Who doesn’t love a good driving-off-with-the-gas-pump video?
BMW, apparently, as they’re trying to save EV owners from the same fate — as well as the hassle of having to plug in their vehicles every day — thanks to a new wireless charging port.
The two-part system consists of the GroundPad (installed in a garage or outdoors) and the CarPad (installed underneath the car), and will be available in the BMW 530e iPerformance plug-in hybrid.
Basically, all a driver has to do is pull in at the end of the day, position over the pad, hit a Start/Stop button, then let the charger do its thing. Its thing being charging the high-voltage batteries from empty to full in three-and-a-half hours, then switching off automatically.
While this makes BMW “the first in market to offer wireless charging for an electric vehicle,” as writes Gizmodo, the technology has been making the rounds for some time.
WiTricity, the Massachusetts-based startup that developed the tech, has been in the business of wireless charging since 2007, as Fast Company chronicled in February. We even wrote about a prototype they were developing with GM back in 2016.
But it’s BMW that’ll be reaching the finish line first and, as they say in The Social Network, getting there first is everything.
Production is slated for this July, with a first rollout in Germany, followed by the U.K., U.S., Japan and China.
See how it works in the video below:
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