All these driverless EVs aren’t going to charge themselves. Or are they?
Tesla and Waymo both announced big bets on autonomous driving this week. Alphabet pledged to spend US$5 billion on its Canada Pension Plan Investment Board–backed robotaxi subsidiary. Elon Musk said this week that anyone that doesn’t believe in Tesla’s full autonomy technology should “sell their Tesla stock.”
“The value of Tesla, overwhelmingly, is autonomy,” he said.
There are many, many questions remaining about how this will all work—especially as General Motors simultaneously announced it’s ditching its more ambitious, steering-wheel-free Cruise robotaxis in favour of regular Chevy Bolts that can accommodate human test drivers. But one question is how robotaxis will maintain their charge without humans to plug them in, considering how cumbersome charging station gear is even for fully sentient creatures.
When Tesla made deep cuts to its Supercharger division earlier this year, optimists posited that the move might pave the way for wireless charging, which would be needed to achieve Musk’s vision for a robotaxi fleet that could run 24/7 without human supervision.
“You can’t have a gasoline-powered car that’s fully self-driving, because you need someone to fuel it,” said John Rizzo, chief technology officer at InductEV, in an interview at the Collision conference in Toronto last month.
“If you want full autonomy and robotaxis, the only way to solve it is with a wireless charger.”
The latest push toward self-driving cars is one of the factors driving the expansion of InductEV, which makes wireless charging pads and which is eyeing the Canadian market. The Pennsylvania-based startup has been lobbying the Ontario government and Metrolinx, and this month struck a partnership with Ramco, a Toronto-based electrical contractor that works with Toronto Transit Commission, Durham Region Transit and Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport.
Rizzo said there are other reasons the company is growing, including deploying charging pads for 48 NFI buses for Seattle’s Sound Transit rapid service. For one, the science is improving, said Rizzo, who assured me that pavement divots and computer vision are helping bus drivers do a better job of lining up batteries on the charging pad. (He may or may not have spotted my colleague Murad Hemmadi and I, with the intensity of Marie Curie staring at a beaker, struggling to line up our phones precisely on a charging pad.)
Other companies are chasing the same opportunity, with Electreon now piloting a wireless charging road in Detroit, and Quebec’s Flo testing wireless charging options for its stations.
Canada has a chance to become a leader in wireless-charging technology, he said, not just because it is home to major bus makers like NFI, Nova Bus and Lion Electric—vehicles that stop and idle at the same places every day by design. Regions where buses need to be heated may benefit more from wireless charging, he said, because placing pads on the routes can offset the impact of cold weather on battery performance. Busy ports, like the Port of Vancouver, are another area where trucks routinely idle and could kill two birds with one stone on a charging pad, he noted.
“The use case and the technology is a perfect fit” for Canada, he said. “We expect to start deploying trial deployments in Canada…my guess would be in less than 12 months.”
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