Recharging while driving.

Electric cars are here!  They have many advantages over fossil-fuel powered cars, but they don't have much range.  If I want to go to my father's house in California in my gasoline car, it's about a 14 hour trip and it takes 3 fill ups--and a night in a motel somewhere Oregon.  That's a lot of gas and a lot of driving.  The electric cars we have today just can't do it.  Even the best batteries would require about 10 rechargings for that trip, and each recharge requires several hours of waiting.  Hydrogen has similar range, although with slightly faster rechargings.  It's up against some laws of physics that probably prevent it from getting much better.

Plug-in Hybrids like the Chevy Volt are a step in the right direction:  it carries a small engine that runs in a narrow, hence efficient, power range to recharge the battery while driving.  It gets much higher mileage for a trip like mine.  But for daily driving, it can run almost entirely from the electric grid.

Battery replacement is also appealing, but batteries are very expensive and in order to make it practical, BetterPlace has to subsidize replacement with very much higher prices on recharging.

There's another option that I haven't seen discussed much.  That is to recharge the battery while you're driving.  The way this would work is a power rail, something like the third rail we're familiar with for subways, would be built into or alongside the freeway.  The car would have an attachment to pickup power from the rail.   If you're doing a long drive, you'd tie into the power rail and your electric car would be recharged.

I think the way to do this is to build the rails into a lane of the interstate highways.  This has almost exactly the right usage characteristics:  they connect all our urban areas and many suburban and rural areas between. The electric car has plenty of range within the urban area, and if not, it will probably pass through one of our special roads en route.

I have several ideas for how this would work.  For example, a gizmo could be added to the bottom of an electric car such that when it detects the rail beneath, it drops a thing that would make contact with the rail.  when you leave the special lane, it disconnects and withdraws.  It would be entirely automatic.  Billing could easily be handled through the same sort of automated system in use on many toll roads today.

Another idea would be to have the vehicle go into auto-drive mode. The driver would surrender control of the vehicle and the vehicle would engage the rail and drive itself.  This has some appealing advantages:  The driver could sleep or read during the trip.  Because the vehicle can know exactly what the vehicle just ahead is doing, it could safely tailgate, which would significantly reduce energy use.  This would also allow much higher speeds.  My 14 hour trip could probably be done in 8.   But there are some problems too.  Most people are still pretty uncomfortable with robocars.  Teaching people how to engage and disengage safely could be tricky, especially if the pack is moving at over 100mph.  Because all of the vehicles will be following exactly the same track, wear on the pavement will be concentrated along that track rather than spread out as it is today.

This second version is essentially the same as an idea called Dual-Mode .  One big difference is that existing dual mode designs require a special vehicle.  I'm just proposing a special gizmo on an otherwise normal electric car.

There are lots of issues to be worked out: the design of the rail so that they're safe (imagine a car dragging a muffler causing a short between the power rails).  The design of the interface.  Convincing the highway departments to do it.  Etc.