Rechargeable electric cars with wireless connection

Published on : 22 January 20203 min reading time

With the advent of electric cars, which are increasingly popular worldwide, discussions about their values and shortcomings seem to go on and on. But one of the manufacturers is thinking about solving at least one problem related to this type of vehicle: how to recharge them.

As range is one of the biggest defects of electric cars, the duty to recharge them by cable is their second defect. And as we can see, the manufacturers are aware of this because one of them is already thinking of getting rid of this problem. It’s Volvo that is thinking of finding a solution to be able to recharge electric car batteries without having to attach them to the wire. It has joined a research project led by Flanders DRIVE that aims to solve the problem of having to recharge electric cars by wire. Nine companies and two universities are already involved in this project (carried out in Belgium), and Volvo has donated its electric C30 to the project so that the new solutions can be tested. Electric cars (also known as ecological because they do not need fuel to run) as soon as they appear have both their fans and their opponents. And one of the reasons “against” electric cars is their autonomy. To be more precise: their lack of autonomy… Constructors promise us that their machines can drive several kilometres without having to recharge them but these figures they give us have nothing to do with the actual use of the car in everyday life. And so in reality, instead of being able to drive about 200 kilometres without having to stop to recharge the vehicle’s batteries, we have to stop every 150 kilometres at the most to do so because the Constructors’ tests are carried out under scientific conditions and not in normal traffic: when we go on the motorway or when we spend hours in traffic jams.

This is induction recharging, thanks to which it was already possible to fully recharge batteries with a capacity of 24 kWh in two and a half hours in the case of rapid recharging. This construction (and mechanism) consists of a coil placed in the transmitter (i.e. the charging station) that creates an electromagnetic field. Several tests show that this way of recharging batteries works, but we now need to look more closely at the impact that the electromagnetic field has on the environment and people in the vicinity of the car. All the manufacturers and people involved in this research assure us that the tests on this subject are also optimistic and we have only a short time (a few years) left before Volvo can start to introduce this solution in its electric cars in series production.

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