Recharge as You Drive? The Future of EVs Could Be Wireless.
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Hey, future of everything listeners. Today's episode is about bringing wireless charging to electric vehicles by electrifying the roads they drive on. And we wanted know, would wireless charging convince you to get an evy? Why or why not email us at F O E podcast at W S J dot com.

At some point in every driver's life, they've probably hit a moment when their car runs low on gas while on the road, no, where is the gas station. And if you're driving an electric vehicle, IT can be even more nor racking charges can be hard to find in some places. And if you do find what what you mean, charges broken.

They aren't always working or they may take a long time to top off the battery. Sorry, honey, it's gonna be a while longer. But what if the electric car didn't have to go on a hunt for a charging station and could simply .

change the low battery?

Let's merge over to the top of the wirelessly charging an electric vehicle. Sounds like science fiction, especially if you think about nv recharging while in motion. But the technology that could make that possible actually exists and is being tested on roads around the world.

You put the corner neath the road surface, and then under your vehicle you have a secondary, quite so that's like your phone, and everything is totally invisible on the roads.

Step on. Toner is vice president of U. S. Business development at election on an israeli company that's working on ways to wirelessly charge electric vehicles as they drive by embedding copper coils beneath the asfa last year elected on installed its technology as part of a test on a stretch of road detroit and tongue says wirelessly charging a moving car could all but eliminate the range anxiety that E V drivers can have about their car batteries.

If you know wirelessly charge these vehicles with electrogram on the neth, then you solve the issue so you're able to charge your multiple IT orchestrates naturally with the vehicle infrastructure, the vehicle talk in a seamless way.

It's all thanks to inductive charging. And while electric vehicles are a lot larger than smart phones or ear buds, the battery technology is essentially the same.

It's exactly like cell phones, but on sort of a grander scale.

Jennifer hiller covers renewable energy and E, V. Charging for the wall street journal.

You basically get rid of the plug and energy flows through a magnetic field. Instead, you would have maybe something written to the ground, or you could just have a map. You would drive your car over IT and park there. And I wouldn't have to be perfectly precise or anything essentially you park and when the car needs to charge, you can start a charging session.

I have to say IT is kind of funny to talk about this considering how many evy manufacturer only recently agreed on some common standards for their charging plugs.

We've got three in the U. S. Right now that is really narrowing to two and then perhaps to one with the tesla connector. But you've got a lot of consumer confusion about what that means.

But Jennifer says the industry is already eying a cable's future for electric vehicles, at least for while their part.

One of the complaints that you hear about the E V charging industry is that the cord's can be a little bit heavy in awkward to navigate, especially if you are disabled, their elderly, if you had a large number of cars to tune, to charge, this could be easier infrastructure to put in and manage. But also if you have autonomous vehicles, there's not can necessarily be anybody there to plug them in to to charge back at the depot.

The convenience factor is a big one, but stuff on toner from electorial says wireless charging has the potential to reshape how we think about powering vehicles on a fundamental level.

Essentially IT chAllenges the the the dominant business model of internal combustion engines and how we are fueling up our cars. If we now bring the feeling to the .

road from the wall street journal, this is the future of everything. I'm danny Lewis. How would the ability to wirelessly charge in EV as IT drives transform the industry and the way we travel? And what route should we take to that future? Stick around.

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In order to get to how electric roads could one day charge moving cars, we first need to talk about E, V. batteries. So let's start with a little one or one on how they work and why they're so different from the gas lean that has traditionally powered cars using gas or diesel is relatively simple.

The tank, the fuel, mixes with air ignites, an expense that energy moves pistons and ultimately turns the vehicles wheels. But lithium ion batteries, like those found in evs and smartphones, generate power by continuously separating and reunite them and their electrons. That's what generates a mission free electricity to power the evs engine. But it's when IT comes to batteries that electric power brings into some tRicky problems.

The chAllenge for electrification as energy storage, we simply can't compete with gasoline.

Reggae is the director of the aspire research center at u taste university researchers. Their study and test a variety related to electrifying vehicles and making E V charging easier and more efficient, including electoral on's roadway charging system.

Battery energy storage on the vehicle is a significant chAllenge when you need to store this amount of energy because of the way to the vehicle, because of the ranging xiety and then, of course, because of the cost of that barrier .

in order to store and release comparable amounts of energy. As gasoline or diesel electric vehicles need a really big heavy batteries, the more energy storage needed, which usually means longer range, the bigger the battery and the longer IT takes to recharge.

even if we can charge our battery is very fast, as just pushing a chAllenge on to the electric utility. Now, any time you stop to to charge, you suddenly require this high power.

E, V, manufacturers and the U. S. Government are working on building out the country's network of fast charging stations, so called level three or dc.

Fast charges like the tesla super charges at highway gas stops. The White pilots with a big red hole in the middle. Those used very high voltage to top of batteries and thirty to forty five minutes.

