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Michigan plans to build the first public road in the United States to allow electric cars to be charged wirelessly while driving. However, competition continues because Indiana has already begun the first phase of such a project.
The “Inductive Vehicle Charging Pilot” announced by Governor Gretchen Whitmer aims to embed inductive charging technology in a section of road so that electric vehicles equipped with appropriate equipment can be charged while driving.
The Michigan pilot project is a partnership between the Michigan Department of Transportation and the Office of Future Transportation and Electrification. So far, the state is looking for partners to help develop, fund, evaluate, and deploy the technology. It seems that the planned highway section is a concept.
The Michigan Economic Development Corporation said a pilot project for inductive charging built into the road will cover a mile of roads in Wayne, Oakland or Macomb counties. The Michigan Department of Transportation will issue a request for proposals on September 28 to design, fund, and implement test roads. Various announcements issued by the Michigan Governor’s Office did not disclose the timetable for the pilot project.
If Michigan wants to be the first in the United States to provide inductive charging for mobile electric vehicles, they need to act quickly: a pilot project is already underway in Indiana.
Earlier this summer, the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) announced that it would work with Purdue University and the German company Magment to test wireless charging on the road. The Indiana research project will be built on a quarter mile of private roads, and coils will be embedded in the roads to deliver electricity to vehicles equipped with their own coils. The start of the project is set at the “end of summer” this year, and it should already be in progress.
This will begin with phases 1 and 2 of the project involving road testing, analysis, and optimization research, and will be carried out by the Joint Transportation Research Program (JTRP) at Purdue University West Lafayette campus.
For the third phase of the Indiana project, INDOT will build a quarter-mile long test bed where engineers will test the road’s ability to charge heavy trucks at high power (200 kW and above). After successfully completing all three phases of testing, INDOT will use the new technology to energize a section of interstate highway in Indiana, the location of which has not yet been determined.
Although vehicle inductive charging has been put into commercial operation in multiple bus and taxi projects in different countries, inductive charging while driving, that is, embedded in the road of the driving vehicle, is indeed a very new technology, but it has been achieved internationally. Made progress.
An inductive charging project involving coils embedded in roads has been successfully implemented in Israel, and Electreon, an expert in inductive charging technology, used his technology to prepare two sections of roads. One of these involved a 20-meter extension in the Israeli settlement of Beit Yanai in the Mediterranean, where the Renault Zoe test was completed in 2019.
In May of this year, Electreon announced that it would provide its technology to charge two Stellattis cars and one Iveco bus while driving in Brescia, Italy, as part of the future arena project. The Italian project aims to demonstrate the inductive charging of a series of electric vehicles on highways and toll roads. In addition to ElectReon, Stellattis and Iveco, other participants in the “Arena del Futuro” include ABB, chemical group Mapei, storage supplier FIAMM Energy Technology and three Italian universities.
The race to become the first sensory charging and operation on public roads is underway. Other projects are already underway, especially the collaboration with Sweden’s Electreon. A project also includes major extensions planned for 2022 in China.
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