Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

throw money to these fine folks, I'm sure they will come up with something

Not really. All you need from the street is a magnetic field.

The hard thing might be making sure the magnetic field all orients the same way... I don't know how they'll do that. Possibly by magnetizing the road after construction...

One potential (I'm trying to remember long dormant physics here) is that the car driving along the road is trying to produce a magnetic field counter to that of the road... In which case over time it could demagnetize the road, and there might have to be regular maintenance to remagnetize the road...

In a weird way, some of this is not that far from my field (hard drives), except that you're trying to magnetize the road and not store data on it lol...

Actually that brings up an idea... If they alternate the orientation of the field every 100 feet or so, might it somehow help the issue I brought up upthread? Because you don't have to keep the orientation of that field constant...

Yeah that's where I was going with the idea of an alternating emag field from the road.  But if you used alternatingly polarized sections of the road made of static magnets, that could work.  I feel like it would have to be synchronized with the speed of the on-board coils as they move through the road's magnetic field. So you might only be able to induce a charge at an optimum speed, where the induction in the coils is matched to the lengths of polarized sections of the road.

To address @Cincydawg 's point, you can think of it as a generator, but with the rotor and stator reversed. The magnets are the stator, and they're unwound and laid flat, as part of the road.  The rotor would consist of the induction coils, but they don't need to be round and they don't need to rotate, they only need to pass through the magnetic field created by the static magnets embedded in the road. They do this via motion of the car itself.

I don't see how a magnetic field alone could work.  You'd have resistance to movement which would generate some current, yes, but offset by said resistance.

You need to have power from some agency.

I suppose it could work going downhill, but you have regen braking for that.

Well the power, which creates the movement in the first place, is created by the car's motors. And the other power is created when you magnetize the road. Obviously that doesn't just occur naturally. 

I'm not 100% sure whether the car moving through a magnetic field will actually create an actual force resisting the car's movement. That goes back to HS physics, and I'm old lol.

BTW there's another option, although I don't know how well it will work... 94 refers to essentially the magnets being laid flat. That's how hard drives worked before ~2005. Each bit was basically a bar magnet with its north and south pole laid flat across the surface. Ever since, it's been done perpendicular to the surface of the disk and thus the north and south pole are vertical--so there's only one exposed at a time to a reader.

What if the receiving coil is placed vertically instead of horizontally, and the road is magnetized in the same manner, perpendicular to the road surface. The way current is generated in the coil is not by the presence of a field, it's caused by a change in the magnetic field. So we were talking earlier about the change in magnetic field being caused perhaps by the cars moving through it horizontally.

In this case, if you could alternate the vertical magnetization of the road surface you could actually cause an alternating magnetic field in the receiving coil, generating power. Say it's calibrated for 70mph optimal speed and you reverse the magnetization every 5 feet. So every 5 feet, you alternate between driving over a north pole magnet and a south pole magnet. The counter force generated by the changing current would be vertical, up or down, instead of horizontal, opposing the direction of travel. Essentially you'd be creating slight changes in upward or downward force on the vehicle, but that wouldn't really meaningfully impede the car's motion in any way. And as long as you don't have forces strong enough to make a meaningful change in the car's handling characteristics (i.e. make the force so large that the car feels 400 lbs of lift followed by 400 lbs of downforce), I don't see a downside.

why don't youse guys call Elon and get this done?

What does Don have to do with this - is he even living?

But there is resistance when you turn a generator.  You need power from something.  Otherwise this is just regen braking.

Yeah I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up.  This is true in the case of any and every generator,  And yet the armature windings still turn despite the resistance.  In the case of a wind turbine, the kinetic energy of the wind, moves the vanes with enough Force to overcome the magnetic resistance.  Same goes for the Force of the cascading water in a hydro turbine.  And in the case of a gasoline or propane or natural gas powered generator, it's the Force produced by the ICE that overcomes the resistance.

So why don't you see that the electric motor(s) in the car, provide the same capability to overcome the resistance of the static electric fields generated by the road-magnets?  It's exactly the same physics, but instead of circular rotors and stators, it's all laid out flat.

Sure,  the EV under power can provide the oomph, no doubt, but at the penalty of being slowed down, it's a zero sum game, less than that due to losses.

It's regen braking, you can't recharge a battery without the input of energy from somewhere.  If that comes from the EV, it either slows down, or it uses battery power to maintain speed.

You can turn a generator without the input of power.  This is like attaching an electric motor to a generator and expecting the generator to provide all the power to keep the motor turning, with no other inputs.

Perpetual motion.