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A half-hour north of Milan, Italy, a loop of paved road two-thirds of a mile long, about 1,050 meters, lets electric vehicles (EVs) run as long as their drivers want without stopping to charge batteries.
The test road was laid by Stellantis—the conglomerate that owns Chrysler, Fiat, Maserati, Opel, Peugeot, and other car brands—and dubbed the “Arena of the Future” to test a range of driving technologies, including the company’s Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer (DWTP) system.
Shallow channels are cut through the asphalt and a series of flat electrical coils are laid into the channels. The coils are connected to a source of electricity and the channels are paved over.
A car fitted with a receiver can draw a continuous supply of power from the roadway.
“Electric highways” aren’t new; they have been tested for years in dozens of places around the world.
What’s new here is that Stellantis’s DWTP system doesn’t charge the battery.
Instead, it sends current directly into the vehicle’s electric motor, leaving the battery power free for lights, heating and cooling, playing music, and other tasks.
The magnetic field poses no threat to the health of people in a vehicle and is mild enough that people can walk across it without feeling it.
The system uses DC power, so it can connect directly to renewable energy sources and use simpler cabling.
TRENDPOST: As is typical with breakthrough technologies, the restraint isn’t obstacles in the science or technology itself but in bringing the innovation to market.
The technology makes financial and engineering sense only when laid over a long stretch of busy highway with cars able to receive the roadway’s current. Round-the-clock power supplies would have to be sited and connected. A way to pay the costs would have to be agreed: should the highway be a toll road, with drivers billed automatically per mile? Should the electrified track be a public utility, paid for through taxes?
Such issues may seem insurmountable but when Henry Ford drove his test car down a street in Detroit in 1896, no one envisioned how quickly the vast new infrastructure to support automobiles would evolve.
The elements are there: renewable energy sources and grid-scale batteries, the growing urgency of shifting from fossil fuels, EV technology, and the urgency to move to energy independence as part of the move to Self-Sufficient Economies that we have flagged as a Top 2022 Trend.
Something like Stellantis’s DWTP could be the magnet that draws those elements into a coherent system.
Transmission coils embedded in Stellantis’s electric roadway.
Credit: Arena del Futuro
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