A quarter-mile stretch of road in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood can now charge electric vehicles as they drive over it — making Detroit the first U.S. city to install wireless charging technology in a public roadway. Inductive coils embedded beneath 14th Street, between Marantette and Dalzelle, transmit electricity through a magnetic field to receivers mounted under compatible EVs, topping up batteries without a single plug or charging stop.
At a glance
- Wireless EV charging: Copper inductive coils from Israeli firm Electreon Wireless sit beneath a 0.25-mile section of 14th Street and activate only when a vehicle fitted with a compatible receiver passes over them.
- Pilot program: A Ford E-Transit van equipped with an Electreon receiver will collect real-world performance data over a five-year study period, with plans to open the electric road system to the public within a few years.
- Michigan expansion: Electreon has already installed two static inductive charging stations outside Michigan Central Station, and the Michigan Department of Transport is planning further installations along Michigan Avenue.
How the technology works
Inductive charging uses the same basic principle as a wireless phone charger, scaled up dramatically. Copper coils buried beneath the road surface generate a magnetic field when energized. A receiver mounted to the underside of a compatible vehicle captures that field and converts it back into electricity, feeding the battery directly.
The coils in Detroit are smart about power use. They only switch on when a receiver-equipped vehicle is directly overhead, which limits energy waste and keeps the road safe for pedestrians, cyclists, and conventional vehicles. The air gap between road surface and vehicle undercarriage is small enough that the transfer is efficient without requiring precise alignment.
Electreon’s system is designed to work both while vehicles are parked and while they are moving at normal road speeds — a capability that could eventually make continuous low-speed charging practical for city buses, delivery fleets, and other commercial vehicles that spend a lot of time on fixed routes.
Why Detroit, and why now
Detroit’s connection to automotive history runs deep. The city is home to the first mile of concrete road in the U.S. and the first three-way traffic signal. Mayor Mike Duggan framed the Electreon installation in that same lineage of firsts. “We are the birthplace of the auto industry,” he said at the announcement, “and today we can add the nation’s first wireless charging public roadway to that list of innovations.”
The project is a partnership between the City of Detroit, the State of Michigan under Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan Central — the mixed-use mobility hub recently restored by Ford — and Electreon. That combination of municipal government, state transport funding, private development, and a technology company reflects a model increasingly common in EV infrastructure rollouts, where no single actor can carry the cost or risk alone.
The Corktown location is deliberate. Michigan Central has become a focal point for mobility innovation in the city, and embedding a wireless charging corridor nearby gives the pilot program a dense, real-world test environment close to researchers, engineers, and potential fleet operators.
What it could mean for electric mobility
One of the persistent barriers to EV adoption is range anxiety — the worry that a battery will run low before a driver reaches a charger. Wireless road charging doesn’t eliminate that concern overnight, but it points toward a future where recharging is ambient rather than deliberate, woven into normal driving rather than requiring a detour.
If the technology scales, it could also reduce the need for the large, heavy battery packs that currently drive up EV manufacturing costs. A vehicle that recharges continuously on common routes could operate safely with a smaller onboard battery, bringing down the sticker price and the environmental footprint of battery production. That shift could make electric vehicles accessible to buyers currently priced out of the market.
Public transit stands to gain as well. City buses follow predictable routes and stop frequently — exactly the conditions under which dynamic and static wireless charging performs best. The five-year pilot explicitly includes studying public transport applications, and that thread could prove more immediately transformative than passenger car use.
Still, significant challenges remain. Installing inductive coils beneath existing roads is expensive and disruptive, and scaling from a quarter-mile pilot to a citywide network would require sustained investment and coordination across multiple agencies. Receiver adoption — retrofitting or manufacturing vehicles with compatible hardware — is a separate infrastructure problem that the road-side rollout alone cannot solve. Early pilots like Detroit’s are essential, but the gap between proof-of-concept and everyday infrastructure is long and costly.
For a city that invented the modern automobile, helping to reinvent how cars are powered carries a certain historical symmetry. Detroit’s quarter mile on 14th Street is a modest beginning — and for the broader shift toward clean transportation, modest beginnings are exactly how lasting change tends to start.
Read more
For more on this story, see: New Atlas — Detroit becomes first U.S. city to install wireless-charging roadway
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
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- The Good News for Humankind archive on renewable energy
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