valhalla360 wrote:
The school bus option is interesting. That would be a good option for electric drivetrain.
Even in rural areas, most bus routes are capped at around an hour, so even a 60 mile range gives you sufficient capacity. Then the bus goes back to a yard where it can be plugged in to top up before the next run. If you are worried about longer range field trips, keep 5-10% of the fleet as diesel to cover that need.
The other big advantage for school busses (and, for that matter, city transit busses) is that there is a lot of starting and stopping, and regenerative braking is pretty easy to implement on an electric vehicle, so you can gain a good bit of additional efficiency that way--and lower wear on the mechanical brakes at the same time. An RV usually is driven in exactly the opposite sort of conditions, with longish highway travel segments and stop-and-go driving avoided.
way2roll wrote:
I see wireless charging coming into the mix. A pad you simply park over and it charges your car/RV. Same principal as the charging pads for phones and devices now. Saves on space and aesthetically would look better. Fast forward to charging pads embedded in highways - charge while you travel.
Wireless charging tends to be comparatively inefficient (at least when compared with a wire connection), which is not too much of a concern for the few watts a phone or razor or toothbrush needs but starts to be more so for a vehicle that needs a few orders of magnitude more power. Also, having a high-power inductive coil in the floor is not always a great idea from a safety point of view; it could turn into an inductive cooktop if you happen to drop a wrongly-shaped wrench on it, and there would be sizable magnetic fields to wreck havoc with stuff.
Maybe a reasonable alternative would be the overhead roof contact and conductive floor like they use for bumper cars.
