Discussion»Statements»Rosie's Corner» When will chargers be incorporated INSIDE THE CAR so you can travel coast to coast without stopping at charging stations?
Assuming a battery-only car, you would still need to stop and plug the charger in to the mains somewhere every few hundred miles, so would not gain anything. If the charger was limited by size, weight and mains availability to the sort installed in homes, you'd then also lose a huge amount of time on the journey to the re-charging stops. The motels would find a new lease of life!
The chargers made for public use are far faster because they ram enormous currents into the battery; but they are big units needing industrial mains supplies.
I suppose a hybrid car is something like the system you ask of, but it still won't get you across the width of America without refuelling and/or re-charging at intervals.
Judging by my atlas showing the relief, you'd be lucky to get a battery-only car far inland California from the coastal plain, over those mountains, on one charge.
No matter how advanced the Engineering, you can't defeat the Physics on which Engineering depends!
Is the PHYSICS of today the same as it was one hundred years ago? Aren't physicists ALWAYS researching investigating adjusting learning enhancing advancing rethinking exploring discovering? What we believe is impossible today may simply be that we are on the low end of the LEARNING CURVE. I think anything is possible Durdle. What I don't know is how much we don't know that is out there just waiting for us to discover. When you are 3 your ability to to do to learn to think is not the same as it is when you are 23. There is a saying which may or may not be applicable here. "When the student is ready the teacher arrives." Anyway there it is. What I think. Thank you for your reply m'dear! :)
I do like your optimism a bout discovery. What scientists learn is not itself new. It is our knowledge of it that is new - indeed only today a team working with the Large Hadron Collider announced they may have made a very surprising discovery about certain of the sub-atomic particles and forces they study.
The physics has always been thus. All that changes is our understanding of it, and how we use it.
It takes a finite quantity of energy to accelerate any given car and its occupants from rest at a given rate to a steady speed, and to maintain that speed, over any given road. It does not matter how the car is powered, and the Laws of Nature were the same for Henry Ford as they are for Elon Musk.
At the scientific level, the difference between the cars built in the 1920s and those built in the 2020s is that the modern ones are far more efficient. By that I mean they convert a greater proportion of the potential energy in the petrol or battery, into actually moving the vehicle along the road. If a typical small, petrol-engine saloon car of the 1960s returned 30-35mpg, its modern edition gives at least 45mpg on the same journey.
In fact the 1920s-mobile was not only much less efficient, but also a lot less powerful, than one of similar size now. So it would have used less energy overall, as well as less efficiently, but reflected that in much lower speed. (Power is the rate at which energy is converted or transferred.)
The Physics has not changed, but the Engineering has found ways to improve how we use the Physics.
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They did by the way, have many and various battery-powered vehicles in the 1900s, but the batteries of the time were bulky and heavy for their electrical capacity, with limited range, and were soon superseded by petrol, and later diesel.
Durdle 