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.]
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 element in a world like this: road based freight delivery could run without stopping by using vehicles expected to have short journies to refuel the trucks along the way.
This is all to define a hypothetical new paradigm in road transport and to quantify its potential consequences (good and bad). I had not thought about on-road refueling before and I think there is good value in pointing it out. We're not at the point where we're seriously charting a course to world like this, but we need to know what the world looks like before we can start to do that.
https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?lang=null&lat=48.21003212234...
Not all pairwise points are connected by rails, while they generally are by roads.
This is not idle speculation. I own an electric car. Furthermore, the vast majority of my charging occurs at home, over night. The total amount time I have saved by not having to visit gas stations for literally months is significant.
Yeah certainly by myself, I could do a gas stop in 5 minutes. With other people never works out like that.
It's more than "somewhat". I can put over 400 highway miles of range into my vehicle in five minutes with a gas pump. It takes 30 minutes to put half that into an EV. I don't want to stop for half an hour every 200 miles.
> This is not idle speculation. I own an electric car. Furthermore, the vast majority of my charging occurs at home, over night. The total amount time I have saved by not having to visit gas stations for literally months is significant.
It sounds like you don't have many days where your driving exceeds the range capacity of your vehicle. The technology in the article, and the post you are responding to, are in the context of long-distance highway travel. It's for cases where a vehicle must be recharged in the middle of a trip, even when it starts with a full battery.
You might be able to do a gas stop in 5 minutes. I'm willing to bet that you can't do a gas stop and pee in that time. Two hundred miles is probably 3 hours of driving, so I am also willing to bet you want at least a coffee. Add five minutes (or more if you have to move your car). If you add in a snack, your total time will probably be around half an hour. A meal, make it an hour.
When I do stop in the middle for coffee and a leak, it's rarely more than 15 minutes total off the highway (unless the service is slow).
Ugh, I don't even want to drive 200 miles in a day if I can avoid it.