is this really the future of trucking??? my view on it is it's a waste of tax payers money. how long will it take to build the inferstructure and will the grid be able to handle it? they call this being green i'm sorry but poultion still comes from the power plant. ok and what about switching lanes i don't know if this is a fully built model or just a tester what are drivers gonna do when they have to switch lanes. a crock of bs.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx8zH7I1F2c

We tried street cars before, they don't work for what we want/need.

i agree repete. and whats the towing capacity on one of these things. i'm against eletric and hybrid cars myself i find em totaly useless and they don't pay for them selves unless you own it for 15 years. and you cant tow nothing with em cause of the small eletric motor. as i have a 2012 jetta tdi and the mpgs are killin me there insane!!

No no no, what you do is you put chicken wire over every highway. Once you've done that you then put a metal tipped pole on every vehicle so that it touches the chicken wire. Wait, sounds a lot like bumper cars, well it is in theory. If a wreck happens, you simply switch off the power for that direction of travel, once the wreck is cleaned up you then turn the juice back on and everybody goes again. Only emergency vehicles would not be required to use this system.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate on ONE part of this system: the electric motor. In every modern railway locomotive, the wheels are turned by electric motors. They have MUCH better starting torque than gasoline or diesel engines. I say, just hook the diesel engine to a generator and have it supply power to an electric motor to turn the driveshafts (similar to locomotives, except that they have motors for each axle and no differentials). To heck with the overhead catenaries. How are the oversized loads going to handle those wires?

I had to laugh at your post. Bumper cars eh now what if the system controlls everyones speed as well. Wonders how much one of them bumper cars will cost to. That must be the next stage after the scr engines. I agree with vipdarkangel about his idea about hooking a diesel enginge to a generator I'd'e have the engine idling even when the trucks going 75 mph. The engine would just make enough power to run the generator for it to make eletricity for the battery banks that power the drive shaft.

I agree with you on the eletric motor and having it hooked up to a generator. The way I see that setup is have the engine idling all the time even when the trucks going 75 mph like on a locomotive.use the engine to make enough eletricity to keep the batteries charged that power the drive shaft. If vw can build a car that can get around 180 mpg what's wrong with truck makers? Then again we will face another hurdle the more fuel efficent cars and trucks become the higher priced the fuel becomes dammed if you do dammed if you don't can't win fir trying

Well since you threw "commiefornia" in your title this is obviously a Red thread and therefore the mods will allow it.

Ground_pounder - think of electrical power as a common denominator. The underlying power can come from nucs, coal, windpower, solar, natural gas, oil - you name it. It's a beautiful concept and we already take advantage of it in the home. When's the last time you had to run to the gas station for fuel for your toaster? Nope, we don't play that game. Welcome to the future. We plug appliances into the wall and power generated miles and miles away powers them. And they all run off the same power source. (oops, excuse me, my fridge sounds like it's running low on coal, let me grab my shovel and fill the bin).

The simple concept of the common denominator frees future generations from having to worry about power sources. Just plug it in and it works.

The drawback on a truck that uses an engine/generator system to power electric motors to drive the axles is WEIGHT. The magnetic fields that make it all work require iron. And, generating those magnetic fields requires copper (or aluminum) wire... Lots of it. As technology advances, various parts of the system can be made more efficient, but you can still only pack so many flux lines into a cubic centimeter of iron. To move a forty ton load, it's going to take an amount of torque that can only be produced with a large amount of added weight. And, that's not even starting to talk about batteries.

Using the pantograph to supply power to the electric motors means eliminating the engine and generator. Doing so allows that amount of weight to be replaced with batteries and motors, rather than adding the weight of generator, motors, and batteries to the engine. Added weight means less load capacity, and shippers won't go for that.