Recently, BMW officially announced that it will launch a wireless charging pilot project in California. In fact, BMW has already demonstrated this technology a few years ago, but it has not been officially commercialized. It is reported that this wireless inductive charging system consists of a CarPad charging module located in the chassis of the vehicle and a GroundPad charging device installed on the ground. Its principle is to transfer the induced current from the magnetic field generated between GroundPad and CarPad to charge the battery inside the vehicle.
In practice, the driver only needs to park the car in the designated position of the garage, the longitudinal deviation is no more than 7 cm, the lateral deviation is not higher than 14 cm, and the wireless charging will start automatically. In order to ensure that the user can park the car more accurately in the corresponding position, BMW has set up a special parking assist system on the display of the central control of the car, which is similar to the technical application of the transparent chassis. When the vehicle is close to the GroundPad, two blue lines appear on the screen to indicate the location of the wireless charging coil and the driving path. When the driver places the green ball representing the car on the blue circle representing the coil on the GroundPad, press the button in the car to start charging. It is understood that the charging power of this system is 3.2kW. The BMW New 5 Series plug-in hybrid model customized for this pilot project can be fully charged within 3.5 hours.
With the development of new energy vehicles, charging piles have gradually entered the public’s line of sight. It is foreseeable that the number of charging piles will gradually increase in the future, and the design of smart charging in the future will be gradually diversified to meet the needs of users in different scenarios. The advantage of wireless charging is that it can simplify the step of conductive charging and plugging in the cable, providing a more convenient experience for the user. For now, wireless charging is more suitable for private scenes and the charging demands of driverless teams.
Nowadays, wireless charging technology has been widely used in mobile phones or electric toothbrushes. As for when it can be popularized on electric vehicles, it stil need to wait patiently. But the landing of this pilot project in BMW can already be seen as the first step towards diversification of smart charging technology.
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