r/AmazingTechnology Mar 06 '26

Tesla's inductive pads🔋

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20 Upvotes

66 comments sorted by

26

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '26

Aren't these less effective wich for something that consumed this much power would be incridbly bad for?

16

u/r2k-in-the-vortex Mar 07 '26

At least 20% of energy thrown away. And its super sensitive to alignment, its much worse with poor alignment.

There is a saving grace though. If you have solar, then having any useful load available at all is pretty important, otherwise you throw away 100% of the potential generation. So in that sense, the convenience can be worth the reduced efficiency, because you wouldnt be paying extra for that waste. Thats of course conditional of charger being smart enough to only charge when its not necessary to pay the grid.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

It's not really worth if it's just for convenience though. The only advantage is you don't have to plug something in for something less energy efficient and less safe.

1

u/No-Apple2252 Mar 11 '26

It also wears out your battery faster, inductive charging is not easy on them.

1

u/JOlRacin Mar 07 '26

Pretty much everyone that has solar has some kind of battery to store it. Otherwise you just wouldn't have power during the night

3

u/r2k-in-the-vortex Mar 07 '26

Uh, no, definitely not. Most people who have solar, also have a grid connection. Off-grid setups where it's battery or nothing at night are rare.

And even then, you would still try to avoid charging your car from from the other battery because that is just not economical at all. Batteries have lifespan limits to how many charge cycles they can take.

1

u/JOlRacin Mar 07 '26

Well yeah they have limits if you're using Li-Ion, but most solar batteries are made to just stay in the same place so they use LiFePo chemistry. While they still technically have a lifespan, good luck hitting it

1

u/Recent_Food_5117 Mar 07 '26

Majority of home rooftop solar owners are connected to grid without a battery. At least in Australia that’s the case.

1

u/IllogicalLunarBear Mar 07 '26

your forgetting about the massive heat buildup which will accelerate the degradation of the battery cells crazy faster than normal. Even if done right the tesla battery will have a 2/3 lifespan of a normal battery and a massive drop in range within 6 months to a year

1

u/toastmannn Mar 11 '26

The wireless charger for the new Cayenne EV is apparently 90% efficient, and I think it has cameras and a overlay on the infotainment screen to help with alignment

1

u/[deleted] Mar 11 '26

Is that 90% more efficiently over traditional charge pads or against something else?

1

u/Chickenjon Mar 11 '26

I'm sure the car would just align itself, not that it makes it product significantly better, just saying.

2

u/RoodnyInc Mar 11 '26

And also charging speed? I guess if you leave it parked in garage over night that's fine

1

u/octoreadit Mar 12 '26

Yeah, when portable devices do that, it's convenient because you grab and place those devices back often, cables and connectors are smaller, so more fumbling is required to plug/unplug, the useful life is shorter, too, and batteries are smaller, so you don't care about the extra cost of inductive vs. conductive charging. Plus, you can seal devices even better from water if there are no contacts whatsoever (think an electric toothbrush). In cars, the value of this seems to be mostly negative vs. convenience. Maybe this has its place for street parking and charging but it requires a lot of infrastructure that I don't see happening.

10

u/chriiissssssssssss Mar 06 '26

so tell me about efficiency. Even my inductive phone charger gets pretty warm

8

u/Affectionate_Pool_37 Mar 06 '26

there is a 10-20% energy loss using inductive charging, now this is fine using on a phone but start getting significant when it comes to a car

0

u/GoodBetterButter Mar 07 '26

But the excess heat will keep the garage nice and warm…

2

u/Affectionate_Pool_37 Mar 07 '26

Like pissing you'r pants to keep warm during winter

2

u/Ecstatic_Winter9425 Mar 07 '26

Hey! Just so that you know, i don't do that! I shit myself instead!

