Q&A: VW Engineering Chief on Wireless Charging at DC Speeds

August 9, 2024

Sebastian Blanco

During the annual Management Briefing Seminars held by the Center for Automotive Research in Traverse City, Michigan, this year, SAE Media sat down with Volkswagen North America’s Lyndon Lie. Lie is the company’s EVP and chief engineering officer, overseeing VW’s North American engineering teams focused on developing products for local markets. VW has over 2,000 engineers in North America, with teams in Chattanooga, Tennessee, working on high-voltage battery and electrification and HMI connectivity, and teams in Mexico responsible for more traditional body, chassis, and interior work.

Can you talk a little bit about how VW’s 270 kW wireless charging technology was developed?

Volkswagen has programs where we sponsor PhD students, and we’re partnered with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which also runs Oak Ridge lab. Some of them are working to develop a wireless charger that’s as fast as DC fast charging. It’s challenging, but this is one of those solutions that, when you look at us, you wonder, ‘Why didn’t I think of it?’ The package is maybe 16 inches (41 cm) in diameter and uses three-phase charging with a rotating magnetic field between the three phases and the same size receiver on the car.

That’s similar to what we saw from companies like Witricity 10 or more years ago.

Even the ones that are on the market now, the latest ones, are 22 kW. We’re more than ten times that. It has DC fast charging speed, and the hottest it gets is 106 F (41 C). Because of the way this rotating field is set up, it never gets hot. Instead of heating one area, it’s pulsing as it’s rotating around so it never heats one physical location long enough to get hot. Typical chargers are single phase and it’s a lot of current that you’re trying to pass through. But because it’s a single phase, you’re heating it up for a longer period of time.

Where might we see this in the future?

We’re looking at it with Porsche. Audi is looking at it. And it’s a perfect application for heavy duty trucks, because they need a lot of power. I came from Nikola before coming to Volkswagen, and we had 730 kWh on-board power. That’s a lot of power.

The battery work that’s being done in Chattanooga and elsewhere is not just for the BEVs, but also hybrids and PHEVs, right?

In my battery team. I have cell experts, controls experts, thermal guys, and mechanical for the packaging. A lot of it’s the same [across powertrains]. You need cooling, you need controls. But when you get to the actual software, that’s where it starts getting different. Cell chemistry is different. Cooling may be slightly different. So, the team’s the same. It’s broken up by the engineer. You may be working on a BEV, I may be working on a PHEV, but you’re talking back and forth, and you’re sitting next to each other.

What can you tell me about continuous improvements to ICE?

I don’t see any all-new engines coming for passenger cars. For trucks? Sure. But for passenger cars, we’ll add electrification. We’ll add enhancements to it, so you could take a 2-L engine and get 400 horsepower out of it because we’ve added an E-axle to the back end. That gives us all kinds of flexibility.

I also see range extenders as another option that’s going to come toward the end of the PHEV cycle, because, really, it’s a BEV with a gasoline generator. And it’s a small engine, like a 1.5-L running a generator in your frunk. Instead of putting a lot more money in a whole new ICE that’s got a very short life cycle, we can tweak what we have and put more money into the rest of the propulsion system. It gives us a lot of opportunities.

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