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Electric Tri-State? Illinois Tollway looks at embedding charging equipment in I-294
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It's good that they are looking at this but it's premature. You can't start building this into highways until there is a single world wide standard and that's a long way off. I've been on standards bodies, I was on two JEDEC committees in the late 70s, and even very simple things can derail a standard because no company wants to give another company an advantage. In the case of a standard like this it's going to be very hard. First the research hasn't been completed yet, but even if it was you have the problem of different patent holders wanting to maximize their return. Then you have the really important problem of getting it right for the long term. Once you build out infrastructure you can't change a standard, ever. Your LED light bulb screws into an Edison socket that was introduced in the 19th century, it can't be changed because every lamp in your house uses that socket.
Bottom line is that there won't be a highway charging standard for 10 or 15 years and by then it won't matter. If you assume that there will be no breakthroughs in batteries just the gradual improvement of 2X per decade that we've seen over the last 20 years then cars still get to the point where they won't need much on trip charging. If you assume that the base range of EVs 10 years from now is 400 miles than you might never charge them away from home. The only on trip charging you will need will be on superhighways and in 10 years you can assume that every highway will have more than enough coverage. Tesla is almost there already, in 10 years CCS will surely have excellent coverage on every highway.
Bottom line is that there won't be a highway charging standard for 10 or 15 years and by then it won't matter. If you assume that there will be no breakthroughs in batteries just the gradual improvement of 2X per decade that we've seen over the last 20 years then cars still get to the point where they won't need much on trip charging. If you assume that the base range of EVs 10 years from now is 400 miles than you might never charge them away from home. The only on trip charging you will need will be on superhighways and in 10 years you can assume that every highway will have more than enough coverage. Tesla is almost there already, in 10 years CCS will surely have excellent coverage on every highway.
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No, the tollway is a quasi private/government agency. Everyone pays a toll, fuel type does not matter. However, EV's are consider "Vehicle: Other" (not a regular car IOW) for this system —not that they tell you that anywhere.
I started getting huge penalty bills because even though our Bolt has a toll transponder, since we did not check that Other box, they essentially treated it as having no transponder. They did back off after a phone call.
I don’t get it. Your vehicle has a transponder registered to it and is V-toll I.D.’d by the license plate. That makes no sense to have to check an OTHER box. How is that any different than the Volt. Mine has a transponder I don’t recall any special boxes to check when I registered it. I just checked my tollway registration. Under vehicle class it says [ auto / motorcycle (2 axles) ]
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And much, much cheaper.
Actually, this is not how the cars are considered. The "Other" designation comes from how they sort the Secretary of State license plate types. The IL Secretary of State has hundreds of types (some of them are special vanity types, etc.) and there are too many to put in pull down boxes on the web sites!
EV plates are not considered regular "Passenger Car" plates by the Secretary of State. They are their own thing. When there are enough EV plates so that they outweigh Motorcycles, Disability, Military plates, etc. then we'll get our own "Other - Electric Vehicle" plate type in the systems:
https://www.illinoistollway.com/license-plate-number-tooltip
^ You may notice that EV's may be moving up in numbers within the "Other - None of the above" category as the Electric Vehicle plate is now the example image for the group.
You may notice that the article mentions that the technology is currently is a study phase with Universities. This project would be a practical test bed as a next phase project; just for a short section of the road.
Tollways should be early adopters for this technology when it comes along because they have an easy mechanism to charge customers for the electricity. (It would be impossible to recover the massive power costs fairly on a public road.)
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The Volt has a gas engine and is not considered as an EV like the Bolt. wssix99 nailed it, the EV license plate makes the Bolt different. So apparently there was a record mismatch in the tollway system. My transponder's "car" designation did not match the EV vehicle license type of "other".
They did reverse the penalties (about $70!) after the call straightened out what was going on.
That you have car, truck, motorcycle, other as vehicle types and then the Bolt is thrown into "other" because of it's motive energy source is a bit weird. It's not a car because it lacks the Volt's ICE seems like a bit of non-logic to me, but whatever, is what it is.
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I agree. This is a good point.
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And cheaper.
Well, they're "Add at Belvidere Oasis" away from having exactly that, at least as far as the Tollway itself is concerned. Lake Forest, O'Hare, and Lincoln are already so-equipped.
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The more I think about it the sillier I think the idea of putting wireless charging into roads is. The time to have done it was a hundred years ago before there were any roads. The infrastructure was already in place, there were electric trolley lines that connected every town that were going out of business because of the Model T, if those lines had been converted to electric roads before all of the electric car companies had gone out of business we would have third rails or catenaries over our interstates today and we would have all been driving EVs for the last century. But it's too late now, the cost of electrifying the interstates with wireless charging would probably cost a trillion dollars which we don't have, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of decrepit bridges that need fixing first. Installing fast chargers at rest stops is many orders of magnitude cheaper and it doesn't require any new inventions, the technology is here and it's already being deployed. Batteries are already good enough, although not cheap enough, to cover 98% of most peoples driving without fast chargers, and putting fast chargers at existing rest stops covers the rest. Since this is the Illinois toll road we are talking about, Chicago to Milwaukee is about a hundred miles, you could do that round trip without recharging in a Model 3 easily, you could even do it in a Bolt if you were careful, and certainly if you had just a little bit of destination charging. Putting a couple of fast chargers on the highway would completely solve that problem.
Your’s was due the EV license plate. A state of Illinois thing.
I’m in WI. We don’t have an EV license plate for General class Automobiles. There is a Low Speed Electric Vehicle plate. But those are only issued to NEV’s neighborhood electric vehicles Aka Road-able golf carts.
A Bolt in this state just gets a regular AUTO plate, but has a $100 EV FEE To make up for lost GAS tax collections added too the Standard plate fee of $75.
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But just imagine how much construction companies can charge to build and install the equipment for this test study, all coming from those wonderful barely accountable tax payer dollars...
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Especially in Illinois. When I was in college in the 1970s there was an expression in Wisconsin, Illinois is 6 inches lower than Wisconsin. This was apropos of one of Illinois's many many scandals where Illinois had paid for concrete that was never delivered.But just imagine how much construction companies can charge to build and install the equipment for this test study, all coming from those wonderful barely accountable tax payer dollars...
Two convicts are standing in the chow line, one says to the other, the food was better when you were governor.
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I stopped at the I-88 oasis by DeKalb on my Iowa trip to see if any were there yet, nope.
Now, what's Wisconsin doing along I-94?
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