Here’s a bold prediction for the future of electric vehicles: We will never, ever have enough charging stations to allow us to convert all of our infernal- combustion-powered cars — 300 million and counting in North America — to battery power. Yes, I know Ford just announced its 12,000-strong FordPass Charging Network, which will help “customers confidentially switch to an all-electric lifestyle.” But the dirty secret about the EV segment is that no one — not electric vehicle manufacturer or charging infrastructure supplier — has any idea how we’ll service all those vehicles if we were really to convert 100 per cent of them to electric propulsion. Nobody.

Oh, there are grand plans to slowly build up a recharging infrastructure: A few quick-charge stations at the mall, a few more at roadside service stations that dot our super-highways. But no one — and I have asked virtually every EV automaker and infrastructure engineer I have ever met the same question — has any idea how we’re going to recharge our cars when we go 100 per cent electric. In fact, one wag — who works for one of the three largest EV charging station suppliers in the world — says the current infrastructure build-out works until EVs get to about 8 per cent penetration (not market share, but registrations). After that, all bets are off.

Just one of the problems is recharging between cities. For roadside charging ports to replenish lithium-ions as quickly as we otherwise can with gas or diesel, we’ll need two-megawatt chargers. Just as an example, an electric truck, according to Ron Borsboom of DAF Trucks, “occupies one charging point 80 times longer than a fuel recharging point.”

A little basic math says that at the current maximum of 500 amps — even then, the charging hose has to be liquid cooled — said “megacharger” would require 4,000 volts. Porsche is just now bragging about getting its batteriesto800 volts. Nobody is even dreaming, let alone engineering, 4,000-volt batteries or charging stations.

And then there are all the households with no access to charging points; existing condos and apartment buildings, not to mention the multitudes that still rely on curbside parking. Meeting all these challenges is simply not on anyone’s radar now,or even in the short time we have before the 2040 deadline — 2030, if you’re Elizabeth May — some countries have proposed to ban internal combustion.

What’s required, then, is an all-encompassing plan, a real plan. Not one based on Tesla fanboy fantasies of 1,000-kilometre range Roadsters and not using their car heaters during the winter. A plan that is realistic in how ineffective charging stations will be, and how truly expensive it is going to be to convert to all-electric motoring.

I suspect one of the key contributors to the effective transformation to zero emissions — one that is not gaining nearly enough attention — will be wireless inductive charging. In its most basic form, wireless charging makes home recharging vastly more convenient. A little seven- or 10-kilowatt pad in the garage, or a magnetic coil built into the driveway, means never forgetting to plug your car in overnight.

Wireless charging, albeit considerably more expensive, would also solve the issue of curbside parking. Norway’s capital, Oslo, is slated to become the first city to offer cabbies wireless charging at taxi stands, Finnish utilities giant Fortum and U.S. supplier Momentum Dynamics are combining to build 75-kW roadside “charging plates” powerful enough to allow taxis to drive all day with intermittent charging. Similar built-in “opportunity chargers”, albeit more powerful, already work so well that electric buses in Wenatchee, Washington,can be driven all day without interruption thanks to Momentum’s powerful 200-kW “resonant magnetic inductive” chargers.

The same technology, albeit less powerful, could be used to allow convenient charging to those limited to street parking — a huge problem in places like Montreal. Wireless charging will also be far more reliable, Wenatchee’s Link Transit reporting that Momentum’s opportunity chargers have been working completely trouble-free for 14 months. That’s important, since traditional chargers built into city sidewalks would almost certainly be subject to significant abuse.

Even more difficult is the fact that our roadways are so unreliable; thanks to our intemperate climate and ... shoddy construction, current methods would almost certainly result in an inductive lane needing perpetual repair

As difficult as solving those inner-city issues will be, however, finding a solution to intra-city recharging will prove even more difficult. But at least partial salvation will come from building wireless inductive charging right into our roadways.Of course, as one might expect, the problems with such a perpetual motion — or, more accurately, perpetual charging — highway are manifold, not the least of which is that they cost at least US$2 million per mile to build.

That said, not all of our roads need be converted to inductive charging.Inner city travel, for instance, would still be handled by home charging while the only intra-city highways that would need immediate upgrading would be the most essential of routes. For instance, in Ontario, if a Windsor-to-Montreal corridor could be constructed that kept electric vehicles at maximum charge — my calculations say 25-kW inductive chargers would suffice — an EV’s battery would more than suffice for the majority of side trips, i.e. jumping off the 401 at Kingston and battery powering to, say, Ottawa. Sweden, which already has two kilometres of electrified public highway outside Stockholm, has half a million kilometres of roadway, but Hans Säll, chief executive of the eRoadArlanda consortium, says that as little as 5,000 kilometres would have to be electrified to service long-distance travellers.

Based on such a scenario, it would cost about two billion bucks to connect Windsor and Montreal inductively. That’s big money, but the dollars saved by being able to equip most of Ontario’s 8.7 million cars with smaller batteries — say, 50 kWh instead of the now de-rigueur 100 kWh — would more than offset it. Besides, said “inductive” lane could be rolled out as a toll road. The monies being charged would not only minimize congestion — those with leisurely timetables could opt to use slowpoke roadside charging pods — but also serve as an EV “road tax,” something electric vehicle owners currently avoid since they’re not buying gasoline.

Naturally, there are huge hurdles to such a Utopian vision. Inductive charging requires a specific distance between transmitter (in the roadway) and receiver (in the car) for optimal charging. Wenatchee’s buses, for example, “kneel” down to achieve the right deck height. Even more difficult is the fact that our roadways are so unreliable; thanks to our intemperate climate, and even more problematically, shoddy construction, current construction methods would almost certainly result in an inductive lane needing perpetual repair.

All of these caveats, however, pale when compared to trying to build an EV infrastructure based solely on above-ground chargers. The sooner we start thinking beyond the conventional, the sooner we can achieve our EV goals.