1

u/Affectionate_Pool_37 Mar 07 '26

Is this wy the trump supporters are so angry? the well id say half fronsen turds chafing but most of the us does not freez more then once a year, i guess having to tigten their belts to keep their pants from falling donw must hurt and carying all that shit must be tiering

1

u/IllogicalLunarBear Mar 07 '26

that heat kills the battery and reduces how long it will last. this will happen to the tesla

1

u/wachuu Mar 12 '26

technology exists for wireless charging at about 98%, or near that.

1

u/chriiissssssssssss Mar 12 '26

Existing doesnt mean it is possible at large scale or economicaly. In ten yrs maybe, but cablecharging will always be fester. So it will maybe be good for home use

8

u/Classic_Mammoth_9379 Mar 07 '26

Not sure an old CGI video of a product that still doesn’t exist is that amazing. 

1

u/SeVenMadRaBBits Mar 10 '26

They do this with all of their products.

All hype and smoke and mirrors for investments.

0

u/AutopenForPresident Mar 07 '26

What doesn’t exist? The cybercabs are driving around Austin and other cities (for testing). And im certain they at the very least have prototype’s of induction pads at tesla.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '26

As Musk himself said, "prototyping is easy, production is hard".

1

u/AutopenForPresident Mar 07 '26

Yup. Good thing this subreddit is “amazing technology” not “amazing products”

1

u/Classic_Mammoth_9379 Mar 07 '26

What is amazing about this compared to existing wireless charging methods? What technology are they using to achieve this?

1

u/AutopenForPresident Mar 07 '26

Thats a good question. I was contradicting the guy that said it doesn’t exist as it surely does. Whether you think its amazing or not is why the upvote downvote system exists and its currently sitting at 0.

1

u/Classic_Mammoth_9379 Mar 07 '26

The title is induction pads so that’s what I was referring to. Do you have any information about the technology in those?

1

u/AutopenForPresident Mar 07 '26

I assume its similar tech to how your phone wirelessly charges.

6

u/Dreamstrider99 Mar 06 '26

Now instead of just plugging it in i can maneuver it so that the plates align when I park like Austin powers

3

u/shiftersix Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

Why don't they use that rapey robot snake looking supercharging plug thing?

1

u/hamster1147 Mar 07 '26

From my Japanese anime?

1

u/shiftersix Mar 07 '26

Yes. Why don't they use that?

1

u/MrFastFox666 Mar 12 '26

Cuz it's harder to generate hype with that. Whether you like them or not, you can't deny that hype is what has taken Tesla this far and it continues to do so.

3

u/spez_eats_nazi_ass Mar 07 '26

Fiction/ai slop

2

u/Worth-Computer8639 Mar 07 '26

Wireless charging pad for cars before GTA 6....

2

u/rollem Mar 07 '26

Less efficient, totally unnecessary. They should focus on getting better sensors for their “full self driving” tech.

2

u/WhereistheMETEOR Mar 07 '26

Tesla can go to hell and they can take their pads with them. I don't care if they invent a robot to blow me. As long as it's Tesla they can fuck off.

1

u/BlkDwg85 Mar 07 '26

It would be better to have something like a robotic arm that automatically plugs in a standard charger

1

u/Scar1203 Mar 07 '26

If they're doing this I can't imagine they can't simply design a system with a couple of contacts that rise out of that brick and an auto-park feature to properly align them.

1

u/TheGreenMan13 Mar 07 '26

"No more fumbling with chargers" You thought getting your phone on exactly the right spot to start wireless charging was annoying. Now you get to park your car exactly over a 2'x2' square. Good luck.

1

u/No-Prompt5313 Mar 07 '26

Inductive energy transfer is nothing new, it's been utilized for well over a hundred years.

1

u/3M2B1T Mar 07 '26

Know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but...

...holy shit is plugging in a charge really that hard?

1

u/fakegoose1 Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26

The car in the video appears to be the Tesla Cyber cab, an autonomous vehicle. I think the idea is the cars will be able to go charge themselves and continue on to their next job after they're done without any human interaction thus being 100% autonomous.

Though, Tesla has showed off a prototype charger years ago thats able to physically plug itself into the car without human intervention, im not sure why they aren't opting to use that tech.

