Disney maintenance crashed our car at Epcot

Why do I feel a 4/1 involvement in that article. Tesla was trying to sort out wireless power how long ago, and the physics around it just don't allow for large sum power transfers without a piece of wire involved.

That's right next to me. It wouldn't even make sense.

Inductive charging at any scale has serious limitations. It's fine to have your phone sit on it overnight, but bigger than that, why? For cars, it only matters if charging speed was static, and it's far from that.

This happened in Detroit last year.

As your friendly neighborhood EECS Professor: Wireless charging in the road infrastructure is a dumb idea for a half dozen different reasons. The Detroit thing is a cute vanity project, but slightly less useful than Shanghai's maglev train, which is only just long enough to get up to maximum speed before it has to start slowing down.

"Maglev trains are the future and will eventually replace all cars in major cities." - Every high school oral report I sat through/gave from 1989-1993.

In fairness, the Shanghai train is pretty cool. I think it was ~$15 based on the exchange rate at the time, which is stupidly expensive to get from the city to the airport in Shanghai terms, but you get an "I've ridden the fastest train in the world" experience.

Shades:

We got a plug in hybrid Chrysler Pacifica for our spring break road trip rental vehicle. I am curious to see how it does on mileage on our 10+ hour drive. I will say that it is eerily quiet when running on battery power.

32.0 mpg with just under 1700 miles driven. I thought that was pretty good. I am guessing that the battery helped the mileage but I don't have a way to quantify. I never did plug it in so it spent most of the trip sitting at <1% charge, but I did notice that when I accelerated after a stop sign/light it was on battery power. Overall it was a nice van.

I was reminded in another conversation that Michigan's Formula SAE team stopped building ICE cars in 2021, and went all-electric starting in the '22 season.

https://www.mracing.engin.umich.edu/

To bring this actually on-topic...

Isn't inductive charging part of the roadmap for the electrification of the USH World Famous Studio Tram Tour? I know they want to electrify that, and quite frankly it can't happen soon enough because if you are in the first or second car, that gigantic diesel engine in the lead car is ridiculously noisy and makes it really hard to hear the guide or the clips on the screens. If you are in the cars further back, you're far enough back that by the time you see the thing the guide is talking about, he's on to something else. It's a great use case for electrification. First, the terrain those trams have to navigate is located on the side of a mountain so there are lots of steep hills, which is an opportunity for both the instant high torque of electric motors AND for substantial dynamic braking. Second, from a vehicle control standpoint, there are opportunities here to put both batteries and motors on all of the cars, so this thing could be coordinated for 16-wheel drive, great for pulling those beasts up the hills. Third, the route is somewhat dynamic, but parts of it are fully fixed so that inductive charging could work, plus there are certain stopping points and special areas where guide rails are used to position the vehicle with precision where busbars could be used (Wampfler has a neat inductive power system using insulated conductors that can deliver very high amperage, for instance). Finally, Universal owns all of the elements of the system...the road network, the vehicles, the power supply, the drivers, etc...so it can all be completely integrated, perhaps the most important feature that pretty much all other inductive on-the-road charging projects lack.

Of course, this is all my opinion on what I might do. I haven't been back to that park in quite a while (since 2019 I think I have only done Disneyland and Knotts). For all I know they've already started implementing the electrification project.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Or you just plug it in while it's idle, which would be way cheaper. They don't need a lot of range.