It seems like a valuable proposition if we threw out the existing paradigms of road transport.
If we throw out concepts such as ownership of vehicles and fuel and treat all road vehicles as one system of controlled individual elements, you could envision is a more efficient solution. Traffic jams would be lessened, trip times would be shortened, total fuel usage would go down, etc. On road-fueling would be one element in a world like this: road based freight delivery could run without stopping by using vehicles expected to have short journies to refuel the trucks along the way.
This is all to define a hypothetical new paradigm in road transport and to quantify its potential consequences (good and bad). I had not thought about on-road refueling before and I think there is good value in pointing it out. We're not at the point where we're seriously charting a course to world like this, but we need to know what the world looks like before we can start to do that.
Many things are valuable if we throw out the constraints of dealing with existing reality. Even then I'm not sure it is valuable; roads suffer from lack of maintenance already. If anything we should be looking at how to make roads less expensive. Having autonomous vehicles disperse their weight to reduce prevalence of potholes, for example.
Right, and that is one thing to weight for when choosing the behavior of the system. While the article in question doesn't explicitly say this, I think these seemingly impractical solutions add to the theoretical toolkit that we can use to shape a road utopia, if society ever agrees on what that would look like. If society does ever agree on a road utopia and then consider it worthwhile to pursue, it will be valuable to have these ideas laid out. Perhaps they are useless today, but they motivate this idea. If they weren't proposed then the possibility of a future road utopia is entirely impossible.
Because charging takes much longer than filling up with gas. If someone is willing to pay a premium for charging while driving to reduce total trip time, that's a business opportunity.
This is often said, but I am not so sure. Fast-charging takes somewhat longer than filling with gasoline/petrol, but I usually also want a bathroom and coffee break. I can easily do that while my car is charging. That is not really true while dispensing gasoline. It is not so obvious to me that I am losing out time-wise.
This is not idle speculation. I own an electric car. Furthermore, the vast majority of my charging occurs at home, over night. The total amount time I have saved by not having to visit gas stations for literally months is significant.
Back when I did more road trips with friends I measured how long stops take. Stops take a lot longer than people think. People think a gas and pee stop is 5-10 minutes tops. Really 15 minutes to half an hour. Fast food place, half an hour. Sit down meals take more than an hour.
Yeah certainly by myself, I could do a gas stop in 5 minutes. With other people never works out like that.
> Fast-charging takes somewhat longer than filling with gasoline/petrol, but I usually also want a bathroom and coffee break.
It's more than "somewhat". I can put over 400 highway miles of range into my vehicle in five minutes with a gas pump. It takes 30 minutes to put half that into an EV. I don't want to stop for half an hour every 200 miles.
> This is not idle speculation. I own an electric car. Furthermore, the vast majority of my charging occurs at home, over night. The total amount time I have saved by not having to visit gas stations for literally months is significant.
It sounds like you don't have many days where your driving exceeds the range capacity of your vehicle. The technology in the article, and the post you are responding to, are in the context of long-distance highway travel. It's for cases where a vehicle must be recharged in the middle of a trip, even when it starts with a full battery.
I don't want to stop for half an hour every 200 miles.
You might be able to do a gas stop in 5 minutes. I'm willing to bet that you can't do a gas stop and pee in that time. Two hundred miles is probably 3 hours of driving, so I am also willing to bet you want at least a coffee. Add five minutes (or more if you have to move your car). If you add in a snack, your total time will probably be around half an hour. A meal, make it an hour.
When I drive long distance, particularly by myself, I typically get on the highway with a full tank and pull off when my low fuel light comes on. Depending on traffic conditions, this is typically between five and six hours. At the end of that I don't mind stopping for half an hour or more, but that requires far more than 200 miles of range.
When I do stop in the middle for coffee and a leak, it's rarely more than 15 minutes total off the highway (unless the service is slow).
While cool to imagine, it seems unnecessarily complicated and unsafe to do this in motion on the road.
[Edit: The prof and his team are quite serious about it, so I assume there must be a reason and I'm actually curious what it might be.]