Petroz,

Perhaps one day we'll refuel electric cars on the fly like this?

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn12014-wireless-power-could-have-cellphone-users-beaming.html

Or will genetically engineered bacteria produce environmentally friendly petrol?

See:

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/18827/

Or perhaps potato power is the way forward.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18784/

I woukd forget this one;

Petroz,

Perhaps one day we'll refuel electric cars on the fly like this?

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn12014-wireless-power-could-have-cellphone-users-beaming.html

The attenuation between source & car would cause too much loss.
At practical distances you would be lucky to get one billionth of the
power transmitted.

There has been one suggestion of electried roadways.
Only the main roads would be powered, and batteries would be used to
get the car from home to the main road. Much smaller batteries could then be used.

There are no cheap and easy solutions, there are solutions, some are easy some are not, none are cheap at the moment.They will be cheap in the future.
We tried cheap and easy and thats why we are in the sh!t.
Our grandkids are going to think we were stupid (and they would be right) we burned all the oil , gas and coal when we had alternatives like wind, solar, wave and geothermal and we didn't use them because dumb politicians and greedy corporations said "no".

Bazz,

It definitely would require apparatus embedded in main roads.

I'm not at all sure how practical this is for cars as opposed to cell phones or notebooks.

Alanpoi

There may or may not be cheap and easy solutions. But if this research holds up I'm pretty sure it will be tried.

Who knows? If all else fails spraying sulphates into the atmosphere may be our "safety net."

There is no way this could be used. Even for mobile phones it will have
dreadful inefficiency.
Probably over one metre the loss would be 100s of db.
You would put in 500 watts and get one watt at one metre;
Ha while I was writing this BBC World TV just had an item about it !

What a co-incidence. From what I read elsewhere they use a frequency
at 10 Mhz. It won't be exactly 10 Mhz because there is a standard
frequency transmission there. There is a scientific & industrial
frequency around 10 Mhz. However it is illegal to transmit a
signal of that level so close to people.

It will simply be prohibited even if anyone made them.
As far as using them over many metres, you would need megawatt
transmitters, its crazy, are you sure its not April the first
somewhere such as the Chinese calander ?