20
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Tesla confirms wireless inductive electric car home charger is coming
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- Authors
- Fred Lambert, Jameson Dow, David Ruddock, Peter Johnson
- Published
- Dec 18 2023
- Word count
- 445 words
This sounds downright awful? I know it’s what people want but it’s such a loss of efficiency. It’s going to spike power usage even more
Is it what people want? I drive a Tesla. I have never thought "I need to find something more convenient than plugging this in." It's already great to have a full battery every day. I don't know anyone who wants this.
I think this is just for self-driving cars and crazy people.
Self-driving cars are accurate enough to park the car on a battery-swapping machine, there's no reason you couldn't design a floorplate in a humans-not-allowed space that creates an electric connection for charging.
Then again, this is Tesla's self driving tech we're talking about.......
I totally agree, but that wouldn't be for people and owners. And yeah, we are still years away from true self driving but I guess it makes sense to think about solutions.
Yes. People constantly want convenience. The more you give, the better. Everyone who currently owns a tesla would still be considered an "early adopter" given the % of electric cars on the road vs normal cars. Early adopters, by their very nature, are not the target market. It's everyone who hasn't adopted.
Obviously some % of this is just production chokepoints, but at the end of the day the VAAAST majority of potential car owners will want anything that makes their life easier, and tesla will want to say "oh yeah just park your car, don't even hook it up!".
In short it's a lot like microphone jacks.
I think the potentially 60 price increase over just plugging it in is going to be a huge turn off to most people. And that's if the induction antennas are directly against each other, which I doubt will be the case here. Maybe they could squeeze a little more out with a phased array setup (and come to think of it, this is likely as this is exactly the kind of tech used in the Starlink dishes), but I have no doubt that your electric bill will see a significant increase of you choose to go with this setup.
Most people who can afford brand new electric cars don't care about 20-30 extra bucks a month on electricity.
Maybe they won't care about the additional cost... but I assume most people who own electric vehicles at least somewhat care about the environment, and reducing their environmental impact, otherwise they would have just bought an ICE vehicle. And so if they were made aware of how much energy is wasted by these chargers, many would probably be turned off by that, and far less inclined to buy one regardless of how small the additional cost per charge is.
It's one thing to charge your phone less efficiently, and ignore that for the sake of convenience, but a car requires far more juice and has far more impact. The problem is, I doubt Tesla is going to mention that problem to anyone, precisely because of that risk of turning off portions of their customer base.
I'm not arguing it's a good thing, but given the average Tesla owner in my area, most of them just bought the car because it's fancy and fun. They don't give 2 shits about the environment. (Or they have solar and Tesla power wallls installed on their homes which makes the increased usage less of an issue)
Haha, my experience with EV owners is they fall in a somewhat bimodal distribution. On one side its what you describe. On the other end its these folks that will bend over backwards and then some for a free charge. This latter group is 100pc not interested in induction.
And again, you're thinking about current adopters who care or pay attention to that.
Musks goal is to be selling these to the same guys who currently screw with their engine so it shoots out smoke, and everyone in between. The goal is to be McDonalds, not a 5 star restaurant.
McDonald's is cheap, though. Those people will care about the electricity cost difference due to the less efficient charging more than they will about having to plug their car in. Only someone with pretty obscene wealth wouldn't care about a potentially huge increase in the cost of charging the car.
I understand that in theory, but in practise I cannot imagine people preferring to redo their driveway and add a part to their vehicle when they can plug in a cable in very similar fashion to pumping gas.
You already need an expensive at home charger for most of these and if it catches on new construction will just come with it.
Further this will start to be used at recharging stations in some situations
What do you imagine the use-case for this to be at recharging stations? I assume you mean in public places, by highways and such. I’m struggling to conceive of anything.
As far as I can tell, the biggest issue with EV charging in public is the amount of time it takes (and the lack of stations). I don’t see how this technology would address either pain point considering its inefficiency and its expensive installation requirements.
Less stuff to damage. People can't unlkug your car.
You can also package it with other operations. Come to our store/theater/whatever And shop while your car charges by just being in our parking lot
Meh, that already happens with regular level 2 chargers. In that respect wireless provides no additional benefit.
Expensive? It cost me $700 to have an electrician run the wiring and install the plug. I imagine having something installed in the driveway and the bottom of your car (I only know of one supercar that is currently able to wirelessly charge) would be significantly more expensive while also being less efficient meaning I am paying more to charge at home. It doesn't seem more convenient and it would cost more.
