The “E-20” highway stretch in Sweden will soon become the nation’s first functioning charging road to juice the batteries of heavy vehicles carrying freight around the nation.
E-20, (the E actually stands for Europe, rather than electric) runs between Hallsberg and Örebro in the middle of the country’s three major cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö.
Construction is slated to begin in 2025 along a whopping 21 kilometers of road (13 miles), but it hasn’t been decided which method of charging will be used. Previously-constructed charging roads in Europe have used methods that require outside equipment—overhead wires like a city tram line or undercarriage-mounted arms that attach to an electrified rail along the roadway.
The last option, and the only sensible one for cars as well as trucks, is to build wireless charging infrastructure down the center of the lanes that send out an electromagnetic signal to a coil on the underside of the vehicle small enough to be fitted to a sedan or a tractor-trailer.
In any case, in order to conduct long-haul trucking in the larger European countries, there has to be sensible charging infrastructure to prevent the trucks from becoming overloaded with the battery packs necessary to drive long distances.
“If you are going to have only static charging full battery solution for heavy-duty vehicles, you will get vehicles with a huge amount of batteries that the vehicles need to carry,” said Jan Pettersson, Director of Strategic Development at Trafikverket, the Swedish transport administration.
Persecution Live 