“If you think of shuttles, they essentially can charge over a segment of roadway in motion while they’re providing the service, and then they can expend that in the rest of the route, then recharge what they’ve expended,” said Michele Mueller, the project manager for the Michigan Department of Transportation’s (MDOT) wireless charging roadway in Detroit. “It would extend their service throughout the day without needing to plug in, without having to go back to the depot.”

Motor City Milestone

When the switch was turned on for a quarter-mile stretch of a lane on 14^th Street in 2023, Detroit laid claim to being the first publicly accessible electric roadway in the nation. The project also included a few wireless charging parking spots near the Michigan Central Station building. A second nearby but unconnected stretch of road on Michigan Avenue will be developed next.

If the upcoming Michigan Avenue project were awarded to a different company, Mueller said the receivers that work on the 14^th Street system would also have to draw power from the new system. She believes that standards will eventually need to be set to ensure there isn’t a patchwork of incompatible charging technologies across the country.

“You don’t want a proprietary system. Nobody is going to put 10 types of receivers on their cars,” Mueller said. “So, this second project really starts to push those envelopes of getting to interoperability.”

Michigan’s climate offered a test of the technology’s ability to hold up under tough winter conditions. The MDOT found plowing caused no issues for the charging infrastructure and it continued to transfer energy through the snow. However, a greater draw on the power was noted during the winter, which Mueller believes was caused by a combination of the extra heating and warmup time required by vehicles and the tendency for batteries to drain faster in the cold.

Trucking in Indiana

In Indiana, they’re going big – as in heavy duty trucks. Construction was completed in July on a quarter-mile of U.S. 231/U.S. 52 outfitted with a wireless charging system designed by Purdue University to be strong enough to power a fully loaded Class 8 semi (33,000 pounds and over) driving 65 miles per hour.

Purdue Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Steve Pekarek believes the technology could bring about a paradigm shift for freight transportation. If charging roads were strategically deployed along highways connecting major ports, it would speed deliveries by eliminating the need for trucks to take lengthy stops to recharge and make the cost of owning electric trucks more feasible for fleets and individual owners.

“The battery costs are enormous and the time that it takes to charge them are long,” Pekarek said. “There’s almost nothing about it today that makes it financially attractive.”

Over the summer, Purdue and the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) began a series of tests that involved towing a receiver behind a truck to ensure the system was delivering power at low levels. As time progresses, they plan to ramp up the voltage and transition to heavier vehicles driving at higher speeds.

Purdue is a member of the Advancing Self-sufficiency through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification (ASPIRE) Research Center, a coalition of universities and other partners dedicated to the development of new solutions that advance the adoption of electrified transportation. It is led by Utah State University, which maintains a quarter-mile demonstration track on its campus in North Logan, Utah.

Pekarek said one of the questions he’s asked most often by those first learning about charging roads is whether they present a safety risk to pedestrians or non-EV drivers.

“The coils are only turned on when there’s a ‘handshake’ between a vehicle that has a receiver and the roadway,” he assured. “Everybody else can drive on it, you can walk on it, animals can be on it, and it’s not a problem.”

Barriers and Opportunities

One aspect of wireless charging that hasn’t been put to the test is its financing. The three American projects to date have been pilots dedicated to exploring the technology and used by a limited number of test vehicles with receivers. They have not been focused on charging users for power or creating a model for who would pay for the infrastructure and how they would monetize it. A financial analysis by Purdue and INDOT estimated the cost of their technology to be $6.3 million per mile for a lane that can support regular EVs and $6.5 million for heavy duty vehicles.

As Ryan McKinnon of the Washington, D.C.-based Charge Ahead Partnership observed, “delivering electricity is complicated.” A July U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that of the roughly 4,000 grants for charging stations approved through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program approved by Congress in 2021, fewer than 400 were built and publicly accessible. The limited availability of adequate power service, particularly in rural areas, was cited among the top obstacles.

The political winds have shifted back and forth, but EV adoption has inched forward over time to a point where it now seems inevitable, McKinnon said. Much of that is due to the public and policymakers coalescing around the expansion of plug-in charging stations as a viable path forward. Given the challenges involved with deploying a few plug-in chargers in a parking lot, he wondered about the viability of outfitting long stretches of highway with infrastructure strong enough to support several fast-moving cars at once. (Story continues below video.)


“We come from a super pro-innovation, free market, let competition thrive, and let the best man win perspective,” McKinnon said of the Charge Ahead Partnership. “Any concern that we have on this is not fear of competition. It’s more concern that it’s going to not work and ultimately slow down the development of a system that can work.”

However, Gurevich believes the technology will catch on by starting small and proving itself with projects that can be financed by their owners, such as BRTs, shuttles that run between hotels and airports, and transit on university campuses. A busy airport like John F. Kennedy International in New York City could install charging infrastructure in the staging areas where taxis tend to idle for long periods, and bill them for the service, he said.

“What’s going to end up happening is that the value is going to be shown in these specific use cases, closed-loop operations – ports, airports, hospitals, etc.,” Gurevich said. “And from there, we’re going to go to high-traffic areas. Think of all the streets in Manhattan. You could essentially charge your vehicle while being stuck in traffic.”

Karl Vilacoba is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.