@Justin Clements

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Wonder what the range is like on a cold wet night when you have the lights, heater and window wipers on?

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Just far enough to make sure you arrive home very cold, and soaked to the bone.

Er, no.

Battery-powered cars are a dead-end technology for Old World countries. Where do I plug my car in when I live in a basement flat in a converted 200-year-old Georgian house with neither off-street nor on-street parking? (I used to park my car in a nearby supermarket car park, but few residents in the area have even that option. Most UK housing was built by the Victorians and predates the rise of the automobile.)

The solution isn't hydrogen -- that's a stopgap measure at best. Why do we insist on driving individual power stations around our roads at all? It's ridiculously inefficient. Trains have been running on electricity for over a century now and they don't use batteries. (Well, not for the actual moving anyway.) They get it distributed to them through overhead wires or live rails. Trams and other forms of light rail use similar power supplies.

Granted, stringing wires along the roads isn't going to make them look any prettier -- though a glance at cities like San Francisco suggests nobody there would notice the difference -- but that's far from the only, or even the most practical, solution...

Bombardier have built an induction-based system for their trams which sits entirely beneath the surface. (http://www.railwaygazette.com/news_view/article/2009/01/9282/primove_catenary_free_induction_tram.html.) This exact same technology would work just as well on *any* road-using vehicle. We're not allowed to drive off-road in London, so we're almost driving on rails anyway. Neither are most urban car journeys done at great speed. 30mph is a typical speed limit in most Old World cities -- often, it's lower. (Induction-based power would, incidentally, eliminate the need for speed traps / bumps and the like: just reduce the power to the induction grid in the relevant roads!)

"But this would mean digging up all our roads!" I hear you moan.

What do you think all those lovely, tarmac-slathered roads, coloured lines, floodlit signposts, traffic lights, zebra crossings, underpasses, bypasses, flyovers, motorways / freeways, roundabouts and the like were built for? The horse and cart? Not only have we already built brand new infrastructure for the car, but this infrastructure undergoes frequent maintenance and renewal: rolling out induction systems while performing routine resurfacing is perfectly viable and wouldn't add noticeable disruption. Batteries would get you through areas where the induction hasn't been fitted, but they wouldn't need to be optimised for long-distances: they'd be recharged while you're sitting at traffic lights over an induction-fitted road.

Remove the need to cart power-plants around in your cars and you can also make smaller, lighter, more economical cars. Making cars *smaller* is how we'll solve the perennial congestion problems in Old World cities like London and Milan.

Removing the emissions also makes certain civil engineering problems like road tunnels far easier to resolve as the ventilation requirements are drastically reduced. (Suddenly, the notion of tunnelling a replacement south circular A205 *beneath* south London's rat's-maze of a road network makes more financial sense!)

And if you've read this far, you need to get out more.