Electricity Transmitted to Auto Tire Through 10cm-thick Concrete | Hacker News Reader

Electricity Transmitted to Auto Tire Through 10cm-thick Concrete

techon.nikkeibp.co.jp

30 pointsiProject19 comments

I just can't help but think that Nikola Tesla was right - he had the same idea (and possibly the means to do it) a full century ago...

We'd also be driving electric cars today if not for the oil and auto industries (read up on how they buried the electric transportation in its infancy)...

citation needed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

http://books.google.be/books?id=MyZo7EhN8-MC&pg=PA58&...

http://earlyelectric.com/carcompanies.html

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/06/henry-ford-thomas-ediso...

Granted, it was cheaper to go with oil-powered cars because of the incentives, but in the long run, we would've been better off with electric.

Oh well, more opportunities for innovative business today :-)

I think you missed the part where battery technology one century ago wasn't as advanced as it is today.

Copper was much cheaper, though!

Not to mention demand and continued production drives research and improvement, so it would have been self reinforcing.

Electric cars are barely practical with all the 21st century technology we can muster, and still come with some fairly enormous asterisks. I don't think over a century would have gone by without anybody noticing that the internal combustion engine was a great deal more practical. To the extent the oil industry buried the electric car, it was wasted effort. It would have buried itself.

"To put the technology into practical use, the electric power needs to be increased by 100 times. But the group said that the parts needed for it are relatively cheap and that there is no major problem."

I have to admit some skepticism about this claim. 2-3 orders of magnitude increase in output power delivered may very well expose non-trivial problems. I.e. making the effort of scaling this technology up more than just linear.

Not to mention the need to rip up and replace all the road surfaces. At least partially.

They seem to do that every other year in bad weather areas :-)

Article says they need 50W * 100 = 5KW. That's reasonable as that's roughly the amount of energy you need to keep a car moving at road speed.

And with a quoted ffficiency of 80-90% this is equivalent to 10-20% being lost probably as HEAT into the roadway. So that means we are turning our roads into long low power electric hotplates.

Okay perhaps it's not that extreme and possibly less waste heat than an IC engine. Maybe the idea isn't so crazy in a densely populated city.

That would be great to melt snow and ice though.

If it uses inductive technology then the current doesn't flow unless the tire is 'receiving' so it loses energy - but only when a car is running over it, not 24x7

But combustion engines operate somewhere around 50% efficiency? (i dont remember exactly, but I remember it being pretty bad). So the 10-20% lost through the road and the (presumably) small amount lost through electric, battery-less cars may actually be less overall than from combustion engines.

I am assuming that electric engines dont generate much heat if they dont have batteries and assuming that roads dont have the power on unless theres a car nearby.

But we already have a much better solution for densely populated cities:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus

Wireless power transmission seems like a great idea, but it can't be billed by usage, and kills everyone who has a pacemaker.

It'll get there soon enough :-)

Is there a reason why you can't legislate that every electric car that can use ubiquitous wireless charging be fitted with a meter that reports usage, just like house have?

It seems to me that the obvious application here would be wireless charging parking spaces, not electric roads.

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