They must have defeated the mechanism that stops the car driving with the charge port door open. Personally I'd prefer a robot arm that opens the door and plugs in a conductive charger. I could see that working. And no loss of efficiency.
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They must have defeated the mechanism that stops the car driving with the charge port door open. Personally I'd prefer a robot arm that opens the door and plugs in a conductive charger. I could see that working. And no loss of efficiency.
I don't get it. What's the point of routing the cable like that?
Anti-theft, I assume.
Fulton Innovation blows our minds with eCoupled wireless Tesla, inductive cereal boxes - Engadget
... The model on display here is an obvious retrofit, a coil stuck between the front wheels that runs to an AC/DC converter and then, quite inelegantly, to a cable running out a vent and into the input on the car itself. This is an obvious retrofit but it was done with purpose: to show that without modifying the internal systems of the car wireless charging can be done -- and reasonably efficiently, too.
This form of charging is 80 percent efficient, but the company estimates that with a more integrated system (mainly deleting the converter) they could get to 89 percent efficiency. The wired charger? It clocks in at 96 percent efficiency, meaning for any given voltage the charging time would only be about 7 seven percent slower going wireless -- a potentially small price to pay for the ability to turn an entire parking lot into a charging station without having to worry about wires or vandalism or semi-inadvertent electrocution of curious people who decide to see what happens when terminals get licked....
Last edited by doug; 01-09-2011 at 01:20 PM.
Cool - but no one with a pacemaker could go in there![]()
I know you're joking, but there's little chance of the field affecting pacemakers. These systems would use quite low frequencies. In fact, they'd probably run below 9kHz to avoid having to be FCC certified as an intentional radiator.
At least this explains the weird plug installation...
They should've got Tomsax to do the plug mod. Much neater.
The 140 mile misquote of Tesla's 240 range removes a bit of credibility.
The idea of these being good for high crime areas is good but this would be equally cool in front of a high end restaurant or hotel parking spots as well.
The world loves to be deceived.
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