IDTechEx was guest of Qualcomm at the Hilton Hotel Park Lane London 26 June and at the Formula E pure electric car racing in Battersea Park London the day after. Unusually, Qualcomm has been at the heart of all forms of wireless (inductive) charging, leading the creation and uniform adoption of the standards essential for widespread adoption of open systems such as mobile phones and cars.

 

It turns out that there is a paradox here. You can now buy cars with a cradle where your phone charges without need of plugging in and there are many new phones with the "Qi", pronounced chee, capability. Contrast wireless charging of the cars themselves and no new models have the capability and there are no public charging pads over which they can perch to get a charge in that manner. So the phone charging is at liftoff with one winning standard and wireless charging of vehicles is going nowhere partly because there is no one winning standard?

 

Not so. With charging of personal electronics, " there is a standards battle going on" whereas with charging of plug-in hybrid and pure electric vehicles there is full collaboration between automotive companies in preparing single standards they will all adopt.

 

The resulting wireless charging will not be retrofitted due to technical and cost issues but it will appear on premium new cars in 2017, there being a possibility that some OEMs may abandon the contacted plug in some models around 2019.

 

For more see Electric Vehicle Forecasts, Trends and Opportunities 2015-2025 and Power Electronics for Electric Vehicles 2015-2025