I’ve written before about a company called Evatran that has developed a wireless charging system for electric vehicles. Earth2tech is reporting that Google is now testing out the technology with a retrofitted plug-in vehicle. See Evatran press release here. It will be interesting to read about the results. Obviously, efficiency of the power transfer will be key. Evatran, according to the article, claims that it’s technology is 80-per-cent efficient and that a product will not come onto the market until it can reach close to 90 per cent. We’ll see how that goes. In any event, it’s a cool idea. The thought of simply driving your electric car into your garage or onto your driveway and having it automatically start charging is very, very enticing. One can envision operators of parking lots and charging stations offering this option at a premium. Not having to get out of the car in the rain or during a cold winter evening in Ontario — I’d pay a little extra for that.

“Evatran is actively seeking other fleet trial opportunities with corporations and municipalities to experience the Plugless Power technology in the third quarter of 2011,” according to the company. “Most EV models are eligible for Plugless Power through a simple retrofit process. In addition to fleet distribution, Evatran is currently working with automotive manufacturers to integrate the Plugless Power technology into mass-market EVs by 2012.”

Toronto should get onto that one.

Still, a lot of work to do in this area, but it does seem promising if efficiency targets can be met — and preferably exceeded.

Earth2Tech has an interesting post here (hat tip to Katie) about a company called Evatran that has developed a system for charging electric vehicles that doesn’t require a plug or a charging cord. The idea is that you would drive onto a parking block, which would sit permanently in your driveway or a parking spot. Once the front wheels are on the block it will establish a wireless proximity link with the vehicle and begin some form of magnetic induction charging. Now that’s convenient, and it would make it far easy for folks to dump their internal combustion engine vehicle and go electric. The only problem is that this form of charging is inefficient, and the idea of one day having millions of cars charging through this method but throwing away 10, 20 or 30 per cent of the energy for the sake of convenience is a non-starter (unless of course we’ve developed too-cheap-to-meter nuclear fusion and have more emission-free electricity than we need — i.e. a non-starter). Still, if we can get 95-plus per cent efficiencies some day it will be a welcome addition to electric-vehicle infrastructure.

BTW: For anyone looking for the latest assessment of wireless power transfer technology, check out this fairly recent and comprehensive study by the Electric Power Research Institute.