Purdue University and the Indiana Department of Transportation are coming together for quite the partnership. The two groups will band together to create the first EV charging highway, and construction on a test segment will start this month.
According to the news post shared on Purdue University’s website, the highway testbed will be built on U.S. Highway 231/U.S. Highway 52 in West Lafayette. The team will test how well a patent-pending system can provide power to heavy-duty electric trucks traveling at highway speeds.
The goal here is to create a baseline for EV-charging highways that can be used to upgrade other highways around the country. This would then allow electric vehicles ranging in size from Teslas to full-blown semi-trucks to recharge as they drive, cutting down the need for recharging stops and concerns over a lack of EV infrastructure throughout the country.
Image source: Tesla
Construction on the test bed begins on April 1, but the actual testing of the components won’t come until next year, most likely. A few other states have also started testing roads that can wirelessly charge EVs, but this will be the first EV-charging highway. The engineers at Purdue say it’s a unique challenge, especially since it needs to be able to charge heavy-duty trucks, too.
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The engineers are focusing on heavy-duty trucks because of the possible improvements they could bring to the greenhouse gas emissions created by heavy-duty trucks. With EV charging highways throughout the nation, we could rely on smaller batteries in heavy-duty trucks, making them more affordable to build and thus making them more affordable for companies that want to adopt them.
While it’ll still be a while before we see just how well something like this works, it is a great thing to see coming together. Hopefully, the engineers at Purdue have come up with a solid game plan, and construction will go off without much of a hitch.