Why Wireless Phone Chargers Don’t Belong in Cars … Yet

Wireless chargers have, for many of us, altered our relationships with our smartphones. No longer are we forced to shackle our precious Pixels and iPhones and Galaxys to cables that tangle and tear; instead, recharging is as simple as laying your phone down to sleep in its own little bed, just like you. Indeed, wireless chargers may one day be the gateway to phones that do without charging ports, leaving our sleek tomorrow tech free of blastopores that only remind us of our sticky organic weaknesses.

Yet while these set-and-forget chargers have made life easier in the office, around the house and at the Starbucks Reserve, there’s one place where their implementation has been sorely, acutely mismanaged, and where we’d currently be better off without them:

In the car.

Over the last decade or so, automakers — in an attempt to embrace the public’s Venom-like symbiosis with the smartphone — have been dropping wireless charging pads into practically every vehicle that rolls off an assembly line. In theory, it’s a good idea: people need to charge their phones in their cars; people don’t like the clutter of cables.

In practice, however, it works terribly. In fact, it’s so bad, it actually makes a vehicle worse.

Wireless phone chargers simply aren’t a good fit for moving vehicles

Most automakers mount their wireless phone chargers in what seems like an obvious place: the flat spot under the dashboard. It’s out of the way yet easily accessible, making for a good place to drop your phone as you plop into the driver’s seat.

But as anyone who’s ever tried to carry a serving tray can tell you, objects resting on a flat surface don’t mix well with movement.

Photo by Will Sabel Courtney

Every time I’ve tried to use a wireless charger on the road, my phone has slid off within five minutes at the first sharp turn, stab of the brakes or punch of the gas. Even the rubberized surface meant to provide grip on some chargers never proves a match for the force being placed on my iPhone via inertia. And given the small sweet spot of most phones — the inductive magnets of the wireless charger on both phone and pad need to be precisely aligned — even a centimeter of movement can push your device from juicing to draining.

I get the issue here. After all, smartphones vary in width and height, so building a charging pad that holds one in place might not work for others. (Spring-loaded clasps like those used in some cars to pop the cupholder arms out could work here, but that would require a lot of extra R&D, and so far, wireless phone chargers seem to largely be an afterthought at most automakers.)

Granted, some cars arrange their charging pads in better ways. Models like the Chevrolet Trax and Cadillac XT4 mount it portrait-style at a roughly 45-degree angle in the base of the center console, which limits movement during acceleration and braking. Still, turns can still slide it from its sweet spot — and its less-visible location means you might not notice your phone had stopped charging.

Photo by Will Sabel Courtney

Photo by Will Sabel Courtney

And by turning that space into a smartphone cubby, automakers restrict its ability to be a cubby for everything else. The magnets that make wireless charging work mean you can’t put anything that could interfere with the process nearby, which means all the knick-knacks and doo-dads you normally put there — spare change, multi-tool, Quarter Pounder with Cheese — now need to go elsewhere in the cabin.

The automotive demands on smartphones requires a lot of power, and wireless chargers can’t always deliver

When Apple CarPlay and Android Auto went from requiring a hard-wired connection to one based on setting up a wireless network with your car, it made life easier for many of us. Instead of fumbling our phones out of our pockets and plugging it in every time we drove, we could just leave it tucked in our Levi’s. As Steve Jobs liked to say, it just worked.

Until, that is, we realized that our phones were draining precipitously quickly as we attempted to funnel our Spotify playlists down from the cloud and simultaneously using Siri to text our friends while also using Waze to wind us around traffic on our way to grandma’s house. At which point, we lobbed it onto the charging pad, and the usual problems popped up.

Even when the road is straight and smooth and the traffic gentle enough that my phone stays in place, the wireless charger doesn’t live up to its billing. The Qi wireless phone charging standard can pump out power at up to 5 watts — enough to charge an iPhone from zero to 💯 in two to three hours, under ideal circumstances — but navigating and streaming and everything else I do in the car can, in my experience, use power as quickly as (or even quicker than) a car’s wireless charger supplies it.

Part of the issue: the typical locations of a wireless phone charger often place the device either directly above or close to the transmission, which has a tendency to grow toasty. (Transferring the power needed to shove two tons along at 80 mph will do that.) High ambient temperatures mean that a charging phone can’t dump waste heat, and as a result, charging slows or even stops.

As a result, if I’m taking a trip of more than 20 – 30 minutes and need to use my phone to stream music or navigate, I’ll always connect to CarPlay via a wired connection. Granted, I’ve had my phones grow too warm in the center console, too — but at least with a cord, I can pull it out and toss it somewhere cooler in the cabin and it’ll keep on charging.

But chargers are about to improve. Will automakers take notice?

Tucker Bowe

Of course, tech companies have been grappling with the issue of improving wireless charging basically since they invented it. Apple has largely cured the issues for iPhones and Apple Watches with its MagSafe technology, which uses magnets to hold the device snugly against the charger as well as power it up.

And MagSafe isn’t about to be exclusive to MagSafe anymore, so to speak. The new Qi2 open wireless charging standard that rolls out starting this year brings to the mainstream the two best parts of Apple’s tech: 15-watt charging speeds and magnetic connections. A Qi2-enabled charger in a car would not only mean that phones would stay in place in a moving car, it would also provide enough power to recharge a phone even as it’s guzzling electrons to tell you how to avoid a traffic jam while simultaneously streaming Grant Random Reports the News.

Whether carmakers will implement this new technology, though, remains to be seen. If they’re smart, though, they’ll be among the first in line to implement Qi2. And if so, I’ll be the first to raise a glass.

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