An electric bus that charges its batteries while driving (rather than while sitting idle in a charging station) is no longer science fiction.

Researchers at Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently constructed a seven and a half mile stretch of asphalt roadway in the city of Gumi in South Korea with specialized electric cables designed to power batteries on a moving passenger bus.

The first of it’s kind technology doesn’t need the vehicles to stop at a point to charge.

The bus’s batteries are equipped with a novel technology called “Shaped Magnetic Field In Resonance” that sends electromagnetic fields created by the electric cables buried in the asphalt to the bus but not normal cars.

The technology recognizes vehicles capable of accepting the electric charge and those that cannot.

A coil in the battery can turn the electromagnetic fields into electricity at a distance of more than half a foot above the road.

If something like that would work here, it might help our transition from the internal combustion engine. At the very least, it would help cut oil imports a fair bit.

It would last maybe one or two winters here.

“Shaped Magnetic Field In Resonance” that sends electromagnetic fields created by the electric cables buried in the asphalt to the bus but not normal cars.


One has to wonder about the effects of spending too much time in a strong electromagnetic field on the human body. You could transmit "electric charging" with a microwave beam, as well but you had better not miss and accidentally cook a person!

Won't happen here 'till they figure how to bill everyone the $1.00 per kilowatt hour they'll charge for its use.

That doesn't make any sense - the fees they charge already include fuel, which is typically diesel. There is no need to charge more because you change the fuel type - in fact, with the over-production in much of Canada, electricity would probably reduce fuel costs for transit departments.

Despite that, I'm not naive enough to think prices would drop, just that they would stay flat for a while because there seems to be less volatility in electricity than there generally is in oil.

Telsa has battery tech that can charge a battery to 80% in 20 minutes. Electric vehicles are already well capable of city travel. It's beyond that where this tech could come in handy.

Your electric car doesn't have a hope in hell of making it from Edmonton to Winnipeg, but it would if these lines were buried in the TC.

It'd be a complete waste to put them in just for buses.

I think it just needs to be stronger so it can be buried more than half a foot down - say maybe two feet down.

It might not be feasible everywhere in Canada right now, but with a bit of R&D, it could be.

Although neat, I don't see it being all that useful outside of say...Toronto, and even then, it'd probably be cheaper to just find extremely efficient vehicles using diesel/natural gas/etc.

It would be a nice feature once electric vehicles become more commonplace, so the average commuter can go from Toronto to Montreal(as an example) while just using electricity, but saturn's right, they'll want a way to bill you for it.