While huge conglomerates and other major retail stores work towards a greener and more sustainable future, a German company has gone even further by creating cutting edge technology that will allow people to drive their electric vehicles and charge them on the road at the same time.
In fact, that state of Indiana might be the very first one to have access to a wireless charging road that actually charges your car as you drive along the road.
While people have been given ideas and pictures in their head from movies and television shows about the future, the fact that the time has actually come at some point in this 21st century only goes to show that innovation and growth are at an all-time high, and people might actually begin to get a taste of what it’s like to live in those very modern times.
Considering Tesla already built a self-driving vehicle and others have the ability to control their entire homes with a push of a button from their smartphones, another amazing possibility is a wireless road that make gasoline basically obsolete.
With battery charging times and range getting better each and every year, the battery is usually the most limiting issue when it comes to people choosing to buy an electric vehicle (EV).
The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) has chosen to get ahead of the game, burying electrified wire coils under the roads to make a magnetic field along the surface of the road. It’s meant to mimic the way wireless charging stations for phones and tablets were designed to work.
So that the roads could work, cars would be fitted with a receiver coil that can pick up the charge as they drive along the road. This would become magnetized, taking in electricity from the actual coils.
The German technology, which has been named ‘Magment’ is expected to be built in three phases, beginning in the late summer.
According to a statement from the company’s CEO, Mauricio Esquerra, “This project is a real step forward towards the future of dynamic wireless charging that will undoubtedly set the standard for affordable, sustainable, and efficient transportation electrification.”
According to SingularityHub, considering that copper was at an all-time high cost earlier in spring, Magment chose to ditch the copper wire coils and use recycled ferrite instead. They believe that this will give them a better chance to “achieve transmission efficiency of up to 95% and be built at standard road-building installation costs.”
If they manage to get the savings they want, they plan to start production soon after the two lab tests are completed.
A Charging Electrified Field
As the project pushes through, it will be the very first electrified charging road within the United States, which is truly a testament to the way the world is moving forward in this manner. In fact, researchers working on the charging road at the University of Cornell projected that the project would take between 5 to 10 years to complete and provide the desired technology.
The Indiana project, which would be the main representative, will be the best example of this capability since it will be able to cater to all EVs. Sweden, on the other hand, already has electric rails in some of their highways, but they only allow the biggest vehicles on the road to charge using an electric arm on their undercarriage, which draws it capacity and power from the rail.
An Israeli firm called ‘Electreon’ has also built their own prototype – alongside Volkswagon – having 70 kilowatt-hours of charging speed on the road. It’s located between the Italian cities of Milan and Brescia, which tends to be one of the more densely congested and populated long-distance commutes.
Meanwhile, another German corporation, Siemens, is also attempting to build wires and cables ‘above a three-mile stretch of road outside Frankfurt’ that will let cars charge as they drive close by the city trams. Many are looking forward to the day this a actually happens, with most believing that the world of motor vehicles will never be the same again. And they’re absolutely right.
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