They just negotiated a standard and the problem was solved – just as they would with electric batteries. It hasn’t happened yet, but that’s simply because there’s been no need to do it yet.

The main purpose of battery-swapping should be to allow EV owners the option to install the type of battery that meets their needs best. Check out my site.

Carl

Also, the effectiveness could increase as battery capacity increases. If you can harvest 10 miles worth of energy while driving 100 miles, then if you get a new battery that can take you 200 miles, you’d be able to harvest 20 miles worth of energy per charge.

Some other possibilities: As PV efficiency continues to increase, maybe it eventually becomes more efficient to use an optical coupling to beam power from the road to the bottom of the car than some kind of inductive technique. PV cells are usually effective at a limited range of wavelengths. So a cell that is 5% efficient over the entire solar spectrum of light might be 30% efficient at some narrow range. Imagine vehicles with PV cells mounted on the undercarriage, and LEDs emitting at the optimum wavelength for those PVs embedded in the road surface, with some short range wireless signaling technology telling the road when to turn each LED segment on and off as a vehicle passes over it. I bet you could eventually realize some pretty decent power transfer, with no EMI, and reasonable efficiency.

Yes, w,e already expose ourselves to substantial risks from existing electrical and liquid fuel sources (including intangible and unquantifiable risks of “wars to protect oil supplies,” etc.). The relative risks, uncertainties, and probabilities involved in things like EMI, shielding, carcinogenicity of gasoline vapors, etc., unfortunately, are fiendishly difficult to quantify and to understand, and even then, unintended random events can distort things further. To make things even worse, we often leave these issues in the hands of politicians and others who are probably the least qualified and least ethical people to manage them. We could, as an option, establish some kind of “quantocracy,” where mathematicians and quantitative experts could come up with reasonable solutions to manage risk. After all, the quants have used sophisticated mathematical computations to do a most excellent and predictable job of managing risk in the mortgage and stock markets, uh, right?

This is a complex system and only one thing can be certain — a simple, one-size-fits-all explanation or solution will predictably be probably wrong. Minimizing risk and maximizing benefits are excellent solutions, but they inherently involve probability. This is as an unavoidable condition of just being alive.

No worries, you can’t be the only one who made that mistake. Had you not said anything, it stands to reason that someone else, having had the same misunderstanding, would have walked away thinking that EVs are an EMI hazard.