The future of EV charging may make you forget about charging altogether.
That’s if efforts to introduce wireless EV charging technology, like what Israeli startup Electreon is now testing on a quarter-mile stretch of road in Detroit, are successful.
“What we’re trying to accomplish is showing that this is a feasible option for multiple use cases,” Stefan Tongur, Electreon’s vice president of business development for the US, told Tech Brew.
The project in Detroit, unveiled late last year, represents what has been described as the first public wireless charging roadway in the US. It’s happening in Michigan Central, a tech and mobility hub Ford is building in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.
Wireless charging is emerging as a technology of interest for the auto industry, with advocates pointing to potential benefits like a more seamless charging experience and possible reductions in battery size because drivers won’t need as much range.
Tesla recently confirmed it was working on an inductive charging platform, and last year bought and then sold wireless charging startup Wiferion but reportedly kept the company’s engineers on staff.
Canary Media reported that VW is developing wireless charging hardware, and that startup HEVO is conducting testing with Stellantis. WiTricity is developing a wireless charging pad for EVs. Electreon is working with numerous automakers, including Ford, Toyota, and Stellantis.
Not everyone is bullish, though. FreeWire, a provider of battery-integrated EV charging stations, got its name because its founder initially focused on wireless charging, but pivoted after coming to the conclusion that there were too many roadblocks to commercializing the technology, Sudhansh Neravetla, the company’s senior director of product, told us.
“You read about it in a headline…and it sounds really transformational, but when you dig into it, you see that it’s not quite ready for prime time, and it’s going to be difficult to scale commercially,” Neravetla said, noting grid constraints and the challenges of rebuilding the country’s roads.
“In an alternate universe where you’re building a city from scratch, sure,” he said. “But in this universe…the most major roadways 15 years from now, that list is probably going to be very similar to the roadways today. And you can’t go and shut all those roads down.”
Electreon, meanwhile, has been working on wireless charging since its founding in 2013. Its tech enables both static charging (when a vehicle is idling or parked) and in-motion charging.
The process involves copper coils underneath the road surface and attached to a receiver on the vehicle. The roadway transfers electricity to the vehicle’s battery via a magnetic field.
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“When the vehicle approaches the road, the infrastructure will detect who you are, will know that you want to charge,” Tongur said. “It’s very user-friendly because you don’t actually need to think about charging anymore, because it’s done seamlessly in the background.”
Electreon has worked on projects in Israel, Norway, Sweden, Italy, and Germany, among other countries, according to its website. The startup partnered with the city of Tel Aviv and a bus company to install a wireless charging station at a bus terminal, a project that led to a commercial agreement to equip bus terminals across Israel.
In Detroit, Electron is trying to determine the feasibility of deploying wireless charging on public roads. The company has a five-year agreement to develop an electric road system for the state. The Michigan Department of Transportation will seek bids this year to rebuild a portion of US-12, a major highway, part of a plan to equip it with inductive charging equipment.
For now, the technology involves retrofitting existing EVs with receivers. In the future, automakers may build vehicles with the equipment. In the meantime, though, there’s something of a conundrum.
“One of its big impediments is that it requires not just the physical infrastructure in the world, but you have to have all the vehicles have it,” Mike Ramsey, an auto analyst at Gartner, told Tech Brew. “Getting the automakers to do it, to add an expensive piece of additional equipment onto the vehicle when there’s no infrastructure to utilize it, creates this chicken-and-egg problem that’s really hard to overcome.”
Electreon is focusing on use cases for commercial fleets—think airport shuttles, last-mile delivery trucks, and public buses—because those vehicles have more predictable routes.
“In those cases,” Tongur said, “we can reach high volume and mainly help them with their operations by providing longer range or improving the total cost of ownership.”
But scaling the technology up from such applications will likely require further infrastructure investments before automakers are willing to equip their EVs with the tech.
“When it gets inexpensive to put the inductive charging systems in a car, then what will probably happen is some government in Europe, most likely, will say, ‘Hey, we’re going to require you to put inductive charging systems on all of your vehicles coming out,’” Ramsey said. “Once they do that, then you’ll start to see the commercialization happen.”