On the road to wireless EV charging with Electreon

Wireless EV charging might sound like a futuristic pipedream, but one company is already rolling it out beneath roads around the globe.

Tel Aviv University bus terminal looks – on the face of things – to be another, innocuous public transport depot in the city on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. But it isn’t. Nor is the all-electric bus sitting in its bay a regular piece of public transport.

Scratch around 10 centimetres beneath where the bus is parked and you’ll find a series of magnetic inductive copper coils. As for the vehicle itself, it’s retrofitted with a receiver to pick up small amounts of charge emitted from the coils via a management unit located at the station, which is connected to the national electricity grid. For as long as the bus sits atop the coils, its batteries are being topped up via the transmitter underneath the chassis.

This, then, is the world of inductive automotive charging – wireless EV charging, if you prefer – and it’s being wheeled out at an electrifyingly-fast rate by Israeli firm, Electreon.

How does wireless EV charging work?

On the face of things, inductive charging sounds difficult. Believe me, I know. I failed my physics GCSE. Twice. However, thanks to Charlie Levine, Electreon’s global strategy manager, it’s a relatively simple concept, and one that all of us with a smart device can understand.

“I think the best way to explain this is if we use our smartphones as an analogy,” she explains from Electreon’s Tel Aviv HQ. “There’s been all kinds of research done about how we should take care of our batteries, and it’s clear that best practice is to keep the state of charge within the 30% to 80% window.

“This is much better than charging from zero to 100% all the time, because it places less stress on your phone’s battery. It turns out that vehicle batteries are exactly the same. If you charge ‘little and often’ or top up frequently as opposed to one big charging session, this will benefit your battery in the long term and eliminates range anxiety.”

Electreon’s ‘little and often’ approach to vehicle charging isn’t just relegated to bus depots and logistics hubs. Nor are its activities restricted to its domestic market. It has implemented its inductive charging tech into several wERS – that’s “Wireless Electric Road System” – locations across Europe, the United States, and even Japan.

The wERS works in exactly the same way as the company’s pilot project at the Tel Aviv terminal. The same copper coils are just below the road’s surface, and they charge the vehicles passing over them via the same floor-mounted receiver.

The difference here is that the coils are placed in the road at “dead energy” locations where vehicles tend to idle, such as pedestrian crossings, intersections, and traffic lights. The technology can also be implemented at short-stop bus and taxi stances. The whole approach feeds back to Electreon’s charging philosophy of ‘little and often’, and is compared by Charlie to an “infinity loop”.

While wERS naysayers have derided Electreon’s projects as unnecessarily expensive – and at £1.6 million per mile, they don’t come cheap – the company maintains that its roads need not be introduced across an entire city. In terms of installation time, a kilometre’s worth of coils can be rolled out in one night.

“We work closely with the University of Tokyo, and their mobility and spatial studies department is saying that in a cityscape, around 2% of the roads need electrifying,” Charlie says. “That’s all that’s needed to provide somewhere between 85% to 97% of the charging requirements for all EVs on the road, and that incorporates passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, and public transport.”

She adds: “Conceptually speaking, we need to introduce these roads where it makes sense to get people to understand what they’re about, and to assure them that the technology behind them works and is 110% safe.

“When we think about deployment, it’s an evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary one. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow morning and find that all of the roads have suddenly converted into wireless electric charging roads – even if that were the case, it certainly wouldn’t be every lane.”

From trucks to Toyotas

Electreon’s approach of ‘little and often’ in contrast to fast charging has already won itself a fan in the Swedish government. Using HGVs fitted with three 35kW receivers, it found that an electric road stretching from 155 to 186 miles in length could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 200,000 tonnes.

Moreover, Charlie adds that Sweden was the original adopter of its technologies around a decade ago.

“Sweden’s a really interesting case, because they were very early adopters of the electric road idea about 10 years back,” she recalls. “In fact, I’d say that it was one of the first countries to pick up on the topic.

“Then I would say that the baton has been passed to other countries in Europe and across several states in the US. In terms of commercialisation, though, we’re seeing a lot of activity at home in Israel, but that’s simply because it’s a very small market, and all of the transport operators speak to each other.

“In a city called Rosh HaAyin not far from Tel Aviv, we successfully completed a project that involved wirelessly charging 30 buses at one time. That was the world’s largest wirelessly charged fleet project, and it wasn’t dissimilar to the one we did in Tel Aviv; albeit on a much bigger scale.”

And the Electreon success story isn’t just relegated to infrastructure and commercial transport. In recent years, it has received the attention of 15 car manufacturers to integrate Electreon’s retrofitted receivers into the construction of their electrified vehicles. These OEMs include Toyota, Stellantis, Volkswagen Group and Iveco.

“Obviously I can’t elaborate too much about the different stages we’re at with various carmakers, but I can confirm that we’re in a collaborative partnership with Toyota and their main supplier, Denso, to make our receivers an integrated part of the car,” Charlie continues.

In 2023, a Toyota RAV4 retrofitted with an Electreon system completed a five-day, 1,207-mile, non-stop drive on the company’s Tel Aviv test track, which was just 25% electrified. Electreon says that the biggest difficulty it faced was swapping over drivers when required, not the fear of running out of battery.

As Electreon strengthens its partnerships with OEMs and is on the cusp of wheeling out a new wERS, a two-kilometre stretch on the A10 southwest of Paris, Charlie is keen to stress that the company’s emphasis on simplicity won’t change, especially in terms of pricing.

While she won’t be drawn into pricing for the integrated transmitter, she once again draws a comparison with mobile phones.

“We imagine the system working very similarly to mobile roaming or EV charging today,” she concludes. “We see the transmitter as being able to seamlessly switch between our existing wERS networks. It’s like when you go abroad and your phone goes 5G, 4G, or no G at all.

“What’s more, our stationary wireless charging system won’t stop you from using plug-in charging on your vehicle at all. At the end of the day, you’ll be charged for what you’ve used and that’s it.”