Nissan recently announced plans to include a wireless charging system for its Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV), which will be on sale to the public sometime in 2010.  The wireless charging vehicle relies on the principle of inductive charging, currently available for smaller electronics like cell phones and toothbrushes. 

Here’s how it works:

Electric energy moves from one circuit to another through transformer coils.  A transformer contains a primary coil that induces a magnetic field by the flow of current through its coil, and that magnetic field yields a voltage in a secondary coil when coupled to the primary coil.  Energy is transferred when a load, i.e. a vehicle, is connected to the coupled secondary coil and induces current to flow.  The hypothetical vehicle charging system would employ a two-part transformer that consists of one part carried by the car and the other by the charging base.  When the parts are coupled wirelessly, the base, as the primary coil, will transfer electric energy by inductive means through to the secondary coil installed in the car to charge up the load.    

In the near future there is potential for at-home inductive parking bays, although we still don’t know at what cost.  Consumer acceptance is important to and dependant on achieving an early electric vehicle (EV) market penetration rate to quickly bring down the manufacturing cost and retail price of EVs via economics of scale.  Even with Nissan’s lack of certainty about the cost structure, we can imagine incremental costs to design and account for the additional weight of the inductive charging system as part of the EV architecture, in addition to the costs of the charging bay itself.  What the EV industry doesn’t need right now is an added expense that make an EV’s total cost of ownership even further from that of a conventional internal combustion engine.

Moreover, Nissan’s more distant vision of charging involves mobile, on-road infrastructure, involving a series of plates within a road’s surface that will allow motorists to charge while driving.  This mobile charging technology has not yet been created or tested, but in theory should work.  Also, we must not forget the expense of renovating roads to install charge bases if on-road charging falls into scope.  Given that current fuel taxes fund 90 percent of surface transportation, and future fuel consumption is expected to decline, without major reform of the current transportation bill we are unlikely to see roads undergoing very costly projects.    

As Nissan is aware, many potential EV consumers are apprehensive about the inconvenience of recharging.  Obviously, inductive recharging is a means to lessen these concerns.  But will Nissan’s business model alleviate any recharging anxiety by the time its ZEV is released for sale in 2010?   Without cost estimates for Nissan’s at-home inductive parking bays, and no known plans for similar public infrastructure, Nissan’s inclusion of this technology in the 2010 ZEV may be premature.  If, as the Technology Strategy Board claims, future inductive charging will most likely be used for “on-the-go” recharging (which doesn’t yet exist), with manual plugging-in overnight, electric car owners may still worry that the additional nightly task will occasionally be forgotten.  This is not the case for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs), which contain a “back-up” gasoline engine for those driving periods when a battery’s charge is depleted, and can make use of current conductive technology.  This may be why many car experts view the PHEV model as the likely winner in the first round of electric vehicle adopters.

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