With phones the estimate I see thrown around is that wireless charging wastes 30% of the power. If you're charging your phone that's whatever; if you're charging your car then that's a lot of wasted electricity and a lot of waste heat.
I never found plugging in my car to be an inconvenience when I had an EV.
Wireless EV charging apparently can be very efficient: https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-demonstrates-120-kilowatt-wireless-charging-vehicles, https://witricity.com/newsroom/blog/what-is-efficiency-how-do-you-measure-it-and-why-should-you-care/.
I don't know why it's different than wireless phone charging, my only guess is that phones have to use very cheap components because nobody will pay a big premium for wireless charging, and they are also very space-constrained.
The power electronics could be cheap stuff, and I also imagine the magnetic transmission between the loops doesn't need to be super efficient. I know in cooking applications, "wireless charging" (aka induction) is the most efficient, at >95% iirc. (That's grid-to-water efficiency, so includes losses from e.g. the pot getting hot) That's the case when you have a flat coil right next to the induction target. Now of course the target is a slab, not a coil, so if you do coil-to-coil induction, you might need to do some work aligning the two coils or something, not sure. I'm not sure what exactly determines the efficiency of wireless charging, whether it's inefficient electronics or some inefficiencies in transporting the magnetic field, but purely electrical systems can be extremely efficient.
In the case of induction burners, the desired product is heat. A resistive burner is also 100% efficient at converting electricity to heat...it's just that a lot of that heat radiates out into the rest of the environment instead of on the pot/pan.
And basically, since you're talking about switching from a (properly gauged) cable that has essentially 0 loss to something that has significant loss, it's a huge extra burden of electricity.
Edit: Looking at the other article posted in more detail, it seems that due to the nature of charging batteries, the losses are about the same, but in a different place. Leaving the rest of the post as-is, because it is a (IMHO) half-decent layperson dive into the world of how small efficiency losses/gains pay dividends. This example still applies if the difference is between cheap chargers at 89% efficiency and good chargers at 94%. My home examples in particular are very relevant: We lose significant portions of our electricity because it can take 5-10 years to make up the cost difference from installing thicker wires. But wires will easily last 100 years.
Electricity diminishes as it travels over wires, it's a function of voltage, wire gauge, and distance. For a homeowner, if there's a 50ft run of 220V cable, if it's at the minimum AWG to code, it's seeing about 3% line loss. Upping to the next thickness of wire costs about $100, but reduces that line loss to 1% or less.
For something like a heat pump, or electric heater that will run for several hours a day good portion of the year, the difference in wire cost is fully compensated for inside of 5 years. For stuff that only runs a few hours a week, it might take 10. But wires in walls can easily last 100 years.
So what we're talking about, is transforming a basic wire run that (if properly accounted for in install) has virtually 0 loss, to something that is going to have on the order of 5% or more, possibly more due to user error.
If this becomes "The default" for electric charging, you'll need to increase electricity production 5% more than you'll need to anyway for the electric cars. That's about 5 extra KWh needed per-Tesla, per charge. So if that is propagated across the USA, 150 million households...that requires an extra 750GWh of electricity produced for the convenience of wireless charging, per charge. Average American drives 12k miles a year. Say a Tesla gets 400 mile range, 30 full charges per year. So total extra annual generation needed is 22.5 TWh. At $0.09/kwh, that's $2 Billion in wasted generation. That's about the annual energy production Brown's Ferry, one of the largest nuclear plants in the USA.
All so people don't have to plug in a wire. #progress
Well TIL, thanks for the links. That really changes the discussion.
One could argue it’s not even irrelevant in phones: there’s probably a few billion mobile phones globally, and most are probably charged multiple times per week, if not daily. Say at around an average 15W (not sure if conservative or too high?) for two hours, every other day.
Using your figure of one third gone to heat/wasted power, that’d mean if all… three? billion phones were to charge wirelessly every time, humanity would waste 15 million kWh every single day, or about a full year worth of 4,000 average European households’ electricity needs. Again, per day. Not sure if we could or should afford to do that at the moment.
(OT: And all that only for not needing to plug the cable in and yet still having the phone remain tethered to the charging platform.)
So in cars it’ll be definitely way worse due to the increased energy consumption/higher charging times. I really hope this never makes it into mainstream meaningfully.
For scale, measured against your 15W figure, a single Tesla will charge at 150-250 kW. A third of 150kW is 50kW, per car. There are well over a billion cars in use in the world. If they were all EVs wasting 50kW for wireless charging, using the same two hours every other day figure, that's 50 billion kWh per day.
