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GM Partners With Boston Startup WiTricity To Develop Wireless Charging Technology (electrek.co)
Earlier this week, General Motors announced a partnership with Boston-area startup WiTricity to develop wireless charging pads for electric vehicles. Their goal is to develop a wireless "charging pad" that can be installed beneath a layer of concrete or other garage flooring material so that cars would simply need to be parked over the pad to automatically start charging. Electrek reports: "The electric vehicle has been recognized as central to the future of mobility, and GM has been a leader, making EVs accessible to the broader market. The convenience of wireless charging will help accelerate adoption even further," said Alex Gruzen, CEO of WiTricity, about the alliance. "Wireless charging for EVs, based on industry standards, is inevitable as we move toward a future of self-driving and autonomous vehicles, and this project brings us one step closer to realizing our vision of a world powered wirelessly." GM agreed to allow WiTricity to conduct tests on a Chevrolet Volt hybrid vehicle, "to show how well it would work integrated into a real car," according to Gruzen. Witricity claims that their system can achieve over 90% efficiency, which would make it at least as efficient as a plug-in charger. "Wireless charging is a technology that our customers have told us they are interested in," GM's executive chief engineer of electrified vehicles, Pamela Fletcher, said. "By testing the WiTricity prototype system, we can ensure that wireless charging systems will comply with proposed industry standards, which benefits the entire industry and consumers." The company has high hopes for their product. Gruzen envisions a future in which EV owners can send autonomous cars to charging stations remotely, a future that would only be possible with wireless charging stations.
wireless charging is a waste ofenergy
how long does it take to plug something in
And wasting energy is particularly bad when we have climate deniers in charge of the govt
If we as a civilization have figured out how to dock spacecraft, and refuel planes in flight, surely we can figure out how to connect an autonomous car to a contact charger. It could be a port at bumper height and the car drives very slowly into it. It could be simple robots at the station itself. I'm not saying wireless charging doesn't have its place, but it is not a requirement for an autonomous vehicle infrastructure.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
"Wireless charging is a technology that our customers have told us they are interested in",
our customers also want flying cars.
227-3517
need some proof. It'll take some work to convince me that 90% is even near of theoretical possibilities, let alone practical realities.
I'd say: startup snake oil.
This dude and his garage begs to differ http://www.theverge.com/2016/6....
GM if anyone would have the engineering resources to put together a reliable and automatic physical charging connection.
/greger
If you park above a charging plate, why wouldn't it simply connect directly, like a tram connects to the line above using a pantograph.
Tesla charger prototype finding its way to Model S video
So we move from gas stations which provide many services to a society of electrical wireless charging stations? Yea that sounds better.
They claim a few meters of cable and a plug are only 90% efficient. ("which would make it at least as efficient as a plug-in charger")
If that were true, charging at 20 kW would result in red-hot cables. So this claim is bullshit.
Someone else posted this automatic charger:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/6...
The electronic guidance needn't be any more complex than the Lego Mindstorms line/ligght following robot, recommended for kids 10 years old and up.
This kit does essentially the same thing and costs £16.50.
https://www.kitronik.co.uk/219...
Install high-efficiency solar panels on the damned things, covering every major surface of the car, and make it so they're hard to see, except to a special camera. Then install lights fitted with these cameras, allowing them to focus some one or more wavelength of EME that can be produced and captured with maximum efficiency, preferably something invisible and undetectable to humans, such as radio or UV, something that can penetrate dirt, snow, etc., travel through great amounts of air, etc., with a minimum of loss.
Then the cars can sip power as they sit outside under the sun, or roll, and using the same system, absorb industrial and quantities of current through their skins, so to speak.
Now you don't need some stupid little pad.
OR... you could make the generally flat underside able to absorb similarly a large amount of IR, which most cars get blasted with much of the time, rolling over road that is spending most of the seconds out of a day being BLASTED by the sun, and reradiating copious quantities of IR themselves, and then just put an IR source UNDER THE CAR while parked to charge? And the bonus here is you could combine BOTH technologies, and the technology to produce large amounts of IR from a flat pad is like, a century old.
As far as I know, heat production is the ONLY 100% efficient thing in the universe. Normally heat is what's wasted, but not if what you're doing in the first place, is making heat!
Honestly I should patent this but I'm just too fucking lazy.
Gruzen envisions a future in which EV owners can send autonomous cars to charging stations remotely, a future that would only be possible with wireless charging stations.
Uhhhh... no. With the state of computer vision (used by autonomous cars of all things), you can easily program a device to automatically align and plug in a cable. Wireless is just a drop in efficiency. Right now, with the state of battery storage and the goal of ostensibly reducing emissions, you would think efficiency would be engineering goal #1.
Silence is a state of mime.
Can they build it in such a way that it drains power if they double park?
The EV1 used inductive charging paddle and receptacle so how hard would it be to make that a retractable and automated system?
This could make the wait in the drive-throughs useful, if the company is ready to pay for it.
The biggest concern about EVs is the limited range and the need to constantly charge them.
Having cheap, wireless chargers that can be embedded into concrete means that drivers can constantly keep their vehicles charged - whether it's in the city in parking spots, at home or on trips where they should be getting out and walking around every 1.5 to 3 hours (100 to 200 miles) for their health. Every time they stop, their cars are being charged/topped up so they never have to worry about running out of charge.
If cities put in wireless chargers in street parking spots, they can provide a service that EV owners would be willing to pay for (and I imagine that the link/payment would be automatic and keyed to the car's license so it's convenient for the owners).
If businesses put in wireless chargers into their parking lots, then they have an additional source of revenue as well as a reason for EV owners to come directly to them.
As many people have noted, wireless charging isn't as efficient as a direct connection and there will be huge infrastructure costs to install the chargers, power to them and network connections as well as add them to existing EVs as well as design them into future vehicles, but there seems to be a pretty strong business case that will make this type of technology very desirable in the near future.
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