L.A.'s High-Watt Highway

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Battery-powered autos are clean, quiet and remarkably energy efficient -- but they have a huge problem. Once they get on the road, even the most advanced models can travel only 190 km (120 miles) or so before they run out of wattage, and then they need to be plugged into an outlet for about six hours to get fully recharged. Now the city of Los Angeles and a California power company have proposed a radical solution to the problem of powering electric cars: electrify the roads. Last week they announced a $2 million demonstration project in which electric cables will be run under 300 meters (1,000 ft.) of roadway in a west Los Angeles development called Playa Vista. Electricity from the cables would be used both to power electric cars and to recharge their batteries for travel on conventional roads.

"It's really very simple," says John Reeves, research manager at Southern California Edison, which is putting up half of the money (the rest is coming from the Los Angeles department of water and power). When electrical power passes through a wire, it creates a magnetic field. A metal plate moving through that field can, by a process known as induction, convert the magnetic force back into electricity. When such a metal plate is suspended from the bottom of a battery-run car, the vehicle can pick up power simply by moving down an electrified road. For maximum performance the plate needs to glide within 5 cm to 8 cm (2 in. to 3 in.) of the road's surface, which must therefore be unusually smooth.

Even if Los Angeles' limited experiment is successful, the technology will not necessarily be widely used. "This is real futuristic stuff," says Sean McAlinden, a researcher with the University of Michigan's Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation. "It's sort of a Star Wars fantasy." Even Southern California Edison officials concede it would take billions of dollars and decades of public works to electrify the streets of Los Angeles. There may never be electric roads in the snowbound Midwest or in Eastern cities subject to the freeze-and-thaw cycles that turn the best-made highways into roller coasters of bumps and potholes.

Still, the electric-roadway project is generating a lot of excitement in pollution-plagued Los Angeles. "I'm thrilled," says Jim Lents, executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which voted last spring to require that all cars in Southern California operate on electricity or other clean fuel by the year 2007. "This is what we were hoping to stimulate." Automakers have also been tinkering along these lines. Peugeot and Fiat have announced plans to sell electric vehicles in Europe within the next few years, and Ford is testing an electrified model of the Aerostar van. Not to be left behind, GM Chairman Roger Smith announced last week that his company will proceed with commercial production of its sleek battery-powered Impact, although experts say the sedan is not likely to reach dealer showrooms before 1995.

Electrifying even a few short stretches of roadway could increase the range and effectiveness of such voltswagens dramatically. Developers in Playa Vista hope to wire the subdivision's two-mile main artery and service the neighborhood with all-electric trucks and vans. Edison's Reeves dreams of extending the network until it crisscrosses the state. Electrifying one or two lanes of a freeway, he says, might be enough to keep fleets of buses and cars charged up. People wedded to gas-gulping cars could still drive on electrified highways, but they might get dirty looks from the new breed of battery-powered motorists.

With reporting by Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles and Joe Szczesny/Detroit