The average US household uses around 30kWh per day, which I believe is a bit higher than the norm for other developed nations. (I seem to recall seeing 18kWh for the UK once, but Google isn't being helpful right now).
A billion cars wasting 50kWh per day would mean more than doubling our current global residential energy capacity just to deal with that waste.
We're already in for a long, hard path to increasing capacity to deal with vehicles going electric to begin with (while also having the issue of most generation still involving C02 emissions). That much waste, because people can't be bothered to insert a plug, is unconscionable.
Why would all those cars be charging 50 kWh per day? My car charges maybe 10 kWh per weekday. I know many people commute farther than I do, but you're estimating like 100+ miles of driving every single day. That's 36,500 miles a year. I'm not saying the end result wouldn't still be huge (but I also think it's hugely unrealistic to expect all EV charging everywhere across the world to be wireless, especially with current efficiency levels), but I don't understand why you just took the wasted wattage and multiplied it by an hour.
It's also odd that you chose the supercharging speed when I assume you're talking about home charging (current speeds don't even get up to 12 kWh even with cables), and especially because the wattage doesn't matter because it gets canceled out. All that matters is how much the car needs to charge. For my car charging 10 kWh per day that I go in to work, if it wasted a third, it will waste 5 kWh regardless of if it's charging at the 110 V charger speed of 2 kW or if the power of the Sun is piped directly into the battery at 328 yottawatts.
Also, links in the comment below this one show that Oak Ridge achieved 97% efficiency at 120 kW.
And before anybody gets stupidly pedantic with me...
I know the charger is technically in the car. Nobody cares.
My understanding was it was more like 60% waste, and that's with the antennas being placed directly on top of each other with barely a few millimeters of plastic between them.
60% is probably for specific use cases like a battery powered wireless charger.
Does anyone else get the sense that Tesla’s main marketing strategy is essentially rage-bait? Like there’s an algorithm running somewhere that says as long as people are talking about it their share values will go up?
It wouldn't surprise me if we got actual confirmation on that. As the saying goes, "there is no such thing as bad exposure".
What is the angle here? That home EV charging is too difficult? If you have a garage that lets you install a wireless charger, you are obviously in a position to charge the vehicle with a cable. What garage has electricity but no power outlets?
If there were some way for wireless charging to contribute to the EV charging network outside of private homes, that might be cool. But I can’t really think of a situation where you would park an EV and it would be possible to charge inductively but not with a cable.
If this is a purely luxury thing, then whatever. I doubt most consumers would go for the installation and I doubt it would meaningfully change residential electricity use. It seems pointless to consumers and expensive for Tesla to develop.
Most likely targeting future self driving taxi hubs / shared swarms of cars etc that can go park and charge themselves when needed.
Will be available as a pure luxury for Tesla owners first, probably combined with improved summon / parking that can control car port and park / charge / pick you up on itself.
I could potentially see an angle here with using the waste heat from the reduced efficiency from a direct line as a garage/space heater for the winter time, though I doubt that's Tesla's intention here. More likely going for a 'luxury' feature here, or maybe for automatic charging in parking spaces if this could be weatherized appropriately.
I timed plugging in my EV because I was going to make a video about how convenient it really is. From stepping out of the car to being plugged in, 7 seconds. There's no way I'd pay any amount of money to save 7 seconds. Now if I was Jeff Bezos...
Yeah I can't see this mattering for anything outside of fully self-driving vehicles.
Is this type of charging less prone to breakage than conventional charger ? Charger reliability is an issue for a lot of EV users (and not only in the US); if this can be extended to public usage and turns out to break less often due to fewer mechanical parts (I have no idea if it's true or not), this can be an interesting development; efficiency notwithstanding.
It is about 5-8 years away from going to market, but it seems like that new Japanese battery is going to lay waste to Tesla.
Got a link? I’m curious as to my memory the Japanese weren’t going that hard on electric
https://tildes.net/~transport/1czr/tesla_confirms_wireless_inductive_electric_car_home_charger_is_coming#comment-bj1i
I do not have a link, but I read about the battery here on tildes.net.
This one?
https://tildes.net/~transport/1bl5/toyota_inks_deal_to_mass_produce_solid_state_ev_batteries_with_932_mile_range
Yes. Thanks for digging it up.
Interesting, but seems quite speculative. Looks like they're still in the prototype phase, but if they can deliver it would be a huge game changer.