USA’s 1st Public EV-Charging Road — Where To Next?

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Motor City, the former automotive center of Detroit, is the first place in the nation to roll out a public EV-charging road. The road charges electric vehicles wirelessly as the drive along it.

The EV-charging road is one mile long and comes from the Michigan Department of Transportation, while the tech comes from Electreon. It includes copper coils a few inches below the pavement that provide the opportunity for inductive charging. Of course, the electric vehicles also need components to allow wireless EV charging. They need a certain receiver plate onboard.

The charging capacity of the road is 15–16 kW. That’s not going to pump a lot of electricity into your car driving just a mile over the road. However, if this charging solution was implemented broadly around a city, it would provide enough electricity for most drivers to cover a huge portion of their charging needs, if not all of them.

I saw a headline about this EV road last month implying that it had just gone live, which confused me, because I thought we had written about it going live a long time ago. Well, we had. This road become operational in 2023.

“In February 2022, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in coordination with the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and Electrification (OFME) and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), announced that Electreon had won a tender to deploy a 1 mile (1.61 km) wireless Electric Road System in downtown Detroit, Michigan as part of Michigan Central Station, a new mobility innovation hub being developed in partnership with Ford, the city of Detroit, and the state of Michigan. The project will serve as North America’s first public Electric Road System for wireless charging of electric vehicles, and will also include static (stationary) wireless charge points as well,” Electroen writes.

“In addition to market entry into the U.S., the primary goals of the pilot will be to showcase the viability and effectiveness of wireless dynamic charging on public roads for multiple vehicle types and use cases in a real-world scenario — such as, but not limited to, transit buses, passenger shuttles, and last-mile delivery trucks. The pilot will also serve as a potential first step towards much larger Electric Road Systems being considered in multiple U.S. states and aims to build partnerships with U.S. based vehicle and infrastructure companies in order to serve as a blueprint for future collaboration and growth.”

Well, that’s great and all, but it’s 2026 now and I haven’t seen any news about another EV-charging road — public or private — coming to a town near you or me. Is the technology viable? Does it make enough sense when you pull out the spreadsheets and crunch the numbers, from any type of perspective — public or private?

Well, in September, Electreon signed a collaboration agreement with autonomous vehicle company ATLoS in Portugal, “starting with vehicles operating along fixed routes within manufacturing compounds, logistics hubs, and warehouse environments—key target sectors for both companies.” In October, Electreon launched another pilot induction charging system in France on a motorway. “The project is now entering a new phase, with prototype vehicles—including a heavy-duty truck, a utility vehicle, a passenger car, and a bus—driving on the motorway under real traffic conditions,” the company wrote. In November, we reported on Electreon acquiring another inductive charging company, InductEV, presumably to help it technologically and commercially in some way. The company wrote, “the combined company will unite Electreon’s stationary and dynamic wireless charging technology with InductEV’s ultra-fast static systems, creating a unified platform with a complete range of wireless charging solutions.”

A lot of trialing and early-stage partnerships. Perhaps it is all going somewhere, but it feels like it’s taking a long time. When will we see a second wireless EV charging road in the United States?