I was pondering at work . Magnets in the floor of the high ways covered by ceramic tiles for the heat . The magnet are 2 feet apart and they pull a magnet on the car everytime the car passes over it . That magnet in the car works like a piston connected to a generator. That charges the battery and the car is electiric powered. If needed , the magnets in the street can be activated by signals in the bumpers so they wont collect metal debris. Ten there would be a truck with a huge magnet that goes over them to clean the street .
Just a thought! Please don't steal my idea

As far as money for this , if they can put a parking meter everywhere , they can put magnets too

Does anybody understand?

you would need two awfully big magnets...electromagnets wouldnt work either, they take too much electricity and $$$ on that large of a scale

its a good thought though, but the piston would have to have little to no resistance when it turns, and be at high speeds. an alternator does a pretty good job on its own. And what would the car do when it stops at a red light?

It'* a little more complex than what I explained. Of course there would be ton'* of circuitry . The car would still maintain a battery supply . I was also thinking about parking pads. When you park the car on a spot, the pad reads your car'* ID and then charges it . Then instead of paying gas, you get a bill in the mail from the company . I'm pretty syre the oil company CEO' * would bride lot' of people for these idea'* not to work but like I said , pondering.....

Most frames are made of aluminum, and body panels plastic. Weight of the magnets would still be less than a gas motor. Spring loaded magnet. The magnets would not be on all the time . Coil'* . circuits.
If you would have told someone the earth was round 1000 years ago the would have thought you were crazy . Explained to the Wright bothers Jet engines(very simple) , they would have asked you to be a dummy test piloy . Told Mr. Ford about how much his cars would suck in about 100 years . Kennedy he would get shot!
Like I said , just a thought .

I can tell you this much . Even though I like the idea of saving the tree'* . There is no way I'm giving up my Monte !!!

Interesting idea. It comes at a convenient time, since I'm studying for my electromagnetic fields final right now.

If such a system were implemented, it wouldn't be done with pistons, or any moving parts for that matter: a coil moving through a magnetic field will have a current induced onto it. There would be a net loss with a piston system: the energy required to pull the piston away from the magnet in the road would at least equal the energy 'gained' when the piston is pulled down by the magnet.

Let'* say you have a coil on the bottom of your car and permanent magnets in the road. You drive your car forward; now you have a moving coil in a magnetic field, so you get a current on the wire. But wait! That act of inducing a current has produced a force opposite to the direction of motion. Energy must be conserved, and entropy is always increasing, so the power that you put into the car to give it a forward velocity in order to get a current will exceed the power that you get out of the coil. In other words, you're putting more in than you're getting out, so the batteries in the car are being depleted even faster than if there were no magnets in the road.

Hmmm.... so that won't work. But wait! There'* another way to induce current in a coil: Use a time-varying magnetic field. This means that instead of permanent magnets in the road, we would use electromagnets powered by an AC source. In that situation, it would be possible to charge a battery on a car. The trick would be getting the coil close enough to the electromagnet so that losses are minimized. Even then, the losses would be non-trivial. Ultimately, could it be done? Yes.

(Yes, there was some hand-waving going on. If you want a more rigorous explanation, let me know)