Then there's the most common level two charges. A lot of E V owners have them installed in their garages, and they run a lot slower. Level two charges can take hours to top off a car battery. They're much less taxing on the power grid, but reagan saying, says that isn't feasible ble for every vehicle that could go electric in the years to come.

Let's talk about trucks. Typical skyscrapers in a big city is a few mega ones of power to keep Operating, that the skyscrapers, one track is going to require multiple megawatts for a fast charge, saying twenty or thirty minutes. And if you have a truck stop, you know, with fifteen or twenty trucks charging at a time, but you can start adding up the numbers and realize truckers p are going to become the large scale substations, utilities. If this is the progression.

we go down also. The more you fast charge lithesome iron batteries, the fast they wear out. Jane says topping evy batteries off a little bit of a time with wireless charging could help them hold a bigger charge for longer, which gets back to what stuff on toner from electron set earlier about rethinking how we approach fueling our vehicles.

Everybody doesn't have a charger at home, right? And the roads are there anyhow. What if you can monitor ze and actually transpiring the roads into charging assets?

Obviously, IT would be really difficult to refuel a moving car with gas, but toner says that would be relatively easy to recharge an electric car on the go with some additions underneath the roadway.

It's a copper coil closed in a ruber material, as you may, and resurface. You only do that for like an ancient to have two inches. And so we have placed the coils four inches on the neath so you don't hurt or touch the coils when you do that.

Tongue says electoral wants to be able to retrofit evs with a wireless charging receiver for upwards of a thousand dollars, and the goal for installing the roadway charging system is to get the cost to about one point two million dollars per mile. For context, the federal highway administration estimates a cost about seven hundred eighty seven thousand dollars per mile to resurface one lane of an urban inter state highway. Installing the charges would require ripping up the street and installing the coils before laying down. Fresh as fault, the talker says that could be done as part of routine roadmasters.

We integrate this already in an existing road construction project. This is an incremental cost because you are bringing the equipment already to million resurface. You just go a little bit deeper and you put into coils in our management units.

Electrical on has actually installed these power systems underneath active roadways in several countries as pilot projects, including its first project on public roadways in the us. Detroit's corker town neighborhood, where they're testing out the technology right now in partnership with the michigan department of transportation.

In total, it's a one mile project and we installed now the first quarter of all, we have a shuttle double Operate in the area, moving people from parking structure to buildings ah and do like a loops that will be able to charge emotion but also when he drops us talks then on the next three, which is michigan avenue, that's more a transit corria. So we working out with this data to integrate our solution in that road construction project as well with buses.

Longer says once the system is up and running, each coil will automatically turn off and on as vehicles outfitted with a compatible receiver drive above. He says it's just like using a mag safe iphone charger, one of those cables that works through a magnetic puck stuck to the back of the phone only, you know, without the cable and you can activate rapidly. It's .

milliseconds IT happens seamless, very fast. And we've also done testing where we have driven more highway speed.

He says the system would also work well for roadways where vehicles are moving slower or even idling like busy intersections on urban streets, or when taxes are waiting for their turn to pick up fares at an airport, or even roads that handle a lot of traffic.

Take the port of long beach or a lay where I live here. Well, now you can slow drive and you can charge these vehicles.

tongue says, because the coils turn often on as cars drive over them. It's a safety feature because they don't continuously generate electric fields that could harm people or animals. It's also part of the company's s future business model, another part of the system that he compares to a smart phone.

If you know today you go to the store and you buy this iphone, you need to put in the sim cut right then you need the subway pan. It's the same thing that will happen here. You need to some sort of model were you you will only charge for what you use on this road. But if you're not identified as an author ize user, you won't be able to activate the system era.

In the detroit pilot project could help pave the way in michigan and beyond by helping all the players, including government agencies and power utilities, build a framework for future electronic roadways to Better serve everyone from drivers to the great itself.

I think we're in a in a in a moment of transition that, that we do drive a vehicle IT makes things easier. And that is the big promise that we're seeing right now.

But that's still a big promise for technology that has yet to be rolled out to the public at large. So how my electric roadways and wireless charging the mainstream and what will I take to get there? That's after the break.

An electric car that never needs to stop to recharge the batteries might feel like a fantasy, but IT hasn't been that long since was a reality of sorts for lots of major us. cities.

There are street cars.

Remember red zane from u. tosta. Universities aspire center street cars.

the parallel above, delivering power as the vehicle S S Operating. And because of that, they don't that meat, the energy storage.

He studies electrifying vehicles, and he says, lots of modern cities faced those wide street cards out for good reasons.

We can't have the high power, high voltage show lines touched on the roads overhead, Chris, crossing all, all roads. There are real chAllenges and having .

to be the full solution. Or for another example, think about bumper cars, which all have holes connecting them to an overhead power grid. But when times up and the attendant shuts off the power funds over, electrifying every single roadway to provide wireless E, V charging would be a pretty expensive and complicated proposition.

