Tony Seba’s study backed by Stanford University predicts about the fall of the fossil fuel (oil) and that petrol/diesel cars will vanish by 2030. The need to reduce pollution will led to the use of the more fuel efficient technology – electricity. Qualcomm Technologies, successfully tested to charge the battery for an Electric Vehicle while its moving at an high speed.
Electric Transportation is the future of commute and according to Seba’s study it is not far. In just eight years period world will see the transformation from fossil based fuel vehicles to electric vehicles (EV). Currently the cost of EV is high compare to the age old oil base vehicles. However, the study showed that EVs will become more and more affordable in future.
Electricity based vehicles is the future.
In his #1 selling book ‘Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation‘, have compared a car running on fossil fuel and most advance electric car in market, Tesla. A fossil fuel car uses Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) which is been used since 1910 and it is 17 to 20% energy efficient, the rest is lost in for of heat or smoke. Whereas, on the other hand the electric vehicle’s motor is 90 to 95%. On an average the fossil fuel car life is of 200,000 miles where as EV can live up to 1 million miles. From a maintenance perspective, EV is cheaper then fossil fuel car, because EV have ~18 moving parts and current car have ~2000+ moving parts.
We have seen Hyundai , Toyota, Chevy, building car hybrid cars. Which means they can run on electricity as well as fossil fuel. However, the vehicle need to be plugged in to charge the battery. The other type of EV cars are the one which get charge wirelessly. So, there is a transmitter and a receiver, same like the way any mobile phone can get charge wireless. Such adds are being build by Audi, Toyota, Renault. However, the car needs to be stop on the charging platform. Qualcomm Technologies tested to charge a Chevy car while its moving at a high speed.
Now, can you see how Seba’s study is related to Qualcomm’s test drive to charge EV while moving. Let talk more about Qualcomm test drive.
The technology developed by Qualcomm to charge the EV while it is moving is called Qualcomm Halo. Imagine an electric vehicle on an high speed highway can get its battery recharged at the same speed or a slow moving passenger bus refuels its battery as it move slowly to the destination or a taxi in rush hour can juice up the battery while moving on the busy streets of NYC. All theses hypnotical scenarios can actually be practically achieved with the Qualcomm Halo dynamic electric vehicle charging (DEVC).
Qualcomm is one of the leading companies in wireless charge industry. Halo DEVC technology needs two basic things to charge any moving vehicle – a road where the wirelesss electricity transmitter is build in it and a vehicle which wireless electricity receiver. Somewhere in Paris based test facility, a 100 meter road was setup using Halo DEVC technology to wirelessly transmit the electric power. And which the help of Vedecom and Renault, 2 vehicles were setup to receive the power. The test drive was successful in charging both the car’s providing a power of 20 kW to their battery simultaneously and moving at the speed of 100 km/h. This is a significant achievement which could benefit public transportation and industry in future.
Qualcomm will soon be able to provide license to other companies who wants to use this technology in their vehicles.