Tesla has given up on bringing wireless charging to the Cybertruck, according to the its lead engineer.
He claimed that they figured out it didn’t make sense on a efficiency basis, but there might be more to the story.
In 2023, Tesla teased a new wireless home charging station – pictured above.
The automaker never commented on the situation other than releasing this picture as part of a presentation. The image pretty clearly shows a wireless charging station and Tesla did briefly acquire a startup that focused on wireless charging before selling back most of its assets, but not before integrating some of its staff.
Cybertruck was expected to be the first Tesla vehicle to feature wireless charging.
Tesla’s Cybertruck owners manual confirmed that the automaker had included ‘Inductive Charger headers’ on the electric pickup truck’s battery pack.
Based on this fact, it was clear that Tesla planned to release a home wireless charger with an optional retrofit receiver for the Cybertruck.
Wes Morrill, Tesla’s lead engineer for the Cybertruck, has now confirmed that Tesla has given up on those plans.
In new comments unearthed from Discord, Morrill confirmed that Tesla has no plan to bring wireless charging for the Cybertruck because it is too high:
Nothing planned there, wireless charging for something as far off the ground as CT is silly. You’d need a base station that’s like 6 inches tall. The main reason we didn’t make the trunk tub fill that space was actually we did that initially and no one could reach stuff at the bottom because it was too deep.
The engineer is claiming that the Cybertruck is sitting too high, which would create too big of a gap between the ground transmitter and the on-car receiver – reducing efficiency.
Porsche recently announced that the new electric Cayenne will have an optional wireless charging system.
Electrek’s Take
This sounds like a very solvable problem. The Cybertruck has the ground clearance to drive over a taller wireless ground pad.
I think that’s not really what’s happening here.
Wireless charging at higher power is less efficient and for that loss of efficiency, you only gain a few seconds of not having to plug in a cable. It’s already a solution to a very small problem, which only gets slightly bigger in a future where autonomous vehicles are more common.
But I think the main problem is that Cybertruck didn’t sell nearly as well as Tesla thought it would.
Tesla is having difficultites selling 20,000 units per year. The program is achieving nowhere near the volume that the company was aiming for. It makes it harder to develop accessories and related products if you know that the consumer base for those accessories is going to be small.
Cybercab was also supposed to support wireless charging, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that either.
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