Are there any projects for wireless charging while driving out there?
If you could somehow power a car while driving on the freeway, you would essentially solve most range problems of electric cars.
If you could somehow power a car while driving on the freeway, you would essentially solve most range problems of electric cars.
EDIT: Yes, you could wire roads only when already performing needed repairs. Yes, you could run wires above roads for power. But why? All of these miles we have of infrastructure, it'll be faster to continue to drive down the cost of battery technology to the point where people will say, "Can you believe we even considered wiring roads?".
My opinion is that battery technology is going to follow that same cost curve as solar modules: http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/countyfair/...
Within 5-10 years the cost of battery technology should have fallen to where the cost of the battery is marginal. The trick is to get the cost of the cells down, while reducing the need for so much manual labor to assemble the packs from cells. My hope is that Tesla comes up with a way to automate pack assembly or 3D prints the entire pack, cells and all (perhaps not "print", but laser sinter).
But roads need to be repaved regularly anyway and, depending on the used system, my guess would be that the cost for also installing charging equipment would be dwarfed by the overall cost of maintenance. The same applies to newly built roads.
The problem with batteries isn't so much the cost as their weight. There is a limit to the power density of current battery technology and nothing really in the pipeline to greatly improve on this.
So installing a higher-capacity battery also means having a heavier car, which in turn requires more power to keep it moving.
I try to put my money where my mouth is; when Tesla went IPO, I bought several thousand shares of stock. I'm holding for the long term, as I think they're not just going to revolutionize mobility, but also battery technology.