For the last few years, one of the coolest bits of e-bike tech I’ve seen didn’t involve more power, bigger…
coolest, or most inefficient ? EU should legislate a universal socket and then a wall with retractable cables ffs.
Is the “surprise hurdle” that it’s a dumb idea?
Ok, but why wireless charging? The reason that wireless charging works for mobile phones but not automobiles is precisely one of efficiency: delivering only 60% of input power to a phone is fine because that’s only a few Watt-hours of loss, but is definitely not fine when it takes 100 kWh to charge a 60 kWh electric car battery. The wastage is catastrophically not worth the convenience if not plugging the car in.
Why then would we want wireless charging for electric cargo bikes, as pictured? Even for normal electric bikes, a bike shelter with USB C cords dangling down from retracting reels would be far superior, and provides weather protection and locking options.
I view it as a convenience to efficiency kinda ratio. with a phone or tablet or even laptop that you might pick up and put down pretty often its nice to not have to fumble for the cord. Bike or car its not so often.
Less about fully charging and more about a convenient extra little bit of battery time when you are running errands?
But it’s inefficient. In the 1 hour you are shopping, it’s going to charge far less than a physical connection and in terms of environment impact, you are wasting energy compared to taking 30 seconds to plug in a bike. Then there’s the issue that no bikes support this but several use compatible charging interfaces. I don’t expect this to go anywhere any time soon.
Plugs, connectors, and cables often break, corrode, get vandalized, etc. The physical connections on most of the electronic devices I’ve owned have been the first thing to fail. The wireless connections and wireless charging has NEVER been something that I’ve ever had to worry about physically breaking. I’d wage that infrastructure maintenance is going to cost much more in the long run than the cost of inefficiency introduced by wireless charging.
There’s some truth to that. I’ve had some USB ports fail on phones that were quite a pain to fix or not really fixable at all.
Wireless charging of a phone avoids degrading the USB port through more use. The difference with a phone is that the absolute amount of inefficiency is so much smaller because a phone battery is so much smaller than a bike.
If time is of the essence, then wireless charging is even worse in comparison to wire conductors. Almost by definition, any stationary wireless charger laid into the ground is supplied by wires, so might as well have conductors all the way that are position-independent and free to use. A dangling USB C cable of any power capacity is going to be a more common standard for more people, while also being compatible with phones and other accessories.
I’d still support wireless over a “dangling USB C cable”. Would take no time for someone to just walk by and vandalize the cable like they do with electric car chargers.
