Many electric vehicle owners suffer from what is known as "range anxiety". You're bound by the range you can drive your vehicle until it needs to be recharged. Sure, one day there may be roads that charge your EV inductively as you go about your merry way, but for now we're held captive by our charging cords.
Volvo hopes to change that. They want to remove the cables and outlets and let you charge your EV's not quite yet by driving down the road, but still by charging pads buried in the ground.
Crisp Green says,
The official name of the project, Continuous Electric Drive (CED) began testing last May with Volvo’s technology partner, Flanders’ Drive. The Volvo C30 Electric vehicle is being retrofitted for inductive charging.
How It Works: For inductive charging to work, a charging plate is buried in the ground at a location where the car can be parked, such as a driveway or parking garage. A magnetic field is generated by a coil within the plate that transfer energy to the battery without physical contact. The transferred energy is an alternating current that is converted into direct current via the car’s built-in voltage converter. This then charges the car’s battery pack. Volvo estimates that the C30 could be fully charged within one and half hours.
Infrastructure like this is paramount for electric vehicles to gain wide adoption. Until then, EV's will be relegated to 2nd cars or city-only commuting.
Check out the Volvo C30 concept in action:
lauren Oshea
said on July 13, 2011