Highways England has awarded Berkshire-based company TRL a £200,000 contract to evaluate the feasibility of dynamic wireless charging and expects to carry out a field trial on a section of motorway within the coming year.
Denis Naberezhnykh, head of ultra low emission vehicles (ULEV*s) at TRL, said the company would also help evaluate trials of the futuristic technology in France and Italy.
The British government’s goal is that “almost every car and van” should be an ULEV by 2050.
Highways England said Britain aimed to be at the global forefront of ULEV technology development to “allow for mass-adoption in the decades ahead”.
Highways England spelt out in a document last year what it thought “success would look like” for Britain.
Looking ahead to a future electric road transport Nirvana, it said dynamic wireless charging lanes would be installed in roads when they were replaced or resurfaced, along with wireless and fibre-optic connected sensors that would provide “instant real-time data on vehicle movements”.
Car owners would be confident their electric vehicles would not run of power on long journeys, greenhouse gas emissions would fall, and drivers would be automatically billed over the internet for the power their vehicles consumed, it said.
ULEV = Ultra Low Emission Vehicles – such as all electric cars