The “Charge As You Drive” Electric Car

November 2nd, 2010 by Chris Milton

Let’s face it .. electric vehicles have one big serious drawback: cables. You can’t go far in them and when you do you need to grapple with some serpentine cable to get energy back into the car. Green it might be, convenient it certainly ain’t.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just drive to work and know your car would still be fully charged when you got there? You’d have to do nothing else .. no plugging in, no battery drops, no nothing. You wouldn’t even have to stop at a gas station. Bye bye cable, bye bye pumps : hello freedom!

This isn’t some photovoltaic wet dream of solar efficiency or rehash of energy recovery systems. This is inductive power transfer (IPT) and its being used to turn the next generation of highways into car charging arteries.

The principle behind IPT has been around for ages: it relies on magnetic fields to make electrons to move, thus creating an electric current without a physical connection. It’s how electric toothbrushes and a whole host of other everyday objects get charged up without dangerous open connectors.

The theory of charging electric vehicles this way has also been mooted for years, but no ones managed to make it commercially viable … until now.

HaloIPT is a New Zealand startup whose major investors include the engineering giant Arup. Their solution is simple: two pads, one on the bottom of the car, one under the tarmac, and when the car is over the pad it automatically charges.

Voilà! No cables, no battery drops, no nothing. Simply install the pads on your driveway or office parking spaces, and your electric vehicle can charge whatever the weather in a safe and electrocution-risk-free environment.

But wait a sec, didn’t I mention car charging arteries? Indeed I did, because this is where HaloIPT’s vision starts to take off.

As highways undergo normal maintenance, why not install the pads under the road surface while you’re at it? Many roads already have an electricity infrastructure for street lighting etc; with an upgrade it could easily support the pads (up to 125A is thought to be sufficient).

This way, as the HaloIPT website puts it, “[when] you drive, the pad underneath your electric car picks up charge – safely, reliably – from pads embedded in the road. Every time you pass over a pad, the battery receives a fresh top-up.”

Now you’ve got to admit it, that’s neat!

HaloIPT are currently calling for early adopters to put the system through its paces, although sadly this is limited to the UK and New Zealand only. To take part go to HaloIPT – Projects and click on “Get Involved”.

A full commercial scale demonstration of the technology is planned for 2012.

^{Picture Credit: Motorway A73 by night by mauricekoop under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives License.}

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Tags: arup, haloipt, inductive power transfer, ipt, New Zealand

About the Author

Chris Milton is a seasoned sustainability journalist focusing on business, finance and clean technology. His writing's been carried by a number of highly respected publishers, including The Guardian, The Washington Post and Scientific American. You can follow him on twitter as @britesprite, where he's one of Mashable's top green tweeters and Fast Company's CSR thought leaders. Alternatively you can follow him to the shops... but that would be boring.

HG NY

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Raymundo

So… like, how might this technology affect U.S- Middle east policies?
fred

interesting concept but not viable on the interstates or roads in the countryside servicing access to the rural sector.

perhaps for a small nation that’s not an issue, but for large countries the likes of America, Canada, Australia, India, China, an invention that’s part of the vehicle is needed.

i have stumbled onto a concept that as yet hasn’t been developed or mentioned anywhere online.

it goes where the vehicle goes.

it’s virtually loss-less, and importantly, 100% safe.

interested?

fred (at) nurture-the-world (dot) org
Sanjay

There might be no point in having micro wind turbines.
though might be useful during braking effect, it will not be much effective as wheeld fitted with dynos.
Also wat abt the cost of these turbines???

also the power loss due to drag caused by these turbines will be much higher than the energy produced. If this is not the case then they might have installed some 100 turbines on each superfast trains by now.

Now coming to your review on “Charging on the Go!” sounds a ok idea. But!!!

this technology when charging a parked car is 90% efficient as the conventional charging (I don’t know if a common man accepts to pay this 10% loss). On the roads, I believe the efficiency drops very narrowly (not sure though).
- http://www.britesprite.co.uk Chris Milton
  
  An awful lot of commercial choices revolve around accepting a loss of quality in return for a boost of convenience. Providing the efficiency loss isn’t much more than 10% I can see that as being perfectly acceptable for most people.
Mary Tabazan

Why not use micro wind turbines, and a hybrid co-genertion system?
Magnets for charging are fine if componenets are sustainable. If they are rare earth, well,um……
- http://www.britesprite.co.uk Chris Milton
  
  That’s an excellent point Mary and one I hadn’t thought about. Although there are no magnets involved in the process (the magnetic field is generated through electricity .. sorry for not being clear) it will required a mind boggling amount of cable to create the magnetic-field-generating coils. Watch the price of copper soar.
  
  I’ve also often wondered why even conventional cars cannot be fitted with wind turbines or energy recovery systems (ie. dynamos) from the turning of the wheels. I presume because the extra weight / drag would counterbalance the effect … does anyone know for sure?
  - Bart
    
    If you mean wind turbines that generate power while you drive: the power to push them through the air will always be greater than the power they generate. Same for wheel mounted generators, so you can never win. (Unless you want to slow down, but that’s just regenerative braking, which all electric cars already do).
    
    My question: inductive systems induce current flows in any nearby conductor. People are electrical conductors, and hence these things will induce currents in them. They will not be enough to kill you, or even feel, but have there been controlled double blind studies reported in journals that show this is harmless?
  - Rom
    
    That’s correct. The increased drag and wind resistance makes it counter productive.
    
    Even if the pads-in-roads lack sufficient power to charge the batteries, it could still be enough to maintain the car at highway speed without draining any power from the batteries. Depending on cost, this could still be worth while.
  - http://www.britesprite.co.uk Chris Milton
    
    Thank you Bart and Rom … I thought that was the case but wasn’t quite certain enough to be , er, certain.
    
    The issue about people being a conductor is an interesting one : surely what would be acting on the person in the car is the EM field from the pad in the ground, not an electric current, which is what the EM field generates in the receiver?