Plugless Power is a family of Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment products manufactured by Evatran that enable wireless charging for electric vehicles. The Plugless Power EVSE wirelessly delivers electrical power to the on-board EV battery charger using electromagnetic induction without a physical connection to the vehicle. An EV equipped with a Plugless Vehicle Adapter can be charged by parking it over an inductive Plugless Parking Pad. The active step of plugging a cord into the vehicle is eliminated.
History and development
In 2009, Evatran began development of Plugless Power, an inductive charging system for charging Electric Vehicles without plugging in. Field trials were begun in March 2010. The first system was sold to Google in 2011 for employee use at the Mountain View campus. Evatran began selling the Plugless L2 Wireless charging system to the public in 2014. In simple terms, inductive charging works by separating the two halves of an electric transformer with an air gap – one half, the Plugless Power Vehicle Adapter, is installed on the vehicle and the other half, the Plugless Power Parking Pad, is installed on the floor of a garage or in a parking lot. When a car with an Adapter drives over a Pad, the two pieces are brought into close proximity,, then current from the electrical grid flows through the coils in the Power Pad to create magnetic fields and these fields induce current flow in the Vehicle Adapter's coils to charge the battery. Idaho National Laboratory testing in 2013 found the system had a power delivery efficiency between 84%-90%, compared to 95%-99% for corded charging systems, depending on the alignment of the Adapter and Pad, the separation gap, and the rate of power transfer in use. In 2014, Popular Science included the Plugless L2 charging system as Best of What's New 2014. Former Chrysler CEO, Tom LaSorda, joined Evatran as a strategic adviser in October 2014. LaSorda joined the management board at Daimler in 2004, then served as CEO and president of Chrysler from 2004 to 2007. As of October 2016, the Plugless L2 was being sold for use with the Nissan LEAF, Chevrolet Volt, Cadillac ELR and Tesla Model S. Until June 2020, support for BMW i3 had been added, while the original plans were much more ambitious: targetting 80% of EVs by 2017.
Manufacturer
Founded in 2009, Evatran was formed as a clean technology subsidiary of MTC Transformers, an award winning American manufacturer of high-quality, precision-engineered transformers and rewind services based in Wytheville, Virginia.
