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If they're electric vehicles, they'll charge on their own based on closest charging station and the cost of electricity at the time they need their charge. Also, the only maintenance you'd require would be tire rotations/changes every ~5K miles, and a new battery every 150K-200K miles (Tesla automated the battery pack swap, I'm sure they could automate pulling four wheels off and bolting four new ones back on).

I agree someone is going to need to clean them out though.



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Heck, they won't even need to plug in once we get wireless, inductive charging stations or inductive roads. Both are coming.

You could outsource the car cleaning with an agreement at any full service car wash.

One doesn't even need a physical presence anywhere to make the business work.


They already have wireless charging for electric vehicles:

http://www.pluglesspower.com/

While high-capacity electric vehicles like a Tesla wouldn't be able to wirelessly charge, it should be trivial to build a physical dock they can connect to with no human intervention (similar to how SpaceX designed the DragonEye mating connector for autonomous mating to the ISS).


I'm well aware. I was referring to public charging infrastructure using wireless charging. This is almost non-existent due to the lack of compatible vehicles today. I understand that some electric buses are already using wireless charging in major trials.

Reliable wireless inductive charging for cell phones doesn't even exist. I imagine an inductive charger for a car would function very well as a harddrive eraser as well, especially in 'inductive road' form.

There will be significant power losses (10-20%) and alignment issues.

One thing I really like about the whole inductive road concept is that it totally removes the need for a battery, one of the most expensive parts of an electric car.

You'd basically have a full-size slot car (if you remember those) track (but without sliding contacts).


We have self-cleaning public toilets, and automated car washes. I can certainly see an down-market option where the cars are cleaned automatically.

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