Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles
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Re: Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles
#2This is a ~400 meters segment; the method is quite lossy due to wireless power transmission and also encumbered with a pending patent. I also suspect that road maintenance will be much more expensive, once there are smarts inside.
A time-proven alternative is to install trolleys on such trucks and put overhead wires, similar to trolleybuses ([1]) or electric trains. It's known to scale to thousand kilometers, easy to service and cheap to install. And the road would remain just dumb asphalt / concrete.
Re: Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles
#3This is a ~400 meters segment; the method is quite lossy due to wireless power transmission and also encumbered with a pending patent. I also suspect that road maintenance will be much more expensive, once there are smarts inside. A time-proven alternative is to install trolleys on such trucks and put overhead wires, similar to trolleybuses ([1]) or electric trains. It's known to scale to thousand kilometers, easy to…
That doesn't get VC money and crazy people screaming about it. Boston/Cambridge is full of those and it's a pleasure to be on them but there's no crazy CEO trying to sell it so no one bothers to pay attention to them.
Re: Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles
#4I like to think this vindicates Heinlein’s conveyor belt solar panel roads, just in the opposite direction of energy transfer.
Re: Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles
#5This is a ~400 meters segment; the method is quite lossy due to wireless power transmission and also encumbered with a pending patent. I also suspect that road maintenance will be much more expensive, once there are smarts inside. A time-proven alternative is to install trolleys on such trucks and put overhead wires, similar to trolleybuses ([1]) or electric trains. It's known to scale to thousand kilometers, easy to…
Overhead wires on freeways have hight issues when trying to power both cars and allow room for oversized loads. It works for trolleys because you have a full sized buss’s height plus the hight of the pickup bar which allows a lot of room below.
Wireless also has quite a lot going for it from a safety, noise, and maintenance perspectives. If they’re deep enough you could theoretically have a 50+ year lifespan while the road surface above gets replaced multiple times. There’s no metal on metal contact so their quiet, and it’s not like the wires can fall up through the road surface.
Re: Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles
#6[dead]
Re: Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles
#7This is a ~400 meters segment; the method is quite lossy due to wireless power transmission and also encumbered with a pending patent. I also suspect that road maintenance will be much more expensive, once there are smarts inside. A time-proven alternative is to install trolleys on such trucks and put overhead wires, similar to trolleybuses ([1]) or electric trains. It's known to scale to thousand kilometers, easy to…
Overhead wires on freeways have hight issues when trying to power both cars and allow room for oversized loads. It works for trolleys because you have a full sized buss’s height plus the hight of the pickup bar which allows a lot of room below. Wireless also has quite a lot going for it from a safety, noise, and maintenance perspectives. If they’re deep enough you could theoretically have a 50+ year lifespan while th…
Germany installed "eHighways" in 2019 which can let heavy trucks charge from overhead lines. Heavy trucks can't really afford much of a weight penalty for batteries (look up "tesla semi load factor" for a bunch of debunks), but cars for general transport have tons of weight to spare. Skip the cars, just go for the heavy trucks.
https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-opens-first-e-highwa...
Re: Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles
#8This is a ~400 meters segment; the method is quite lossy due to wireless power transmission and also encumbered with a pending patent. I also suspect that road maintenance will be much more expensive, once there are smarts inside. A time-proven alternative is to install trolleys on such trucks and put overhead wires, similar to trolleybuses ([1]) or electric trains. It's known to scale to thousand kilometers, easy to…
That doesn't get VC money and crazy people screaming about it. Boston/Cambridge is full of those and it's a pleasure to be on them but there's no crazy CEO trying to sell it so no one bothers to pay attention to them.
Moscow was a trolleybus capital of the world just recently. I'm still salty that they destroyed it in just a couple of years, replacing with regular buses and a handful of electric ones (which still require a small ICE engine in winter to stay warm, ridiculously enough)
Re: Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles
#9solar freaking whatever, again...
Re: Building the first highway segment in the U.S. that can charge electric vehicles
#10This is a ~400 meters segment; the method is quite lossy due to wireless power transmission and also encumbered with a pending patent. I also suspect that road maintenance will be much more expensive, once there are smarts inside. A time-proven alternative is to install trolleys on such trucks and put overhead wires, similar to trolleybuses ([1]) or electric trains. It's known to scale to thousand kilometers, easy to…
That doesn't get VC money and crazy people screaming about it. Boston/Cambridge is full of those and it's a pleasure to be on them but there's no crazy CEO trying to sell it so no one bothers to pay attention to them.
Especially with all of the problems they've been having over the last couple of years, I had to double-take when I saw you describe riding the MBTA as "a pleasure"