Posted by sizzle 9/12/2025
Not only that, but this requires object detection and the car suspension has to drop to (nearly) meet it, which seems like it’s enough work that automated contact charging can’t be wildly more difficult.
The other thing is that it needs to be perfectly aligned. If you can’t be bothered to plug in a cable, can you be bothered to align your SUV in your garage perfectly with a charge pad?
[0] https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2025/products/porsche-wirele...
Hell, a single good 110 outlet ("good" meaning higher amp, like a kitchen or garage outlet) is sufficient for keeping two actively used EVs well charged at home if Superchargers are available as a backup.
Sounds like the root cause is not technical at all. Why can she not just plug it in when she gets home?
What a world we live in.
A 10% efficiency drop takes electric cars from "much greener than ICE cars" to "still much greener than ICE cars".
In fact if this tech encourages 11% more people to buy electric cars then it might be more green overall. So take your poorly thought through naysaying elsewhere.
Because that is not "a little farther", it's vastly more complicated. And also because the charging mat is flat, not some box in the middle of your garage.
This is clearly a better solution overall (for people who are too lazy to plug in a plug themselves).
It seems weird they took that approach vs having the box extend upwards when it detects that it should. Seems a lot simpler and cheaper.
this amount of extra heat would probably need in car AC to kick in draining probably another 500W
Their sole purpose is to save the auto industry.
What's the deal against hydrogen? Toyota made a car that made it to market, it can't be that dangerous if it was sold in certain regions with extensive safety testing procedures. I know the problem is getting hydrogen at the pump station but other fully battery dependent cars have had that same issue before.
I'm sure hydrogen has other problems (conversion efficiency?) but what about ethanol? Better than gasoline, no? At least 40% less greenhouse gases out of the tail pipe, and its production is pretty mild for the environment compared to batteries. It wouldn't make cars that much more complicated either, and you could "easily" convert your ICE car. Of course, at the scale we are talking about the gains would be way lower given a 5 year timespan vs batteries
Hell, there are others.
Such a weird set of events dictating the future of cars ngl, some of the alternatives may have had come sooner if someone focused there (I know Brazil has some minimum ethanol requirement that seems like a good idea while transitioning).
But for a premium carmaker the simple solution of “plug in” isn’t good enough when they have to justify the price tag.
I guess that doesn't have the sexy Nikola Tesla factor.
Less efficiency is one thing.
But what about the magnetic fields? I notice some EVs have pacemaker warnings due to the magnetic fields. Would this be a similar situatuon? And would it erase the mag strip on your credit cards?
Taking five seconds to plug in isn't a big deal to me. However, my wife (with her own separate EV) does often forget, and it's a bit maddening at times. Of course, we have a long enough cord that we can park in different places and always charge, so a wireless charger wouldn't fix the problem if we had to switch around to use it.
Given induction's fundamental (physics) limitations, there's zero chance this will make it into a production vehicle.
The energy storage requirements and practical charging speed of a car are not remotely the same as for a portable electronic device such as a phone.
Human passenger EV charging will always be through a direct cable connection.
If you want something even faster, just do an automated physical battery swap and design the car's physical safety envelope and grounding systems around this additional access affordance.
Wireless charging is in production. Here's one example:
https://electrifynews.com/news/auto/enc-electric-bus-now-fea...
Wireless charging can be as efficient as wired charging:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1gaNO9nj0
https://www.pcmag.com/news/wireless-ev-charging-tests-achiev...
Also, that "efficiency" measurement is not overall Pout/Pin. It's merely measure of charging speed and they do touch on that mentioning the lack of a "break-out box" etc. to determine the actual numbers.
One can absolutely achieve the same charging speed with induction charging, but with a much higher power input and at a greatly reduced vehicle efficiency due to the much higher on-vehicle mass dedicated to charging the battery.
This is also a bit of rigged game as they're using the oldest wired-charging infrastructure against the latest wireless. They do touch on that. The older wired standard has a much lower power-factor duty-cycle.
That said, it, otherwise, was a good test as they also took into consideration ambient temperature and battery heater.
Of course, you could have some driver aid informing them how to better align themselves. But still, you will always waste energy in practice, and at the scale of automobiles out there it becomes unreasonable, no?
> Human passenger EV charging will always be through a direct cable connection.
Induction charging made it into production vehicles in the past [1], so always is a little bit too strong.
I think it would be more interesting to have some kind of robot-type mechanism to make the car connect itself to the charger.