Reply To: Wealth of Nations, and Economics of Abundance

[Lerner]

First of all, self-service is not such a great idea when you are pumping gasoline either, so let’s assume you have service people connecting your car.

But Rematog is right that the technical problems are non-trivial. You have to get the current to the car without losing hardly anything to resistance or everything melts. You have to worry about inductance slowing you down. You have to have very efficient transformers to step the voltage down because the capacitor is not going to be charging very high. The you have to worry about distributing a whole lot of current in the capacitor itself.

These are not easy problems, but not necessarily insoluble. And, hey, if it takes 15 minutes to charge your car instead of 5, will it really matter?

In addition, let’s not lose track of the fact that we have to get a lot of cars off the road anyway with mass transit. Right now, with existing technology the US could have as much mass transit as West Europe but does not for political reasons and the power of the oil/auto interests, both now and historically.

Personally, I’ve always liked the idea that, I think, RAND came up with in the ’70’s of running maglev trains in evacuated tunnels. Energy consumption is very low, since you get it back in electromagnetic breaking, but speeds are only limited by how fast acceleration is comfortable for the passengers. I once figured you could get NY to DC with a stop or two in 20 minutes and NY-LA in under an hour, non-stop. Big tunnels, but do-able.