ai4px
Wes
I work as a process control engineer in the paper industry. We use inductive heating to distort a calendering roll to control the thickness of the sheet of paper we're making. These heaters are 94% efficient. It is not uncommon to have 150 6kw heaters across a 30ft width. We are very interested in power efficiency. If there was another product that was 96% eff, we'd be all over it. All the major players (ABB, Valmet, Honeywell) all plateau at 94%.What happens when the charging cord is no longer needed, will people still call it the charger? WiTricity's wireless charging option will be available for Tesla vehicles in select locations in the US starting in late 2022. We can expect wireless charging to be widely available by 2023.
WiTricity Wireless Vehicle Charging
All of that said... The inductive heaters transfer energy to a steel "dummy load". If we wanted to recover that energy back into electricity, in theory the best we could do is another 94% efficiency. So 0.94 x 0.94 is 88%. As slick as wireless charging sounds, why on earth would you take the largest energy using device in your home and make it cost 12% more to run?
There is a guy west of Seattle who is working on an automatic connecting method for EVs. He's already done a magnetically attached charge connector for his Nissan Leaf and his wife can nail the +/- 2" left right tolerance to get it to connect every single time. He uses the same thing on his M3, but it requires some surgery you don't want to do... so he's working on something that uses the charge port that is better than the tesla snake.
All in all... if you ask my wife how long it takes to charge her car, she'll say 15 seconds. Plug it in, pet the dog and walk inside.