Will the future of EV charging mean never stopping at a station again? Florida’s State Road 516 project is betting on it. By 2029, a 3/4-mile stretch of the new Lake/Orange Expressway will be able to wirelessly charge specially equipped electric vehicles while they’re traveling at highway speeds-a small-scale pilot with potentially transformative implications for mobility infrastructure.
The Central Florida Expressway Authority is building SR 516 in three sections, the first of which will include an in-pavement inductive charging system. The section will be open to all traffic, but during its initial testing phase, only vehicles specially equipped with the required receiver hardware will be able to receive power. The technology, developed in collaboration with ENRX, is engineered to supply as much as 200 kilowatts of power at speed, a quantity that meets or exceeds the power requirements for heavy-duty trucks and far exceeds the normal on-highway charging rates for passenger EVs.
Dynamic wireless power transfer, the technical term for charging vehicles in motion, has been tested globally, but Florida’s implementation joins only a handful of real-world deployments. In France, Electreon’s “Charge As You Drive” system on the A10 motorway demonstrated average power transfer above 200 kW and peaks over 300 kW-enough to not only sustain but increase a heavy truck’s charge while cruising. Michigan’s quarter-mile pilot in Detroit, also with Electreon, marked the first U.S. public wireless charging road, though it has yet to expand.
But the most significant domestic milestone came from Purdue University earlier this year. Partnering with the Indiana Department of Transportation, researchers embedded transmitter coils in a concrete highway segment and successfully charged a Class 8 electric semi truck traveling at 65 mph, delivering 190 kW comparable to the energy consumption of about 100 homes. This is a system designed to work for the heaviest class of trucks all the way down to passenger vehicles, said Aaron Brovont, research assistant professor in Purdue’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. By designing for high-power trucking needs, the system inherently supports lighter vehicles, potentially allowing smaller battery packs, lower costs, and increased cargo capacity.
From an engineering perspective, the challenge is one of efficient energy transfer across the relatively large gap between pavement coils and the receiver of a moving vehicle. According to Purdue’s Dionysios Aliprantis, “Transferring power through a magnetic field at these relatively large distances is challenging. And what makes it more challenging is doing it for a heavy-duty vehicle moving at power levels thousands of times higher than what smartphones receive.” The Purdue design uses a single, high-capacity receiver coil under the tractor unit instead of multiple low-power coils, reducing integration complexity and mechanical burden.
Florida’s SR 516 pilot will act as one proving ground for similar high-speed inductive charging systems. ENRX CEO Bjørn Eldar Petersen said, “When you can charge while driving, range anxiety and frequent charging stops will be a thing of the past.” This fits into the larger landscape of autonomous mobility. Tesla, for instance, has demonstrated wireless charging pads for its forthcoming Robotaxi fleet; it facilitates fully automated replenishment of energy reserves without any human intervention-though at far lower power levels compared with highway systems.
Infrastructure demand for such an electrified road is large: embedding transmitter coils in concrete requires careful engineering to withstand heavy loads of traffic and environmental stress. The power delivery should be stable over a range of vehicle speeds, alignments, and distances between coils and receiver. Integration with grid infrastructure is also a concern: high-power dynamic charging lanes could demand the energy equivalent of hundreds of homes and require robust substations and load management systems.
The potential payoff is equally significant. Dynamic charging could reduce battery sizes, cut vehicle weight, and improve payload capacity for freight operators. It may be able to eliminate long charging stops and ease range anxiety adoption barriers for passenger EVs. To the transportation engineer, it represents a whole new paradigm in road design-where pavement is not just a surface but an active energy delivery system.
