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Wirelessly-charged electric buses start public route in South Korea
Wireless charging might seem perfectly suited for smartphones and tablets, but the city of Gumi, South Korea is putting the tech to use with something a little larger: buses. A pair of Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV) motorcoaches, which recharge by driving over specially-equipped asphalt, are now running a public transportation route in the city, and it's said to be the first network of its kind open for regular use. Rather than stopping periodically to jack in, coils on the coaches' underside pick up power through an electromagnetic field created by road-embedded wires. Currently, the vehicles have a roundtrip journey of 24km (roughly 15 miles) when completing their stops. Since the system operates so long as 5 to 15 percent of the path is electrified, there's no need to rely on a completely rigged-up highway. What's more, the solution is only triggered by passing OLEVs, which means that normal cars can share the same street. If this all sounds familiar, that's because the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has been hammering away at the technology for several years. Now that it's made it this far, the city has plans to add ten more buses to its fleet by 2015.
Korea starts testing 'recharging road,' might make it part of its public transport system
Time to set aside the chains of worry that have prevented us from jumping on the electric bandwagon -- Korean researchers have figured out a way to make us forget all about charging stations and cruising ranges with their magnetically recharging road. The Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV) you see here went into service yesterday and can now be found towing three bus-loads of tourists around a Seoul amusement park. It operates on a battery five times smaller than conventional EV juice packs and can collect its power through non-contact magnetic transmission from the recharging strips in the ground. We're also told running costs for this system are a third of what a typical EV would require, and should it prove successful and find itself expanded to the public transport system, only about 20 percent of bus routes would need to be electrified -- at bus stops, crossroads and the like -- with the rest being covered by the power stored inside the OLEV. Here's to hoping it all works out.
