I used to share your gut feeling that this is stupid, but I’ve done a lot of calculations on this now and it (dynamic charging, not necessarily inductive) starts making a lot of economic sense on major roads when most traffic is electric. The technology has very high base cost and very low marginal cost per additional user. The cost of stationary charging scales fairly linearly with the number of users, with surprisingly minimal scale benefits.

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.