Milestone in charging e-powered automobiles

© easelink

The vision is to simply park an e-powered car somewhere and charge it – simply, automatically and everywhere – without the cumbersome handling of a charging cable. An Austrian startup is working to tackle this challenge and showed its new system for the first time at the IAA in Frankfurt.

How does it work? The only thing necessary is to park the vehicle above the four-centimeter-high and extremely robust base plate, the so-called “charging pad”. The connector, the name given by the startup easelink to the plate in the car, recognizes the charging station and automatically connects to the charging pad, beginning the charging process. This has nothing to do with induction charging, as one is aware of with smart phones. “This would be much too inefficient and would only provide one quarter of the required power”, explains Hermann Stockinger, founder of the startup. “Our system functions in a conductively like cable charging and just as efficiently. However, it is much easier to do it via a matrix of hexagonal metallic contact surfaces, which serve as the basis for the name of the system i.e. Matrix Charging”, he adds.