The wireless EV charging road that was previously announced by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will be complete by 2023.
Whitmer at NAIAS in 2019
In a press release issued Tuesday, Gov. Whitmer’s office said the new inductive charging roadway, which will be capable of wirelessly charging an electric vehicle’s battery, will be operational by 2023. The project is currently slated for up to a 1-mile stretch of both dynamic and stationary wireless EV charging in downtown Detroit, the press release said, and is being built with support from Ford, Michigan utilities provider DTE Energy and the City of Detroit.
Whitmer’s office also said this week that it has awarded the contract to install the inductive charging road to Israeli tech firm Electreon. The company is currently building similar EV charging roads in Germany and Sweden, which will utilize copper coils embedded under the pavement to wirelessly charge vehicles’ battery packs. The Michigan Department of Transportation will provide $1.9 million in funding toward the pilot project, Whitmer’s office said Tuesday, with Electreon contributing the remainder.
Michigan State Transportation Director Paul C. Ajegba said this week the EV charging road pilot project will help Michigan prepare for the expected uptick in EV ownership in the U.S.
“Michigan is aggressively rolling out various charging solutions and we need to continue to stay ahead of the technology curve,” Ajegba said. “A wireless in-road charging system will be revolutionary for electric vehicles, potentially extending their charge without having to stop.”
Whitmer’s office is hopeful that EV charging roadways like the one that will be tested through its inductive vehicle charging pilot program will accelerate EV adoption in the state.
“Electrified roadways have the potential to accelerate adoption of electric vehicles by consumers and fleet operations alike by enabling continuous vehicle operations and turning public streets into safe and sustainable shared energy platforms,” the Governor’s office said.
General Motors is also making significant investments in Michigan to promote EV ownership and adoption. The automaker recently announced it would build a large new Ultium battery plant in the state, which will provide battery cells to its various EV production facilities there, which include Factory Zero in Detroit-Hamtramck and Orion Assembly in Orion Township.
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Comments
They can’t even fill a pothole mist places in SE Michigan, yet they have money to waste on this.
Stupid. Losses are going to be enormous. Just stupid.
C’mon man, what’s another 25% in efficiency losses. The EPA already ignores almost all losses in their MPGe derivation for electrics. Who cares that a TESLA already gets more like 18 MPGe than 100 MPGe….the EPA will lie about the additional losses from wireless charging just like the EPA already lies about all the other losses.
Whose paying for this? Let me guess, Mr. & Mrs. Tax payer? More government waste!
Great idea in concept, but I agree with the others here. Once the roads need repairs, who will pay for the electric recharging portion? And how many roads will be charging roads? It sounds terribly expensive.
Yes, but it will be great for the economy because big pharma will profit a lot more from all the additional demand for chemo and other cancer drugs….and the hospitals will make a lot more money too.
Inductive charging is slow. You need scale for this to work. Would be better if it were say downtown or parking lots for when cars are parked for prolonged periods.
Parking lots won’t work because the vehicle is stationary. In order for the inductive process to function, the vehicle must be moving.
Naw.. inductive process is going on at the transformer can in my backyard and it just sits on the pole and hums.
There used to be a lot of ‘touchless’ chargers for the leaf and volt but they were small. Only 3,000 watts. But it was a pad in middle of garage stall and an inductive pad underneath the car. They worked but as I said earlier I wouldn’t let pets into garage when it was working since they’d be attracted to the warmth of the thing and not sure how dangerous it would be for them.
Greedy Gretchen wants to give everyone cancer….because it’s not fair that only BEV users get all that intense EMF from powerful electric motors while the ICE users get to cruise on the highways without increased cancer risk.
I wonder if these magnets will screw up on-board electronics.
Not intense enough….but they should probably test implanted health devices….not that they care much about human health when they try to force everyone to participate in their human EMF experiment.
Just ask all the fighter pilots how they like all that EMF in their pilot seats……cancer rates are through the roof. Must be their very weak immune systems that are typical of fighter pilots. The air force really should try recruiting young men with better physical health.
Implanted Pacemaker/Defibrillator patients beware !!!!!!!!!!!! Bad enough this expen$ive debacle can potentially interfere with Pacemakers by interrupting the timing of the impulses sent to the Heart but those with Defibrillator/Pacemaker combos ( my Wife has one ) could get a false signal triggering the Defibrillator which patients report is like “getting kicked by a Mule”. How’d you like to experience that while driving in Traffic ?
That’s a really good point. I have a pair of headphones and it warns to keep it away from pacemakers. If headphones can do that, what will charging roads do?
Yeah – I’ve know since I was a teenager that I’m especially sensitive to electromagnetic radiation….
I can just imagine some Cat or Dog snuggling up near the thing because – due to inefficiency, it gets warm in an otherwise cold garage..
Any warnings are no doubt given for lititgious reasons – of course – where the companies have ALREADY been given legal immunity from prosecution – there are therefore no health warnings at all…. That particular issue is what worries me, and I’m not just talking about silly 1 mile stretch of roads that have been built just so that some creepy governor can have a press conference.
Yep.
All those folks who think they’re being green by placing their pooches and kittens on the floor of their electric cars where the EMF is the most intense are passing a cancer death sentence on their pets. I researched this. It’s bad.
I asked my grandmother’s cardiologist years ago and he said he had no clue, he had never heard of any research on the issue!
