fred_jb
Registered user
No no no.... you've got it all wrong.
Batteries won't be the issue, unless you go off-road (and even then, technology will deal with that).
You'll have conductive charging built into the road infrastructure. It'll charge and power you as you ride/drive.
Under normal use, you won't ever have to charge a battery. It'll happen while you ride/drive![]()
Well forgive me if am sceptical about that, but I don't think we will all be driving around in full size Scalextric vehicles anytime soon, and I think it would be difficult to engineer for single track vehicles like motorcycles - tramlining anyone! In fact it will probably be downright hazardous to bikers. If it ever does take off the cost of the infrastructure will mean it will undoubtedly be limited to heavily used major roads in the vicinity of large cities. This means it will probably only ever be used to augment, not replace battery capacity and wired chargers.
There is parallel development going into wireless EV charging but this also has serious limitations. First of all you have the inverse square law which means that the intensity of the field used for wireless charging drops off with the square of the distance between the emitter in the road and the receiver in the vehicle. This limits the efficiency of the energy transfer, so unless you want brain frying levels of radiation coming out of the emitters you need a large flat receiver as close to the road surface as possible and properly aligned with the emitters in the road surface. Difficult to achieve even with cars, much more so with a narrow single track vehicle like a motorcycle which moves around in its lane, has limited space for a receiver, and due to the need to be able to lean in corners, must have quite high ground clearance.
As far as I know there are no agreed standards for either road based conductive or wireless charging, and no plans to introduce it on a commercial scale so the vast majority of EV vehicles will require a large battery capacity and a widespread roadside wired charging infrastucture. Unlike some other countries, instead of having a national plan and investment into this, we will no doubt leave it to the private sector, so it will end up like broadband provision - suppliers will cherry pick the more lucrative locations for this infrastructure, and neglect other places.




