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Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

It would be cheaper and more easily scalable to fit more charging points in parking spaces at shopping centres, motorway service stations and so on.

Why do we keep on inventing new complicated ways of doing things instead of standardising and exploiting the things that we already know work?

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If electric vehicles only had to have a range of a few tens of km (similar to many existing plugin hybrids) they could be built dramatically cheaper. This would also be ideal for buses, lorries and similar.

Something like this? https://www.micro-mobility.com/en/experience-micro/microlino

Because I want to stop for at most 10 minutes every 2 hours. (better yet I want a self driving car where 8 hours latter I wake up where I'm going, and the farther I get in that 8 hours the better) With gas cars we can do this, with batteries that requires a lot of expensive, heavy batteries (the heavy is important because energy is expended just hauling them around).

I don't know if this is a good/useful solution to the problem, but it is an obvious idea to consider.

Electrified rails on trains have been around much longer than parking stations. Plus batteries are the biggest problem (and most expensive) part of ecars, so this is a good idea to try out.

But those rails are on otherwise off-limit tracks and 'third rail' solutions are notoriously dangerous. This system has the two rails closely spaced side-by-side so it may be a bit safer but in the presence of moisture it could be dangerous too.

It's basically a scaled up version of a slot car track.

> This system has the two rails closely spaced side-by-side so it may be a bit safer but in the presence of moisture it could be dangerous too.

Did you read the article? This is addressed.

Yes, I did read the article, otherwise I would not have been able to write what I did, note that the title says nothing about how the electrodes from the car connect to the road. So you could have known that I had read the article. Yes, the article addresses it, no, the article does not address it in a way that gives me a good feeling about the safety of this system in the presence of moisture. It really doesn't take a lot of power to kill a person and even though you can ground-fault-protect the crap out of a setup like this the fact is that such measures can fail and if you start deploying it en-masse in a hostile environment they will fail in large enough numbers that it will not longer be safe.

Note how industrial power is hardly ever ground fault protected because the leakage currents in the standard setup are too high already to reliably detect a ground fault.

In other words: if the system delivers enough power to electrical cars to meaningfully affect their state of charge there is inherent danger.

> the article does not address it in a way that gives me a good feeling about the safety of this system in the presence of moisture

It clearly states that salt water in the rail only gives off 1 volt at road level and that you can walk on it barefoot.

Highways are already off-limit and notoriously dangerous.

Unfortunately, we need to accommodate the future Darwin Award winners. Besides, there's dangerous, and then there's 'the government caused the death of someone who stepped on the highway'. Getting zapped, even mildly, would distract someone and decrease a person's chances of getting out of the way quickly.

Batteries are expensive and heavy. Plus range anxiety.

If this allows for cars to have a 50 mile battery range while still being able to travel unlimited miles on highways, it would be a huge win.

Exactly. The article doesn't expand on this point but this is capable of charging multiple vehicles in motion. More charging points at stations, shopping centers, etc would still require people to stop and wait.

Good for them for actually trying something.

You actually have to try and make something. Sometimes you get it wrong. That's ok, sometimes you'll get it right. As long as the general trend line is going up, you're doing good.

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