Michel Jullian wrote:
There might be a way for purely electric vehicles to deal with long trips, without the need for a network of charging stations, nor even a network of gas stations: an Internet based peer to peer (EV to EV) kWh trading scheme, where home- or office- charged cars with energy to spare would automatically advertise their location and kWh for sale on the Internet . . . Some kind of standard interconnection cable would have to be devised, allowing cars to talk to each other during the charge transfer, notably to make sure that they agree on the amount of energy that has been transferred.
I believe it would still take a long time to transfer the energy. That is, to charge and discharge the batteries. Conventional batteries are slow, no matter how much electricity you have available.
Supercapacitors are fast. If you have them, you don't need another car with a full-up battery. You can use an electric power connection, although as Mike Carrell pointed out years ago, a charging station for several cars, equivalent to a large gas station, would require a lot of electricity with a good-sized substation. Perhaps as much as a shopping mall. Look in the back of one sometime to see the power supplies.
A charging station itself would need a bank of supercapacitors to smooth out consumption.
- Jed
