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Nissan wants your electric car to charge while you drive

Posted by Hootan Mahallati | July 27, 2009 | In green nissan

Next week is an important one for Nissan: the Japanese giant is opening its new corporate headquarters in Yokohama, Japan and will mark the occasion by unveiling an all-new electric car. The five-door hatchback will enter a production run of 50,000 unites in 2010 and by 2012, will be built in the US to the tune of some 150,000 units. Nissan will start selling the cars in the US next year.

Alas, electric cars still have a long way to go before they become as easy to use every day as internal combustion engine vehicles. The main issue, of course, is that of charging the cars in a matter of minutes, just as you would fill up your car at the gas station. To that end, Nissan is working on a bold, flawed but brilliant technology to get around the issue by borrowing a technology from electric toothbrushes: inductive charging.

Inductive charging is the touch-less technology used to charge your average electric toothbrush, an upcoming version of the Palm Pre and artificial hearts. Nissan's plans call for inserting charging plates into roadways that would charge your car as you drive down the road.

In my opinion, this is an elegant but monumentally expensive strategy. The issues involved range from health hazards caused by constant exposure to electromagnetic fields, to the cost of the tearing up roads and providing power to a network of charging plates. These issues are not insurmountable but will likely require anti-radiation plates built into the cars (plates NOT built out of heavy lead) as well as local and national government involvement in construction of the grids. Nevertheless, innovation in the category continues and it will be interesting to see how far Nissan can develop inductive charging technology for cars.

[Source: Treehugger]

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