Porsche demonstrates inductive EV charging at IAA | Hacker News Reader

Porsche demonstrates inductive EV charging at IAA

newsroom.porsche.com

28 pointssizzle41 comments

Sitting in the passenger seat of the wife's Macan 4S EV right now. Installed 11.2KW charging for it. Had to stop at a super charger for 15 minutes as we had to take an unexpected long trip today and she never plugs it in until the car is at 30%. I would 100% install this in the floor. You park in the garage and it charges. It is perfect.

To you what is the downside of lifting a cord and plugging it in, in essentially one motion, that is a bad enough downside that it justifies spending $8,000?

$8000 is nothing. You see what a Porsche EV costs?

The real problem is the power loss, which is fine for rich people doing personal installs in their home, but probably rules this out for high-volume charging services. I’m just not sure how big the “rich people personal installs” market is.

Not only that, but this requires object detection and the car suspension has to drop to (nearly) meet it, which seems like it’s enough work that automated contact charging can’t be wildly more difficult.

their site says it’s 90% efficient [0], which is impressive, but I agree, still sub-optimal for large scale installations.

The other thing is that it needs to be perfectly aligned. If you can’t be bothered to plug in a cable, can you be bothered to align your SUV in your garage perfectly with a charge pad?

[0] https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2025/products/porsche-wirele...

Sure, and they charge you individually for each little thing you want on it. But that doesn't mean $8000 is nothing.

The cost comparison should be with a plug that delivers 11kw. That’s going to be a lot more than zero dollars.

Nah. A single good 220 outlet is sufficient for keeping three actively used EVs well charged at home. We use a middle range one (40 amp, not 50) and it supports three cars easily. With 50 amp it would be even easier. Most houses come with these already installed.

Hell, a single good 110 outlet ("good" meaning higher amp, like a kitchen or garage outlet) is sufficient for keeping two actively used EVs well charged at home if Superchargers are available as a backup.

I’m in New Zealand and the average power point is 10 amp (240v). I haven’t realised how high the current is on US outlets.

>she never plugs it in until the car is at 30%

Sounds like the root cause is not technical at all. Why can she not just plug it in when she gets home?

So upselling a supposedly “green” product by throwing away a sizable portion of energy while charging it.

What a world we live in.

Does anyone still believe EVs are here to save the world from climate change?

Their sole purpose is to save the auto industry.

There are pretty clean combustible sources out there or even alternative electrical sources out there, but somehow humanity has gone with big, heavy, rare mineral hungry batteries.

What's the deal against hydrogen? Toyota made a car that made it to market, it can't be that dangerous if it was sold in certain regions with extensive safety testing procedures. I know the problem is getting hydrogen at the pump station but other fully battery dependent cars have had that same issue before.

I'm sure hydrogen has other problems (conversion efficiency?) but what about ethanol? Better than gasoline, no? At least 40% less greenhouse gases out of the tail pipe, and its production is pretty mild for the environment compared to batteries. It wouldn't make cars that much more complicated either, and you could "easily" convert your ICE car. Of course, at the scale we are talking about the gains would be way lower given a 5 year timespan vs batteries

Hell, there are others.

Such a weird set of events dictating the future of cars ngl, some of the alternatives may have had come sooner if someone focused there (I know Brazil has some minimum ethanol requirement that seems like a good idea while transitioning).

Clean hydrogen begins with electricity and then loses a vast amount of energy in the conversion process. Also it’s extremely pressurized and/or cryogenic, and one of the most difficult molecules to store. If there was a process for converting electricity to ethanol and burning it that was more efficient than batteries, we’d be using it instead of batteries. Other sources like corn-based ethanol have their own problems that have been pretty extensively covered elsewhere. In fact, all of this stuff has been covered elsewhere and great answers are available with a search.

Man you see this crap pop up on here so many times I'm almost starting to wonder whether car industry shills are just trying so sow seeds of doubt with misinformation.. haven't we agreed by now that the only future we should strive for is one that can plausibly be made completely emmissionless...? All options you list either still have emmissions associated with them or are so hilariously inefficient that we would need to blanket half the globe with PV panels to power everything. All alternatives have been extensively explored and the only and most efficient way to power cars in an emmissionless way turned out to be a battery electric drivetrain. There is a reason all the options you list didn't take off.

Batteries don't dump half their capacity overnight because they're filled with the gas that doesn't want to be contained.

But a 1 Ton full battery is the same with a 1 aton empty battery.

Surprised to see this dumb of a take on HN. How exactly are they saving the auto industry? And yes they are obviously better for the environment. Are you just being conspiratorial for the sake of it or do you actually think this?

It's apparently 90% efficient (which I believe - it can't be too inefficient otherwise it would generate too much heat to be usable).

A 10% efficiency drop takes electric cars from "much greener than ICE cars" to "still much greener than ICE cars".

