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Comment by pcarolan | Hacker News Reader

We have trains in chicago that reach whiskers up to charging lines above them. Same as the trolley systems in San Francisco. What if every major city to city freeway stretch had these in a lane for electric vehicles?

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I don't know whether or not it is legal, but I have seen an electric car with tram whiskers before. I think I saw it in San Francisco, and I think it was a Prius. Some quick Googling fails to turn it up, though.

EDIT Found a link: https://thebolditalic.com/hacked-prius-running-on-muni-power...

That is awesome but the article's date is April 1st 2014.

Be that as it may, I saw the actual car before I ever saw the article. Maybe it was him, maybe the article is fake, but it inspired someone to try it for real. Either way, I've seen a real life car doing this.

EDIT I've found confirmation that the article is an April Fool's joke. I still, however, have seen a car doing this (or at least attempting to do this) on the streets of San Francisco.

I question your memory. Lol.

Fair enough... Memory is definitely fallible. In my memory, the car is blue, and what I remember seeing is someone pulling the poles off of the line, but just like we've seen with neural networks, maybe my brain is backfilling the events after having read the story.

Seems like a lot of physical infrastructure spread out over a lot of area for little gain. Little gain because it doesn't feel like charging at fixed stations is so bad, and it's not something folks need to do that often. There's other challenges too. You'd also need to build some system for billing, such that people don't start to steal power. Do we trust the cars to meter themselves? Or do we try to have the line monitor who is using how much power continuously?

Personally i more imagine something like this video, except instead of physically towing a car to run it's generator, the "tow" vehicle is merely a truck with a lot of batteries, battery-powered charger (easy), and charge plug at the end of a boom arm. Folks can summon a on-the-go charger & it follows them around for ~30 minutes & charges them.

I like the big-dream nature of your ask, how it seeks to adapt the infrastructure of the road to the new power modality. It seems dauntingly expensive, but it's certainly going to be more power-effective & material-effective than battery-charger-trucks are.

Commercial drivers routinely make at least $0.50 per mile... towing hazardous materials (lithium or sulfuric acid and lead) is an endorsement that guarantees more money, as well. Add in amortized cost of the truck, charger, fuel, and batteries, you're looking at a "30 minute charge truck" costing like $25, minimum.

cdl (commercial drivers license) starts at 13 tons. that's way way more battery than I had in mind, multi megawatt-hour class. no. that's be stupid. no one is talking about hazardous materials. they're talking about a vehicle with 2x, 3x, 4x more battery than we have today. which, as battery technology continues to advance, will become probably smaller and lighter.

i appreciate your attempts to check me & my fantasies but wow I really think you are way way way off here, orders of magntiude off target on the emerging economics.

As for your 30 minute charge, at 200kW (a very attainable rate today already) a 30 minute charge is 80kWh, a full charge for most cars. Why do you need a full charge? in my head I see this more as a system of 10 minute charges, that turn back after a certain distance to maimtaon proximity to home. just get more charge from the next township's local charge fleet.

The other advantage is coordination and self driving. You could pretty much get in the charging lane, go to sleep and wake up in chicago. The whiskers can provide steering and other vehicle coordination if you think of them as power + data.

And you can build special roads that only your model of cars can drive on, with your model of cpu brains. And maybe get some government grants to build it all.

> Little gain because it doesn't feel like charging at fixed stations is so bad

I think people would like very much never having to charge their cars as long as they remain in the city.

Are all the cars going to reach up 13 feet in the air to the charging lines? That would be a very tough sell. Not to mention the increased danger of live power lines coming down in an accident.

Also, how would lane changing work? Do they have to decouple from one set of power lines and connect to another?

Southern California has linked the carpool/ZEV lanes for several freeways, so for the best case of "north of los angeles" to "southern orange county" you wouldn't ever "change lanes" - you'd take the left fork of a gentle Y, which overhead lines can already do fine.

Speaking of Southern California, Interstate 57 had some work done around 2000, they were installing some sort of lane sensor substrate into the right two lanes of the freeway. there were some people claiming they wanted to do power delivery or collection too - like solar roadways.

Why not? We do it safely in busy urban areas already. As for changing lanes, even the most basic autopilots could solve the lane changing problem. Also, making connection can help steer the car and coordinate with other cars in the charging lane.

Volvo did a trial of this. Not sure how it ended up.

https://www.volvogroup.com/en/news-and-media/news/2018/sep/v...

There are nasty leak currents when the ground is wet. I wonder of they managed to fix that.

Air wires will probably be the way to go, but those will unfortunately be to high for cars.

They also did a trial of a highway with power lines above, like a city tram, but I don’t know the search query to find anything about it. Was ~5 years ago

Why not wireless power? I would guess that it's highly inefficient, and goodness knows the radiation levels that would have to be broadcast throughout the city to charge all the cars, but imagine if everything you had was charged automatically in the city.

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