One thing I have often wondered is how often they'd need access to electricity if they had a small battery to cover for the times they're not connected.
i.e., do they need to be connected at /all/ points of their journey? Or just often enough that they can get enough of a charge to make it to the next point? e.g. if there was induction charging at stop signs or traffic lights, would that be enough for a majority of trips?
This seems like it should just be a bit of a game of statistical coverage of charging points, time spent at them, speed of charging, and so on.
So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires or third rails for every lane of every roadway?
I think that is a much more solvable problem than charging and batteries yes.
Do I think it will happen in my lifetime? No. But there's a reason that we don't have battery-powered trains, and it's not like in 2022, cars are that much more "off-road" than trains are "off-track"
https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=...
Do you think adding hundreds of KG of batteries to two billion cars is more reasonable?
We produce enough conductors to wire every street in America in a couple years. At the current rate of battery production, replacing all cars in the world will take over 100 years.
We think "Well gas cars transport their own energy source, so electric cars must too" and that will probably be one of the things future generations laugh at us for (in the same way older generations thought flapping wing costumes could generate heavier-than-air flight).
Hydrocarbons are an extreme outlier in terms of energy density (vs. weight) and the fact that we are trying to replicate that model with other non-outlier materials is crazy.
Cars travel on roads almost exclusively. In the US, 90%+ passenger miles are on roads that already have some amount of power infrastructure (lightposts) and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved.
The sad part of Elon being so successful is that all he does is see places where we used to do things well (we electrified the whole country very quickly, built an advanced space program in 2-3 decades, etc.), notices we lack the will to keep doing those things (even I understand the overhead wires thing is a moonshot), and comes up with the pragmatic "OK but not really great" solution.
Seriously, if you had said in 1960 "the richest man in 2020 will focus on cars, low-earth-orbit rockets, and tunnel boring machines" people would be extremely bummed by the lack of progress.