Honda R&D and Taisei Corporation announced that they have jointly developed a system to wirelessly charge electric vehicles (EVs) from the road while they are in motion. Transmission devices embedded in the road surface send power to EVs fitted with receiving devices as they drive over them, and the companies plan to begin field trials on expressways from fiscal year 2027 onward. The goal is to help overcome the short driving range and lack of charging infrastructure that have been holding back EV adoption, but on 5ch threads, commenters raised concerns one after another about low transmission efficiency, the cost of road construction, and the extra power generation that would be required. At the same time, there were plenty of joking comments comparing it to overhead-wire systems or trolleybuses, and poking fun at fears of electromagnetic radiation, with opinions split over just how realistic the technology actually is.
On the 5th, Honda announced it had jointly developed a system with Taisei Corporation to charge electric vehicles (EVs) while they’re driving. By wirelessly supplying power from transmission devices embedded in the road, the system aims to make long-distance driving viable. Field trials on expressways will begin from fiscal year 2027 onward.
Driving-range limitations and the buildout of charging equipment remain key obstacles to EV adoption. Wirelessly charging EVs as they drive is meant to reduce how often drivers need to stop at charging points, improving convenience.
Honda R&D, Honda’s research and development subsidiary, developed the receiving device fitted to the EV and the transmission device embedded in the road. Taisei Corporation developed the road design and power-supply system, while its subsidiary Taisei Rotec is handling the road construction method.
Source: jiji.com / Read the original article here
Yeah, they'd need like 20 more reactors running.
Same, that's what I thought too.
Better stock up on tin foil while I can.
Apparently PCs and smartphones are dangerous too, so they say.
Pretty nice idea, right?
So… a trolleybus, basically?
Seriously, exactly lol
How much is building all this infrastructure even going to cost?
The range meter drops in no time on hills.
Performance is also unstable since it's affected by temperature.
It's hopeless.
If there's an uphill, there's a downhill somewhere too lol
Alright, let's bury this stuff under roads all across the country!
Something feels off about this.
There's gotta be a smarter way to do it.
The flip side is excellent acceleration, but there are plenty of downsides too — fuel/energy efficiency, controllability on slippery roads, tire wear, and so on.
On uphills, this torque characteristic backfires: the motor has to haul the car's weight up the slope, so power consumption spikes all at once.
That's basically just the reason some Prius out there turns into a 'missile' (runaway acceleration incidents).
This is a country too broke to even repaint the crosswalk lines — no way they're pulling that off.
On recent phones, while charging, the charger powers both the battery charging and the device itself — the device isn't actually running off the battery during that time.
If you want to pull off something like 'you get charged just by driving through this bypass section,' that's basically the Cyclops system (another Gundam superweapon, but one that blasts a wide area).
So what you'd need is some kind of medium that can contain and carry a high-output discharge while charging on the move.
That means electricity bills go up, and they'll end up building nuclear plants like crazy.
Is Honda secretly an anti-Japan company or something?
Maybe ever since Honda got a new president, it turned into an Apple-poisoned-apple type of company?
There are actually devices out there that use only about 30 watts of power but can output 6,000 volts at 200 amps.
If that actually happens, it'd top even solid-state batteries — gas cars would be wiped out completely, and smartphones would barely degrade at all, so you could just buy one great high-performance phone outright for around 300,000 yen and use it for years — the cost-to-performance would be insane.
Humanity could probably live for free, completely, but the powers-that-be with their vested interests just enjoy creating a gap between rich and poor to feed their lust for control.
Like, a few dozen people own most of the world's wealth or something, right? lol
Same with pharmaceuticals — there's probably a sales strategy that deliberately works to increase the number of patients first.
No way that's happening — they're re-paving the asphalt year-round as it is.
Well, they could probably manage it by just using concrete at the spots with the charging equipment…
Same logic as why tunnel floors use concrete instead of asphalt.
So let's talk about it.
Honda named the EV it sells in China "Ye" (燁) — and that drew backlash, with people saying "Fire under a flower? You trying to burn China down?" (the character combines "brilliant/splendor" with "fire," which read as an inauspicious pun to Chinese buyers).
On top of that, the EV had pointlessly great cornering performance that nobody driving mountain roads actually needed, got crushed by Chinese EVs on driver-assist and IT features, and cost over 1 million yen more.
It bombed, spectacularly.
No sense of judgment in anything they do.
No wonder they're talking about charging cars while they're driving lol
Background and Key Points of This Topic
This technology is called “dynamic wireless power transfer” — a method that supplies power to EVs from the road while they’re actually driving, without stopping, unlike conventional charging-stand setups. The announcement only confirms that Honda and Taisei Corporation jointly developed the system and plan to begin field trials on expressways from fiscal year 2027 onward; it does not mean transmission devices have been decided for installation on roads nationwide. The thread’s disagreement centered mainly on estimates of transmission efficiency and cost — some pointed out that wireless power transfer tends to lose more energy due to distance and positioning gaps, and that securing enough electricity would require building more nuclear plants, while others compared it to overhead-wire systems and trolleybuses and said “there’s nothing new here.” Honda’s EV “Ye” has reportedly struggled in the Chinese market, and this history of distrust toward Honda’s EV strategy itself appears to be part of the backdrop to the reaction.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Honda to Charge EVs While Driving — Developed with Taisei Corporation, Field Trials Targeted for FY2027.”
