VW Believes In Battery Recycling, And Stellantis Experiments with Wireless Charging
Volkswagen may be fixing a weakness in batteries, and Stellantis wants the road to charge your car while you drive.
Battery technology has come a long way, but one big elephant in the room still lies on what to do when a battery’s life has run its course. Well Volkswagen is leading the charge along with a number of other top tech institutes in Germany to find a solution to recycling.
Mining of raw materials for batteries has had its own concerns in the past, and now Volkswagen wants to see if it is viable to recycle batteries without losing any performance qualities. And then they want to recycle them again and again to continue to test this theory.
In essence, Volkswagen will have “closed loop” recycled, with no need for any new material. As well, it needs to be tested to see if this can be done to a high level of energy efficiency.
No solar panels here. Stellantis wants the road to charge your car.
These days you can place your phone on a puck, and it’ll charge. That’s induction charging at work. Stellantis is hard at work to prove this tech has a shot. DWPT, or Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer is the main focus here, with an aim to implement the tech in the most environmental conscious way possible through recyclable materials.
Stellantis has been using Arena del Futuro in Italy to showcase this tech. This “Arena of the Future” has a road with dedicated coils built in, much like the ones that would charge your phone. In initial testing with the FIAT 500, it is said that the charge amount from highway driving is sufficient enough to allow the car to travel without discharging at all.
It doesn’t have to be a Stellantis product either. A “receiver” can adapt to any car in order to utilize the charge infrastructure from equipped roads. This in particular solves range issues, but also charging times, since there won’t be any battery drain. For cars like the Mazda MX-30, this would be a huge boost in appeal. But overall, it means that EVs can have smaller and lighter batteries knowing they won’t have to store as much energy.