Electric Avenues Smart roads might serve as off-board EV range extenders

The end of range anxiety? The key to lighter, more affordable electric cars? An impossibly expensive infrastructural pipe dream? Wireless EV charging through the road might prove to be all of the above, but on a stormy day in May, it also proved to be something else: technically feasible.

On that day, at a 100-meter-long demonstration track located on a former French Army proving ground near Paris, two electrified Renault Kangoo vans each managed to draw 20 kW of electricity from inductive charging pads in the road while traveling at 65 mph. That’s enough to cover propulsion and climate control loads while lightly charging the batteries. (At lower speeds, there’s more charging.)