Porsche puts wireless EV charging into production
electrek.co
electrek.co
That’s a some 9kW lost on a 80kW battery. I get the convenience, but I think the best use for those would be when standardized and installed in public parking spots, for a brief charge bump, not to charge fully at home, e.g overnight, which is what Porsche aims for.
It's about the same as wired AC charging. There are always charging losses:
https://insideevs.com/features/711659/ev-charger-efficiency-...
It is "up to 90%"
We all know what this means in reality.
90% is pretty good efficiency at this level of power. One cannot give an exact figure because it depends heavily on environmental factors, primarily temperature. 90% is pretty much exactly what I'd expect to see in the real world under same conditions.
Right there. You've restated the problem. "up to 90%" is nothing guaranteed. If the suspension does not lower, you're not getting 90%. If the charger is covered in dirt, you're not getting 90%. If nothing is guaranteed, I'm scared to volunteer.
If a pet, person, or metal object gets between the pads, the system supposedly stops working so nothing overheats.
So, it might get a cat yelled at ^_^
Then you don’t, unfortunately.
> 90% is pretty good efficiency at this level of power
Too good. That’s what they’re saying.
For instance they claim a 0-60 time of 2.4s for this car. Car & Driver independently tested it and achieved 2.1s. They also claim 298 miles of EPA range (mixed highway & city driving). Car & Driver worked out 300 miles at a constant 75 mph (which is harder on an EV than city driving.) On the base model, which claims 303 miles range, MotorTrend achieved 350 miles of pure highway driving.
Pick any Porsche and you'll see that they lie to make things sound worse than they really are.
*kWh
Using the right units is important.
I don't understand the mention about battery capacity (80 kWh, which would translate to around 7½ hours of charging at 11 kW, if a battery could charge at a uniform rate) or where the "9 kW lost" figure comes from.
*Which is probably useful to melt snow above the device, when installed outdoors on cold climates.
This would cost $0.15 to $0.20 per average trip to NOT plug in.
Average person spending $100k on a car would likely pay that without a second thought.
I drive a more efficient PHEV and spend much more than $1.50/day.
> I drive a more efficient PHEV and spend much more than $1.50/day.
Cool story bro. I drive a more efficient EV and spend less than $1.50/day. Isn't it fun to share anecdotes?
...obviously never productionized.
They were claiming that they’d gotten the losses down to 2x the wall to battery losses of wired chargers, by removing the transformer in the charger and handling the voltage conversion in the coils.
Also you’re prematurely optimizing. By comparing wireless charging to wired instead wireless to internal combustion. If we did things your way it would reduce the rate of electrification of the market. So calm down.
The way my house is set up I can only get power from the passenger side of my car and almost twenty feet away. There’s no EV I’m interested in that can b charged from that side. They tend to put them on the driver’s side to keep you from driving off while still plugged in. Wireless has no plugin. Which would also simplify public charging stations.
Wouldn't an overnight (usually cheaper) 10+ hour charge be a great use for (slow) 11 kW charging?
(Some of this becomes clearer when you have a feeling for the units: kW is a measurement of power, not energy)
Seemingly not.
Plus you just got home. You probably want to go inside and may be carrying packages or such, which you might have to juggle or put down to get the cable and plug in.
When it’s time to leave you have to unplug and then store the cable, leave it on the floor (trip hazard for others), or have installed an overhead cable system.
With wireless it’s all gone. Pull into you’re garage? You’re done. You were doing that anyway, so it’s no different. Ready to leave? Just back out. Again, same thing. Nothing extra.
Yeah it’s convenience. But it’s not a small win, it’s big. And it’s every time you use your car. Twice.
Your car can always charge. It can always precondition. You used to have to go to gas stations, now you don’t even have to plug in. It’s fully automatic and taken care of for you.
“You don’t need a remote. You can just get up to change the volume”. How well did that argument go over? Every TV has remotes. Buttons are hidden and effectively dead.
The losses from this charger are nearly the same as the losses from a wired charger.
