New Electric Cars with Wireless Charging

The hope of the future seems to lie with electric cars that don’t pollute the environment with fumes while exhausting the earth’s fuel supplies.

One such vehicle is the Citroen C1; it is a quiet little car that runs remarkably smoothly. It needs charged on a regular basis, not unlike most other battery powered vehicles. The thing that makes this one different is that it can be charged much more easily. Instead of lugging around a heavy cumbersome cable to charge the little car, the driver will not even need to step out of the vehicle.

The way it works is with a wireless electromagnetic induction that can take power from a pad which will be pre-built-in to the ground. So one pad is in the vehicle, and the other is in the ground. All the driver will need to do is switch off the vehicle and wait for it to charge itself.

There is talk of installing these charging pads in supermarket parking lots, into garage floors, and at fueling stations in a special area for charging vehicles. The driver just has to line the pads up by driving directly over the built-in ground pad, turn off the car and turn on the charging switch. It is that simple.

This electromagnetic induction was first discovered way back in 1831, by a physicist named Michael Faraday. He discovered it when he had two different coils and introduced power into just one of the coils. He was astounded to discover that the magnetic field this produced would then introduce power into the second coil as well.

With this new type of car charging, the pads are fitted with the coils which will then be able to pass power from one to the other.
In Italy today, about 31 busses are already using this wireless charging system with success. Some have complained that some electricity will undoubtedly be wasted during this new charging process, and although this is somewhat true, it makes up for it with its simple easy to use method, along with of course, its low emissions.

Some cities however do not feel ready to embrace this new technology as they feel that having lines of charging pads throughout the city and on the streets will cause problems, both safety issues and health issues.
Some of the concerns lie with the risk of having live electric charging pads all around, which could be hazardous, particularly during wet and rainy weather. But experts say that with these wireless pads, those risks have been eliminated, even in bad weather conditions.

Another benefit is that these wireless charging pads will discourage theft as they will not be easy to steal, unlike the cables with could previously be unplugged and stolen while the vehicle was charging.

At the moment there are no charging stations in the UK so having a vehicle of this type would not be easy for any Brit who would want to give it a try. But the makers of this new vehicle hope that the charging stations will soon be commonplace in most cities and even smaller villages. -auto-types.com