Detroit is now home to the country’s first chunk of road that can wirelessly charge an electric vehicle (EV), whether it’s parked or moving.

Why it matters: Wireless charging on an electrified roadway could remove one of the biggest hassles of owning an EV: the need to stop and plug in regularly.

    • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I would love to have both. Especially trains! The trains here are so bad though. They cost more than flying and are such a hassle to deal with. The train stations are sometimes far away from the city in some cases too. So you need a ride from the station.

      I would support building that out if it was offered.

    • Empricorn@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      The roads are there. They ain’t moving skyscrapers in major cities! For better or worse, American travel is very road-based, and we’ll never have as many diverse options as some other countries…

      • Maalus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Or just build trains. Which move tons of people, every day, for cheaper, safer, faster and overall more efficient ways. Don’t have space for a train track? Make it a tram. Problem solved by changing up a road for cars into a road for cars and trains.

        • bamboo@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Or do what has been done for over a century now and just build the train line underground if there’s no room above. It’s more expensive, but in moderately dense cities that can still be worth it.

    • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      There’s public transport in large and dense cities. It doesn’t work to move around the country very well. These people that think something that works in a country that’s smaller than an individual state in the US should work fine are “special”.

      • negativeyoda@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        … but this is Detroit which is a city that can support NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL teams. We’re not taking about the sticks here

      • isles@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Japan is the size of the entire east coast and has high speed interconnected rail.

        • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          There’s only about 800 cities to connect in all of Japan.

          There’s about 19,000 in the US.

          You prove my point. Japan is small and easy to get everywhere by rail. The US is not.

          • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, area wise Japan is about 60% the size of Texas. With Japan having more than twice the GDP. Seems pretty straight forward why infrastructure should be better there. Japan has 4x the populous as well. Makes a lot more motivation to focus on public transport.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s not as bad as solar roadways, but it’s still a meh idea. It works, but it’s not very efficient. You need coils of wire built into the road, which means replacing the concrete. Still need to upgrade the power grid to handle the load. If it’s not 100% tax subsidized, then it has to track where you’re car is in order to charge you properly.

      It solves few problems and adds some of its own.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          1 year ago

          Had to follow a link from OP’s link, but here it is:

          Wireless charging can add $3,000 to $4,000 to an already pricey EV, notes Meticulous Research. Electreon, which is working with carmakers to add receivers to their vehicles, aims to get the cost down to $1,000 or $1,500, Stefan Tongur, Electreon’s vice president of business development, tells Axios. Users would likely access the feature through a monthly subscription, he noted.

          Right now, it’s just a quarter mile test section. Don’t know either way, but they may not be charging for the initial proof of concept.

  • anubis119@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Why occasionally plug in when you can lose roughly 50% efficiency and not. Such a boondoggle.

    • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Not only that but AFAIK no current EV can do wireless charging so who do they expect to use this? I should probably read the article.

  • BeanGoblin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    Goddamn we can’t even maintain the basic roads we have, much less a much more expensive and complicated one. It’ll be obliterated by salt and snow the first winter and never work again.

  • pastabatman@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There’s a lot of details missing here. It sort of makes sense if you are parked on the street, but it says you can also get a charge while driving. How much battery capacity can you realistically expect to get driving down this stretch of road? Like within the limitations of physics. Maybe if the highway system had this installed but it would be outrageously expensive to replace it all. I also have major doubts that a universal standard would be agreed upon by all manufacturers and municipalities.

    Money would be better spent installing more frequent charging stations, which I understand is already the plan.

  • Surp@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Now when will the capitalism kick in and if you don’t pay your monthly sub you don’t get road charging

    • lettruthout@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not a problem unless you have hearing aids or a pacemaker. We’re not going to talk about higher cancer risk either, are we?

      • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        I’m worried about RFI that will interfere with my radio reception.

        There won’t be any health issues from this. They wouldn’t be allowed to use it if it exceeded FCC RF exposure limits, which are quite a few orders of magnitude lower than anything that could cause harm.

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Charging keeps getting presented as a major hassle but it really really isn’t. Trickle charge overnight is more than plenty for a day of driving.

      • Zeoic@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Same here in canada, but we also have to deal with winter being 50% of the year here. Charging and batteries need to come a loooong way before we can even think about having one…

  • muse@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Somewhere in the world, Norman Reedus started breathing heavily in anticipation