Applying a little common sense with experiences of other wireless chargers, its most likely just the losses of the wireless charging solution.
Just laziness / not necessary for my commute. However, my understanding is that keeping the battery around 80% is better for lifespan. So, the convenience will actually result in longer lasting batteries?
AI;DR
Yet, the five seconds you save by not plugging in a USB cable have led to charging coils being added to nearly every phone to the market these days.
It's a flashy convenience feature, but this is Porsche we're talking about. People interested in buying these cars are all about flashy features without any practical use, because if they wanted a practical car, they wouldn't be buying a Porsche.
I cannot afford the Cayenne, but once this gets to cheaper models this will be an option I would be willing to pay for.
Yet I can see the advantages for someone with a disability.
And what a lot don't seem to understand: at 11kW we aren't talking about high charging efficiency anyway. Meaning, you cannot assume close to 100% for cable based charging and talk about how much 90% loose on a full battery (like others here do).
I also have a lot of trouble believing in the scenario of a neighborhood that has an automated charging station for EVs but no grid. That seems like very misplaced priorities.
You can kind of just leave them exposed and live.
None of that applies to a 220V, 50A (or whatever amperage) charging. That can absolutely kill somebody; jet fuel may not melt steel beams, but 11,000W sure will.
You’d end up needing some kind of recess probably, and then getting cars to connect to it like planes refueling mid-flight is a nightmare. You could try some sort of USB-C like signaling before power is sent, but people are never going to enjoy “exposed 220V contacts that may or may not be live depending on if things malfunctioned”.
Planes refueling mid flight is hardly an apt metaphor given the charging station isn’t moving at all and the car can move as slowly as needed.
Surely getting something to autonomously without fail extend an arm and plug in for the lifespan of these vehicles vs just park in this allocated spot you would park in anyway is an obvious tradeoff.
I also frankly do not believe the 90% efficiency claim because it seems so much higher than any other wireless charging I’ve heard of.
This seems like one of those things that seems cool but is not generally practical. As a convenience for wealthy Porsche EV owners, sure. As a general purpose charging solution? I doubt it.
Starting a fire, maybe, cooking an animal, extremely not likely.
Turn on an induction stove to max. Put your hand on it. Did it burn your hand? No. Put a ferrous pan on it. Suddenly, really hot.
Same concept happening here. A 36" induction stove top is likely putting out about the same inductive power. If the risk of being over the pad while it operated was enough to burn someone, so would cooking food on an induction stove.
If you put a chicken breast in a microwave oven and turn it on, it will rapidly cook. If you stand next to a radio antenna emitting hundreds of watts you can potentially get burns. These things use electromagnetic radio fields (E + H) to blast energy out, and those fields can stably radiate out on their own.
Inductive cooking and charging is radically different. If you put a chicken breast directly on an induction cooktop and turn the cooktop on, nothing happens. The unit doesn't even really increase its energy usage, because there is no load. This is because this energy transfer is relying on just the magnetic fields (H). It relies a lot on the target being harmonically in tune, and the other side needs to actually be conductive and at least somewhat magnetic. Non-magnetic materials don't couple with these magnetic fields. This is why some pans (like aluminum and copper) "don't work" with induction cooktops.
So if a cat did climb on the charging pad, maybe some parts of the collar would energize and heat up.
If animals were significantly affected by things like wireless charging pads or inductive cooktops we wouldn't be able to survive MRIs.
Regardless, your MRI comparison is very apt. MRIs use similar amounts of energy for scanning and do sometimes cause burns. But no one seems to be getting cooked.
> that the transfer is via electromagnetic waves.
An induction charger doesn't transmit its energy through electromagnetic waves. That's what I'm saying. It's inducing a current through magnetic fields. Its a very different process. If the material isn't magnetic it doesn't react. Which is why a steel pan heats up very rapidly while your hand is cool, why an induction stove doesn't use much electricity at all when there isn't a pan on it to heat. If it worked by emitting RF, it would have the same power output regardless of the pan type. Which is like your microwave, if the magnetron is energized it's putting out 1,000W regardless of what you have in there.
