Electric cars - a crazy idea

[Ginger Yellow]

So, despite considerable progress in recent years, it seems like the dream of affordable, practical electric cars is going to be out of reach for the foreseeable future. Fuel cell technology has serious efficiency and infrastructure problems, while battery technology advances relatively slowly thanks to the hard constraints of technology. But Tesla style wireless electricity transmission has been coming on in leaps and bounds using resonant induction. So I was wondering if this is a possible solution to the battery problem. Presumably you'd lay an appropriately designed cable under or alongside roads, massively reducing the amount of battery storage required for electric cars. It would obviously involve some pretty serious roadworks (even if you restricted the network to major roads), but assume for the sake of argument that this part is feasible. Does anyone know what the difficulties are for scaling up the technology? Would it be energy efficient (compared to the clean alternatives)? Would it be safe given the amount of power needed? How often would the infrastructure have to be maintained?

[Bored Of Education]

Electric cars - a crazy idea

I was under the impression that hydrogen fuel cells powering electic engines was pretty much the way forward a la the Honda Clarity.

Apropos of this, I notice there was no retraction on the repeat of Top Gear about the Tesla breaking down

[Ginger Yellow]

Electric cars - a crazy idea

As I understand it, it's not the fuel cells themselves that's the problem, but the hydrogen storage infrastructure and the efficiency of electrolysis. Of course, it could well be that my cabling idea is less efficient - power transmission is notoriously lossy over long distances.

[WOM]

Electric cars - a crazy idea

Not an expert on this either, but isn't the big issue with hydrogen that it takes such a massive amount of energy to create/separate the hydrogen in the first place? Plus, yeah, the whole storage/shipping/distributing problem.

If it were me making the call, on the gut level, it would be to put all my research eggs in the battery capacity basket. I think there will eventually be some kind of breakthrough in that area that will solve a lot of other problems. By that I mean some type of 'flash charging' technology that will take no longer to top up depleted batteries than it would topping up your gas tank. From a practical point of view, the whole electrical grid is already in place. We know how it works. We know we can do it cleanly. We know it's infinite.

[Ginger Yellow]

Electric cars - a crazy idea

There's quite a lot of progress on the flash charging front, actually. There was a big development recently (yet to be commercialised) using a modified lithium ion battery technology. In the medium to long term, I don't think charging time is going to be a serious problem. It's the energy capacity/volume issue that I think is largely constrained by chemistry. We're seeing incremental improvements, of course, but nothing like as fast as in other areas of technology. You're still going to have electric cars whose bulk and weight consists mainly of batteries , and still can't go all that far on a single charge, unless we completely change how they work.

[Ubik]

Electric cars - a crazy idea

Heh. This occurred to me while I was reading about Witricity. I don't know how feasible it is either but I'd like to suggest it would be a significant design advantage to any vehicles using such a technology to replace the accelerator pedal with one of these:



Relatives standing at sharp corners optional.

[Ginger Yellow]

Electric cars - a crazy idea

Last week's Science Friday had a segment on hydrogen locomotives. The idea seemed intriguing at first, not least because one of the researchers was from Champaign. Also, the problems of battery weight and storage volume are greatly mitigated with trains, which are designed to carry heavy, bulky things. But as they never really explained why it made more sense than just electrifying the lines. I suppose electrification is fairly daunting for long distance freight, but they specifically mentioned commuter rail as a likely application. Surely it can't be more efficient to generate electricity, use it to electrolyse water, transport the hydrogen and burn it in fuel cells, than just to generate and transmit the electricity?