Image: Tesla
Tesla appears to have quietly bought a German company specialising in wireless EV charging, confirming its hint at Investor Day in March that it was looking at the technology.
The Investor Day, which featured Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Master Plan 3, also included a sneak peek into what Tesla was working on to make charging easier.
This included a potential wireless charging solution for homes and workplaces and came from Rebecca Tinucci, the head of Global Charging Infrastructure, in the “Charging” section of the investor’s day presentation.
Tesla has now acquired a wireless charging solutions company based out of Germany, called Wiferion. The purchase is confirmed by Wiferion’s website footer which now states “Tesla Engineering Germany GmbH 2023”, confirming Tesla as the parent company.
The purchase was first reported by German media outlet Teslamag, which suggested that Tesla had paid $US78 million for the acquisition.
Wiferion says it specialises in “contactless charging and energy systems” with an inductive charging solution for autonomous driverless transport systems in industrial settings such as warehousing.
“Wiferion is the leading supplier of solutions for the mobile wireless power supply for industrial trucks, autonomous guided vehicles and autonomous mobile robots,” the company said in a recent press release.
The company was founded, according to a report in the Robot Report, by four former researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems. Its first product was the etaLINK 3000, a contactless inductive charger for industrial vehicles that works with any type of battery.
This is not new territory for Tesla as the company is known to use technologies from various industries in its vehicles, such as the materials engineering capabilities borrowed from Space X to manufacture various drivetrain and structural components of its vehicles.
It would be interesting to see what a home and workplace wireless solution from Tesla could look like in the coming years, but the acquisition of Wiferion is looking like a promising start.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.
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