In fact if this tech encourages 11% more people to buy electric cars then it might be more green overall. So take your poorly thought through naysaying elsewhere.

A device that only makes sense in extraordinarily high-end cars with an expensive adjustable suspension probably isn’t going to move the needle that much. If you’re doing object detection and moving the car, why not go a little farther and move a plug into a physical port on the base of the car, so you don’t need the car to move to the charger.

> with an expensive adjustable suspension

It seems weird they took that approach vs having the box extend upwards when it detects that it should. Seems a lot simpler and cheaper.

It likely already had the active suspension anyway.

> why not go a little farther and move a plug into a physical port on the base of the car

Because that is not "a little farther", it's vastly more complicated. And also because the charging mat is flat, not some box in the middle of your garage.

This is clearly a better solution overall (for people who are too lazy to plug in a plug themselves).

well, in this case it means you got extra 1.2 kW heater in your garage. and this is considering standard "slow charging" in ev world.

this amount of extra heat would probably need in car AC to kick in draining probably another 500W

I thought induction has big losses and heat generation?

It does. And very tight alignment requirements.

But for a premium carmaker the simple solution of “plug in” isn’t good enough when they have to justify the price tag.

Working at this scale and price tag, it seems like it would be easier to install a small robot arm in the floor to do it. Or a setup like a 3-axis milling machine, just to align with a port on the bottom and plug it in.

I guess that doesn't have the sexy Nikola Tesla factor.

Right! a robot arm with some sort of magnetic alignment like we have on MagSafe would go pretty far.

I wonder about unexpected side-effects of inductive charging.

Less efficiency is one thing.

But what about the magnetic fields? I notice some EVs have pacemaker warnings due to the magnetic fields. Would this be a similar situatuon? And would it erase the mag strip on your credit cards?

While it's neat, it's not that fast (same speed as a 60A Level 2 charger). The advancement we really need is hot swappable (and affordable) spares.

11 kW is just fine - it means the car will be fully charged every morning after an evening in the garage, and wireless means you'll never forget to plug it in.

I don't disagree. My EV charger is even slower (only 30A), and it's more than enough. It also only cost $250 and uses a standard 220V plug in my garage. I suspect the Porsche solution is much, much more expensive.

Taking five seconds to plug in isn't a big deal to me. However, my wife (with her own separate EV) does often forget, and it's a bit maddening at times. Of course, we have a long enough cord that we can park in different places and always charge, so a wireless charger wouldn't fix the problem if we had to switch around to use it.

This is an absolute waste of weight and nothing more than a presser tech demonstrator.

Given induction's fundamental (physics) limitations, there's zero chance this will make it into a production vehicle.

The energy storage requirements and practical charging speed of a car are not remotely the same as for a portable electronic device such as a phone.

Human passenger EV charging will always be through a direct cable connection.

If you want something even faster, just do an automated physical battery swap and design the car's physical safety envelope and grounding systems around this additional access affordance.

> There's zero chance this will make it into a production vehicle

Wireless charging is in production. Here's one example:

https://electrifynews.com/news/auto/enc-electric-bus-now-fea...

Wireless charging can be as efficient as wired charging:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1gaNO9nj0

https://www.pcmag.com/news/wireless-ev-charging-tests-achiev...

This type of design (polyphase) is inherently even harder to align to achieve that level of efficiency, and misalignment throws the efficiency downward even faster than a simple coil. Wish I could link the research but it is behind a paywall. But a simple search on scopus and the like should suffice.

Of course, you could have some driver aid informing them how to better align themselves. But still, you will always waste energy in practice, and at the scale of automobiles out there it becomes unreasonable, no?

No. If you're capable of aligning your car to a parking space, you're capable of using wireless charging.

CAR! Not bus. Apples vs Oranges.

Also, that "efficiency" measurement is not overall Pout/Pin. It's merely measure of charging speed and they do touch on that mentioning the lack of a "break-out box" etc. to determine the actual numbers.

One can absolutely achieve the same charging speed with induction charging, but with a much higher power input and at a greatly reduced vehicle efficiency due to the much higher on-vehicle mass dedicated to charging the battery.

This is also a bit of rigged game as they're using the oldest wired-charging infrastructure against the latest wireless. They do touch on that. The older wired standard has a much lower power-factor duty-cycle.

That said, it, otherwise, was a good test as they also took into consideration ambient temperature and battery heater.

> Given induction's fundamental (physics) limitations, there's zero chance this will make it into a production vehicle.

> Human passenger EV charging will always be through a direct cable connection.

Induction charging made it into production vehicles in the past [1], so always is a little bit too strong.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magne_Charge

You're correct. I should've worded as mass-production.

I don't quite see the appeal.

I think it would be more interesting to have some kind of robot-type mechanism to make the car connect itself to the charger.

Charging has just got "reasonably" short at maybe 15-30 minutes and with inductive charging the charging industry goes back 5 years in term of time needed to charge.

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