Tesla Releases Teaser Video for Wireless Charging of Cybercab

Oct 20, 2024

Tesla released a teaser video Friday showing what wireless charging of the company’s electric vehicles might look like in the future. But if you’re hoping for detailed info about what that infrastructure will entail one day, you’re out of luck.

When Elon Musk unveiled his long-awaited Cybercab last week, the Tesla CEO mentioned the robotaxi wouldn’t need to be plugged in to charge its battery.

“Something we’re also doing is, and it’s really high time we did this, is inductive charging,” Musk said on Oct. 10. “So, the robotaxi has no plug. It just goes over the inductive charger and charges. So, yeah. It’s kind of how it should be.”

But that was all he said about wireless charging. There were no details about how it would work or how far along Tesla had advanced technologically in order to bring this promise to life. But on Friday, Tesla released a 14-second concept video on X that purported to show what the Cybercab would look like while charging.

Robotaxi wireless charging

No hands required pic.twitter.com/XL746DkGhb

— Tesla (@Tesla) October 18, 2024

People online raised a lot of questions about what they were seeing in the video, including whether the charge time—which displays early in the video as 56 minutes remaining—means what we’re seeing is a charge to 100% battery life or 80%, the maximum allowed at Tesla Superchargers for a fast charge at 250kW.

We can see the first full screen in the concept video, which displays a 35% charge using 25 kW…

…but once we’re shown the fully charged screen, it zooms in to only show the remaining time. But viewers can’t see if that’s fully charged.

This obfuscation may be intentional, of course. Musk often releases teasers for technology that hasn’t even been worked on yet. Remember when the billionaire announced his robot project in 2021 and it was just a person dancing in a robot suit?

There’s also the question of efficiency with wireless charging, since induction can be much less efficient. As one electrical engineer joked on X, this kind of charging in an enclosed garage could be creating a “space heater with extra steps,” given how much energy could be wasted.

Tesla has seemingly teased wireless charging before, like when an unexplained home charger appeared to be wireless during a presentation in 2023. But the company didn’t actually address the image and what looked like an inductive charging unit directly and it was only later that Tesla’s chief designer Franz von Holzhausen confirmed wireless charging was coming without giving more details.

The Cybercab itself still faces a number of hurdles before it can become a reality. And Musk says release of the product is still 2-3 years away, something that’s probably way too optimistic given all the challenges Tesla faces—not least of which are the regulatory approvals from local governments. That’s probably why Musk held his demonstration at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California, rather than on real streets. They were able to demonstrate what driverless cars look like without actually operating on real California roadways, all thanks to movie magic. Competitors like Waymo have gotten approval to operate driverless taxis in California, whereas Tesla hasn’t even started the process.

Wireless charging for electric vehicles is already being done by companies like WiTricity, which has a pilot program in Massachusetts and California with Ford’s electric vans. Historically, the idea for how to build induction charging for ground transportation has involved laying the infrastructure into the road itself, charging the car while you drive. A stretch of road in Detroit even got an experimental version of that in 2023. But there are still major efficiency issues with wireless car charging that make it less than ideal at this point in the game. And we don’t even know the details for specs yet.

Like all things Musk, we need to take this video with a big grain of salt. It looks cool, but it’s little more than a concept video at this point. And given the stunts Musk has been pulling to make his Optimus robots look much more advanced than they really are, the billionaires claims require a lot more proof before we can make a call on whether wireless charging for Tesla vehicles, let alone the Cybercab itself, is just around the corner.

Elon MuskInductive chargingTESLAwireless charging

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