No more trip hazards: safe in-pavement electric car charging system pilot | Hacker News Reader

No more trip hazards: safe in-pavement electric car charging system pilot

ianvisits.co.uk

14 pointsedward16 comments

The only reason people are clicking on this they because they are dreaming of an inductive charging system. This is not the droid they are looking for.

The Inverse Square Law is coming for your charging efficiency and will take no prisoners. 6G will be everything connected by wires once again as if they discovered it yesterday. It'll be funny!

My thought exactly. “in-pavement electric car charging system” reminds me of those back of magazine ads selling “solar powered clothes dryer” only for it be a simple clothesline.

Actually, I clicked because I was thinking about actual in-pavement charging solution like this https://easelink.com/ and not just a slit in the sidewalk for the cable.

The solution from the article seems more of a meme and then I saw it's an actual product from Dragon's Den which explains everything.

This is way cooler than inductive for this application I think, but for a lot of other things inductive is pretty nice.

It's great to have a backup to the USB port so the device doesn't become useless if anything happens to it.

The annoying thing is the stuff that really would benefit most from wireless is lower power, less often used stuff, which never actually has it...

A Qi charging flashlight would be pretty nice. But almost nobody does them.

> The annoying thing is the stuff that really would benefit most from wireless is lower power, less often used stuff, which never actually has it... A Qi charging flashlight would be pretty nice. But almost nobody does them.

I've thought about trying my hand at circuit design by making a Qi charging beard trimmer with a supercap "battery", but I suspect that might be jumping into the deep end.

“Yak” shaving of a sort!

Wireless charging can be surprisingly efficient. You should check out this video where wireless charging beats wired charging in end to end efficiency: https://youtu.be/AE1gaNO9nj0?si=E3y_y28lpCXU_WLt

In that case it’s probably more due to a particularly inefficient DC fast charger. (It’s been a long time since I watched it so I might not remember the details right.)

In the end it doesn’t have to be exactly as efficient as wired charging, and probably never will be for a good implementation of a wired charger. It only has to be so close that you don’t care about the difference.

I don’t think the inverse square law is very relevant on these scales. Electromagnetic radiation can be focused.

Wouldn't it be substantially cheaper to basically just grind a channel into the pavement and then have people charging put a rubber mat on top of it? I feel like I could do this in a couple of hours with the tools in my garage.

You don't need the rubber bumps to be literally zero height, a few mm is fine, you just don't want it to be a big effort to get over with a pram/wheelchair.

Looking at it holistically though, it's probably the wrong place to optimize anyway because in practice most streets picked at random will have more obstacles in the way of wonky tiling due to subsidence or weathering of a pavement that's 50, 100, etc years old.

> dig small trench in sidewalk > fill with cheap pliable plastic

Definitely will not create permanent tripping hazards in the future. Why not design the cords like a very small speed bump with tapered edges so people can walk/wheel over them? Over design flat cords?

Because that's not worth large capital investment.

No.

If you have a pacemaker or a cochlear implant (as I do) or even those new finangle experimental brain probe, any strong electromagnetic field is inherently harmful.

I hear the 60hz without the CI processor in such a strong presence of an EM field so I know that this is harmful if I get closer.

Did you even read the article before commenting? This article is about a low tech solution: just a basic trough carved into the sidewalk so that the charging cable can go through the trough rather than hanging in the air or laying across the sidewalk. No EM field involved.

This comment honestly reads like it was written by an LLM bot without actually looking at the article content.

> Residents will need to pay an application fee of £108 and if their application is successful, they will pay a further £1,251 for construction costs and a licence for the first year.

...and after handing all that money over, will be thwarted from charging their vehicles when someone else parks outside their house in that spot.

So hire a pensioner to hang out in your spot in a lawn chair while you're away ?

Genius! Though for that price and the "license fee", the council should be providing you with a free pensioner and/or lawn chair.

> Residents will need to pay an application fee of £108 and if their application is successful, they will pay a further £1,251 for construction costs and a licence for the first year. That works out significantly cheaper for the average electric car user compared to the cost of using 3rd-party chargers.

License for the first year, which means license for the future. An awesome money grab by local governments.

Nice, I'm always a fan of a well planned grift.

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