I would like to add my voice to the chorus of support for you doing what you do under very limited resources. We are GRATEFUL for what you do and how you promote the all important move to electrification of transportation. Many of us see you as a champion and general motoring good guy. GM would do well to send you a care package or two and offer to pick up a copy editor’s salary. But maybe some other kind heart would do this.

Do not stop your good work! It is a great site doing important work – THANK YOU and thanks to GM – like a rock.

I am a Senior Satellite Engineer and I have a EE degree. But when I design something for our company I dont try to re-invent everything because it adds too much time and typically you end up with something that is the same as when you started.

GM needs to go back and REUSE the EV1 plans and design its all done for them. The engineers need common sence. Just use the parts from the EV1 they work, they have been tested.

KISS is what you need to do.

GO EV1 stop trying to re-invent the wheel engineers!!

The separation should be less than roughly 1/4″ or efficiency will begin to suffer. I visualize the same “drive-on charger” mechanism actuated by the weight of the car’s front tires would first slide a cover plate back before elevating the driveway charging hump to the level of the car’s “charging plate”. Snow would have to be pretty deep and encrusted or icy to cause a problem –in that case the driver would just plug the car in manually at a fender socket (or get out the snow shovel to scrape the ice/snow off his driveway charger).

I understand where this magnetic/coulping/recharging is going, BUT how far away can the respective coils be before contact is lost? Understand? Let me see if I can word it better…

Coil A is imbedded in the car, and Coil B is imbedded in the ground, or “hump”. How far can the coils be before continuity is lost? I thought is was an inch or so… But I really don’t know about this wonderful device. It would be cool IF it could handle a foot or so, that way, if you had snow or mud covering up the one coil, it wouldn’t matter.

I find this funny though, the damned car isn’t out yet, years away, and we’re already getting lazy!!

I can picture in the future though, drive on a pad like what were speaking of, but to do a 10 minute recharge.. Well, 3 phase 480v@~200 amps? That pad would be huge!!! It’s almost downright scary! Good God, that’s a lot of power……….. We’ll see.

Andy, how many screw-ups did I do? Keeping track? Ask me if I care..

>Regarding the “drive-on charger” idea you asked, “Are the inductive components expensive? I was wondering about a normal Plug on the underside with three low power RF transmiters & one reciever around it, LED in dash. In the ground you have a movable plug and one transmitter & reciever…..”

No, the inductive components are not expensive — they’re essentially the two halves of a low-power 50-60Hz transformer, the secondary of which is about the size of the bottom face of an oil pan & centered between the Volt’s front wheels facing downward. The “drive-on charger” itself would contain the transformer primary.

It might be possible to devise a plug & socket, both underneath the car, that automatically “home” in on one another, but I can’t imagine how RF xmtrs/rcvrs could be positionally accurate enough to do this. Maybe a large cone with protected contacts deep inside it, plus a mating conical device designed to steer itself into the cone and fully seat the pairs of electrical contacts to each other could be made to work? But the “drive-on charger” scheme with inductive coupling (as I described it in 64 & 69 above) is clearly the more foolproof, simple, elegant & SAFE approach as I see it.

Thanks for the heads up on Lyle. ….If they are investing 1 BILLION If they do, I would think they could assign an assistant to help Lyle with the final copy.”

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Andy Andy andy,

We can all Nit Pik can’t we? Hate to do this but your sentence that begins in # 51 “if they are investing…” is not only disjunct, it’s poorly constructed at best, and to have any chance it’s missing necessary punctuation to be even remotely colloquial.

God forbid that any of us miss anything grammatically in any effort to contribute to this site. I’d hate to think we’re going to lose focus and waste time over something as ridiculous as this.