Detroit is now home to the country’s first chunk of road that can wirelessly charge an electric vehicle (EV), whether it’s parked or moving.
Why it matters: Wireless charging on an electrified roadway could remove one of the biggest hassles of owning an EV: the need to stop and plug in regularly.
EEVBlog, Dave, where you at? We need a debunking video. This smells like solar freakin’ roadways.
I thought the same thing!
It’s not as bad as solar roadways, but it’s still a meh idea. It works, but it’s not very efficient. You need coils of wire built into the road, which means replacing the concrete. Still need to upgrade the power grid to handle the load. If it’s not 100% tax subsidized, then it has to track where you’re car is in order to charge you properly.
It solves few problems and adds some of its own.
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Had to follow a link from OP’s link, but here it is:
Wireless charging can add $3,000 to $4,000 to an already pricey EV, notes Meticulous Research. Electreon, which is working with carmakers to add receivers to their vehicles, aims to get the cost down to $1,000 or $1,500, Stefan Tongur, Electreon’s vice president of business development, tells Axios. Users would likely access the feature through a monthly subscription, he noted.
Right now, it’s just a quarter mile test section. Don’t know either way, but they may not be charging for the initial proof of concept.
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Why occasionally plug in when you can lose roughly 50% efficiency and not. Such a boondoggle.
The point would not be to never plug in, but instead extend the drive time of an EV by using certain roads.
If on a full charge you get 250miles, but if you take a slightly alternative route and get 500 miles, you’re going to have much less resistance to EVs in any community that would be likely to use these roads.
You missed the 50% loss. Wasted energy. Means you have more infrastructure delivering electricity that isn’t utilized. Means you have more production that isn’t utilized.
And batteries already have a loss of up to 20% during charge from heating.
Sounds like the next step is to power it using renewables so that we reduce that inefficiency as low as possible
It wouldn’t reduce the inefficiency though. You still have 50% of that power being lost, which means you need 50% more renewable generation. It’s wasteful.
That’s the good thing about renewable energy, we can waste some without it being a big deal.
Efficiency was the wrong word, but I can’t find the right one.
um not really. Renewables aren’t completely free. Solar panels, turbines, etc. They have to be replaced. with 50% efficiency loss your talking about twice as much mining and manufacturing of the renewable infrastructure. That produces carbon and waste like anything else and more use of limited materials.
Baby steps friend. We try things incrementally
Yeah and who uses the energy that is lost? Nobody. It’s not a 50% loss to a driver, it’s all gain over the last charge stop.
As someone who did 500 miles this last week in an EV with 2 little kids, let me tell you it would be fucking worth it not to interrupt my sleeping children even if it’s not 100% efficient.
Electricity isn’t free. Convenience doesn’t make things a good idea nor economically viable. Need to charge on the go? Overhead catenary charging is a technology that’s already developed for use on vehicles and solves the efficiency issue.
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I actually make a yearly pilgrimage of 500 miles and apart from gas stops I go nonstop, no breaks. I find that making numerous stops wears me out and I start to fall asleep in the last couple hours. Could easily be because I’m adding hours to my drive if that’s the case though.
Edit: Keep in mind though, the 250 is typically ideal. You can easily have a range down to 100 miles or less with a few years of general use. A wireless charging solution would ease such wear and tear.
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Truck drivers do it all the time, I’m just doing it to visit family. 😜
The wasted energy isn’t inherently a problem. If it is 100% renewable, for instance, it would be more environmentally friendly to have no battery with 99% wasted energy.
So moving forward as we move more and more to a green grid, the concern of wasted energy becomes less and less.
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You’re kinda missing the forest for the trees…
Ehh, i dont really see a problem driving that long as long as you start it when you first get up for the day. I do 8 hour drives multiple times a year to go see family and only stop after 6 hours to gas up, then continue on. With how quick gasing up is with paying at the pump these days, 3 minutes of stop doesn’t sound to far fetched.
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I live in canada, and the charging infrastructure is very bad here. In fact, my usual drive probably isn’t even possible in the winter due to a lack of charging points with how little range the cars have in winter here.
Not only that but AFAIK no current EV can do wireless charging so who do they expect to use this? I should probably read the article.
Goddamn we can’t even maintain the basic roads we have, much less a much more expensive and complicated one. It’ll be obliterated by salt and snow the first winter and never work again.
Financially or electrically?
Yes
There’s a lot of details missing here. It sort of makes sense if you are parked on the street, but it says you can also get a charge while driving. How much battery capacity can you realistically expect to get driving down this stretch of road? Like within the limitations of physics. Maybe if the highway system had this installed but it would be outrageously expensive to replace it all. I also have major doubts that a universal standard would be agreed upon by all manufacturers and municipalities.
Money would be better spent installing more frequent charging stations, which I understand is already the plan.
Now when will the capitalism kick in and if you don’t pay your monthly sub you don’t get road charging
Roads are paid for via taxes
And tolls
Also a government initiative, and effectively a regressive tax, if not definitionally.
Okay, but does that get the water paid for? Without lead.
No it pays for roads.
Apparently
Why would you expect something like that to be free or even one-time payment?
Electricity definitely cost money even when the city or state pay for the infrastructure, which is really unlikely.
It doesn’t have to.
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Didn’t know Hummer make EV. And god it’s still as inefficient as always.
That sounds like it would be very inefficient and produce massive amounts of RFI.
Not a problem unless you have hearing aids or a pacemaker. We’re not going to talk about higher cancer risk either, are we?
Non ionizing radiation doesn’t cause cancer.
You’re worried about that 5G vaccine, aren’t you.
I’m worried about RFI that will interfere with my radio reception.
There won’t be any health issues from this. They wouldn’t be allowed to use it if it exceeded FCC RF exposure limits, which are quite a few orders of magnitude lower than anything that could cause harm.
Kinda like F-Zero?
Charging keeps getting presented as a major hassle but it really really isn’t. Trickle charge overnight is more than plenty for a day of driving.
This is America son, I can drive 11 hours a day and still be in the same state.
Same here in canada, but we also have to deal with winter being 50% of the year here. Charging and batteries need to come a loooong way before we can even think about having one…
Wrap the battery in heat tape and plug it into itself. lol
It still operates fine in winter, its just that you need to expend so much more energy that you lose half the range
You know what other form of transportation wirelessly recieves power? Trains.
Wirelessly?
Not wireless. Overhead contact lines are wires they just skim along them.
Comparison for this would be a metal brush dragging the ground over electrical contacts to maintain connection. Which would be a third rail on roads, very dangerous.
Guess what’s inside your wireless charging port!
The point is, there’s no physical connection being made.
… Yes there is in trains. Not in wireless charging. I was correcting your comparison.
Electric trains gather energy by running a conductive element along suspended wires. No connection made.
Wireless chargers charge devices through induction, in which a coil of wire produces a magnetic field, inducing a current in the wire coil in your device. Both have wires, neither make connections, we call both wireless.
Via which mechanism exactly?
The ones I have at home get it through the tracks.
Which are just heavy gauge wires.
Gooooood point
Third rail, baby
Which is a wire.
Anyone else getting FZero vibes?
Coming soon: Tesla charging roads, Rivian charging roads
Somewhere in the world, Norman Reedus started breathing heavily in anticipation
awesome so Robocop can charge while driving to a crime!
Wireless charging 🤦
