It would be useful if the electric car could be charged while driving. This is to be tested in Italy. Recharge your batteries while driving: In Italy, a section of the motorway is being equipped with technology to wirelessly charge electric vehicles while driving.
For the project called Arena del Futuro, the Israeli company Electreon Wireless will equip a 1.05 kilometre bypass road with I technology for inductive charging. The road is near Chiari, on the highway between Brescia and Milan.
In the middle of the roadway, about ten centimeters under the asphalt, copper coils are laid out and then connected to the power grid. The output should be one megawatt. In order to be able to use the infrastructure, the electric vehicles must also be equipped with a coil. The coils in the street are only activated when a vehicle drives over them.
The tests are carried out with two trucks and one bus
According to Electreon, trucks and buses, in particular, should benefit from such a system because they can then be equipped with significantly smaller batteries. Accordingly, an intercity bus from Iveco and two trucks from Stellantis, the car manufacturer that emerged from the merger of PSA and Fiat Chrysler (FCA), will be used for the pilot project. According to Electreon, it should also be possible to equip cars with charging technology.
The system has already been tested: In 2019 Electreon equipped a 20-meter-long stretch of road with its technology in the Israeli settlement of Beit Yanai on the Mediterranean Sea and demonstrated that it works with a Renault Zoe. In the same year, Electreon announced a project on the Swedish island of Gotland. The company is preparing another project with the Baden-Württemberg energy supplier EnBW in Karlsruhe. There has also been a 700-meter test track in Tel Aviv for some time.
Electreon isn’t the only company looking to incorporate an inductive charging system into the street. Some time ago, the US company Qualcomm set up a test track in Versailles, France, on which the originally stationary inductive charging system Halo was further developed into a dynamic system.