For the last few years, one of the coolest bits of e-bike tech I’ve seen didn’t involve more power, bigger…
Ok, but why wireless charging? The reason that wireless charging works for mobile phones but not automobiles is precisely one of efficiency: delivering only 60% of input power to a phone is fine because that’s only a few Watt-hours of loss, but is definitely not fine when it takes 100 kWh to charge a 60 kWh electric car battery. The wastage is catastrophically not worth the convenience if not plugging the car in.
Why then would we want wireless charging for electric cargo bikes, as pictured? Even for normal electric bikes, a bike shelter with USB C cords dangling down from retracting reels would be far superior, and provides weather protection and locking options.
Less about fully charging and more about a convenient extra little bit of battery time when you are running errands?
But it’s inefficient. In the 1 hour you are shopping, it’s going to charge far less than a physical connection and in terms of environment impact, you are wasting energy compared to taking 30 seconds to plug in a bike. Then there’s the issue that no bikes support this but several use compatible charging interfaces. I don’t expect this to go anywhere any time soon.
Plugs, connectors, and cables often break, corrode, get vandalized, etc. The physical connections on most of the electronic devices I’ve owned have been the first thing to fail. The wireless connections and wireless charging has NEVER been something that I’ve ever had to worry about physically breaking. I’d wage that infrastructure maintenance is going to cost much more in the long run than the cost of inefficiency introduced by wireless charging.
There’s some truth to that. I’ve had some USB ports fail on phones that were quite a pain to fix or not really fixable at all.
Wireless charging of a phone avoids degrading the USB port through more use. The difference with a phone is that the absolute amount of inefficiency is so much smaller because a phone battery is so much smaller than a bike.
