I am not sure if this idea has been discussed before, but rather than stopping at a Supercharger while on a road trip, what if a "recharge fleet" vehicle could be summoned to pull alongside you and do a quick charge while you were moving?
Say for instance, that Harris Ranch had a bunch of company cars sitting in the parking lot, and they would top themselves off whenever they saw empty Supercharger stalls. Then as someone drove down highway 5 and the software knew the owners' car needed more charge to reach the eventual destination, it would summon one of the fleet cars to drive alongside the customer car and give some charge from the fleet cars' pack to the car on the road trip.
From what I understand of all the technology, this doesn't seem impossible. Sure there would be regulatory concerns, and some technical details to work out, but I assume cars could be made that allow car to car recharging, and some sort of mobile charging tether (or inductive coupling) could be devised to allow the charging while moving. Autopilot features enable the control of both cars to attempt such a thing. SpaceX does related things with remote satellite deploy, space-station docking, etc. It would seem "up their alley" in terms of things they could tackle.
I was thinking about this when pondering how military planes can refuel while in flight...
Aerial refueling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Say for instance, that Harris Ranch had a bunch of company cars sitting in the parking lot, and they would top themselves off whenever they saw empty Supercharger stalls. Then as someone drove down highway 5 and the software knew the owners' car needed more charge to reach the eventual destination, it would summon one of the fleet cars to drive alongside the customer car and give some charge from the fleet cars' pack to the car on the road trip.
From what I understand of all the technology, this doesn't seem impossible. Sure there would be regulatory concerns, and some technical details to work out, but I assume cars could be made that allow car to car recharging, and some sort of mobile charging tether (or inductive coupling) could be devised to allow the charging while moving. Autopilot features enable the control of both cars to attempt such a thing. SpaceX does related things with remote satellite deploy, space-station docking, etc. It would seem "up their alley" in terms of things they could tackle.
I was thinking about this when pondering how military planes can refuel while in flight...
Aerial refueling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia