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Wireless Car Charger Test Starts In London
judgecorp writes "A test of wireless chargers for electric vehicles has started in London. The Halo system owned by Qualcomm is one of several competing technologies designed to deliver power to charge car batteries without having to plug the vehicles in. At this stage, Qualcomm is apparently worried about frying cats."
"At this stage, Qualcomm is apparently worried about frying cats."
It's not a bug, it is a feature!
...to singe a cat!
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
As long as it doesn't harm dogs!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I would like to know how much electricity is lost when using a wireless then a wire.... that seams important to me. Especially that people who drive plug-in car normally care about environment and efficiency. My guess? It's there is a huge chuck of electricity lost. Who care when your charging your iPhone but about a car that seems important to me.
Just build more Chinese Restaurants.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
How would this be green when wireless charging is so inefficient? Is it really that much extra work to plugin or design some other simple physical connect?
For me they seem like they are trying to solve the wrong problem. For the Electric Car, it is having locations where we can plug in the wire, which is the same as having locations to park your wireless charger. Will work pay the power bill if you park your car at work and plug it in or wireless charge it? Probably Not.
The big problem is infrastructure, not pushing a button and plugging in a big wire. Besides if the goal with electric cars is to be green, why waste so much power on transferring it wirelessly?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It should be a pretty typical month in London, so their test should get accurate results.
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What are the effects of all of that energy floating around? I think this needs more testing. Also, this sounds highly inefficient.
Qualcomm clearly didn't understand my voice mail.
already have them http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wec.shtml
If it is anything like wireless gasoline fueling the loss is near 100%. I'm often in a hurry and poking the gas nozzle into my car's gashole is way too time consuming, so I usually just squeeze the handle in its general direction and hope for the best.
Instead of wirelessly. The car should have below the bumper at regulation height, a set of plugs, that allow to pivot up to 30 degrees and slide left and right a few cm. when it parks, it slides into a set of grooves with triangle guides on the corner, that will power the car. Once contact is made the car does a full stop, and will only go in reverse, until unplugged.
More power efficient, minimum loss of user friendless, easy to install, no fried animals, kids, or stupid adults.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The most interesting aspect of the article was reading that Qualcomm regularly invests in technology that may not pay back for 10 years.
Nice to see a company that is looking long term rather than maximizing the profits for this quarter.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
My idea for Wireless charging
You put this tank in the back of the car, which you fill with an organic liquid. This liquid is with air and the high temperature reaction pushes a set of pistons that turn a generator and the resulting current is used to charge the battery.
Is putting a plug in REALLY so hard? Is it a major problem to getting everyone electric cars? no...
having ANYPLACE to plug in is.
And the cost. And the battery replacement cost.
That battery pack has a limited lifetime. And so far its cheaper to run the gasoline car for the same duration. (so far. now that gas has gone back down)
My guess? It's there is a huge chuck of electricity lost.
Run the numbers and compare to a space heater. If its much above single digits loss you'll melt the car. Its really quite a bit of power.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Or better yet, instead of hauling around a great big battery everywhere why not have that set of plugs hang down just a little farther and contact a set of power strips embedded in the roadway, through which electricity would be transferred.
The car could then have a much smaller battery to power it short distances when not in contact with the strips, such as parking lots and such.
Quick skim on Wikipedia makes it look like 60-86%, which...isn't terrible. Not great, but not terrible. I'd be more worried about the possibilities of stray EM fields frying electronic devices (or cats, as the summary mentions). It's quite a lot of power to transfer wirelessly.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Or better yet, stop burning fossil fuels to produce electricity and then sending it hundreds of miles to charge a battery, and just burn them directly in an 'engine' built into the car.
Is wireless really needed? Even with wireless you still need to put a pad of some sort on the ground and a matching device on the car and the driver still needs to be able to have somewhat decent aim to park in the proper spot over top of it. I'm sure they could come up with a similar device that is not wireless which would work just as well without all the costs, losses and slow charging involved with a wireless system.
How could this be safe?
Just like CFL bulbs are not being said to cause skin damage. I'm not talking about the Mercury here either http://www.humanevents.com/2012/07/23/study-says-energy-efficient-light-bulbs-may-emit-harmful-radiation/
Before we leap into this where is the safety checks on all this stuff. IF I had a small child that got fried there would be all hell to pay. I know the article mentions fried eggs and fried cats but still.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
I thought Tesla licked this problem years ago.
would never work... what you sir speak of is a pipe dream. Energy on demand as you need it as part of an 'engine'?
Fried cats are tasty, nutritious, and go well with ketchup!
This should work great. The efficiency issue really is not that important and I think can be improved though some additional redesign to improve the mutual inductance. I'm just concerned that somebody might figure out that putting charging coils in the roadway is a good idea. High flux magnetic fields (which this system will create) are sorta dangerous, cats not withstanding.
