Electric Cars and Wireless Recharging

One of the problems with electric cars, although they are more ecofriendly than petrol or diesel powered cars is the inconvenience of having to recharge them. Currently, anyone with an electric car needs too physically plug the car in to recharging points by the roadside, which look a bit like parking meters, or to plug into recharging points at home. As anyone with a mobile phone will know – sometimes you just forget to charge it up, even though you use it every day. With a phone, that means you don’t get to make calls, but if you forget to recharge your car up, you could end up stranded and out of power.

There is an apparently recognised problem in drivers of electric cars such as the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, the G-Wiz and the Nissan Leaf, called charge anxiety. Charging the car up becomes one of those tasks that drivers hate having to do, but the consequences of not charging preys on their mind a lot of the time.

Remote, Wireless Recharging

Manufacturers realise that this problem is likely to make electric cars less appealing to motorists, and probably impedes the take up of the electric car into the mass market. So, they have come up with an ingenious solution – cars that are capable of automatic recharging. This is done wirelessly and just involves parking a car with receiver pads on its underside, over a transmitter pad. Charging starts automatically, without the driver having to do anything.

This would be particularly convenient for charging an electric car at home – transmitter pads could be fitted into the garage floor, and just putting the car away in the garage would mean that it was fully charged and ready to go. Drivers of electric cars would then have an easier system of refuelling compared to petrol and diesel cars, which should significantly improve their appeal.

How Does Wireless Recharging Work?

Electric cars that have been developed to recharge automatically and wirelessly can do so because of a process called inductive charging. This can be very efficient, even when the transmitter pads are buried under the surface of the road, or within the garage floor. The process also has the potential to recharge the car much more quickly than by physically plugging in to recharging points.

Successful Trials

Some wireless charging systems have already reached an advanced stage of development, although they are only really in use in the USA, New Zealand, Italy, France and Germany. No automatic wireless recharging points exist yet in the UK. In Milan and New Zealand, trials of automatic recharging have been done in electric-powered buses and have worked very well.

The UK government is embarking on a scheme to subsidies electric cars in 2011, knocking £5000 off the price of each one, to try to boost uptake. Manufacturers and developers of the wireless systems are looking hard at the UK electric car market and the technology is very likely to become available in the near future, to attract more people to the idea of owning an electric car.

The Future For Electric Cars

If it were possible to charge an electric car at home using the wireless system, that would be great but without recharging facilities elsewhere, electric cars are still going to be held back by their short range. Most models can now travel 100 miles before they need refuelling, but if the only recharging point is at home, that limits people to travelling only 50 miles before returning.

In the future, it has been suggested that entire stretches of road could be fitted with transmitter pads to allow wireless recharging. This is likely to cost billions but it would extend the range of electric cars infinitely. If your car was recharged as your drove around, and enough roads were fitted with transmitter pads, electric cars would have another distinct advantage of traditional vehicles powered by fossil fuels.