I wonder, with all this need to reduce greenhouse gas, and vehicles definitely accounts for a huge amount of it, the move to electric vehicle is good but battery technology is always a huge limit.
I mean lots of railroads are electrified, like in Taiwan with few exceptions almost all railroads here are electrified, so trains all run on electricity. My question is, has anyone tried this with roads? What if there is some way to keep say a Tesla battery charged at all times so you never have to stop to recharge the battery, it would simply run off of the electrical grid. And if you go off electrified roads then the batteries would carry you the rest of the way.
I wonder how it can be done… It would really get rid of smog for example.
One implementation would be something like trolleybuses, where the electricity is drawn from overhead lines. I think that might be the most practical implementation…and it’s obviously not very practical owing to the need to install the additional overhead wires everywhere you want the vehicles to be able to go (an alternative would be to just have the overhead wires on main roads and rely on in-built batteries when the vehicles transfer to non-electrified side roads, as you suggest).
With the above, there would be some engineering issues relating to getting the vehicles to successfully couple to (and decouple from) the overhead grid. The vehicles would need poles on the top for a start, which I’m guessing would be unpopular, and there would be the usual electric vehicle catch-22 situation of no companies wanting to invest in the infrastructure when there’s no market and no consumers being willing to buy the vehicles when there’s no infrastructure.
The additional costs associated with constructing and maintaining the above-road grid would also be an issue - I’m not sure this would be competitive with the current system of in-built batteries in each vehicle. Not to mention the safety issues relating to having live cables above roads (storms, accidents, etc.).
The only alternative to having an above-road supply is having some part of the ground itself electrified. There’s an obvious safety issue there with not being able to walk on roads anymore, in addition to the problem of making the connection underneath the vehicle. You could plausibly have something like the poles on the top but underneath, but I’m not sure how stable/resilient that type of contact would be for often uneven surfaces.
The contact mechanism would also need to accommodate left-to-right movement of the vehicle, which it seems would be difficult. Alternatively, you could restrict that movement using rails or similar, but at that point you’ve got a train.
So is there not some means of transmitting electricity wirelessly with microwave or RFID? I don’t know, just throwing something out there.
We already have electrical wires delivering electricity to buildings, so having overhead cable isn’t an issue. Also San Francisco has electric street buses running on overhead wires.
It’s apparently possible to charge electric vehicles through inductive charging, but the infrastructure required to do that for moving vehicles on roads would be absolutely ridiculous (probably even more so than the Solar Roadways idea).
There’s a difference between overhead cables in general and overhead cables above roads (note that I didn’t say anything about the former). The latter is definitely an issue - think about it. What happens when these come down in a storm, or a vehicle that was too tall drives into them? (This system would also limit the height of vehicles able to use roads.)
It may well do. So does…erm, Riga, if I remember correctly. Most cities don’t. Why do you suspect that is?
But you know before Elon Musk, almost no car manufacturers made a commercially viable electric vehicle. I mean when I was in high school I saw an electric car made by Saturn. It only had a range of around 80 miles and is packed to the gills with lead acid battery (lithium ion wasn’t commercially viable at the time). But I think Elon Musk’s goal with Tesla isn’t necessarily to be a major auto player, he simply wanted electric vehicles to become commercially successful, and so far he seems to be succeeding as GM, Chrysler, Toyota, etc. are all entering the electric vehicle game…
But either we find some way of storing electrical energy with the same density of gasoline, or we find some way of electrifying roads, or find a good way of making chemical fuels out of air using electricity (so that even if the vehicle emits carbon, it is carbon neutral).
With today’s battery technology and prices I don’t think it will take off. Also there is many large-scale battery manufacturing plants being build around the world, especially in Europe.
Electrified “roads” is an idea that’s been toyed with (I think Scania experimented with the possibility of trucks powered from a catenary cable) but the fundamental problem is that nobody wants to just ditch the idea of roads and cars. Unless that happens, powered transit routes aren’t going to happen.
What do you compare?
EV powered by renewable, and gasoline powered car? Sure, EV wins that emission-battle. In Taiwan that’s not the case.
It depends on lots of factors though. And let’s not forget that Taiwan tops the list for energy consumption per capita. North Americans pollute more but population density is so small that you all can now talk about the “fresh air” haha.
The plan is to stop the sales of the gasoline-powered vehicles until 2050 in most of the developed countries. People need an effective and efficient alternative. Question stays, what is the solution for Taiwan? With 95% of imported energy the future is blur.
As finley mentions, the whole i.frastructure needs/should be redone. For that to happen though, might be good to wait a few decades for the tech to advance more and we can build longer lasting systems rather than hybridize it with what we have now.
Musk is going underground, thats one way. Tunnels. Certainly beats the hundreds of trillions in real estate trading inbolved to rebuild a small country like taiwan. But still seems pretty simplistic and unlikely to do much other than provide arteries like freeways.
I wonder if those train systems that run off magnets could work for cars. I rember the states maye california, experimented with roads for electric cars and automatic driving. But not sure ifthey were testing charging or not.
Batteries are a huge problem. As are cars hooked up to wifi and .able to be shut off by the manufacturer which has led to more moral problems from companies like tesla. This latter problem seems to not be cared about by most for some strange reason.
Charging or supplying power through roads seems technically possible. But yes, lots of caveats.
My impression was that the cost difference is so gigantic that it simply isn’t viable. Like so often, the “traditional” way is so dirt cheap and has no drawbacks - except of course being unsustainable. That word sounds like a buzzword, but to me it simply means “it will cause troubles in the future”. But as long as that doesn’t cost money now or cause trouble now, few will care.
So, any more sophisticated solution will always be seen as multiple times the standard cost, and thus hard to adopt.
