A couple of problems with EV charging roads?

I'd expect that drag to be small. But if the car drops down a coil, to be closer to the roadway, air drag will increase.

It's a silly idea. The cost would be incredible. And we're eliminating power plants and working towards rotating blackouts already. Imagine adding a megawatt per mile of road.

Resonant coils can couple fairly well, even with an air gap. I think some electric busses charge that way.

Efficiency will be low. Some of the transmitted energy will heat the soil and rerod and car parts. And melt snow!

John Larkin seems to be just as ignorant as Crash Gordon.

Varying magnetic fields only transmit energy when they induce current in the soil, snow and reinforcing rods (which aren't a feature of most road construction). Car parts might be a problem, but a car isn't designed to be a Faraday cage, and probably won't present the sort of current loop which could pick up much energy from the charging field.

Electric buses recharge by parking on top of the coupling loop. We haven't had any stories about cars parking or waiting briefly on the same spots and getting hot - the charging hardware presumably has a bus sensor and turns off when there isn't a bus there to charge.

In-road chargers will presumably be just as smart.

It seems like a somewhat unnecessary technology, for the same reason we don't have in-transit refueling tankers for cars. There are already EVs with close to 400 mile ranges and 800 doesn't seem infeasible with near-future technology.

Lots of expense to try to re-invent what sounds like "the electric train." Trains hauled by electric locomotives are hard to beat for cost per mile.

Some African countries seem to be leap-frogging over 20th century infrastructure concepts entirely - work using videoconferencing when possible, use WiMax and satellite for internet instead of maintaining cable and fiber optic, do last-mile shipping via drone delivery, and generate power on-site with micro grids rather than run high tension lines.

I never understood the right-wing refrain that "everybody wants to come here" (the US) when it's pretty clear to me that what the majority of people around the world generally prefer to do is stay home where they were raised with the people and culture they're familiar with, if at all feasible. Infrastructure is expensive, commuting can be depressing, and most people don't like to travel very much in the first place unless they're on vacation.

One problem with EVs is finding an available (and working) charging slot and waiting for your car to charge. The (impractical) electrified roadway would fix that.

More KWHs means longer charging times. I can gas up my car in less time than it takes to squeegee the glass. And I never have to wait for an available pump.

Diesel-electrics?

Maybe that's why they are so healthy and have such low unemployment rates and such huge GDPs. Some African citizens even have electricity and running water.

Google says

Immigrants and their U.S.-born children number approximately 90.8 million people, or 27 percent of the total civilian noninstitutionalized U.S. population in 2023. This is an increase of approximately 14.7 million (or 20 percent) from 2010.

Some large fraction of my employees are foreign-born and seem to like it here. You don't seem to like it here.

Nobody is arguing that that they offer a better environment than the US does now. The argument is that they don't have to get to US - or even better - European standards of living by going through the same intermediate stages as we did.

The US does like hiring cheap workers from overseas. They haven't had to feed or house them while they were growing up, or educate them.

Australia exploits immigrants in just the same way, but does better at getting them paid them same wages as native-born citizens. Trade unions can be good at that.

The US is a better place to live than quite a lot of countries. It now doesn't compare well with Australian and the northern European countries

- it was more attractive when I was younger, but the median standard of living has stagnated for the last thirty or forty years. The average might have gone up, but so has inequality, so the median hasn't.

I've had the somewhat unusual experience of being both upper middle class and poor in the US at different points in my life, yeah the US is great if you're in the top 20% of incomes. There's almost always someone available in any decent-sized metro area who'll provide best-in-class goods and services, for a top-dollar price. As a New Englander that I usually have the money to afford it at this point in my life doesn't mean that I much enjoy paying it.

Being in the bottom 50% of incomes is less enticing; you tend to pay a pretty high price for mediocre service at best, and at worst you'll occasionally get treated pretty much like a degenerate just for trying to get something done (as many people who've flown low-cost US airlines or taken Amtrak or a bus can attest.)

Food is pretty expensive by world standards and there is little succor in sight for people who rent their housing, as rental costs ruthlessly increase. Neither political party seems deeply interested in this, they finally answer to landlords.