Indiana will test a highway that can charge moving vehicles

An experiment in Indiana, USA to wirelessly charge electric vehicles along a highway while those vehicles are in motion.

Cars and trucks must be equipped with special receivers for the wireless charging to work, meaning current models are incompatible. The coils are installed underground and use magnetic fields to deliver the electricity wirelessly.

I think this article is funny because the technical solution being described here is essentially an inefficient version of a catenary wire powering an electric train. Unlike a catenary wire, in which the train's pantograph makes contact with the wire aboveground, this experiment tries to wirelessly charge cars from underneath the pavement. It also has a speed limit of 65mph, above which it apparently doesn't work.

The article does not estimate how much charging could happen while driving a particular unit distance along a highway. My guess is not a whole lot, but I could be wrong.

Contactless charging is usually relatively inefficient. Copper is expensive. Building/rebuilding long stretches of highways is extremely expensive. Digging up highways to do maintenance on power delivery systems (as opposed to doing work above ground) sounds quite expensive too, not to mention how disruptive that would be to throughput compared to conventional aboveground work. And remember that highways are already inefficient and expensive in their current state. They aren't great ways to move a lot of people quickly or safely (space-inefficient, friction-inefficient, prone to crashes), and they cost more than you think to maintain. Making that whole process even more expensive to operate is probably not workable.

So this solution is not really a solution, just a way for a state Department of Transportation to waste a lot of money on highways instead of investing in technologies that are more efficient to begin with, like... fully electrified inter-city passenger rail, and even zero-emission freight rail. Or, I don't know, the bare minimum of building more rapid charging stations along interstates, including some such stations for long-haul delivery trucks.

Indiana could do a lot better. It chooses not to. My recommendation to residents of this state and every other state is to vote for political candidates who support funding for useful transportation projects (especially railroads) and who will subsequently appoint leaders to Departments of Transportation to carry out that mission without pretending it's 1955 where expensive car-centric infrastructure will always the solution to every problem.