Tesla has released a closer look at its upcoming wireless electric vehicle charging station, which was showcased at the Robotaxi unveiling.
Tesla never seemed interested in wireless charging for its electric vehicles until recently.
The problem wireless charging solves is not a major one. It alleviates the need to plug in your car, which is not a super difficult or time-consuming task. Nonetheless, Tesla has previously talked about automating the task in order to be ready for self-driving technology. If the cars could drive themselves, it would make sense for them to be able to charge themselves without a human needing to plug them in.
Then, there’s also the issue of efficiency. Wireless charging historically had a bigger loss than cable charging, but some more recent solutions, like with magnetic resonance, for example, do claim similar ~95% efficiency as cable charging.
Nonetheless, over the years, Tesla has favored an automated robot arm instead of wireless charging to complete this task, but things have changed recently.
Last year, Tesla teased a new wireless home charging station – pictured above. The automaker never commented on the situation other than releasing this picture as part of a presentation.
However, the image pretty clearly shows a wireless charging station and Tesla did briefly acquire a startup that focuses on wireless charging before selling it back – not before integrating some of its staff, though.
Furthermore, Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen more recently confirmed that Tesla is working on a wireless charging pad.
Earlier this year, we also learned that the Cybertruck has inductive charging connectors, which hints that it could be retrofitted with a wireless charging pad.
At Tesla’s ‘We, Robot’ event where they unveiled their new Robotaxi, the automaker confirmed that wireless charging is going to be the company’s solution to charge its autonomous vehicles in the future.
Now, Tesla has released a new video giving us the best look at its wireless charging pad yet:
The automaker went a step further with the Robotaxi and didn’t even include a charging port. It looks like wireless charging is the only way to charge the vehicle.
The video shows a charge rate of 25 kW:
Top comment by Iggy
Hopefully someone will eventually gather and share data on the power going into the pad vs the power coming out of the receiving coil as well as how much things heat up. Some solutions claim 95% efficiency but that's under ideal lab conditions with perfect coil alignment which is unlikely in real world use. If the power losses from this are too large I'd really rather it remain a niche thing. If it becomes the standard for all EVs it can add up pretty quickly to a ton of wasted energy and added load on already stressed power grids that (at least in the US) aren't being upgraded fast enough. The idea and convenience are great in concept but I worry in practice this could add overhead to energy consumption that we should be trying to minimize until we have resilient grids with energy surpluses. Just smells a bit of Jevons paradox.
This is not comparable to level 3 DC fast-charging that Tesla owners are used to with the Supercharger network, but it is higher than your typical level 2 home charging.
However, we don’t know about the efficiency of the system.
We recently reported that Tesla revealed more of its wireless charging technology through several patent applications.
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