About six years ago I went to the dentist and got some bad news. A decade of hard, ugly living (my twenties) had left my gums as weak and diseased as an 80-year-old’s. The dentist said if I wanted to be able to chew solid food in my forties, not only would I require scaling (a barbarous form of minor – from an anesthesia point of view – surgery where your gums get peeled back and scraped clean), but from now on I had to use an electric toothbrush. I mention this because that very electric toothbrush was my first brush (no pun) with induction charging. My latest encounter occurred in the U.K. while driving the arresting, august Rolls-Royce Phantom Experimental Electric, aka the 102EX. Like all other electric cars, the 102EX can be plugged into a wall. But unlike all other electric cars, it also can get its juice via a big metal plate attached to its underside. All the chauffeur needs to do is drive over another plate on the ground (or buried just below the ground) and the big, blue, whale-like Roller stars charging. Just like that. The magic part? Modern inductive charging (like the Magne Charge method used by GM’s EV1) is right around 90% efficient — basically as efficient as conductive charging (i.e. plugging something in).
Impressively, Rolls-Royce claims that this wireless, non-contact yet still 220-volt and three-phase method of powering up requires only 8 hours to replenish the 102EX’s 71-kilowatt-per-hour, 1452-pound battery. This is fantastic news, because – and I hate to be the one to break this to you – most cars will have a much smaller battery than the electric Rolls-Royce. Sorry. For instance, the much lighter Nissan Leaf’s battery stores just 24 kwh of energy. The Chevy Volt? A mere 16 kwh. Which means that if they were set up for some 102EX-style induction charging (again, 220 volts, three phases), they could be fully charged right quick using Rolls-Royce’s technology.
But where are you gonna find an inductive charging plate to park on top of? Well, you could get one installed in your garage, if you have a garage. Of course lots of people don’t. I’m talking about apartment dwellers mostly, but some people who own garages don’t park in them. And what about when you go to work? Where are you going to find a parking plate? I suppose you could bring a plate with you, drop it on the ground, and plug the plate into a wall somewhere, but talk about over-complication.
But what if charging plates were buried everywhere, in every parking spot?
Electric cars make more sense in cities. Unless you’ve got a Volt-style range-extender onboard, range anxiety is your ever-present copilot when driving long distances. Shorter commutes just make more sense when you’re driving all-electric. One other feature of city living (and driving) is parking meters. Here in Los Angeles, they’re everywhere. Not only that, but they’re now (mostly) digital, meaning that in order to park and pay the dollar-an-hour fee, you shove in your credit or debit card. What if those same parking spots had charging plates buried in the asphalt, and the city charged you an extra buck per hour? Put another way, what if the city was able to easily charge $1 for $0.25 worth of electricity? You’re already getting ripped off by the parking meter – what’s the difference at that point?
As you’ve probably heard, throngs of American cities are broke. In order to combat that, some have been selling off (or leasing out) the rights to their parking. Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis have done it. New York is considering doing the same. So are Baltimore, New Haven, and Los Angeles, to name just a few cities. But according to a good number of pundits, selling out your city’s “renewable parking revenue resource” is a lousy, terrible idea. So here’s a money-making one: turn every parking spot in the city into an induction charging space. Not just street parking, but garages, structures, and lots. Make it so that drivers can either quickly pay with their credit card, or purchase monthly/yearly subscriptions that are handled wirelessly. Instead of just sitting there at the mall doing nothing, cars can generate profits.
I’m not just pipe-dreaming here (well OK, fine, maybe just a little). Several OEMs are peeking into wireless electricity: GM, Toyota, BMW and Nissan to name some biggies. Moreover, Nissan’s actually investigating the possibility of an inductive highway. Essentially, there would be strips in the ground and your electric car could just zip along, sucking power from the ground as it goes. Talk about cool and cost-prohibitive technology! Still, while fully electric highways might be beyond the realm of what’s possible, inductive parking clearly isn’t.
San Francisco just installed SFPark, a parking system that “uses sensors in parking spots to detect when they’re occupied.” So the ability to modify a city’s parking infrastructure with electronic doodads is there; doing so just a matter of will. The good news? There’s money to be made here, and if there’s one thing American entrepreneurs love and crave, it’s brand-new revenue streams. All signs point to electrification of the automobile becoming a reality, and soon. One impediment is of course our crummy infrastructure and crumbling power grid. When faced with the choice between chicken and egg, it’s best to assume they both live on a field of dreams. Build it and they will park. And charge.
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