Future Cars could be powered by Electrified Roadways.

THE cars of the future could be powered by electrified roadways. Such technology would allow electric cars to forgo their heavy batteries, which not only add to a vehicle’s weight, increasing the energy needed to move it, but also force it to sit idle while recharging.

The idea has been around for decades. Previous attempts used an electrified coil in the road to create an electromagnetic field that interacts with a coil attached to the car. “Since the coils must be exactly aligned face-to-face to achieve high energy efficiency, such schemes may be useful for [charging] vehicles in a parking lot, but never very effective for cars while running.

Toyohashi University of Technology are developing a system that transmits electric power through steel belts placed inside two tyres and a metal plate in the road. To test how much energy would be lost as electricity travelled through the tyres’ rubber. They set up a lab experiment in which they put metal plates on the floor and inside a tyre. “Less than 20 per cent of the transmitted power is dissipated in the circuit.