Wireless car charging has been teased for a few years, but it’s set to enter the consumer market officially this year after BMW confirmed it’ll start production of an inductive charging pad in July.
Originally announced back in September 2017, and teased with a simple “2018 arrival”, the German auto manufacturer has now provided more information on when we can expect to pick up the wireless charging pad for electric vehicles.
That’s according to a report from Car, which sites word from from BMW that the pad will arrive “before the end of summer 2018″, which means we’re possibly looking at a late August/early September time frame.
Just one catch…
There is a small catch though – it’ll only be available on a lease-deal for the BMW 530e iPerformance plug-in hybrid, which means the BMW i8 hybrid, fully electric BMW i3 and the firm’s other hybrids miss out for now.
We know that the i8 and i3 can be adapter to work with wireless charging pads though, as they’re used as the Safety and Medical car respectively in the Formula E racing series.
They use Qualcomm’s Halo wireless charging technology, allowing them to juice up in the pit line without being plugged in – letting them be deployed immediately in the event of an on-track incident.
Support for the charging pad will roll out to more of BMW’s range in the future, but for now we don’t know which cars will get it, when and how much it will cost.
Source: techradar.com
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