One of the largest hurdles to widespread adoption of pure electric vehicles is charging. City dwellers need a convenient and safe place to charge their car. Often, that means hunting for one of the few public chargers spread around the town or finding a parking garage that was forward-thinking enough to install chargers and muscling out all the other EVs to grab that plug.

Inductive charging could eventually change all that. It uses an electromagnetic field from a coil embedded in the ground to transfer charge to the battery pack of an EV. (A different version of the technology is already used in wireless charging pads for smartphones and other gadgets.) So electric car owners would simply park their cars over the charging area and return later to a fully charged vehicle.

Nissan is now working on inductive charging, with the first production application of the technology arriving when Nissan's luxury arm, Infiniti, launches its new EV model in 2014. Nissan says the charging system is 80-90 percent efficient depending on how well aligned the car is to the charging area. That's about the same range, the automaker says, as a conventional (conductive) plug-in charger because of electrical losses between the plug on the car and the plug in the wall. Inductive charging would certainly leave homeowner's garages free of cords. But the real benefit would come in the city.

"Streetside parking with cords dangling from EVs would eventually go away," says Mark Perry, director of product planning and advanced technology for Nissan. And though Perry hinted that since the wireless system will initially cost about 20 percent more than a conventional plug-in cord charger, he outlined a future scenario in which EVs could eventually get their charge on the go.

For example, cars traveling on the freeway with a low battery could exit and drive slowly through a rest area's "EV pit row" embedded with inductive charging coils, getting a refill on the go. Or, he mentioned, if these coils were embedded under traffic lights, EVs could get their charge as they roam around the city. Payment for that electricity? That would come directly from your credit card account, wirelessly like some fuel retailers do today.

Inductive charging could also solve problems that electric car sharing programs have today. Perry says that in some cases, drivers borrowing EVs forget to plug them in for the next user; people just aren't used to the whole plug-in thing yet. But with inductive charging, the borrowers wouldn't need to plug in. They could simply park the cars in the correct return spots, and inductive coils embedded beneath would charge away.

And new automotive suppliers are waiting to deliver inductive charging systems to both the public and OE manufacturers. A new Wytheville, Va., company called Evatran, which launched in July 2011, will begin offering an inductive EV charging system through the aftermarket. According to their website, test demo systems are available now for Original Equipment Manufacturers.

But widespread adoption of inductive charging will begin with the standardization of these systems. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has a task force working to create a standard (SAE J2954) for wireless charging. SAE's timeline shows that the SAE wireless charging standard is slated for completion by 2014.

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