Currently, road-tripping in an electric vehicle requires you to stop every few hours to charge your car. If you have a bigger battery, you can go further between charges, but that increases vehicle weight, which makes it worse for the roads and more dangerous to others. Not to mention more expensive. But what if there was another option? What if you could essentially drive indefinitely with a relatively small battery? It sounds unrealistic, but it’s also what the Israeli company Electreon is trying to make happen.
CarScoops reports that Electreon is developing wireless charging technology that can be embedded in roads. And it’s currently in the middle of an attempt to show that it actually works. Starting two days ago, it began driving a Toyota RAV4 Prime around a test loop, a quarter of which has Electreon’s “Electric Road” wireless charging installed in it. Their goal is to drive in EV mode for 100 hours straight, only taking short breaks to change drivers.
If you’re interested, you can check out the live stream below, although we’ll readily admit that watching a car drive in a loop isn’t exactly exciting. What is exciting, though, is the possibility that one day, electric cars could be able to get away with using much smaller batteries while also making range anxiety a thing of the past. Is it going to happen soon? That doesn’t seem likely. But it’s still cool technology, and we love the idea of being able to drive more than 600 miles in a car with an 18-kWh battery without needing to stop to charge.
And while it seems incredibly unlikely that this tech will be adopted in a widespread manner in the next decade, it’s still fun to dream.