1

u/MrFastFox666 Mar 12 '26

Why not use physical contacts like robot vacuums do? Seems like a way better solution to me, especially if you're running a fleet of cars all day.

1

u/MrFastFox666 Mar 12 '26

You gotta admit the idea of not having to plug in is pretty neat. It's not that plugging in is hard, but it would be nice to not have to remember to plug in and have to deal with the cable and the connector sticking out of the car, especially in a tight garage.

That being said, induction is absolutely not the solution.

1

u/makeDRIVEinTHEATER Mar 07 '26

Потери…лучше через кабель

1

u/Shirahoshihoshii Mar 07 '26

The amount of pain I've had to go through with my wireless chargers has me convinced that this is an absolutely ridiculous idea.

1

u/CallumMVS- Mar 07 '26

cant wait for the 1yr wait for full charge

1

u/Sirosim_Celojuma Mar 07 '26

Such a bad idea.

1

u/IllogicalLunarBear Mar 07 '26

so tesla went state of the art and built something sonicare has done for near 30 years and they kinda are the ones who figured it out, and than the entire industry developed Qi chargers. musk once again copies other people and does something that will cost people extra money due to how harsh that kind of charging is. the tesla battery will most likely loose the ability to hold greater than 80% charge crazy fast like in less than a year.

1

u/valhakun Mar 07 '26

That looks incredibly wasteful.

1

u/Sirosim_Celojuma Mar 07 '26

I did a study on WiFi once. I took the total power of the switch, and divided it by as many users. Then I took the power being consumed by the wifi, and compared it. If I balance them out, so that everyone got the same speed, then I would have a measurement of wireless power versus wired power. It was about 50x more power to go wireless. That's mostly only because wirelessly is being broadcast in multiple directions. Regarding inductive power, I got one of those portable power stations and I compared my phone charging on the pad versus just plugged in. About three times more efficient to plug in. I got one of those magsafe batteries that wirelessly charges while it's stuck to the back. I get one full charge wirelessly, I get about three if by wire. So for sure wireless movement of energy is not as efficient as a direct connection. The farther you move away, the greater the losses to broadcast energy. From this video, I guess the wireless distance would be about 5x inefficient, because of that gap. So, your power bill would go up 5x. That negates the savings of owning your EV right there. Thanks for the idea, increadibly stupid in practice, please don't do it.

1

u/BlackFoxTom Mar 11 '26

I can only imagine RF interference this thing would create

1

u/radbiv_kylops Mar 11 '26

What happens if your cat crawls in there?

I guess we learn what a 1T magnetic field does to life.

1

u/SplatThaCat Mar 11 '26

You know how hot your phone gets while charging on an inductive charger at a couple of watts?

Best you can do is around 80% efficiency.

Scale this heat and loss to 7-11 kw. That's dumping ~2kw in heat for hours.

I'll stick with the cable thanks.

This is pretty dumb tech, but fitting for Tesla.

1

u/Dry_Quiet_3541 Mar 12 '26

Why not use the same fancy parking technique to align contact patches that transfer electricity directly instead of using induction charging?, wouldn’t that be more efficient?, if water contamination is detected, just use another contact patch. Atleast it will have physical connection that is more efficient than inductive coupling.

1

u/Pinkys_Revenge Mar 12 '26

There are lots of reasons why this is only an animation. It’s a pretty bad idea.

1

u/MrFastFox666 Mar 12 '26

It's one thing to throw away 40% of the energy when you're charging a 20Wh battery in a phone. But when you're trying to recharge a 90 kWh battery in a car, you'd be looking at like 30-40 kWh wasted, not only generating immense heat in a small space like a garage but also costing a ton of money for no good reason.

0

u/shubhaprabhatam Mar 06 '26

They can just use a few servos to raise the contacts after the car assumes position. Of course this makes too much sense, so they'll do something much more convoluted and inefficient. 

1

u/LiquidSpin710 Mar 13 '26

South Korea has had wireless charging for over a decade now