Roads that charge as you drive could flip the EV paradigm

As interest in EVs continues to grow, one of the biggest stumbling blocks the industry keeps running into is range anxiety. Drivers are wary of being stranded with a low battery and no charging stations to be found. The genuine dearth of charging infrastructure is an impediment to selling more EVs. For day-to-day use, with short trips and a charger installed at home, there isn’t much risk of running low. But when it comes to road trips or long-haul transportation of goods, there is a genuine risk of drivers finding themselves stuck with no charge and no easy way to get one. When they do find chargers, they have to stop operations to top up, adding downtime and necessitating larger fleets to keep running. Large batteries take a long time to charge, and their weight causes vehicles to burn energy more quickly. To allay those fears and facilitate more widespread EV adoption, companies are taking unique approaches to making charging easier.

A breakthrough in EV charging is redefining what’s possible for electric mobility: dynamic wireless charging. Instead of relying on roadside or home charging stations with plugs and cables, this technology delivers power to vehicles as they drive — seamlessly and in motion. It opens the door to electric vehicles running 24/7 without stops or interruptions, creating a future where charging is as effortless as driving itself. Combining stationary wireless charging pads with charging tech embedded in roads, this approach can increase efficiency and sustainability and might pave the way for everyone to move to electric vehicles.

‘The Charger Will Come to You’

Imagine driving your EV down the road and seeing your battery’s charge go up rather than down as you go. That’s exactly what happens with “inductive charging,” where injecting alternating current into a special-made coil on or under the pavement to create an electromagnetic field that transfers energy to a second coil attached to the chassis of a passing vehicle without any physical contact between the coils.

“This is the magic,” says Oren Ezer, co-founder and CEO of Electreon, which makes wireless EV charging infrastructure.

Oren Ezer

The energy then flows directly from the vehicle coil to the vehicle battery, charging it as it drives at full speed or while moving slowly. The technology also works when vehicles are parked at home or in a depot, say on a charging pad that functions much like a wireless phone charging pad does.

“Instead of going to the charger, the charger will come to you,” Ezer told Reboot.

The challenges of implementation, Ezer said, are placing coil infrastructure in the roadway without impacting traffic or damaging the road, and installing it quickly and at low cost. At this point, he said, it’s possible to install 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) in a few days at a lower cost than other EV charging infrastructure alternatives.

“The world is moving to electric, but batteries will not be able to hold this transition alone. We started analyzing battery swapping, hydrogen, fast chargers, etc., and we realized that wireless charging is the most sustainable and cost-effective solution.”

With approximately 1.5 billion vehicles on roads around the world, sourcing and producing enough batteries to convert all of them to electric might be an impossible task. Then there is the matter of the amount of waste all those batteries would generate at the end of their life cycles. Wireless charging can change the calculus on all of that and encourage more rapid and sustainable EV adoption.

Use Cases

Short stretches frequented by medium and large transit and commercial vehicles with regular timetables are a sweet spot for wireless charging as a first step. Vehicles and fleets that travel longer distances will most likely be the secondary use cases. Ezer said just 1 mile of electrified road can keep a rapid transit bus system operating 24/7.

In most electric BRT systems, the buses need large batteries, the charging infrastructure is expensive, and the buses essentially charge at the same time overnight, putting massive strain on the electrical grid.

With wireless charging technology, which Electreon has been testing on a 100-meter stretch of a bus route in Trondheim, Norway, and with stationary wireless charging at a Tel Aviv bus station to charge Dan bus company’s fleet of e-buses, batteries can be smaller, charging more frequently throughout the vehicle’s operational day. Wireless charging is less affected by extreme temperatures, as proven by successful winter testing in sub-zero temperatures in Norway, and the extreme heat of summer in Tel Aviv. They also don’t put as much pressure on an electrical grid because they are charging a little and often, at different times throughout the day.

“When you enter the depot, within 1 or 2 seconds, you are charging,” Ezer said, compared to cable charging which requires drivers to get out and plug the bus in. “With wireless charging, you convert all this downtime to charging time.”

Electrifying bus terminals and depots can increase range by 20%, he said.

Autonomous car sharing with services like Waymo can run on wireless charging roads, reducing both vehicle count and parking needs. It would be inefficient for autonomous vehicles to have to return to a depot and be out of commission for hours to charge, Ezer said, but well-placed wireless charging strips at airports, train stations, and outside hotels keep them going.

“We can identify where the vehicles are idling and spending most of their waiting time. If we understand where to put the wireless, we can give this fleet almost 24/7 operation.”

Ports are another ideal setting for wireless charging, enabling 24/7 fleet operations: Cranes could charge continuously on short stretches of charged road, while drayage trucks can run on charging roads throughout the port. Electrifying part of the corridor between the port and a warehouse or a logistics center keeps vehicles charged without the need for oversized batteries.

“They will go from the port with full battery charge and arrive at their destination with a full battery,” he said.

A Little Goes a Long Way

Electrifying even a small percentage of roadway can have a huge impact. What the Kashiwa-no-ha Smart City project near Tokyo has found is that 10 seconds of charging equates to an extra kilometer of range. So charging coils at traffic lights can add a great deal of range while cars idle. Ezer said that in real road environments like the quarter-mile section Electreon has in Detroit, static efficiency is more than 90% and dynamic efficiency is in the 85-88% range, so very little energy is lost in the charging process.

“If you can reduce the battery size, we can actually have higher efficiency,” as the vehicle will weigh much less, he said.

In addition to the first wireless charging BRT line, which Ezer hopes will show the viability of wireless for BRT lines around the world, Electreon is the first company to deploy dynamic wireless charging on a highway with a 2022 demonstration on a 1-km stretch of Germany’s famed Autobahn. Next is a three-year trial on a 2-km section of the A10 autoroute outside Paris, due to launch in September.

“It’s an open road, so everyone can drive on it. We are testing the system with all types of vehicles driving on this road section, whether it’s a heavy-duty truck, bus, passenger car, or van. This will be a huge multimodal showcase.”

Germany and France in particular have been actively developing electric road systems for heavy-duty trucks as part of their carbon reduction strategies. If the A10 trial proves successful, it could play a key role in helping France achieve its goal of 8,850 km (5,500 miles) of electrified roads by 2035.

“Roads facilitate 87% of passenger and freight transportation. Even in the most optimistic scenario of conversion to rail, they will still account for more than 75% of travel in 2050. So, it’s the roads that need to be decarbonized,” Christophe Hug, deputy general manager in charge of environmental policy at Vinci Autoroutes, told Le Monde. “This is particularly true on the freeway, where trucks emit 45% of greenhouse gases due to their greater number, compared with an average of 25% over the entire French road system.”

With cable charging, drivers might have trouble finding a station, find that it’s out of order, or have to wait in line for it to be available. Governments looking to decarbonize have to rely on global supply chains with complicated geopolitics for raw materials and manufacturing that might not be able to keep up with demand.

“If you move to (wireless) infrastructure, it’s actually a solution that a region can do by itself,” Ezer said. “You are not relying on gas, or batteries, or anything else. You can do it by yourself and create meaningful jobs along the way.”

That could do away with not only range anxiety, but a whole host of other worries holding back EV adoption as well.