Tuesday, 25/08/2026 | 15:55 GMT+7
An Italian company has developed a new type of road that captures otherwise lost energy from cars. The system creates electricity and its developers say it makes the roads safer too.
Transport is the fastest growing contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand and already accounts for around a fifth of what we emit.
A group of Italian engineers are trying to reduce the impact of vehicles by capturing their lost energy through the road. The company's founder, Andrea Pirisi, says it's "an innovative and smart system to recover and absorb energy from cars by slowing them down, increasing road safety and producing green energy by using energy that the car would disperse anyway through its brakes".
The system, called LYBRA, is a tyre-like rubber surface that absorbs a vehicle's kinetic energy and converts it into electricity.
It also slows cars down, so Mr Pirisi wants to install LYBRA near pedestrian crossings, roundabouts and parking lots.
In the meantime, a test strip has been set up in Milan and the team's technical director, Silvio Doni, says the "system is completely safe even in the most critical conditions".
The team says a 10-metre strip of the surface can generate around 100,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year. That's roughly enough to power 12 homes, but there's no word yet on how expensive the system is.
Every single day an enormous amount of energy is wasted by vehicles on roads, and LYBRA is just the latest of many systems that propose to make roads greener. But while they're looking to get energy from cars, a New Zealand-designed system is trying to use roads for the opposite – recharging while in motion.
Wireless electric car charging technology was developed by University of Auckland scientists.
Qualcomm Halo can currently charge stationary cars wirelessly but is hoping to roll out the system to roads.
The company says electric cars could have unlimited range in the future thanks to a continuous charge.
In any case, if either the LYBRA or Qualcomm Halo teams get their way, roads that don't give or take energy from cars will soon be a thing of the past.
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