The Charging Pad That Could Kill Wireless EV Charging Before It Starts
Retractable conductive charging allows for touch-free park-and-forget charging with none of the power losses or safety concerns, for a third of the price.
We recently covered the latest EV convenience item about to roll out on the 2026 Porsche Cayenne Electric: Wireless inductive charging. So convenient! Just pull into your garage, center the car over an inductive charging pad, and walk away. Your car charges without your having to touch anything. There are downsides, the first biggie of which (for the Porsche) is cost: Roughly $1,600 for the vehicle's receiver, $6,500 for the garage-floor pad, and around $2,000 or more for installation.
0:00 / 0:00
Inductive Is Less Efficient
There's no beating a plug and socket. Depending on efficiencies inside the wall unit and the onboard charger, plug-and-socket tends to be better than 90 percent energy efficient. But with magnetic-resonance inductive charging, there's always a bit more loss. Align the car perfectly with the pad, over a short air gap, and you're talking a loss of about 1–3 percent efficiency. But get the alignment off a bit, or draw that power over a wider gap (say with an SUV), and there can be 5–10 percent lost.
Matrix Charging
Graz, Austria–based Easelink reckons it has a better plan: Matrix Charging still has a vehicle pull in and align itself with a floor pad. But then a conductor extends down and makes magnetic contact with the floor-pad's matrix of charging points. As it's approaching the pad, it blows air to clear dust or debris from the pad, and once it makes contact, it rotates so that a set of four rubber blades can mechanically wipe any gunk off the pad. Then it magnetically locks such that the four sets of conductors align. Electronics disable all conductors on the pad except the eight in contact with the vehicle's conductor.
Way Cheaper Pad
The floor pad requires no power electronics and no cooling, dramatically lowering the parts and installation pricing. It's impossible for a connection to be made with any foreign object (or live animals) in between the car and the conductor pad, so safety isn't an issue as it is with inductive. And if someone crashes into the parked car upsetting the connection, any disturbance stops the power flow instantly.
AC or Low-Power DC Ready
Residential applications would generally use AC current, and can accommodate whatever the car can accept (typically 11–22 kW), but if, say, an electric taxi fleet wanted to enable autonomous park and charge, with faster charging, the system can support DC charging in the 30–50 kW range. A taxi fleet in Vienna has been using the system, but with manual vehicle/pad alignment. A means of helping the driver align the pad must be accounted for in the vehicle's infotainment screen. The team is currently using NXP's ultra-wideband communication technology for sensing the location of the pad.
Bi-Directional Charging
Another big bonus to Easelink conductive Matrix Charging is that it supports vehicle-to-home or vehicle-to-grid charging. This might allow owners to defray the price of their charging system via power-company incentives to always leave their vehicle "plugged in" to the grid, even if they only program it to charge when necessary.
Where Does It Mount?
The conductor typically mounts just ahead of the battery and behind the axle to stay out from under the drive unit for ground clearance purposes. The system can extend down to reach a flush-mounted pad from an SUV height (a certain rugged all-terrain EV manufactured in Graz has successfully demonstrated the system's capabilities).
When and How Much?
Easelink is working with five automakers on a standardization initiative with a target of volume production by 2027. The hope is to bring the system to market at a price of €2,000-€3,000 ($2,350–$3,500).
I started critiquing cars at age 5 by bumming rides home from church in other parishioners’ new cars. At 16 I started running parts for an Oldsmobile dealership and got hooked on the car biz. Engineering seemed the best way to make a living in it, so with two mechanical engineering degrees I joined Chrysler to work on the Neon, LH cars, and 2nd-gen minivans. Then a friend mentioned an opening for a technical editor at another car magazine, and I did the car-biz equivalent of running off to join the circus. I loved that job too until the phone rang again with what turned out to be an even better opportunity with Motor Trend. It’s nearly impossible to imagine an even better job, but I still answer the phone…
Read More
