Sweden plans to build world’s first EV charging road

Range anxiety could soon be a thing of the past as Sweden is planning to build the world’s first EV charging road.

Before you ask, the road does exactly what it says on the box. It will essentially top up the battery on an electric car, bus, or truck as it drives along, boosting range and reducing the time needed to stop at a charging station if not eliminating the need.

The innovative project is expected to be complete by 2025 but there’s still one rather large hurdle to overcome, and that’s how electricity will be transferred from the road and into the vehicles driving on it.

There’s a few ways to get the job done, one being an catenary system which uses an overhead line as seen on various rail, tram, and busways around the world, including Wellington’s old trolleybuses which were retired in 2017 as they was deemed too costly to maintain.

It could also make use of a conductor on the road below such as an electrified rail, almost like a life-size Scalextric track.

However, these options would require the vehicles themselves to make physical contact with a surface to receive power which obviously wouldn’t work well for electric cars. It does however make sense for heavy vehicles like trucks which is a sector Sweden’s transport administration, Trafikverket, wants to significantly decarbonise.

“If you are going to have only static charging full battery solution for heavy-duty vehicles, you will get vehicles with a huge amount of batteries that the vehicles need to carry,” says Jan Pettersson, Director of Strategic Development at Trafikverket, speaking to Euronews Next.

A more complex and ideal way to charge EVs on the go is by using induction, a way to wirelessly transfer electricity between two objects via electromagnetism. This has tested before but only on a short stretch of road in Sweden.

“We think the electrification solution is the way forward for decarbonising the transport sector and we are working with a number of solutions,” added Pettersson.

The team handling the project has already chosen European route E20, which runs between Hallsberg and Örebro, as its first EV charging road. If successful, we could see an electric road revolution – cost permitting of course.