Inductive charging highway section to be built in Florida

Pros of dynamic charging:

- Substantially reduced need for large batteries, which reduces vehicle cost and contributes to overall lower cost of electric road transportation;

- Easier logistics planning, no queuing for charging, and reduced downtime for commercial vehicles;

- Cost of public daytime charging on par with private night-time stationary charging;

- Same access to charging for all, at the same time, at the same cost;

- Well adapted to high vehicle utilization (e.g., 24h operation, autonomous trucks and car sharing services);

- Greatly reduced need for high power fast charging, which wears out batteries;

- Greatly reduced need to build out infrastructure for stationary charging, which is not easy to do quickly and at scale;

- Potentially easier to connect to the power grid than static charging of equivalent capacity.

Challenges to overcome include:

- The transition phase from zero to many users;

- The transition phase from zero miles to coverage of most major highways;

- Electromagnetic emissions;

- Not in line with how the public and industry perceives that electric cars and trucks should work;

- Initial funding (requires public sector support, but not subsidies);

- Primarily benefits vehicle owners and transport buyers, not vehicle manufacturers and energy companies.

- Unclear if dynamic charging is cheaper beyond ~2045, due to declining levelized battery costs.

As for the argument that it is better to electrify rail - both should be electrified. Europe and Asia wonder why North America hasn’t electrified its rail network already.

Most EVs use something like 0.2-0.4kWh/mile. So in fact even at 10% efficiency you could drive forever if this stuff was scaled out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_interference

The point of an electrified road is not to magically charge your vehicle to capacity in seconds, but to sustain and extend the travel distance of EVs.

> What a complete boondoggle. Embarrassing for everyone involved.

I'm still stuck on this line, it seems so out of place. What is embarrassing about this project? When did building out infrastructure become embarrassing? Would you say the same if it was a different state?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_road

I don't see reason to criticize investing billions of dollars in innovative projects with a high probability of failure. All these projects generate massive amounts of knowledge which might be allied in the future if not now. As these projects fail, the researchers and employees moving might not have an idea how to accomplish something but rather will know several ways not to accomplish something which is valuable too.

While it's unlikely to be adopted for cars, it seems a cheaper and more reasonable first step at electrification (though the USA can't even electrify its rail and that sits there and goes nowhere and is a minimal cost). Electrification of rail is something like $5m a track/mile - electrification of all rail in Los Angeles could be done for something in the low few billions. Add electric trucks for $20-50b more, and suddenly LA is much cleaner, and you've not touched a single car.

We have those vehicles now. I'm travelling on a vehicle right now which draws it's power from an overhead wire.

Don't ask why but I had a fantasy of building a road in a developing country and your best options are dirt, sealed gravel and asphalt. Everything else is not cost effective at all.

Similarly, that's 400kW for 5% of the road, or 2MW for 1% of the road.

- Cost of placing under the highway (mitigated by only doing so on full reconstruction/maintenance works)

- Cost of materials (massive induction coils, over a very large distance to get meaningfull charging....

- Cost of electricity (Induction would be much less efficient than direct charging - rather than 100%, you'll get a fraction of that (heavily dependent on the distance from the body to the roadway - good luck Electric F150s..)

Roads are designed to be as cheap as possible while fulfilling their purpose. It's difficult to imagine you could cost-effectively spread that charging infrastructure out. It would be more expensive than pantograph electric lines, which would be much more efficient at actually transferring energy.

EVs are still only a few percent of all cars, so this infrastructure would be unused most of the time. Cars with inductive chargers underneath will be even less common, and people willing to pay the premium to use them less common again.

This seems like a pipe dream like solar roadways, sounds good but beaten out by the normal, sensible solution of just charging at stationary car park where cars spend 95% of their time. Batteries are only getting cheaper as well, which hurts the business case too.

That's basically saying "big if true". Inductive charging is barely fast enough to charge a phone laying directly on top of the charger in a reasonable amount of time, do you honestly think electric roads that inductively charge fleets of EVs are going to be ubiquitous?