while listening to the presentation about the small electric vehicles plan for large cities, i got to thinking about how they would stay charged. he suggested there would need to be charging stations for them, and i thought that the logical solution would be to have the charging stations at all parking spots. then anytime you were parked, you'd get recharged. then i got to thinking how they would charge, something could connect to the car like a gas pump, that would come from the meter...or the ground even. then i thought maybe it could be more automatic, you just park and it starts charging. but how? something could come up from the parking spot to connect underneath, but what about something that's already connected? that's where i had a eureka moment.

what if there were electrical receptors built into the tires, so that the car could be not just charged, but fully powered by an electrical current which was part of the road itself? think about how those toy racecar tracks work, the cars are on metal rails that give them their power, they don't need batteries because they are powered by the track itself. now what if cars did the same thing? the most prohibitive bottleneck in EV technology is batteries. they're incredibly expensive and not nearly as efficient or lightweight or compact as we would like them to be. they're the proverbial rock that the house of EV is being built around. so what if we did EV's with little or even no batteries? they were just giant toy cars on a city sized track. i don't really know anything about how electricity works or how this could be possible but it seems like a very worthwhile track (pardon the pun) to explore. i do know that technology like the powermat and the way the pen device stays powered on my tablet (while hovering over it at a short distance) proves that it wouldn't have to be a dangerous electrified surface, but a layer just beneath the rubber of the tires, and the surface of the street that exchanged the electricity necessary to power the car.

this would defer the cost of the switch to EV over to the government instead of the consumer, they would need to provide the infrastructure of the electric charging roads and the cost of electric vehicles would go way down, probably to less than that of gas vehicles. they would be come popular in urban areas and eventually could spread nation wide.

this seems like a really cool idea, i'd love to talk to some EE majors and get their takes on it to see if it's even remotely possible. but with a little creativity i'm sure it could be.