Realizing The Potential Of Its Future Electric Vehicles, Volvo Cars’ Wireless Charging In Sweden

Expanding its potential for future electric vehicles (EV), Volvo Cars teams up with selected partners and commences trials on a new wireless charging technology in a live city environment.

Significantly, the wireless charging test is one of many projects under the Gothenburg Green City Zone initiative, which designates areas in the city for progressions of sustainable technologies.

Volvo Cars’ head of research and development, Mats Moberg, expressed, “Gothenburg Green City Zone lets us try exciting new technologies in a real environment and evaluate them over time for a potential future broader introduction. Testing new charging technologies together with selected partners is a good way to evaluate alternative charging options for our future cars.”

First off, a small fleet of fully electric Volvo XC40 Recharge cars are to be used as taxis by Cabonline, the Nordic region’s largest taxi operator.

Scheduled to span for over a three-year period, said cars are able to wirelessly charge at stations located in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The charging stations used in the test are delivered by Momentum Dynamics, a leading provider of wireless electric charging systems. 

Interestingly, the charging starts automatically when a compatible vehicle parks over a charging pad embedded in the street, allowing drivers to conveniently charge without getting out of their car.  

To elaborate, the charging station sends energy through the charging pad, which is picked up by a receiver unit in the car. 

Making it easy for drivers to align the car with the charging pad, Volvo Cars utilises its 360-degree camera system that comes equipped in the XC40 Recharge.

For the fully electric XC40 Recharge cars, the wireless charging power is claimed by the company to be more than 40 kW. 

Thus, making the charging speeds around four times faster than a wired 11 kW AC charger and almost as fast as a wired 50 kW DC fast charger.

Cumulatively, the XC40s are to be used over 12 hours a day and drive 100,000 km per year, which also makes this the first durability test of fully electric Volvo cars in a commercial usage scenario. 

Other partners involved in the project are the company’s own Swedish retailers Volvo Bil and Volvo Car Sörred, and Swedish energy company Vattenfall and its charging network InCharge.

Also in the list are the city energy company Göteborg Energi, and Business Region Gothenburg, a municipal economic development agency owned by the City of Gothenburg.

In short, using a real city as a testbed enables Volvo to accelerate the growth of technologies and services in the areas of electrification, shared mobility, autonomous driving, connectivity and safety.