Electric cars and plug-in hybrids won’t recharge their batteries through a bulky cord. Instead, a small pad placed on the garage floor — or maybe embedded in it — will transmit energy to a receiver on the car’s undercarriage, no wires needed. Just drive over the pad, park and forget about it.
That’s the vision of WiTricity, a Boston-area startup backed by Toyota and Intel. Its technology resembles the cordless charging pads already available for smartphones and tablets, but it can transmit more power over greater distance.
Spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007, WiTricity isn’t the only company chasing this particular vision, with Qualcomm, Bosch and Evatran rolling out their own versions. WiTricity CEO Alex Gruzen argues that wireless recharging will soon become the norm, for personal electronics, medical devices and, yes, cars. The power cord’s days may be numbered.
“I’ll have it in my kitchen counter, my bedside table, probably my coffee table,” Gruzen said. “And throughout my day, I’ll be casually topping off my devices with this quick ‘energy snacking.’ The same thing will happen in the automotive space, because when you park, it’ll just charge, and you won’t be thinking about it.”
Toyota was an early investor in the company, which has raised $45 million. The world’s largest automaker plans to offer WiTricity’s technology as an option on its plug-in hybrid Prius, Gruzen said. A Toyota spokeswoman declined to confirm any specific plans to outfit the Prius with WiTricity’s gear. But the automaker announced a licensing agreement with WiTricity in 2013 and has field-tested the equipment.
Honda uses WiTricity to recharge a Fit EV at one of the auto company’s showcase “smart homes” near Tokyo. And several of the world’s largest auto-industry suppliers, including Delphi Corp. and IHI Corp., have licensed WiTricity’s technology.
Granted, consumers are still getting used to electric cars, with sales slowly growing at a time of low gasoline prices. Wireless charging would add another layer of novelty to a type of car that many Americans consider untested. But the simplicity could win converts. A study last year by the Navigant Research consulting firm concluded that annual sales of wireless electric car charging stations could reach nearly 302,000 by 2022.
“Although some in the industry remain unconvinced that wireless charging will ever be more than a small niche market, it’s clear that major automakers have concluded that this technology could be a differentiator in a crowded EV market,” said Richard Martin, Navigant’s editorial director, at the time. “Features once considered luxury items, such as power windows and automatic garage door openers, tend to spread, over time, across all vehicle segments — and that is likely to apply to wireless charging, as well.”
WiTricity’s technology uses a wire coil in its pad to create an oscillating magnetic field. That field generates an electric current in a receiving coil that either sits on the undercarriage of a car or is built into a phone or other portable device.
“It’s like the opera singer hitting a note and shattering a glass,” Gruzen said. “When you think about it, she’s moving energy over distance.”
The previous generation of electric car — General Motors’ EV1 — used something similar, with a recharging “paddle” that had to be inserted into a slot between the headlights. But WiTricity doesn’t need such close, precise placement between the energy transmitter and receiver. Just parking over the transmitter will do. While the car is elsewhere, the transmitter remains off.
Magnetic fields travel through materials, so Gruzen argues the technology could be better suited to public charging than the current crop of plug-in chargers. WiTricity’s transmitting coil can still function if it’s covered in concrete, safe from weather, vandalism and copper thieves.
Gruzen says the switch to wireless recharging, for many different devices, will follow roughly the same path as the adoption of cordless phones — once a novelty, now ubiquitous.
“I grew up when phones had cords,” he said. “I still to this day think of it as a cordless phone. But to my kids, it’s just a phone. They’ve never known phones with cords. So when we’re talking about wireless charging, I think in five years, it’ll just be charging. It’ll just be what you do.”
©2015 the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
