http://muscatinejournal.com/news/opinion/how-to-learn-to-love-stoplights-and-your-electric-car/article_78d9def2-327e-5785-b676-54f93da923af.html
How to learn to love stoplights and your electric car
[20151002] • Llewellyn King
Ever thought you’d be pleased to wait at a stoplight?
Well, the day is coming when the stoplight may also be a refueling
point for
your electric car. It won’t be the key point, but it might give your
car a
little boost until you get home, or to your parking garage or the
supermarket.
Electric cars are much in the news these days, as the big automakers
like
Mercedes and General Motors try to catch up with the space, and
notoriety,
that Elon Musk and his Tesla Motors occupy.
But the bugaboo for electric cars, whether they are the super-refined
Tesla
or the more utilitarian Nissan Leaf, is charging. Batteries are
getting
better all the time, but they still need frequent charging. You
wouldn’t
want to try to go any distance without planning ahead for where you
can plug
in, whether it’s a high-speed, high-voltage charging station or a wire
coming out of a kitchen window, which would need about eight hours to
get
you ready to speed off with that legendary electric car acceleration.
Electric cars have been the dream of automakers since the first cars,
some
of which were electric, but the limits of lead-acid batteries doomed
them to
very narrow uses. When I lived in Britain, milk delivery vehicles,
called
milk floats, were electric; and Harrods, the great London department
store,
used electric delivery vans for decades. In this case the slow-moving,
use-specific and very distinctive vehicles possibly were as much for
advertising as anything else. Customers wanted to have them pull up at
their
homes, suggesting that they could afford the substantial prices that
are
still part of the mystique of Harrods.
Over the decades, many new battery types have been tried, including
some
very far-out ideas like the aluminum-air battery. But the best, so
far, is
the lithium ion battery, a version of which you have in your cell
phone or
your computer, and which powers both pure electric cars and the
electric
component of hybrids such as the Toyota Prius.
But there’s still the pesky issue of charging. A Nissan Leaf has a
range of
about 100 miles, and a Tesla Model S Performance car’s range is 265
miles.
The test comes on a cold, wet night when you’re throwing everything at
the
electric system in addition to propulsion. Get it wrong and your only
way
home is by tow truck.
But the technology is on the way. The limits, as in so many things,
are not
on the technology, but the institutions that will bring it to market.
Anyone
want to make a business of car charging?
The technology, where the power is delivered by magnetic field without
a
direct connection to the wires, is called induction charging. You
probably
use it if you have an electric toothbrush, or a phone that charges in
a
cradle. Scaled up, it can be used to charge cars without a hard wire:
a car,
or other vehicle, drives over a plate in a parking lot or at a
stoplight in
the road and, miraculously, charging begins.
The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in
Golden,
Colo., is working on induction charging; and in South Korea, the
technology
already is in use for buses. The South Koran buses charge, among other
places on their routes, at bus stops. While the bus is loading
passengers,
it is also fueling. Very cool.
Nikola Tesla, after whom the car is named, was the Serbian-American
genius
who briefly worked with Thomas Edison before selling several patent
rights,
including those to his alternating-current machinery, to George
Westinghouse. Tesla claimed he’d found a way of distributing
electricity
without wires. But how he’d planned to do this remains one of
science’s
biggest mysteries because he left no plans when he died in 1943.
It is fitting that Tesla, in some small way, may be vindicated as
electric
vehicles named for him could be among the early beneficiaries of
wireless
charging.
[© muscatinejournal.com]
