| This idea is dumb on a lot of levels. Asphalt is a really great road surface. It's hard, cheap, and durable. Paint is great for road markings. You can see it during the day and it consumes no electricity. Let's take a look at "Solar Roadways". Glass as a road surface. Not just glass, but glass that must be optically clear in order for the cells to work. The two most important things for a road surface, traction and durability, just went straight out the window. LEDs as road markings. Sorry, but this is one of the dumbest things I have ever read. There's no way you could see LEDs under thick glass at the angles you would be looking at them while driving in broad daylight. Not to mention, the cost to power these LEDs on a major highway would be enormous. Their site includes a video of them driving a light tractor on a short stretch of tiles, in order to prove durability. I'm sure the tiles would hold up just as well with a year's worth of fully loaded tractor-trailers unevenly weighting and unweighting each tile as they travel across this multi-trillion-dollar slippy slidey glass road. How exactly do they propose to transport the feeble amount of electricity generated which isn't used by the LEDs that no one can see? There's many other things wrong with this. I'm pretty distressed to see this on the top of Hacker News, and even more distressed to see that they've raised over 1M in funding. |
Solvable problems. Hard, yes, but solvable.