Brian McCowan, Zondits staff, 10/7/2022
In 2018, George Sassine, Vice President of Large Scale Renewables at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), posted an article entitled Forget Electric Cars, The Future is Magnetic (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/forget-electric-cars-future-magnetic-georges-sassine/). Prior to that, Volkswagen experimented with magnetic hover cars. Now, researchers at a Chinese university are testing an experimental EV that uses magnetics to levitate the vehicle above the roadway.
Magnetic levitation has been in use since the 1980s on some high-speed rail lines. The enabling technology is termed “Maglev” and involves both levitating the train and pushing or pulling the train magnetically with an imbedded rail bed.
Magnetic levitation theoretically allows high speed travel with less friction loss and thereby less power. Last year a Chinese maglev high-speed train reached speeds of over the 370 miles per hour. The sedans being tested at China’s Southwest Jiaotong University, levitates 35 millimeters (a little over one inch) above an electro-magnetic rail and have reached speeds over 140 miles per hours.
Read more about magnetics for EVs: