Pay wall warning

Pay wall warning

Dear UK, I would like to help you save £30m. My suggestion: You give me £10m and scrap this plan.

First of all, it is not "Scalextric style" if it is wireless. Slot cars are wired. Secondly, wireless charging is OK for devices with low capacity that can be brought close to the charger, but not for electric cars. Why?

My phone has a relatively large battery with 16Wh, many have less. Serious cars start at 60kWh, 4000x the capacity. That's an enormous electromagnetic field you want to create.

Electromagnetic fields have an interesting property: The field strength is depending on the distance between sender (charger) and receiver (device), but not linearly! Field strength is the square root of the distance. That means, if the receiver gets 1V at a distance of 1m, it will be 0.25V at a distance of 2m. You can of course use centimeters instead of meters, the principle is the same. In short: If you don't get real close (= touch), you are losing efficiency, wasting energy. You waste anyway with wireless, but even more with distance.

And there we come to the last point. Not a physics issue, a financial. We live in societies where almost everything needs to be paid for. How do you want to bill drivers for charging on roads? Your chargers are always on, no matter if cars are there or not. You could use sensors to turn them off after a while of inactivity, but not between cars. You cannot measure how much energy a car consumed, only how much you put out, you don't know the efficiency.

And that problem applies even in car parks, where you can exactly know who is where and for how long: You still don't know how much the car did indeed receive, only how much you put out. And which driver would be stupid enough to pay the same as the driver of the next car, but only get a quarter of what the other guy gets?

So, better give me £10m and put the other £30m into NHS, they will need that money.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scalextric-style-roads-to-power-electric-cars-3psgjjk0g