6 ms·

Porsche demonstrates inductive EV charging at IAA

28 points by sizzle 1y ago

Havoc 1y ago
I thought induction has big losses and heat generation?
- _aavaa_ 1y ago
  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.
  - rozab 1y ago
    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.
    - atonse 1y ago
      Right! a robot arm with some sort of magnetic alignment like we have on MagSafe would go pretty far.
bdcravens 1y ago
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.
- samcheng 1y ago
  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.
  - bdcravens 1y ago
    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.
calmbonsai 1y ago
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.
- breve 1y ago
  > 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-feature-inductev-wireless-charging-no-cables-no-downtime/ 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.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1gaNO9nj0 https://www.pcmag.com/news/wireless-ev-charging-tests-achieve-breakthrough-96-efficiency https://www.pcmag.com/news/wireless-ev-charging-tests-achiev...
  - spookie 1y ago
    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?
    - breve 1y ago
      No. If you're capable of aligning your car to a parking space, you're capable of using wireless charging.
  - 1y ago
m463 1y ago
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?
myrandomcomment 1y ago
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.
- natch 1y ago
  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?
  - olyjohn 1y ago
    $8000 is nothing. You see what a Porsche EV costs?
    - natch 1y ago
      Sure, and they charge you individually for each little thing you want on it. But that doesn't mean $8000 is nothing.
    - matthewdgreen 1y ago
      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.
      - ch_sm 1y ago
        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-wireless-charging-inductive-charging-40421.html https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2025/products/porsche-wirele...
whiteboardr 1y ago
So upselling a supposedly “green” product by throwing away a sizable portion of energy while charging it. What a world we live in.
- lm28469 1y ago
  Does anyone still believe EVs are here to save the world from climate change? Their sole purpose is to save the auto industry.
  - sjiabq 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - spookie 1y ago
    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).
    - tekno45 1y ago
      Batteries don't dump half their capacity overnight because they're filled with the gas that doesn't want to be contained.
lifestyleguru 1y ago
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.
impossiblefork 1y ago
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.

28 points by sizzle 1y ago

Havoc 1y ago

I thought induction has big losses and heat generation?

_aavaa_ 1y ago
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.
- rozab 1y ago
  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.
  - atonse 1y ago
    Right! a robot arm with some sort of magnetic alignment like we have on MagSafe would go pretty far.

bdcravens 1y ago

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.

samcheng 1y ago
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.
- bdcravens 1y ago
  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.

calmbonsai 1y ago

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.

breve 1y ago
> 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-feature-inductev-wireless-charging-no-cables-no-downtime/ 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.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1gaNO9nj0 https://www.pcmag.com/news/wireless-ev-charging-tests-achieve-breakthrough-96-efficiency https://www.pcmag.com/news/wireless-ev-charging-tests-achiev...
- spookie 1y ago
  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?
  - breve 1y ago
    No. If you're capable of aligning your car to a parking space, you're capable of using wireless charging.
- 1y ago

m463 1y ago

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?

myrandomcomment 1y ago

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.

natch 1y ago
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?
- olyjohn 1y ago
  $8000 is nothing. You see what a Porsche EV costs?
  - natch 1y ago
    Sure, and they charge you individually for each little thing you want on it. But that doesn't mean $8000 is nothing.
  - matthewdgreen 1y ago
    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.
    - ch_sm 1y ago
      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-wireless-charging-inductive-charging-40421.html https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2025/products/porsche-wirele...

whiteboardr 1y ago

So upselling a supposedly “green” product by throwing away a sizable portion of energy while charging it. What a world we live in.

lm28469 1y ago
Does anyone still believe EVs are here to save the world from climate change? Their sole purpose is to save the auto industry.
- sjiabq 1y ago
  [flagged]
- spookie 1y ago
  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).
  - tekno45 1y ago
    Batteries don't dump half their capacity overnight because they're filled with the gas that doesn't want to be contained.

lifestyleguru 1y ago

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.

impossiblefork 1y ago

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.