Why Tesla's are bad at towing!

Huntindog wrote:

ShinerBock wrote:

agesilaus wrote:

4x4ord wrote:
I think it makes sense to have the power for electric vehicles embedded in the roadways to keep the batteries charged as the vehicles drive along the road... kind of like trolley busses.

LOL how many millions of miles of roadway are there in the US? Aha! There are about 4,071,000 miles of road, changing all the time of course. And figuring a conservative $100,000 a mile to electrify that would be $4,000,000,000, that 4 Trillion bucks plus operating and maintenance costs. And that does not include all the dirt an gravel roads that we like so much out west.

Not to mention the fact that wireless charging is very inefficient and wastes a lot of energy. There is also the factor of voltage drop over long distances.

I have thought about this alot. You would not need to wire every road. Start with the interstates, then the seconday highways and major roads. The beauty of is that with the car being constantly charged while driving, then the on board battery can be a lot smaller, as it would only be needed in residential areas.
Cars could be cheaper and more efficient, and the nasty stuff in batteries would be lessened.
If we ever get to 100% EV use, there will be some crashes,,, and a crash could turn into a hazmat situation real easy when two huge battery packs run into one another.

Keep in mind, his estimate of 4million miles of road is sort of incorrect. If you are outfitting lanes, even small roads will have 2 lane miles per mile of roadway...freeways and arterials generally start at 4 lane miles per mile of roadway.

And his estimate of $100k per lane mile is wildly low. I would be shocked if you could keep it under $500k and that's if the road is already being rebuilt.

Then you have the maintenance costs. I work with traffic signal loops (essentially wires embedded in the pavement)...if the pavement isn't in top condition, it's a nightmare trying to keep sensors operational. You could expect similar with embedded power cables. Now one option would be to bury them deeper but the deeper they are the less efficient wireless charging is and the losses increase with the square of distance.