A radio is emitting its power regardless of if there's an antenna on the other side tuned to receive it. If there's nothing on the other side of the inductive charger, there's no load, there's no power usage. You need something able to receive the power to actually transmit the power. With that something being how well it reacts to magnetic fields.
So while I buy the distinction between magnetic coupling and propagating EM waves, it seems that there is some risk.
Maybe at 11kW+ of effective power delivery these fields are enough to actually make eddy currents in your blood enough to cause damage. There's a decent chance it could cause neurological disruptions while in the field. But once again, its really not the same kind of thing as RF radiation emissions, and how these things will affect you is pretty different in the end.
Those two things really aren't comparably difficult. Eg in the dumbest case for pads, you could make the pads slightly smaller than axle diameter (to prevent dead shorts) and have the car randomly jostle around the space until it detects current flow. I've seen some amateur systems that work vaguely like this. Some signal that charging is nearby, and then a semi-random search to find exposed contacts.
That's not going to cut it on a recessed outlet. Your odds of hitting it randomly are tiny, and it will probably the damage the port with enough repetitions of ramming it into the floor.
> Planes refueling mid flight is hardly an apt metaphor given the charging station isn’t moving at all and the car can move as slowly as needed.
Change your reference point to the plane carrying the fuel and they get an awful lot closer. The planes are moving a lot relative to the ground, they're moving very little relative to each other. I'm not sure if you've watched them doing it, but relative to each other it's actually a very slow process.
Why would it be random? The scenario here is self driving cars. Suddenly we are talking about random jostling instead of actually targeting.
> Change your reference point to the plane carrying the fuel and they get an awful lot closer. The planes are moving a lot relative to the ground, they're moving very little relative to each other. I'm not sure if you've watched them doing it, but relative to each other it's actually a very slow process.
What is your point here? I’m totally lost. You seem to be trying to hand-wave away the difficulty of refueling mid flight. The specific difficulty there is the fact that it’s happening at high velocity, not the difficulty of plugging a hose into a port. (Traditional mid air refueling is manually directed anyway.)
You are probably fully capable of fueling your car at a self serve gas station. Try doing the same at highway speed. Just reach out the window of the vehicle you are in and fill up your friend’s car from a gas can. Should be easy since the cars are “moving very little relative to each other”, right?
This thread is full of people trying to invent problem to a solution.
The 3D rendered video of a car driving over the pad doesn’t really show anything unlocked. There are a lot of possible ways to build automated charging stations. This is not necessary tech for that scenario.
Damaged equipment >> time savings
Step reduction >> time savings
Welcome to capitalism.
https://carnewschina.com/2026/06/13/xiaomi-unveils-home-char...
I’ve seen similar issues with multiple watch chargers. “Oh, it didn’t charge overnight again.”
I’m not as sold on wireless charging as I once was.
Also adding in sentry mode and dashcam support to all Porsches would be some basic security need when it already contains great cameras.
Charging at home is already supere easy, that's never the part when I advise other people against owning an EV when they are asking me about it.
Telsa's are capable of both self-park and summon, but neither of these can charge the car without manual intervention.
This is why you can't just let the car go in or come out of your garage at home, no charging.
I could see it for restaurants or malls.
(they have a solution for this for the cybercab, but it has a port in a different place and is not wireless)
> Charging is automatically paused if a person or animal enters the area, or if a metallic object is detected and begins to overheat.
https://dealer.porsche.com/gb/porschecentresouthlakes/en-GB/...
1. Losses remain very high for daily use.
2. Nobody is going to spend to install these propriety chargers except for millionaires that don't care about the costs.
This isn't a luxury charger; it is an exotic charger.
2. Nobody is going to buy these cars except for millionaires (and delusional credit-hounds), so that's not a problem either.
It might not work for you, and that's cool, but for someone spending that much on a car it's just a small percentage increase in lease payments. And on the Porsche they might have spent as much on a custom colour as on this item.
It's about the same as wired AC charging:
https://insideevs.com/features/711659/ev-charger-efficiency-...