A road that charges your electric car as you drive sounds like the sort of future promised by a man wearing silver trousers. Honda, thankfully, has approached it with less theatre and more asphalt. Its wireless-charging project is heading towards public-road trials in Japan, and the cleverest decision is to begin where the technology could solve a genuine problem: hard-working commercial vehicles.
The principle is familiar if you have ever dropped a phone onto a charging pad, although the scale is rather more serious. Transmitter units buried in the road create a magnetic field. A receiver fitted beneath the vehicle converts that energy back into electricity, allowing the battery to take on power while the wheels keep turning.
Honda is developing the vehicle receiver and the road-mounted transmitters. Taisei is responsible for the responsive DC power supply, while Taisei Rotec is working out how to put the hardware into real pavement without turning every installation into an archaeological dig. Together, the companies plan to test power transfer at up to 150kW as they develop the system for everything from passenger cars to heavy commercial vehicles.
Lorries make the best argument
The romantic sales pitch is obvious: an EV glides along forever, its battery gauge held steady by an invisible stream of electricity. Reality will be patchier, dearer and covered in traffic cones. That is why Honda’s plan to focus first on logistics makes sense.
Long-distance lorries need large batteries, powerful chargers and high daily utilisation. Every hour spent stationary is an hour in which the vehicle earns nothing, while carrying enough battery for every possible route adds weight that could otherwise be payload. Electrified road sections on predictable freight corridors could change that equation without requiring the entire motorway network to become one enormous charging mat.
This does not mean the battery disappears. A vehicle still needs stored energy for ordinary roads, diversions and depots. The interesting possibility is a smaller pack that receives regular top-ups on the busiest sections of its route. In theory, that could cut vehicle weight and reduce the huge charging peaks created when a fleet arrives at the same service area hungry for electrons.
The road unit is the real clever bit
Wireless charging demos are not new. Honda’s more useful work concerns installation and maintenance — the deeply unglamorous matters that decide whether infrastructure survives outside a trade-show hall.
Its ground unit combines the inverter and coil in one buried assembly, with DC power distributed along a chain of units. Honda says this arrangement reduces wiring and the number of components installed beneath the surface. It is also designed to be milled into existing pavement and replaced or upgraded later. Anyone who has watched a roadworks project age from inconvenience to local landmark will understand why construction time matters as much as charging power.
The hardware must also tolerate punishment. Tests scheduled on a dedicated road from late 2026 include the equivalent of one million wheel loads, based on 49kN per wheel, alongside checks of charging performance and electromagnetic-field leakage. The design target includes traffic from vehicles weighing roughly 20 tonnes. A wireless phone pad merely has to survive a mug landing on it; this one gets articulated lorries.
A public road will expose the difficult questions
From Japan’s 2027 financial year, Honda and Taisei are due to join a demonstration on a roughly 300-metre section of the Tateyama Expressway near Kimitsu. Toyota, Denso and Obayashi form another participating team. That competition is healthy because charging roads cannot become useful if each manufacturer builds a private electric moat around its own cars.
Honda says it is participating in international standardisation work so compatible vehicles could use another company’s road hardware and vice versa. That ambition is essential. The remaining questions are formidable: efficiency at speed, installation cost, maintenance, metering, safety, billing and who pays when the road serves thousands of vehicles from dozens of brands.
Auto Express highlighted Honda’s project, but the exciting part is not the prospect of never touching a plug again. It is the chance to electrify freight routes without asking every lorry to carry a battery the size of a bungalow.
Britain should watch closely. Our busiest logistics corridors are exactly where targeted infrastructure could work harder than another scattering of chargers. Honda has not solved the charging road yet, but it has chosen the right first customer and is preparing to test the awkward engineering in public. That is how science fiction earns its high-visibility jacket and becomes roadworks.
Sources
- Honda’s wireless EV charger means no plugs and you won’t even need to stop!
- Honda Develops Underlaying Technology for In-motion Wireless Charging of EVs, Including Large Commercial Vehicles
- Tateyama Expressway dynamic wireless power-transfer demonstration
- Honda dynamic wireless power transfer technology
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