BMW produces giant wireless charging pad for your car
Just when you were getting used to the idea of wirelessly charging your iPhone 8, BMW's jumped on the bandwagon with a giant wireless charging pad for your car.
The German auto maker explains in a blog post that it's planning on making a wireless inductive charger available in 2018.
The charging pad — essentially a giant version of the Qi chargers you put your smartphones on — will first come to the BMW 530e iPerformance plug-in hybrid, before other electric models.
As BMW shows in this video, you'll need to carefully drive your car over the plate, aligning the charging plate under your car with the pad on the ground.
The car maker says the 530e's battery can be charged fully within 3.5 hours, comparable to how long it'd take if you plugged in your car the old-fashioned way with the wall cord.
Now, if you've already got an iPhone 8 (or you've been using Androids that've supported wireless charging for at least two years now), you'll know that charging pads can be finicky. You need to carefully place your phone more or less dead centre of the plate, before it'll start charging.
So, if it's that difficult with a phone, imagine how much harder it'll be with a car.
Topics Cars
Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
