Engineering News

Wow a whole 50 or 60 watts of power transmitted through a 10 centimeter block of concrete. While that is impressive, it is nowhere near what it takes to power a vehicle down the road. Lets compare this with the power it takes to cruise a low air drag Porsche 911 at a modest 15 m/s (aka 33.5 mph). A Porsche 911 requires 4.1 kW or 4100 watts of power to cruise at this modest speed. This is almost two orders of magnitude too small of a transmitted power level for even local driving. I am certainly all for research but this is very far away from a plausible method of power coupling to a vehicle. The author of the Engadget article is doing both the readers and these researchers a disservice by proposing that this makes electric vehicles more viable with this puny amount of power coupled. I realize the article states that 100 time more current is needed along with transmission through thicker concrete. With electromagnetic field strength attenuating at an inverse squared relationship I don't see this happening anytime in the future.

Slow and steady power transmission. Now they need to direct it beamwise to cars that are all over the road, unless the cars are driverless, which may be in sync, timeframewise. And even if only half the power needed is transmitted, that would double the range, eh? Pretty wise to bet on it.

That article was pretty scant on detail.

Nice development none the less. It can only get better.

Bring it on I say! Lots of interesting infrastructure implementation work to be had in that when they get it properly sorted.