Supplier wants to ship Tesla Semi and more without cables > teslamag.de

According to CEO Elon Musk, Tesla’s superchargers will have higher production at a time yet to be announced, but even the announced 300 kilowatts won’t be enough for a semi-truck. Tesla announced the launch at the end of 2017 and later reported progress on one of them Standard proposal to charge at least 1 megawatt. One supplier has now announced that this value should soon be realized with a wireless solution.

Tesla Semi needs high performance

The company called Wireless Advanced Charging Solutions (Wave for short), headquartered in Utah, USA, has been part of the Ideanomics group since the beginning of this year and, in keeping with its name, is focused on cableless charging. His system is already in use by several electric bus companies in the USA and currently offers inductive charging power of up to 250 kilowatts, as is the coolant cable in the Tesla Supercharger. According to information in a document published last week, Wave should convert this to 500 kilowatts and then 1,000 kilowatts (i.e. 1 megawatt).

The top performance will be developed on behalf of the US Department of Energy, it says without further details on this aspect in the document discovered by a private investor and posted on Twitter. This appears to be an excerpt from tender documents relating to loading trucks in port traffic (dryer trucks). Tesla Semi is also mentioned explicitly with the high performance requirement.

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Charging through the air, in which electricity is transmitted with the help of magnetic fields, is now a mature and proven technology, writes Wave with the goal of reaching the 250 kilowatts achieved so far. The gap between the transmitter and receiver coil can be up to 25 cm. Looking at the Tesla Semi, it is said that it will likely have 800 kWh of battery capacity to fill it up, thus needing about 1.5 MW of charging power. Without promising this value, the company states that the order from the Department of Energy is for extremely fast charging. The special system for this would be by far the most powerful.

Useful for autonomous electric cars

Wireless charging is not yet operational in private electric cars, although it would be convenient and technically feasible. But in professional transportation with recharging and fixed stopping points, the additional costs of induction technology may be more worthwhile. Wave is now called an output of at least 1 megawatt, and for a reason Tesla CEO Elon Musk has indicated that the battery is almost likely to be around 500 kWh. That would be enough.

If inductive charging spreads to trucks and buses, costs may also drop so much that they also become more attractive to individuals. Interesting convenience offerings such as a convenience store in a fast food line immediately come to mind. And for a fully autonomous driving in the future as well, it would definitely be useful if there was nothing for energy consumption Snake robots look even more weird by inserting a plug into the socket ought to.