Honda Takes Wireless EV Charging Onto the Highway, Targeting 150 kW for Moving Trucks

The next big change in electric vehicles may not be inside the vehicle at all. It may be buried under the road.

Honda R&D announced on October 5 that, together with Taisei Corporation and Taisei Rotec, it has developed the underlying technology for a magnetic-coupling wireless power transfer road system that can send electricity to EVs while they are moving. The system is being designed for vehicles ranging from passenger cars to large commercial trucks, with public-road testing planned from fiscal 2027.

Turning the road itself into a charger

Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer, or DWPT, sends electricity from equipment embedded beneath the roadway to a receiver mounted under the vehicle. The vehicle does not need to stop or make physical electrical contact.

Honda calls the road-side component the Ground Assembly, or GA, and the vehicle-side receiver the Vehicle Assembly, or VA. Its research uses magnetic coupling at around 85 kHz. Honda says it is developing GA units capable of peak power transfer of up to 150 kW while keeping the VA compact enough to fit within the subframe area of a passenger vehicle.

That 150 kW figure is comparable to a conventional high-power DC fast charger. The difference is that a vehicle would move across a sequence of embedded units, receiving power intermittently along the road rather than parking beside a charger.

Heavy trucks are the first serious target

Honda says logistics and transportation are the initial sectors where it wants to put DWPT into practical use. The reason is straightforward.

Large trucks consume far more energy than passenger cars. Giving them long battery-only range requires very large battery packs. Those batteries add weight, can reduce payload, and make charging downtime an operating-cost issue for fleet owners.

If trucks can replenish energy while moving, the battery may no longer need to store an entire day’s energy. It only needs enough capacity to bridge the gaps between powered road sections.

Honda was already exploring that architecture in its 2021 “Honda Electric Road System.” At the time, it presented a concept in which electrified sections of highway could support passenger cars and heavy trucks, potentially allowing much smaller onboard batteries than a fully battery-dependent design.

A research path that began in 2021

Honda publicly showcased its Electric Road System at the 2021 ITS World Congress in Hamburg. The central idea was to combine vehicle technology and road infrastructure rather than treating charging as a stationary activity.

The early work included systems that could deliver substantial power to vehicles in motion and aimed to reduce charging stops, shrink battery size and extend practical range.

The newer program moves further toward non-contact charging. Instead of relying on a mechanical collector touching roadside equipment, magnetic coupling sends power across the air gap between the embedded road unit and the receiver under the vehicle.

Why magnetic coupling is difficult

A highway is not a laboratory bench. Vehicles bounce, shift laterally, travel at speed and pass over surfaces exposed to rain, heat, debris and pavement deformation. The magnetic link must tolerate those variations while transferring significant power efficiently and safely.

Honda says one of the keys to combining high output with compact dimensions is its conductor design, using what it describes as copper strip wire. At the roughly 85 kHz frequency used for wireless transfer, alternating current tends to concentrate near the surface of a conductor because of the skin effect. Simply making a conventional copper wire thicker is therefore not an efficient answer.

The aim is a receiver compact enough for passenger vehicles while still supporting high-output operation for commercial vehicles, creating the possibility of shared road infrastructure across vehicle classes.

This is as much a road-engineering project as a vehicle project

An automaker cannot deploy DWPT alone because many of the hardest problems sit inside the road.

Taisei is developing the fast-response DC power-supply system. Taisei Rotec is responsible for methods to embed charging hardware into pavement. Together with Honda, the companies are developing pavement structures that can withstand repeated heavy-vehicle loads while preserving charging performance.

The equipment has to survive heat, water intrusion, cracking, maintenance work, road repairs and years of axle loads. For large-commercial-vehicle use, Honda says the system is being developed with approximately 20-ton-class vehicles in mind.

That turns DWPT into a multidisciplinary infrastructure problem involving civil engineering, power electronics, communications, vehicle control and road operations.

One million wheel loads before the highway

Starting in late 2026, the companies plan to build a test roadway at the Taisei Group’s T-FIELD/TAMRA facility.

