Porsche’s wireless electric car charger is now available for the electric Cayenne – but the price might shock you
The Electric Cayenne can now be charged thanks to an optional weatherproof wireless charging pad for a mere £7,285
by Alistair Charlton · T3
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QUICK SUMMARY
Porsche Cayenne Electric customers in the UK and Ireland can now order a wireless home charger for their car. It's weatherproof and operates at up to 11 kW – the same as a regular home wall box charger.
But all that convenience isn't cheap, with a total price of around £7,300.
Wireless chargers have been commonplace for years now, topping up smartphone batteries without a cable – and now you can get them for electric cars, too.
Porsche has just made its car-sized wireless charger available for the Cayenne Electric SUV, and it works in a similar way to that Belkin one on your desk. Instead of plugging in a chunky charge cable, Cayenne owners can now simply park over the permanently installed ground pad, and charging begins.
The system consists of three parts. The first is hardware on the car itself, which comes as standard on all Porsche Cayenne Electrics sold in the UK and Ireland. Then there’s the vehicle pad, which is fitted to the underside of the car, and the weatherproof ground pad, which sits on your garage floor or driveway.
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Park in the right spot, and charging begins automatically at a rate of up to 11 kW – impressively, that’s the same as what’s possible from a normal wired home charger, and it’s claimed to work in temperatures ranging from -40 to +50C. Porsche claims the wireless charger has an efficiency rating of about 90 per cent, despite electricity travelling through an air gap between the charger and the car.
Speaking of electricity travelling through open air…Porsche says safety systems include motion sensors and foreign object detection. These automatically stop the charger if a living creature – like next door’s cat – comes close to the vehicle or the ground pad. It’ll also stop if a metal object is on the ground pad and heats up.
This all sounds great, especially if you’re fed up with lugging a chunky charge cable into place, in the rain, and getting your hands dirty for good measure. Just park precisely, get out and walk away. The ground pad, which is 60mm tall and weighs 50kg, can’t be embedded into the floor for a seamless finish, unfortunately.
Can you put a price on such elegant convenience? Well yes, actually, you can. And it’s rather a large price at that. Porsche is charging £1,930 for the vehicle charging pad – the bit that connects to the underside of your new Cayenne Electric – then £5,355 for the ground pad, which does the actual charging. The ground pad functions as a standard home wall box, so at least you don’t need to pay for a regular charger installation on top of everything else, and it can connect to the Porsche phone app too.
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It’s certainly very expensive, but it’s a neat solution for added convenience and removes the risk of charge cable theft. Hopefully this is a technology that will mature quickly and, providing other companies develop competing alternatives, prices will eventually fall.