Florida is building a highway that can wirelessly charge EVs while you drive

[TheBigT42]

I don't understand why there are not more Electric Vehicles with Gas Range Extending Generators. I know the Chevy Volt was one but it was Chevy so it failed. Dodge teased a 1500 Charger Truck but it has not hit the market.

To me this is the best of both worlds. 100 Miles of EV range and a gas generator for longer trips.

 

[scavengerspc]

I don't understand why there are not more Electric Vehicles with Gas Range Extending Generators. I know the Chevy Volt was one but it was Chevy so it failed. Dodge teased a 1500 Charger Truck but it has not hit the market.

To me this is the best of both worlds. 100 Miles of EV range and a gas generator for longer trips.

BMW had a range extender. If I remember correctly, it was a small 2 cyl engine and it had
just under 2 gallons fuel capacity. It was underpowered and scrapped on all future EVs.
Rumor is they are bringing it back.

Anyway. That Ramcharger is what I have been waiting for and is now scheduled for mid 2026. It's an EV with a V6 engine that can be started to charge the battery. The engine is not even connected to the drive train, and is strictly for charging the battery.

Damn! I can see a new bullshit EPA rating coming. kWh per gallon.

 

[Loadedaxe]

I don't understand why there are not more Electric Vehicles with Gas Range Extending Generators. I know the Chevy Volt was one but it was Chevy so it failed. Dodge teased a 1500 Charger Truck but it has not hit the market.

To me this is the best of both worlds. 100 Miles of EV range and a gas generator for longer trips.

A 100 mile EV range plus a gas extender would indeed solve range anxiety...but most companies now think it’s easier to just push EV range to 250‑300 miles and skip the gas engine entirely.

 

[Squid Surprise]

You don’t need a “better number” when the premise itself is wrong. No one is talking about replacing existing roads or electrifying the entire highway network, so any total cost figure built on that assumption is meaningless.

The real discussion is about targeted segments with known traffic patterns and utilization, where the comparison is against alternatives like bigger batteries, more vehicles, or more downtime, not some imaginary nationwide rebuild.

Ok - so how many km will you need to replace with “known traffic” etc… or do you think this 4.4 miles of road fixes everything?

 

[TommyBoyFL]

Who is paying for this electric and all the Construction to install it?

Tolls

 

[TheBigT42]

BMW had a range extender. If I remember correctly, it was a small 2 cyl engine and it had
just under 2 gallons fuel capacity. It was underpowered and scrapped on all future EVs.
Rumor is they are bringing it back.

Anyway. That Ramcharger is what I have been waiting for and is now scheduled for mid 2026. It's an EV with a V6 engine that can be started to charge the battery. The engine is not even connected to the drive train, and is strictly for charging the battery.

Damn! I can see a new bullshit EPA rating coming. kWh per gallon.

Me too I just need a good excuse for a truck that big....Right now it has a very low WAF (Wife Approval Factor)

 

[VariableSpike]

This sounds confident, but...
Near field inductive systems don’t behave like radiative RF links with inverse square losses, coupling efficiency is driven by coil geometry, alignment, and ferrite shaping, which is why commercial stationary systems already hit ~90% efficiency at 85–200 kW.

The assumed 50 to 100 mm burial plus 200 mm air gap isn’t how these are deployed either, pads are closer, segmented, and only energized when a compatible vehicle is present. There’s no “hundreds of kilos of copper” under the car, receivers are thin, ferrite backed, and on the order of tens of kilos. The 0.5 kWh per second figure is simply wrong anyway, that would imply megawatts of power.

You don’t have to like the idea, but writing it off as government money burning ignores that the physics is well understood, deployments already exist, and the use case is intentionally narrow.