I’m usually FOR this kind of thing, but I agree this sounds like a giant waste of money for the reasons cited. Fix the damned roads and bridges first!
In the past these ‘wireless’ charging systems have required BEVs to be fitted with some sort of ‘receiving’ equipment but there is no mention of that here.
Not only will this “Wireless charging Roadway” use incredible amounts of costly Copper but, unlike chargers, will suck Electricity out of the Grid 24/7. More Government madness from the left.
I’ll go ahead and put on my tin-foil conspiracy hat and suggest that half the comments that are negative about this experiment are from people paid by the oil industry, an industry that hates EVs.
Just as, in Europe, “environmentalists” that profess fear of nuclear power plants are just fine with power plants fueled by natural gas, which for them, comes from Russia. Why is natural gas, which produces carbon, more “green” than nuclear, which generates long term waste, but no carbon. (And for the nuclear waste, I expect that at some future date we’ll find a way to not only render it less toxic, but it will be in a manner that generates further electricity – we’re close to that with sodium reactors….).
Experiments are good. Be wary of comments critical of EVs and nuclear.,,,,
It is true that for home use at least, the system is ‘pulsed’ so that any substantial amount of electricity is only used when the car is actually charging.
Nuclear Power has legally very limited liability due to the Price-Anderson Act…. Without it, the insurance cost of it would be far too expensive. The big problem with Nuclear is that you can have 40 years of perfection and then one really Bad Day.
I have zero problem with Natural Gas as long as it has been obtained with traditional methods… However the ‘Fracking Boom’ is likely to end sooner rather than later, as the amount of gas so obtained is less than planned. Biden selling US LNG to China doesn’t help either. As far as ‘green house gasses’ are concerned – there are 5 times as many polar bears as there were 50 years ago, and the Arctic Ice Extent thickness has reached a recent record.
I drive 3 evs, but those Nissan Commercials about saving Polar Bears by driving a Leaf were made for idiots.
Nuclear is the most powerful global warming heater ever invented, PERIOD!
Nuclear relies 100% on heating and evaporating a liquid in order to generate electricity.
Natural gas is much less heat-intensive since most of the energy is derived from breaking chemical bonds.
Even solar generates a lot of heat.
The only two major sources of electricity that do not generate heat are wind and hydro. Hydro is an environmental disaster. If you want every greenpeace memeber and their entire family to show up and protest, tell them you want to build a hydro dam.
Got some info. for you Aceof. Natural gas is nothing but a Lobbyist’s spin-name for Methane. Methane is the most effective “warming gas” on the planet, used by nothing in nature, unlike CO2, and is anywhere between 20X and 40X more potent as a “warming gas” than CO2 depending on which study you read. On top of that, it hangs around in the atmosphere for Months doing its dirty work. Fracking allows huge amounts of un-captured, un-contained Methane to escape. just ask Residents in certain fracking areas who rely on wells for their water how their kitchen faucets can substitute for blowtorches ! It’s not only Greenpeace members that oppose Hydro but the entitled, elitist members of the Sierra Club too.
My cell phone gets hot and charges slowly when mated to the in car wireless charging so I suspect that means it is wasting energy and is not efficient charging compared to hardwire connected charging. This energy loss could be also applied to charging a car battery wirelessly – no?
Well – Super92 – I think the wireless chargers in cars are quite low power, and the phones themselves are not capable of receiving that much power wirelessly anyway – I think the maximum is about 15 watts wirelessly as compared to 9 volts @ 5 amps (45 watts) through one of those so-called ‘lightning’ chargers…..
So you might lose a few watts with the wireless charger on your center console, but the power levels are quite low – and they are only there when the phone is actually charging since the system, again, is pulsed at low power just to ‘detect’ a wireless device being placed on it prior to its being turned on full power… Easy solution there is to just use a corded charging cord while you are driving.
The “1 mile stretch” will be completed in 2023? She says that like it’s an accomplishment. At that rate it will only take a few hundred years to get the entire state completed. As a EE I can tell you that the amount of power required to charge those batteries across the gap between road subsurface and vehicle pickups cannot be accomplished through inductive charging. Maybe a trickle, but not the amount of current needed for recharging. But why let physics get in the way of Green New Dealism? Just ban physics, problem solved.
I might NOT be a “Rocket Scientist” but it sound like it would be living under “Power Lines” driving on a road with that charging ability.
Yep…or more like living under a cell tower.
Let me tell you….all those engineers and scientists that research this stuff and tell you that living under high voltage power lines and cell towers is safe would never allow their families to live anywhere close to these dangerous EMF sources. I know…because I’m an engineer….and I study this stuff. It’s bad.
If all this successfully comes off as planned it will be monumentally amazing. Autonomous electric vehicles with induction charging in a winter climate with icy black ice roadways, beyond our wildest dreams. Driverless electric, self charging, autonomous Class 8 trucks…please pinch me.
Curves and downhill sharp turns on black ice….???
Construction zones. ??? Crash sites. ???
Best wishes and good luck to Gretchen, Mary and the Secretary of Transportation.
Norway has mostly electric cars now. Ten years ago it was only 0.5% BEV.
Ten years ago the women of Norway enjoyed low cancer rates. Nowadays, the women of Norway have the highest cancer risk for lower body cancers on the planet.
No Way Norway.
Gretchen will go down as the most CARcinogenic governor of all time.