I drive a Chevy Volt, a car that can operate entirely on batteries or by using an ordinary gas engine to power the electric system. It’s a bit of a complex system, but it allows the car to travel for 40-something miles on electric alone, then switch over to gas for longer trips.
I’m on my second Volt. On the first car, which I leased, I kept my gas mileage just a bit above 100 miles per gallon. My daily commute was exclusively electric on most days, but every now and then I headed out on a cross-country trip and burned a few gallons of gas. It was a nice balance, and I appreciated the $0.75 it cost me to charge up for a 60+ mile commute.
When my lease ran out, I bought a used Volt with 40,000 miles already on it. I was surprised to see that the lifetime average on that car was only 45 miles per gallon. The previous owner had almost never plugged it in, logging electric miles for only a small fraction of travel. As it turns out, he wasn't the only one.
Consumers, most of whom are still fairly unfamiliar with electric vehicles, have certain anxieties about them. ...
Alex Gruzen, the CEO of wireless-charging tech company WiTricity, told me that one automaker has done an internal survey of its plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle (PHEV) owners and discovered that 70 percent of them never plug in. They use the vehicles as ordinary hybrids, sacrificing an enormous amount of fuel economy (which they paid extra for!) just because nightly plugging is a hassle.
Is one of the big things coming between between electric vehicles and general public acceptance just the problem of the plug?
Personally, I’ve never found plugging in a hassle. I installed a 220-volt charger at home that can fill the car’s batteries in around three hours. Which is nice.
There’s a big push for wireless. However, current wireless solutions are less than optimal. If you own a cell phone or other bit of consumer tech that charges wirelessly, you’ve probably found that positioning a device carefully over the sweet spot of a charging pad is not appreciably easier than simply plugging it in. The induction charging used in these pads is also inefficient, delivering less than half its power to the device. For something that uses as much power as an electric car, that's obviously not an optimum approach.
But new tech is on the way.
The first magnetic resonance products, including laptop chargers, will hit the market later this year.
The advantage of magnetic resonance is mainly convenience: The transmitter and receiver can couple at any orientation and at greater distances, so the device doesn't have to be quite so precisely positioned over the charging pad.
It's also incredibly efficient. The larger coils in EV chargers, operating at higher frequencies, attain end-to-end efficiency of 90 percent or even a little higher, roughly equivalent to the efficiency of a plugged connection.
If you can get plugged efficiency without the plug, and without needing to put the car in a precise position, there’s an obvious appeal. Also, this level of efficiency means that running the wireless system won’t strain the capacity of a normal household electrical system. It obviously doesn’t solve the problem for apartment dwellers (you can’t prop a transmitter in your window and beam power down to your car), but it might make for a standard which parking garages and even municipalities find more visually acceptable and less prone to vandalism.
Numerous manufacturers are looking to put this tech into new vehicles, and for those with old vehicles like my 2011 Volt, there are adapters.
There’s even the possibility of broader use.
Imagine, a few years hence, when the bulk of EVs are outfitted with standards-based, interoperable WEVC receivers. Charging pads could be embedded in parking garages, parking lots, street curbs, rest stops, even under select traffic lights.
By picking the right spots, you might get rid of both plug anxiety and range anxiety. Considering the difficulty manufacturers have had in coming up with battery tech that leapfrogs the current generation, maybe they should look at the other end of the system: Better charging technology.