Where would you start? Zen has an idea. Go big. The U. S. Interstate highway system.

not only about three percent of our paved roads, but a very significant set of roles connecting our city. Even if we had that, we would need enough battery storage on vehicle to Operate, get work, get home, but we wouldn't need the energy storage to go from city to city.

Goodbye range xiety. why? Like a big battery that can power your vehicle for hundreds of miles, if the roads themselves can constantly top off a smaller power self while you drive cases that would have cascine effects for how evs are made and used, the vehicle .

would weightless, meaning requires less energy to move IT premies. You would have a relatively small battery, maybe hundred miles at most. For most people, that means that the cost of vehicles relatively love.

We could have ten, fifteen thousand dollar electric vehicles for fleet, for trucks. The same story. But now the numbers are much bigger.

In this future, electric big rigs could be constantly charged as they barel down the highway, thanks to roads powered by solar panels, for instance, Carrying more cargo for less money than they would have if the sam trucks only relied on battery power. Another model for how wireless charging could change the way we drive could .

be starting small in the industrial use is much, much more useful.

That's magness world, the chief commercial officer of enrica, norway based company that is developing wireless charging systems for electric vehicles.

If you think about the warehouse, for instance, where you have a four lift that is going and he wants to go twenty four, seven and it's is automated, why should I stop for if you make the floor electric instead, the four lift would be able to charge all is driving and and you would never have to stop for charge. Those kind of application and industry are probably going to take off commercially long before the a the evs.

Because world says wireless charging itself needs to become more widespread before people can start talking about embedding power coils under roadways, andrex is planning to install inductive charges in florida along a mile of highway west of orlan du u. tosta. universities. Aspire center is also part of that project. But world says smaller and closed facilities like warehouses or even ports present more controlled environments for fleet Operators and government regulators to see how that works, while making sure there aren't any safety concerns related to the charging equipment.

All issues a lot of people are worried about is if you have a pacemaker, for instance, and you have an electric treat, can fill with your pacemaker, which would not be a really a good thing.

There are other issues that need to be worked out too, like making sure that wireless charging for evs is standardized, as IT is for smartphones in other small electronics.

If you look at the long term, there's a little things that needs to be in place. They're still stand the decision to be down, and there needs to be much more interactive ability between the different companies start acting in this right now, you have to have this standard that is great of that, that one manufacturer can make a pickup for a car and you can drive on something that somebody else.

Once the technology starts becoming more common, both thinks things will start moving fast. The technologies .

is there is just about product defying IT. But then at the end of the day, if you want to do the big escape, you are dependent on so much more, right? This is not something that can be done in a vacuum by some few producers of of, why is charging IT needs to be part of a bigger planet.

But that bigbang would have to be really big. Like, for example, U. S. Interstate highway system big, which brings us back to reagan zine.

Let's take youtube for example. We could act fy fifty miles in an urban corridor between two cities, cover the majority of our population. But our population isn't confined denver and seattle.

So you wouldn't get adoption even if we elected fine. You know, one significant urban cord. Or you really need to go from solid to denver, link up solid down the los Angeles. We need to finish up the triangle from los Angeles, cisco and back up to some lag.

all of which would a lot more coordination and cost a lot more than pouring regular old as fault, like what electorial has had to grapple with detroit. But on an even larger and more complicated scale.

key aries, interstate highways, national highway system, urban roads scored doors within the cities. If we can deliver the power where the majority of the energy is being used, we cut that middle component out and we make the whole system far more effective.

Jane says big infrastructure investments would need to happen at scale from the very beginning for electric roadway system to be effective and to be adopted by drivers and automate makers alike.

This needs to catch traction before we start converting individual and users. And this couldn't be a more critical time, is we're investing in infrastructure to make careful decisions on how this infrastructure would be developed for tomorrow.

The future of everything is a production of the wall street journal. Stephanie organ fruits is the editorial director of the future of everything. This episode was produced by me.

Danny Lewis, our fact checker is a partner, Nathan Michael level and Jessica enton. Sound designers Katherine mills up is our supervising producer. I shall all muslim is our development producer Scott salary and Christianity are the deputy editors, and philonous patterson is the head of news audio for the wall street. Jero, like the show, tell your friends and leave us a five star review on your favor platform. Thanks for listening.

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The modern enterprise, the cio, is more than just a technology. Later on, the fourth episode of tech fluent til deloitte ludie, renzo talks with tim buckley, former cio and chairman, and bangguo and john mark count former C. I, O, advanced and dey's cio and residents. Together, they define what tech leadership can look and how that can impact the sea sweep and the board. Where technology and influence converge, new opportunities can emerge that take fluently al, a podcast from delete and custom content from W, S, J.