Range anxiety continues to be one of the drawbacks of electric-car ownership. While endurance isn’t too big of an issue in city driving, covering long distances on highways is another matter. Having enough range in between battery top-ups is a genuine concern. And there is also the fact that charging generally takes longer than brimming a fuel tank. However, the state of Indiana says that stopping at charging docks could be a thing of the past.
That’s because the Indiana Department of Transportation and Purdue University are pursuing the deployment of wireless-charging solutions for highway use. The goal is to embed contactless chargers into the pavement so that compatible electric cars can get a top-up simply by driving over the modified lanes. Just like other projects of this nature, the technology will be developed by a startup: Germany-based Magment GmbH.
The target rate for these embedded chargers is at least 200kW. For comparison, a Tesla V3 Supercharger’s peak rate is 250kW—supposedly enough to add 322km of endurance in just 15 minutes. Wireless phone chargers these days are still not as fast as their wired counterparts, so it will be interesting to see how the experimental electrified lanes will perform in practice.
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