New highways to charge electric cars as they drive

From Hayes to Romford, Watford to Purley, and everywhere in between, electric car charger stations are dotted across the streets of London. Numbering around 1,000, this sprawling collection of fuel stations for the environmentally conscious is the largest in Europe. Those who prefer their fuel non-combustible are able to recharge their right-on electric battery powered cars at their convenience, and be on their silent way.

A new trial by the British Department for Transport, however, could soon render these electric juice points obsolete. It was announced in August that the UK government would go ahead with an 18-month trial of highways that will be able to charge electrically powered cars as they drive along.

“What has been committed to is that by 2016 or 2017 we will hold off-road trials – in other words not on a public road”, Stuart Thompson, a spokesman for Highways England told the BBC. “It’s still very early days. Where exactly the trials will be has yet to be determined.”

So far £200,000 has been spent investigating the feasibility of the technology, while it is expected another £500,000 will be spent on the plan.

Current of history
The basic idea behind the electric highway is to lay electric cables under the road. These cables will give off an electromagnetic field. Cars equipped with the correct technology will, if all goes well, pick up the electricity emitted, providing them with power to continue driving along indefinitely – or at least until they veer off the electric highway for long enough.

The concept itself can be traced back to the late 19th century, being one of the many ideas of the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla. Patenting the idea in 1894, Tesla proposed a scheme for tramcars to be powered by electric currents emitted from the ground along their route of travel. As the patent itself noted, the idea was to provide tramcars with electricity currents “without the use of sliding or rolling contacts between the line conductor and the car motors”. The electricity supply, it continued, was intended to “convey these currents… run from the stationary source of supply along the line of travel and preferably through a conduit constructed between, or alongside of the tracks or rails”. As with so many of Tesla’s bold ambitions, however, it sadly never came to fruition.

Similar technologies do, however, now exist around the world. After years of testing, in 2013 the town of Gumi, South Korea opened a 15-mile route on which specially constructed buses draw their power from under-road cables. In 2014, the British city of Milton Keynes introduced a less technologically sophisticated version to charge its own bus fleet. Rather than bury the cables under the surface (which requires digging up and relaying the road), the city opted to lay electric plates on top of the road at certain points, where buses pick up the charge as they sit above them. This does, however, require the buses to remain stationary to be charged.

Red flags and range anxiety
One major obstacle to electric cars becoming more popular is that people feel they are not very practical. A perceived lack of ease in keeping electric cars charged and running puts people off considering one, while the lack of such vehicles makes creating an infrastructure for charging them seem pointless.

“When the UK government surveyed consumers and businesses, they found the chicken-and-egg problem that haunts [electric vehicles] elsewhere”, said the website Co.Exist. “Some consumers don’t want to buy an electric car without a full infrastructure for charging in place.”

In the UK, a trip to the petrol station is routine, but outside London, the infrastructure needed to support electric cars is all but non-existent. Even inside London, the charge-up station network is shoddy. In 2014, The Telegraph pointed out that many of the charging points in London do not work, with confusion over who is responsible for their repair leaving them offline. The website Source London tracks which points are online and available for use: the map is constantly changing, but a quick glance at any given time will show a large number flagged red as inoperable. As The Telegraph said: “[T]he London Borough of Camden admits that it’s struggling to keep more than 70 percent of its charging points operational at any one time, leaving significant holes in the network.”

One Financial Times journalist recounted: “On a recent weekday morning, I walked to the nearest charging point to my home in Camberwell, southeast London, but it was out of service. So was the next one I visited, around half a mile away”.

Motorists in the UK have become accustomed to the ready availability of fuel. The idea of being uncertain whether or not the source of petrol for one’s car will be available is particularly unappealing.

All of this creates ‘range anxiety’; another major reason people have an aversion to electric cars. No one wants to get caught short, half a mile from the nearest charging point. Not that drivers in petrol powered cars are not also prone to such problems, but people have become accustomed to gauging how far they can get on low petrol before they arrive at the next station, or at least have the comfort of knowing there is an emergency jerry can of petrol in their car boot. The electric highway, if widespread enough, could alleviate such fears.

Many of the newer models of electric cars have increased battery power, allowing vehicles to run longer, easing the mind of drivers. This does not mean electric highways would be redundant, as even the longest powered battery needs to be recharged. As the electric highways themselves would require major road works to lay the cables, the highways will initially cover only certain areas, or be gradually integrated road by road. At the same time, as the BBC noted: “Highways England is also committed to installing plug-in charging points every 20 miles… on its motorway network over the ‘longer-term’.”