On May 26, 2015, at 11:37 PM, EVDL Administrator via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote:
> Here's one: transparent inductive charging. If we're dreaming, it's a wonderful dream. I don't think it's a very realistic dream, but it's certainly wonderful. As a bonus...going from inductive charging while parking to inductive charging on select stretches of highway wouldn't be that big a deal. It's even something that could be very beneficial without being close to a perfect solution. Just do grab the back of the envelope...if a typical car is consuming 300 Wh/mi at 60 MPH, that's 18 kW / car. Round up to 20 kW for losses and to make the math easier. Even if a roadway could only deliver 5 kW / car, less than many of today's in-home chargers, that still extends range by 25%. Your 300-mile-range car almost becomes a 400-mile-range car. But, honestly? I think EVs are going to get a _lot_ more popular once 200 miles is the range of the base model econobox and 300 miles is not uncommon in top-of-the-line models. Rapid charging infrastructure or no. You can put 300 miles of range in a 300 Wh/mi car in 8 hours at 220 V / 50 A. Almost nobody drives 300 miles in a day, and almost everybody has the car parked at home at least 8 hours a day. With even minimal rapid-charging infrastructure, such a car is a direct replacement for today's ICE vehicle -- even for vacation road trips. Drive ~250 miles; four hours into the trip and it's time for a break. Even if it takes half an hour to recharge, that's not a problem; most people would be taking almost that long just to stretch their legs or maybe grab a bite to eat. And when the break is over, you're ready for another four hours of driving before you plug into the hotel's charger for the night. If the rapid charging station has a restaurant, so much the better. Even today, just look at how you automatically expect the middle-of-nowhere gas stations along the freeway to have a restaurant of some sort. We're already expecting the next generation of EVs to be at that 200 mile range, and Teslas are already at that 300 mile range. Which tells me that the only _real_ challenge to EV adoption...is sticker price. When the price premium for an EV is comparable to what the price premium used to be for an automatic transmission over a standard, that's it. We can even see a direct parallel in very recent history: hybrid vehicles. They used to be much more expensive than their battery-less counterparts; today, they're only a bit more expensive and it seems like every other car on the road these days is an hybrid -- even a number of SUVs. Until the past couple months or so, I was decidedly pessimistic about our chances for surviving the end of cheap oil. I still don't think it'll be a walk in the park...but solar is already cheaper for utilities than anything else but coal, and Tesla's utility batteries are already cheaper than any other form of peaking production. That means that all kinds of money is now going to shift away from fossil fuels and into solar and batteries, simply because the utilities that don't do so are going to lose out to those that do. And, more importantly, because the CEOs will want to pocket the savings, themselves. That will, in turn, _very_ rapidly drive down prices for solar and batteries for the rest of us...quickly to the point that the utilities themselves won't be able to compete with local generation and ICE vehicles won't be able to compete with EVs. Imagine that, for a moment, so long as we're dreaming -- you've got an EV with a ~120 kWh pack and a ~400 mile freeway range. Next to your water heater (or wherever) is a ~400 kWh battery that both serves as a "dump pack" for your EV for rapid charging as well as all your other electricity needs. If you don't drive, you can go a week or two without sunlight depending on how much of an energy hog you are. And your roof is covered with enough solar panels that, even in the dead of winter, they'll collect enough that your batteries won't actually run out. I think most any American would consider something like that a very desirable luxury life...and I do believe we might actually, after all, be on track for me to live long enough to see something like it come to pass. b& _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
