Alphabet seeks wireless charging for self-driving cars
06 Feb 2016
Alphabet is seeking a radically different approach to resolving the issue of battery charging in its autonomous cars.
An FCC filing has revealed that Alphabet plans to test wireless charging on its self-driving cars.
According to commentators, the technology is available on some commercial electric cars, but at the current state of the art, it remained difficult to set up and was nowhere as fast as traditional charging.
In the case of Alphabet's self-driving cars, two companies are to trying to change that, Hevo Power and Momentum Dynamics, which according to reports, had shipped some equipment to Alphabet. Currently the Hevo Power cequipment is only shown to charge at 1.5 kilowatts, a rather slow pace for any electric vehicle of any sort.
They add, some form of wireless charging could use manhole-style transmitters embedded in the pavement so that compatible vehicles would be able to be charged.
According to the documents with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the companies had been given the go ahead install experimental chargers at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, besides its Castle facility.
The end game would involve the self-driving cars remaining above a charging pad for a few minutes to gain charge and then making them pass through a series of transmitters along the way for constant charging.
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