If it was a system suggesting top up charging at traffic lights at rates of say 50kW, then sure, but not a moving system like this, hence saying its burning money for an implementation like this as there are so many challenges to doing it like this that its dumb, but more than likely someone skewed the idea to have great delusions of grandeur about a use of the tech that is pointless because it can net the headline "200kw moving ev charging installed" and get attention, investors et al. Existing examples are there from Electeon or whatever other conpanies are trying to rush in for VC money, but apart from fanfare about launching in Detroit with lots of hyped up things about all the magic it will do 2 years ago, there's nothing concrete, and neither do we hear about the whole country being carepeted by this company, nor do we see goverment case studies (because the ones from the very same company are usually useless) showcasing these developments and pushing infrastructure upgrades. A video debubking that Detroit install is here

 

[Loadedaxe]

If it was a system suggesting top up charging at traffic lights at rates of say 50kW, then sure, but not a moving system like this, hence saying its burning money for an implementation like this as there are so many challenges to doing it like this that its dumb, but more than likely someone skewed the idea to have great delusions of grandeur about a use of the tech that is pointless because it can net the headline "200kw moving ev charging installed" and get attention, investors et al. Existing examples are there from Electeon or whatever other conpanies are trying to rush in for VC money, but apart from fanfare about launching in Detroit with lots of hyped up things about all the magic it will do 2 years ago, there's nothing concrete, and neither do we hear about the whole country being carepeted by this company, nor do we see goverment case studies (because the ones from the very same company are usually useless) showcasing these developments and pushing infrastructure upgrades. A video debubking that Detroit install is here

I think you’re mixing up what the pilot is actually for with the worst case hype version of it.

No one serious is proposing to carpet the country with dynamic charging lanes for private cars. The use case that keeps coming up both in pilots and in policy discussions is commercial fleets on fixed routes, buses, delivery vans, port vehicles, possibly long haul trucks. For those, even short electrified stretches can materially reduce battery size, charging downtime, and grid peaks.

Saying it’s “burning money” misses why pilots exist in the first place. They’re not meant to prove nationwide rollout, rather they’re meant to answer boring but necessary questions like durability, maintenance costs, winter performance, efficiency losses, and interoperability. Of course you won’t see government wide adoption two years in, that’s exactly why it’s a pilot.

Static high power charging at traffic lights sounds simpler, but it has its own issues, queueing, grid spikes, and zero benefit once the vehicle is moving. Dynamic charging trades infrastructure complexity for operational efficiency, which is why fleets are even interested.

Electreon’s hype deserves skepticism, sure, but dismissing the entire concept as “pointless” ignores the very narrow, very practical niche it’s being tested for. This isn’t about headlines.

 

[Loadedaxe]

Ok - so how many km will you need to replace with “known traffic” etc… or do you think this 4.4 miles of road fixes everything?

No one thinks 4.4 miles “fixes everything.” It’s a pilot to validate real world performance, costs, and utilization.

If it works, you deploy small, strategic segments where traffic is predictable ... ports, freight corridors, depot approaches, urban bus routes, not hundreds or thousands of kilometers.

That’s how every piece of transport infrastructure gets evaluated before scaling, not by pretending a single test is the final solution.

 

[Squid Surprise]

No one thinks 4.4 miles “fixes everything.” It’s a pilot to validate real world performance, costs, and utilization.

If it works, you deploy small, strategic segments where traffic is predictable ... ports, freight corridors, depot approaches, urban bus routes, not hundreds or thousands of kilometers.

That’s how every piece of transport infrastructure gets evaluated before scaling, not by pretending a single test is the final solution.

Ok - still waiting on your number….

 

[John Staerck]

4.4-mile highway, seriously?
That's ~5 minutes at 50 mph. How much you can charge, wirelessly at that, for 5 minutes? You can't even charge a mobile phone.

I don't even want to think about the efficiency and the cost of charging.
The amount of money wasted on this would be enough to put many thousands of chargers (of the type that can really charge your car).

Much less than 5 minutes. The article states "About three-quarters of a mile of one travel lane will be equipped with inductive charging coils beneath the asphalt."