Japanese researcher shows future of EVs with new wireless technology

Wow. Big long article that basically comes down to "let's change the roads and change the vehicles and everything will be fine."

This seems to be, more or less, like giving everyone an electric trolley car and letting them move around on a grid, getting power as they move along. Um. But without wires and using a lot of electric fields instead. The article gives only ONE SENTENCE that casually mentions problems, which are basically SAFETY, EFFICIENCY and COST. Oh. OK. I would add TIME in there because anything that might be unsafe and expensive is not going to happen on its own. Unless it is a war.

There must be some good ideas in there, but the whole concept is never going to fly. It is an attempt to work around the problem of batteries, which are bulky, heavy, and expensive. People DO UNDERSTAND that batteries are a dead end, and they are trying to get around it. Allow me to suggest hydrogen instead, as I always do.

Something that was left out of the article is how people are going to pay for their own mileage. If you put up these roads that anybody can use, how are you going to bill them for using your electricity?

I think we will figure out that changing OURSELVES is going to be the greatest hurdle. We are not short of technologies today, or financing, or general support for ideas. But apparently, people are loathe to change their habits. Probably we need to adopt systems that do not make radical changes to infrastructure or daily life. We need to replace THIS with THAT with the least disruption possible. If I am right, then we need electric trains, nuclear power, rapid investment in wind and solar, hybrid vehicles and hydrogen vehicles and a smattering of natural gas and electric vehicles. That is just a practical perspective. People (even 50%) won't support anything else. Everything else is disruptive, expensive, unsafe or whatever. People are lazy, and why not? Most people in developed economies have a nice life, why wreck it for them with all this "newer and better" whatever, right?