Anyone who uses a charging pad instead of a cable to charge a mobile phone in the car will know what game-changing wireless electric car charging is. No plug, no cable, no interface.

The dream is to bury the mat in the place where you park or stay for a short time: home, workplace, supermarket, car through train and even traffic lights.

"It has the potential to truly make charging a non-event," said Dr. Neale Kinnear, head of behavioral sciences at the TRL Research Laboratory in the UK, which has overseen a series of electric vehicle charging experiments.

However, the realization of this dream will take time. The latest wading trial is a government-supported trial, scheduled to start in March, and involves laying 5 mats outside Nottingham Railway Station, covering 10 electric taxis (5 LEVC TX black taxis and 5 Nissan e -NV200) Wireless charging, with modification compatibility. Taxi drivers do not need to get off the car, just shuffle the cards in the queue, and continue to charge at the speed of 11kW on the next pad.

Nottingham City Councillor Sally Longford said: “If it works well and is reliable, this is obviously a very simple way to avoid plugging the vehicle into a charging point.” “There will be less clutter on the street and it will be very convenient.”

Inductive charging is quite simple. The oscillating magnetic field in the charging pad is received at the same frequency in the vehicle receiver and the charging process starts. The people who developed this technology, led by US-based Witricity, claim that even if the receiver is connected to a higher SUV, it is as safe and almost as efficient as plugging in a power source.

Nottingham taxis will be retrofitted by British electronics expert Sprint Power using Witricity technology. The company is looking to develop a transformation business from it, mainly for electric taxis.

CEO Richie Frost predicts that private cars will follow. "It won't be as cheap as a cable, but if I had an electric sports car, I would pay for this convenience," he said. He thinks it can even change the design of electric cars: "This is an infrastructure story. When you have the opportunity to charge, the mileage anxiety will disappear, and the battery will actually become smaller."

In theory, it will also reduce the need for fast charging. In the future, it will also become a must-have for autonomous vehicles.

Currently, there are zero wireless charging options. As early as 2018, BMW UK planned to offer it on the 530e plug-in hybrid sedan, but it overturned this decision, and the current generation of batteries does not support it. In Germany, this is a 3205 Euro (2700 GBP) option.

But it came. Frost estimates that 90% of the world's new automotive architectures will support wireless charging. For example, it is understood that Volkswagen has designed its MEB platform to support it. Rolls-Royce has long stated that the use of cables is off-brand, so it will not sell electric cars without wireless charging; this was reflected in the 102EX experimental electric Phantom in 2012. Concept cars, the most recent Lexus LF-30, also often use this technology.

The problem is one of chicken and egg. Car manufacturers do not want to design a system that will not be used, and if the car is not equipped with the ability to use it, charging board suppliers are not willing to provide reciprocating technology.

"We haven't seen much change among automakers, which shows that passenger cars don't have much future," said a representative of BP Chargemaster.

The British company Connected Kerb provided a solution. The company installed a low-profile EV plug charger that can be easily converted to a wireless charger when demand arises. It also carries or deploys fast fiber optic networks that provide the Internet. The company is installing its system in a new residential area with 3,500 families, which will be built in the southwest of England. The charging speed at night is only 3-7kW, not fast charging.

Connected Kerb’s dream is to provide wireless charging for 40% of UK homes where street parking is not available.

The application was also in the mind of Nottingham City Councillor Longford. "We can use plugs on lamp posts," she said, "but our plugs are mainly behind the sidewalk, which means a cable runs through the sidewalk. Pads will provide an option."

In a version of the wireless dream, an electric car is charged while driving. A European trial called Fabric conducted between 2014 and 2017 investigated this on three test tracks and claimed to have been partially successful. The other is led by Renault and will run from January of this year to 2022, including two "dynamic" wireless charging experiments conducted in France, one of which is in Paris.

Whether static or dynamic, wireless charging is clearly the key to fulfilling the promise that electric vehicles provide a better consumer experience than traditional alternatives-which is completely absent in the current world full of cables, plugs, and fragmented charging networks Persuasive.

However, TRL’s Kinnear warned that there is still a long way to go. "The problem always comes down to the details-who provides the infrastructure, who pays the electricity bill, and how to identify the vehicle and the account holder," he said. "Currently, no one fully knows the answer. But in the end, the technology is shifting to a solution that is easier than inserting."

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Analysis: Who will charge our electric cars?

As someone has already mentioned, the decline in charging efficiency and the radiated electrical noise will be so high that it will endanger human health, especially children, and may interfere with general telecommunications (aircraft TV broadcasting), etc., so maybe in the future Somewhere, but not currently. The electrical coupling field decreases sharply with increasing distance, so tall vehicles may need to lower or raise the charging plate to some extent to optimize the coupling from the charging plate to the vehicle. Don't want this to be a negative comment, so let us hope that they have resolved all issues.

The efficiency of modern gasoline engines is between 20%-35%, which is much lower than inductive charging. Nice try, though. Is there any stupid argument?

Very correct, but power generation is not 100% efficient, depending on the source of 30% to 40%. Then the transmission loss and distribution are reduced by another 10% from the top.

Hybrid power sources, some of which are wind and solar, I think electricity is cleaner. I would even argue that you can think of this type of efficiency as 100% because there are no combustible raw materials. However, we are not entirely dependent on these sources.

In order to maximize the efficiency of power generation, including transmission and distribution, it is a bad idea to throw away so much in the final use. Especially when it is easily avoided by establishing a physical connection.

If they use something that is actually an air-core transformer to achieve 90% efficiency, it would be like throwing away 10% of the electricity used to charge the vehicle. In addition, if people are worried that a few milliwatts of power in a mobile phone will generate a magnetic field, they will wait until they discover the thousands of watts of magnetic field generated by these things. Then there is the radio interference they will produce, causing DAB, mobile phones and wireless devices to lose their hearing.

We used to have gasoline pump attendants. This is the disadvantage of an additional £2,700, heavier, more complex, slower, expensive to install, and when you plug it in twice a week for 20 seconds, who wants to spend a few pounds to dig their drive. Any real use I see may be a bus, maybe a suitable taxi.