Detroit has unveiled a stretch of road that can wirelessly charge an electric car as it drives. Here's how it works.
+ READ ARTICLEThe blue Ford E-Transit pulled quietly up to the curb on a block in Detroit’s Corktown, just west of downtown. I slid into the front passenger seat next to Ted Fillippi, a Ford Motor Co. research engineer, and off we went. Ahead of me lay a new, quarter-mile stretch of concrete, looking like any other unblemished city street, except for a row of white circles about the size of Frisbees.
From the back seat, Stefan Tongur, vice president of business development for Electreon, an Israel-based technology firm, leaned forward to show me a tablet. As the van traveled over the circles on 14th Street, a display on the computer screen showed that its battery was gaining strength.
Welcome to the first stretch of EV charging road in the United States. It’s the product of a collaboration between the state of Michigan, the city of Detroit, Ford, DTE Energy, and Electreon. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced the road’s development two years ago and the $1.9 million project made its debut on Nov. 29.
The system uses inductive coupling, something like wirelessly charging your phone or laptop. Copper coils are installed below the pavement, signified by the dots. When cars equipped with special receivers approach them, energy enters a magnetic field. The electricity is then passed to the batteries. (Electreon’s wireless in-road charging technology was named one of the world’s top 100 inventions for 2021 by TIME.)
Each coil is only activated when the receiver is present, meaning the road is safe for pedestrians, pets, and other vehicles. However, right now the receivers are only being used for testing rather than available to the public. Several industrial transformer boxes sit next to the road, equipped with QR codes so the curious can find out more. Already, neighborhood kids have stopped by to check out the system, Tongur says.
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Tongur confirms the charging road will work in ice and snow, and in fact, there was a light coating on the ground when the system made its debut in November. And cars using the electrified road can still opt to get power from conventional chargers as well, giving vehicles two options to get juice, he says.
Tongur began developing the idea in 2010 as an alternative to stationery charging points. At the time, his main concern was with long-haul heavy duty trucks built by Swedish manufacturers Scania and Volvo. It’s one of the most challenging transport sectors to decarbonize due to the distances traveled by the trucks compared to the average range of an EV battery. “The question was, how do we electrify these big vehicles? They can’t carry around big batteries, so how do we solve it?” he said. A logical alternative struck him: “Why don’t we charge them while they are driving?’”
In 2019, Electreon won a pilot project in Sweden to get started on the idea, which expanded to other countries. An Electreon-developed road is already active in Israel, where it is used to charge buses, while projects have been completed in Sweden, Germany, and Italy. There are also planned projects in France, Norway, and China. In the U.S., Electreon is part of a demonstration project at Utah State University in Logan.
Tongur says Detroit’s road could not have come about without a public-private collaboration. “The idea was to find other believers,” he says. That includes Ford, which announced plans in 2018 to acquire the decrepit Michigan Central railway station—a symbol of the city’s so-called “ruin porn”—and make it the center of a new innovation campus.
At the same time, Ford also acquired a former book depository next door that has become Michigan Central, a mobility incubation center that borrows its name from the train station. Seventy-six startups are now based there as part of Newlab, with a full view of the electrified road outside. Carolina Pluszczynski, Michigan Central’s chief operating officer and head of innovation services, became a liaison with Tongur to get the charging road up and running.
Some of her interest in it was personal. “I’ve been driving an E.V. for almost two years now. In the winter, I have that anxiety, ‘how am I going to charge my car?’” she says—cold weather and the challenging driving conditions winter brings can significantly reduce the efficiency of an EV, meaning drivers have to charge more frequently.
Michigan Central’s chief executive, Joshua Sirefman, says the charging road project is designed to answer similar questions among motorists who have not yet made the switch to EVs. “The point here is to actually start to confront…the challenges of adopting innovation, and adopting technology in the real world,” Sirefman says.
However, Tongur says testing will go on for another year before individual drivers can acquire receivers needed to wirelessly power their EVs. If the project is deemed successful, there are plans for another road in Detroit, and then the developers would like to go elsewhere in the country. “Now that this is a reality, [cities and states] are calling us and saying, ‘Let’s do a project,’” he says.
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While EV sales are setting records this year, already breaking 1 million units in the U.S., recent data shows that interest might be stalling. In October, General Motors chief executive Mary Barra said the automaker was pulling back on its goal of building 400,000 EVs from 2022 through mid-2024, although it is not abandoning plans to build 1 million by 2025. And this month Ford cut production plans in half for its new electric F-150 Lightning pickup.
Tongur thinks the electrified road will help boost interest in EVs by changing the way people think about charging. “The [current] model for charging is based on gasoline-powered vehicles. But that doesn’t work as well,” he says, because fully charging an EV takes longer than visiting a service station, and it will take a long time to blanket every corner of the country with chargers.
Our afternoon test drive didn’t go far or fast, but over the course of our 15-minute test drive, the E-Transit charged several kilowatt hours according to Tongur’s tablet. That wasn’t enough to completely charge the vehicle’s 68 kilowatt hour battery, so it would have to fill up from a plug-in charger. But as testing ramps up next year, he expects there will be enough electricity flowing from road to van to fully charge the battery.
The Swedish engineer realizes the electrified road might strike some people as far-fetched. “You would say, ‘yeah, well that’s down the road. Well,” says Tongur, “the road is here.”
Correction, Jan. 16
The original version of this story misstated where Stefan Tongur was born. He lived and studied in Sweden, but was not born there.