Of course, driving a 100% electric powered car is kind of nuts for most of us. Current offerings of EV's have very limited ranges and fairly long recharge times. The cost per mile driven in an EV (including purchase price) is higher than other options over the expected life of the car, but that's at current gas prices, so it might pay off sometime. If you have the $$ to buy one, don't ever drive very far and have time to recharge the thing, who am I to complain.
He wanted to supply household current via tesla coils.
But Westinghouse asked "Where do you put the electric meters" ?
Roll up under some high power lines and charge away. My friends dad use to capture electricity with some gizmo on his farm from the high power lines that the BC hydro had running through the property.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
plug the damned things in? Is it really worth the loss of efficiency of the wireless charging scheme?
Electric cars thought to cause brain tumors, news at 10.
Wireless charging devices are used for electric razors, toothbrushes with >90% efficiency. Why we'd expect any less from a far larger/more expensive charger used for a car I don't know.
Expect efficiencies in the upper 80s to probably near 90, maybe a little more under the best cases. Not terrible, but not great. Expect to pay a grand or three extra for the convenience.
But who is going to want to plug their car in every time they park it? I see this technology being used in parking buildings. A wireless charger in every parking space. What's to stop it being embedded into the road as well, to assist the battery in powering the car while you drive?
You just won't be able to cross the street without risk of electrocution.
You'll also need to constantly replace the contacts as they will wear down.
You'll need to constantly clean the tracks on the road too, since dirt isn't very conductive and is very abrasive, especially when it's caught between two rubbing piece of metal.
Disneyland has been using wireless charging on the Toontown Trolley for twenty years.
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This is one tech I can do without.
A kill zone in my house? NO.
Agreed. Accelerator can be a plastic trigger instead of a pedal.
Yeah, should be modded up, even if off topic. Same thing I said to a friend of mine. "But the Chevy Volt isn't all electric!" says he. I said, no car on the road today that I know of is all electric. What's the difference if the generator is sitting 5 feet from the electric batteries and motor or 500 miles. "Oh yeah."
So a technology that at its core is electrons moving through a metal just isn't suited to have metal touching metal to charge it? WTF? And for a green energy, a big selling point is that you're going to lose a massive amount of energy in transmission through directed energy beam absorbtion? MEGA WTF. If people smoke a cigarette while pumping gasoline, they blow up. If people electrocute themselves despite like 50 safety measures while charging their electric car, they die. It's called natural selection, okay?
use the subject line as such rather than the start of a sentence?
But will we be using the Scaletrix or the Aurora AFX standard?
Lower efficiency means not only about getting less energy in the battery but also getting more energy outside of it. Would be nice if the losses were just heat but they are not.
Except that it takes a lot of electricity to make and transport gas. You could pretty much use this electricity directly and skip the whole pointless cycle of producing, distributing and burning gas.
Hey, but wireless charging is much better than that. By "much better" I mean "at least 2x more efficient".
BTW, haven't you noticed how everybody complains about these damn gas nozzles? Screw larger and cheaper batteries, we want wireless charging.
I really don't see the problem with plugging in my car when I park it.
Inductive car chargers are a monopoly-enabling technology -- people won't be able to charge their car without going to the charging station that sells electricity above the prices from electric utilities.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Wireless charging of cars evades a new kind of problem.
When charging cars with a cable the risk for damaged electronics in a tempest is much higher, because the cable usually crosses the faraday cage and insulation of the car, therefore it becomes vulnerable to all kinds of problems you would have with your home electronics but rather uncommon in conventional vehicles.
Charging it wirelessly removes some problems, as long as the induction coils and the charger are protected well enough... of course. Hopefully that has been reminded during design :-)
I know, they're idiots, but eventually metal thieves will figure out just how much copper is in an electric motor. This technology, I presume, will add significantly to the amount of copper wire in an electric car, with copper being the most common metal used in coil windings. I'll not even go into the resell value of automotive battery packs, for which there is already a healthy black-market.
How much copper does it take to turn a metal thief into a car thief?
You're right. Instead we could transmit power in overhead cables - most of the dirt would fall off on it's own that way, and if we used a metal wheel for the contact we wouldn't have much abrasion to worry about. We could call them "Cable Cars" and they could run all over the city. This is brilliant! I can't believe nobody's done it before...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Never underestimate the profit to be made off of lazy people.
To quote Garfield: "You can bet it wasn't an exercise nut that invented power steering!"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's a *lot* cleaner to have the burning done at a centralised location where pollution can be more easily dealt with, than simply spewing it out everywhere because the alternatives are too hard, for you, to figure out.
They already run all over the city I work in. I ride on these similar inventions that have a single wire hanging from a pole and run along metal tracks to get there as well.
Wear and tear on plugs and sockets, stupid people driving off with it still attached, stupid people leaving the cord on the ground for the next person to run over...
And no kids tossing bits of tinfoil under your car because the sparks are so cool!