This Brilliant Innovation Could Make EVs Exponentially Better
You might never have to charge on a road trip ever again.

As much as I love EVs, I must admit that charging them can still be a significant hurdle for many people. If you have to street park your EV, you basically can’t charge it at home. If you want to take a long road trip or tow something a reasonable distance, even the best EVs on the market will struggle. However, a once-overlooked technology might be able to solve these problems while also helping EVs become more eco-friendly and even making long-haul electric semi-trucks viable!
The technology in question here is EV wireless charging.
A few years ago, this tech was basically just a gimmick. BMW developed a wireless system that could deliver a dismal 3.2 kW of power incredibly inefficiently to its i3 EV. The fastest wireless EV charging solution on the market today is the Hevo Jobbie (don’t google what Jobbie means in Scottish slang), which delivers a painfully slow 12 kW of charging power.
However, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researchers have turned this tech up to 11. They recently tested an experimental EV wireless charging system that used a “lightweight polyphase electromagnetic coupling coil design.” This system was able to deliver 100 kW of charging power to an EV over a 5-inch gap with an efficiency of 96%! What’s more, it reached peak rates of 120 kW, and researchers believe it still has the potential to deliver more power.
In other words, this is a super-efficient wireless charger that can pump 350 miles worth of juice into an EV in just an hour. This leap turns EV wireless technology from novelty to potentially revolutionary. Let me explain.
Street-parked EV charging is a mess. Trying to give each space a charger would both look horrible and impact the street’s functionality. Installing these chargers along street parking spots could solve this while also ensuring the cars can charge fast enough to be useful.
But possibly the most incredible use of this technology is wireless Electric Road System (wERS), also known as wireless charging lanes.
These work by installing wireless pads in a line under the tarmac. As an EV drives, a pad underneath turns on and creates the magnetic field to transfer power. The pad then turns off as the EV drives onto the next pad, which turns on, etc. Surprisingly, using these pads in this way doesn’t impact efficiency or the amount of power that can be transmitted that much.
Currently, the leader in wRES is Electreon. Their system can deliver 35 kW of charging power to a moving vehicle or, for larger vehicles like buses and semi-trucks which can have three receivers, 100 kW. A normal EV cruising at 70 mph uses 18.6 kW of power, and an electric semi-truck cruising at 65 mph uses 140 kW. So, for regular EVs, their wireless charging lanes can trickle charge the car while it drives along, but they can only limit how quickly electric semi trucks drain their enormous batteries.
Now, let’s imagine Electreon adopted this 100 kW wireless technology, meaning a normal EV can charge at 100 kW, and semi-trucks and buses can charge at 300 kW in their charging lanes. An everyday EV driving in one of these hypothetical lanes for 30 minutes at a steady 70 mph will use 9.3 kWh of energy to keep its speed but receive 50 kWh of wireless charge, giving a net gain in charge of 40.3 kWh. That’s enough for the average EV to drive 160 miles! In other words, the EV gains an extra 4.6 miles of range for every mile driven in one of these lanes. If you do the same maths for an electric semi-truck, after driving for half an hour at 65 mph, their battery will have an extra 32.7 miles worth of charge than when they started.
If even a few of these charging lanes existed on our highways, and EVs were fitted with the equipment to use them, it would spark a revolution. EVs with tiny batteries and previously unusable ranges will suddenly become road-trip heroes. It would also mean that new EVs don’t require such huge batteries, and as the battery is the most environmentally damaging part of the car, this could make EVs way more eco-friendly. But, if all of our highways had a charging lane in them, then long-haul, purely electric logistics would suddenly become viable. These trucks spend hours at a time on these roads, so they could actually be fully charged by the time they leave the highway and use the main roads to get to their destination.
Just because this is now theoretically possible doesn’t mean it will or can happen. We don’t yet know about the costs of ORNL’s system, how well it can be integrated into a wERS, or whether governments would be willing to install nationwide charge lanes. But the fact that this is now possible is, at the very least, a huge step forward.
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