South Korea has just switched on the first commercial road in the world where OELVs (Online Electric Vehicles) can be constantly recharged while driving.
Electric cables fitted under the pavement are used to generate electromagnetic fields which are picked up by a coil inside the vehicle and converted into electricity. The technology allows electric vehicles (EV) to break through the range barrier, which has hampered EV adoption so far.
At CES in January both Ford and General Motors unveiled their connected car open development plans, but the two automakers couldn’t have been different in how they followed up. Ford immediately started pumping out new apps for its Sync AppLink platform, but GM kept quiet. It opened up its new developer portal to registrants, and that’s it; except for a promise to show us the fruits of its labors this fall in a few of its model year 2014 vehicles.
Electric vehicles take too long to recharge. To charge a Tesla Model S just halfway takes five hours at a typical home or public charging station. But in its effort to make electric vehicles more practical, Tesla Motors is quickly reducing the charging times. Last September, it unveiled a network of “supercharging” stations—designed exclusively for its Model S and future electric vehicles—that could charge a battery halfway in 30 minutes. In May, it announced an upgrade that cut that time to 20 minutes.
Hydrogen-powered vehicles have been out of the spotlight for years, but they’re about to make a surprising comeback. Toyota says it will unveil a hydrogen fuel-cell-powered sedan later this year that will go on sale in 2015; several other automakers, meanwhile, have announced partnerships to commercialize the technology (see “Ford, Daimler, and Nissan Commit to Fuel Cells”), including GM and Honda, which announced such a collaboration this week.
This week I met an owner of an Tesla Model S electric sedan who raised the question of whether electric vehicles are really better for the environment when you including everything, including the resources that go into making the battery and the impact of disposing of it. He was feeling uneasy about his environmental bona fides.
On Friday, Tesla Motors, the company behind the Tesla Model S, arguably the most promising all-electric challenger to the century-long domination of fossil-fuel cars, announced an innovative switching station based infrastructure that would bring its flagship product one step closer to being the first all-electric no-compromises luxury sedan.
Tomorrow Tesla Motors will announce a way to charge its Model S electric vehicle faster than a conventional car’s gas tank can be filled—by swapping a depleted battery for a fully charged one.
Such a system would address one of the big drawbacks of electric cars: limited battery range and slow recharging make them poorly suited to longer road trips. But there are questions about how practical it would be, especially as a way to help make electric vehicles more popular.
Tesla Motors, whose stock price has soared in recent weeks after a series of positive announcements, once again made news today with details of its plan to extend and upgrade the performance of its fast-charger network. Within a year, the network will allow drivers to travel cross-country in the company’s electric Model S, stopping every few hours for a 30-minute charge that adds 200 miles of range to the vehicle. Tesla has doubled the rate at which it’s building its fast-charger stations and, by upgrading the charging technology, cut charging times in half.
