The problem of range anxiety has dogged the progress of electric cars – but now researchers at Toyota Central R&D Labs and Toyohashi University of Technology believe they may have found a solution.
They have suggested a novel new way of allowing electric vehicles to run for unlimited distances which is based on electric railways where each car of a train is powered by an overhead wire.
For electric cars they have proposed avoiding the use of dangerous contacting devices and instead converting the energy from power lines into radio frequency using high-speed inverters that are implanted along tracks in the road. The voltage is applied to a balanced metal track that is embedded under the surface of the road with the electric car picking up the voltage via electrical capacitance between the metal and a steel belt inside its tyres.
The researchers have already conducted feasibility experiments to test the ideas by putting small metal plates on the floor and inside the tyre with another positioned above the tyre. The results showed the impedance to depend linearly on the RF frequency and although they were low power experiments the researchers believe they demonstrate the feasibility of energy transfer from the road to a running car.