One of the tests will subject the embedded system to the equivalent of one million wheel loads, based on a 49 kN load per wheel, using actual vehicles. The purpose is to see whether pavement containing GA equipment retains structural integrity over prolonged use.

The companies also plan DWPT performance testing, verification of measures against electromagnetic-field leakage, testing at output levels up to 150 kW, and evaluation of transfer reliability when vehicles are moving at high speed.

That distinction matters. Demonstrating that electricity can jump across a gap is the easy part. Making the road safe, durable and maintainable for years is much harder.

The real-world stage: the Tateyama Expressway

NEXCO East announced in May that Japan’s first DWPT demonstration on the main line of an expressway will be conducted on the E14 Tateyama Expressway as part of its Tateyama Project.

The test zone will be near Kimitsu Parking Area in Chiba Prefecture, covering roughly 300 meters. The Fujimoto-Shimizu Laboratory at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Frontier Sciences will support the project.

Two industry teams are scheduled to participate: Honda R&D with Taisei, and Toyota Motor with Denso and Obayashi. NEXCO East plans multiple tests from fiscal 2027 onward.

The road-side coils are intended to transmit only when they detect an equipped vehicle passing above them. Ordinary vehicles without compatible wireless-power hardware would simply drive over the section without receiving power.

The road does not need to be electrified end to end

One common misconception about dynamic charging is that an entire highway would have to be rebuilt as an electric road.

A more practical model is selective installation. Powered segments could be concentrated where energy demand is highest: long climbs, freight corridors, approaches to logistics hubs or high-utilization highway sections.

If a truck can periodically replenish energy, its battery can be sized around the distance between charging segments rather than around the longest possible route. That is the core economic argument for DWPT.

But the economics remain unresolved

Technical feasibility does not automatically produce a viable infrastructure business.

A Honda engineer declined to tell Reuters how the cost might compare with a conventional fast-charging network, saying economic viability still needs to be assessed.

The cost questions are formidable: road excavation, embedded hardware, grid connections, power conversion, maintenance, resurfacing, billing systems and eventual replacement. There is also a basic institutional question—who pays?

Road operators, electric utilities, logistics companies and automakers would need a workable model for allocating capital costs and user fees.

Smaller batteries could create a second climate benefit

The environmental impact of an EV is not determined only by what comes from the tailpipe. Large batteries require substantial quantities of lithium, graphite and other materials, as well as energy-intensive manufacturing.

If in-motion charging allows commercial vehicles to use smaller batteries, it could reduce vehicle mass, resource demand and battery cost. High-mileage fleet vehicles may also make better use of expensive infrastructure because they pass the same corridors frequently.

Honda also notes that a charging road could theoretically be paired with renewable sources such as solar and wind, allowing locally produced power to be consumed by local transportation.

Standards may be the hardest challenge of all

Road infrastructure lasts far longer than a vehicle generation. A charging road that works only with one manufacturer’s vehicles would be difficult to justify as public infrastructure.

Frequency, communications, authentication, billing, electromagnetic-safety limits, receiver geometry and road-equipment dimensions will all require cross-industry compatibility.

That makes the presence of two separate manufacturer teams in the Tateyama Project important. Honda and Toyota may bring different technical approaches, but testing them on the same highway could help expose the common requirements future standards will need.

Could EVs stop being vehicles built around enormous batteries?

Today’s EV design philosophy largely assumes that range must be carried onboard. More range usually means more battery.

Dynamic charging offers a different architecture: the vehicle becomes part of a larger energy system that includes the road and the grid. In that model, the battery acts more like a buffer between powered sections than the sole energy reservoir for the entire journey.

The fiscal 2027 highway tests will not settle whether that model wins. Durability, safety, energy efficiency, construction cost, interoperability and maintenance all remain unresolved.

But Honda’s work shows that there is another way to attack the EV range problem besides putting ever-larger batteries under vehicles. If heavy trucks can reliably draw substantial power from highways while moving at speed, the boundary between vehicle and infrastructure will begin to blur.