I wonder if we'll ever have recharging drones that sense your car is running low, pull ahead of you, and just start towing your car for a ways so you don't even have to stop.
No offense but that is the most loaded phrase I've heard this week.
That would be a major overhaul of both roads and electric car designs.
I suspect the hard part is getting every car manufacturer to agree to the same system not designing something that works.
There's a test in Sweden that uses power rails embedded under the road surface. I like that approach because it's more versatile and looks better, but on the other hand it's also more expensive.
The cost is that you'd have to re-engineer maybe ten or twenty percent of major freeways and interstates (like have two miles of charging per every ten to twenty miles of regular road), and you'd need to establish a standard for trucks and passenger vehicles and get automakers to adopt it. (Or make it simple enough that it can be added as an aftermarket kit.) You'd also need to install more electrical generation capacity. (Fortunately, charging cars while they're driving shifts most of the charging from nighttime to daytime, when solar power can be used for this purpose.)
The benefit is that you could reduce long-haul trucking fuel consumption to near zero and reduce the need for EVs to have heavy, expensive 200-mile-or-more-range batteries.
Are there really no better investments in electric than tearing up 17,000-35,000 miles of highway to make them slightly more efficient?
- do a lot of (probably expensive) road construction in the short term
- expect every family to own at least one car with a giant battery if they want to go on road trips
- everyone keeps on burning gasoline for the foreseeable future
The second option is the one most people seem to expect to happen eventually as EV prices drop and batteries get better and cheaper. But the present reality is that only around 2% of cars in the United States are battery electric vehicles. The main reason BEVs are expensive is the batteries, and the factories needed to make the quantity of batteries we'd need to electrify all our cars just don't exist yet. We can change that by reducing the amount of batteries needed per vehicle. (To be fair, if the project takes ten years or so and batteries have gotten a lot cheaper and better by then, maybe the picture will be different.)
Electrified roads could greatly improve EV adoption, as range wouldn't be an issue as long as you keep on the main highways, and charging would be more convenient, as you don't really have to do anything at all. It would also allow manufacturers to use cheaper batteries like lithium iron phosphate which are also much safer and more durable than the lithium ion batteries that most EVs use, and they don't require cobalt or nickel.
Also, the same considerations that apply to small passenger vehicles are even more true of long-haul trucking. Hauling giant batteries is not only expensive, it reduces the cargo capacity. Reductions in diesel consumption could be pretty huge, which is good both for transportation costs and for climate concerns.
(This is probably best done as a government project, but I suppose a private company with adequate funding could just create some electrified road segments parallel to some existing heavily-trafficed freeway as a pilot project, and maybe expand it if it works out. Sort of like Tesla's supercharger network, but with roads instead of fixed charge stations. It'd be easiest if were a car or truck manufacturer, as they could make the required hardware standard on their vehicles.)
Cons:
- Less efficient than using an actual electrical cable.
- Requires larger infrastructure space.
Pros:
- Could work with any brand that has regenerative braking.
- Could be adapted into existing automated car washes as a premium feature.
- Decrease the lifetime of your tires by 1/2