Porsche is bringing very efficient wireless EV home charging to the industry.
The electric vehicle game is ultra-competitive, with many upstarts offering tech and equipment that traditional car makers are struggling to catch up to. In this realm, Porsche has managed to find new ways to stay ahead of the game. The latest innovation it is now offering to customers is wireless EV charging – a technology that has been in concept form for some time but is finally ready for the real world.
With Porsche Wireless Charging, you’re getting 11kW of charging speed, which is on par with what the standard wired home charger can provide. What’s more, their system is claimed to be up to 90% efficient in its energy transfer from the power grid to the battery, meaning rather minimal losses to heat during the transfer, which has always been one of the major drawbacks of wireless charging. The trade-off will be worth it to many Porsche customers, who will no longer need to manually connect a charging cable at home, where up to 75% of all EV charging takes place, according to Porsche’s own analysis.
The main component of this system is the Porsche Wireless Charging floor plate. This item is 117cm by 78cm in terms of area with a thickness of 6cm and a weight of 50kg. It features an LTE and WLAN module as standard. It’s weather-sealed, so it can be installed indoors or outdoors as long as it’s safely connected to the mains. Installation can be done by Porsche Installation Service, which will see a certified electrician perform the installation.
Obviously, wireless charging is new, so existing EVs will not support it. The first vehicle from Porsche to have the feature will be the upcoming Cayenne Electric. It will be an optional feature in the form of a Porsche Wireless vehicle plate. This receiver unit on the car is mounted on the underbody between the front wheels.
It lowers automatically when the Cayenne is parked above the floor plate so that the gap between the receiver and charger is just a few centimetres. Ultra-wideband technology helps to track the vehicle’s location relative to the floor plate and informs the driver when they are in the right spot. The floor plate has a motion detector and a foreign object detector that halts the charging process automatically if a living creature or metallic object gets in between the gap.
Porsche Wireless Charging is integrated into the My Porsche app, so you can track its progress. Within the Cayenne, a special view in the parking camera activates to make steering the car into the precise place easier. All the familiar home charging options should be present here, including timer charging with preconditioning and charging limits.
