Technology
The ground level power supply system is well known by children playing with cars at miniature racing tracks using vehicles with rubber tires and DC-power rails (which have also a guiding function). Because of the health risks with higher voltages in real systems, the power rail is only switched on when a vehicle is covering the section thus preventing pedestrians from being injured. This system is used in Bordeaux with trams and is called Alimentation par Sol . The French Wikipedia article states that it is three times more expensive than the Catenary system.
Hybrid vehicles differ from dual-mode vehicles because they may not be fed by another energy source during operation (there might be an exemption for a hypothetical hybrid solar vehicle).
Read more about this topic: Dual-mode Vehicle
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)
“Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)