements, independent of usage.

There’s also the fact that roads are built up to trucking standards. Without trucks the roads would be thinner, reducing cost and pollution (concrete is a major source of CO2).

Roads are mostly made from asphalt and mother nature would still destroy them in well under 100yr in most places.

Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?

#108

Post by ashtonkem »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #107
ashtonkem wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also the fact that roads are built up to trucking standards. Without trucks the roads would be thinner, reducing cost and pollution (concrete is a major source of CO2).

Roads are mostly made from asphalt and mother nature would still destroy them in well under 100yr in most places.

Highways are much more relevant when we’re talking about trucking, and highways are largely concrete.

Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?

#109

Post by throwaway0a5e »

ashtonkem wrote: post #108
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roads are mostly made from asphalt and mother nature would still destroy them in well under 100yr in most places.

Highways are much more relevant when we’re talking about trucking, and highways are largely concrete.

This is utterly false and in a trivially verifiable way in this age of street view.

Raised highways sometimes have concrete decks because the strength can be attractive but the overwhelming majority of highways are asphalt. At or below grade highways are almost always asphalt. Tunnels are often concrete but those are a vanishingly small minority of miles.

Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?

#110

Post by loa_in_ »

lmilcin wrote: post #103
willis936 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a valuable proposition if we threw out the existing paradigms of road transport. If we throw out concepts such as ownership of vehicles and fuel and treat all road vehicles as one system of controlled individual elements, you could envision is a more efficient solution. Traffic jams would be lessened, trip times would be shortened, total fuel usage would go down, etc. On road-fueling would be one elemen…

If we are "throwing out the existing paradigms of road transport” then why not throw out roads completely. Rails are way more efficient.

That's true only if they reach all destinations
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