If I were to put wires in roads, it would be for wireless charging, so that autonomous taxis and delivery vehicles could keep driving forever (or at least until they require maintenance) without needing to stop to charge.
I can see this happening gradually, beginning with docking stations, followed by parking spots with wireless charges and then downtown roads and highways. With each step reducing the required amount of space destined to parking.
Any tech that aims to improve something by re-designing roads is bound to fail. It's simply not cost effective.
How about truck by-lanes across the country are equipped with electric cables on poles, and trucks have those train type extenders to get charged. Or even charging stations in truck stops.
Street parking solutions are being proposed. Many streets already have power to the street (street lamps and similar street furniture) and chargers become the new parking meter. Also, there's experiments in street-installed inductive chargers (like the wireless chargers you can buy for many phones these days) and even companies exploring the logical extreme of street-level inductive chargers the "power road" (where the car can draw an inductive charge even while driving), which seems unlikely to be pragmatic but still interesting to experiment with.
The problem is that even 1-2 inches of distance decrease the efficiency greatly, inductive charging follows the square root law so even small changes in distance induce a large cost in efficiency which is already inefficient as it is.
You can break most wireless cell phone chargers with a few sheets of paper, think what a few good inches of asphalt and a few inches of an air gap would do.
Then you come to the biggest problem which is that it would require you to have coils all over the road and that would mean that a road that is pretty cheap to make now would cost millions per kilometer simply because of all the copper and charging circuitry involved.
You also now add a lot of weight and cost to the cars which are now have to have large inductive coils in them to take in the charge.
And lastly you take a huge risk both in term of long term health effects of driving on top of a high power inductive field and the potential safety problems, what happens when you have a guy driving his truck with a wound copper cable which is just at the right length to pick up the charge? what happens when the handlebars at on some bus are arranged just in the right way to act as act as a decent antenna for the frequency you modulating your field at? what happens when some grandma with a pacemaker decides to take a cab ride or some one is driving on the road with sensitive electronic equipment?
We have barely managed to standardize wireless charging for consumer electronics and these are low power devices that need pretty much near full contact with the charge station to charge, and those still come with warnings for people with medical implants.
On an anecdotal side I've seen what happens when some one with an unlucky arrangement of dental implants (bracers) comes close to an active powerful RF source (SAR RADAR) those things heat up; luckily for them some one realized what was going on before their mouth turned into a BBQ pit.
An overhead/undercarriage contact charging the same way some busses and other forms of public transportation are being powered is more than fine, but again we don't necessarily need them if your car has a range of even 50 miles on a charge in most uses it would work just fine with parked charging only, anything else just adds another layer of complexity and cost to the system which is likely to only impede adoption not improve it.
If electrical cars are going to rely on multi billion or trillion dollar infrastructure improvement projects they are doomed, they have to be just as independant of road conditions and detached from their supporting infrastructure as petrol cars are, and for the most part they are.
I think the ideal end-game is that we have chargers in most residential parking spaces and plenty at workplaces and commercial property, plus we've either electrified sections of the interstate highway system (or the equivalent in non-US countries) so that cars can recharge without stopping or batteries are big enough and can charge fast enough that charge times on long trips don't matter.
The electrification of highways is something I'd love to see happen, but so far I don't think there's much interest or even consideration of that as a possibility. (There are a couple pilot projects in Sweden, one using overhead lines and another that uses slots cut into the road surface with high voltage rails underneath.) The payoff would be huge though in terms of reducing the cost and carbon emissions from long-haul trucking.
Yeah, every parking spot could be a simple charging station. All you need is a power cable.
Reusing the land of all gas stations for other things will be a good benefit of all this. Except for San Francisco, where they all will be preserved as historical landmarks.
>self-driving cars could cooperatively pack/unpack themselves into space efficient configurations.
I've had this same thought, but haven't seen it discussed much.
Parking lots essentially switch from random access (which requires expensive unoccupied 'lanes') into a slowly snaking space-filling curve. Cars can crawl slowly from entrance to exit, moving like water through a pipe. The paths can even branch and merge to make efficient use of the entire surface area.
If you also want to charge the cars stored in the parking lot, your solutions fall into two broad categories:
1.) Arrange the parking lot with rows of chargers that automatically plug in. Cars choose the appropriate row based on state-of-charge, twith he algorithm making sure the entire row finishing charging at roughly the same time. This minimizes unnecessary disconnect/move forward/reconnect cycles. Or,
2.) put wireless charging under the parking lot. This would be a lot more feasible than electrifying large swaths of highway.
Personally I still prefer option 1, because the peak charging speeds can be much greater.
Ultimately the 'charging station' is going to become a socket on the wall that is a beefier version of what you might plug a kettle into. Some people with posh garages might have these fancy snake things but everyone else will be getting some charging lead and plugging it in.
I can imagine it becoming a viable business to dig up a whole street and to install sockets for every space on both sides of the road, for electricity to be sold and parking charged for. We have seen this with the roads being dug up for fibre broadband.
What I don't ever imagine is the street outside my house ever having snake style robot arms every few yards, sockets I could imagine and I could imagine some gold rush where the streets get dug up to cash in on some electric car boom, even before electric cars are ubiquitous. With cable we had the streets dug up for relatively few takers, but in time, with broadband, everyone became dependent on that service.
Urban parking lots would essentially become high traffic charging stations. Those cars will need to charge every 100-200km, so owning parking lots will become highly profitable soon.
If I was a long-term real estate developer I'd be buying up a bunch of urban parking lots and converting them into charging stations. Then selling a stock of them to Tesla/Uber in 5-10yrs at a high mark-up.
Apartment/grocery stores/office/etc buildings with underground parking could technically lease out their land as well.
It would still very likely free up far more land than is needed for charging, as so much parking space is used for far longer than the average charging/waiting-for-fleet-calls would need. Not to mention the AI space optimization they would utilize.
I think if a parking area has many vehicles in one place it might be easier to move the charging infrastructure around them. I’d assume that can be done easier than moving refuelling infrastructure. So maybe 100 vehicles could have 10 charging widgets on wheels with cords to their base point, 2 people to hook up and move to the next one that is done.
I can see this happening gradually, beginning with docking stations, followed by parking spots with wireless charges and then downtown roads and highways. With each step reducing the required amount of space destined to parking.
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