Highways England's 2015 Wireless Charging Road Trial Explained

The UK’s 2015 Plan to Test Roads That Charge Electric Cars

In August 2015, Highways England, the company that runs England's motorways and major A roads, announced that it would test technology to charge electric and plug-in hybrid cars wirelessly while they drove. The trials were to take place off the public road network, on test equipment built to imitate motorway conditions, and were expected to last about 18 months. If the results were good, on-road trials might follow. They never did: the project was shelved, and later UK studies concluded that wireless charging roads were too expensive to justify.

The idea is still alive elsewhere, though, and the story of the 2015 plan is a useful way to understand how "electric roads" work, why they attract so much interest and why they have proved so hard to build.

What Highways England announced in 2015

The announcement followed a feasibility study into what engineers call dynamic wireless power transfer. Highways England said it would procure trials in which vehicles fitted with wireless receivers would be charged by equipment buried beneath a test road surface. The main concept image released at the time showed a green "re-charging lane" on a motorway, with cables, substations and converters running alongside it.

The government framed the work as part of a broader push on low-emission vehicles. Transport Minister Andrew Jones said that "the potential to recharge low emission vehicles on the move offers exciting possibilities", and he pointed to a commitment of £500 million over five years to support the technology. Highways England's chief highways engineer, Mike Wilson, said the off-road trials would "help to create a more sustainable road network for England".

It is worth being precise about what was promised. This was not a motorway that would charge cars from the end of 2015. It was a controlled test, with real roads only a possible later step.

How charging while driving works

Most proposals for electric roads use one of three approaches.

Inductive (wireless) charging. Coils are buried in the road and carry an alternating current that creates a magnetic field. A receiving coil under the car picks up that field and turns it back into electricity for the battery or motor. It is the same principle as a wireless phone charger, scaled up and made to work while the car moves at speed. This is what Highways England planned to test, as the cross-section diagram above shows: a power transfer loop under the lane, fed from the national grid through substations and converters.

Conductive rails. A metal rail set into the road surface is touched by an arm or pick-up under the vehicle, much like a slot-car track. Studies in Sweden and France judged this the most cost-effective option.

Overhead wires. Trucks with pantographs, like those on trains and trams, connect to cables strung above one lane. Germany tested this on a stretch of the A5 autobahn south of Frankfurt.

The appeal of all three is the same: if a car can top up as it drives, it could carry a smaller and cheaper battery, and drivers would not need to stop and wait at a charger.

What happened to the UK plan

The off-road trials did not lead to wireless charging on English motorways. According to Wikipedia's summary of the project, it was cancelled in early 2016 for budgetary reasons, and the official notice about the trials was later withdrawn.

A later British study, known as DynaCoV and carried out in 2021 and 2022, looked again at dynamic wireless charging for buses and vans. It found the approach three to ten times more expensive than conductive charging and not financially viable. Its estimate for a 200-metre section, including fitting one bus and one van with receivers, was around £1.5 million.

The technology company Electreon has since proposed a demonstration road in Coventry, so the idea has not disappeared from the UK, but it remains small-scale.

Electric road trials around the world

Other countries have gone further than England did.

South Korea opened a public bus line using buried inductive coils in the city of Gumi in 2013, developed from research at the KAIST institute. Further lines followed, but the early ones were later shut down as their equipment aged.
Germany began its ELISA overhead-wire trial on a 10-kilometre stretch of the A5 in May 2019. Trucks ran successfully, but high costs, maintenance and safety concerns about roadside poles led the government to end its support.
Detroit in the United States opened a quarter-mile wireless charging section on 14th Street in November 2023, built by Electreon at a cost of about $5.9 million. Tests powered a van at low speed.
Norway tested wireless charging for buses in Trondheim in 2024 and 2025, with buses receiving roughly half of their rated receiver power on average at city speeds.

These projects show that the physics works. The open question is whether it can be done cheaply and reliably enough to matter.

Why electric roads are so hard to build

Engineers keep running into the same problems.

Energy losses. Wireless transfer across an air gap is less efficient than plugging in. A French study found that inductive systems fitted to trucks lost 20 to 25 percent of the power supplied.

Road wear. Coils buried under asphalt can heat up and put extra strain on the road structure. Tests have flagged a risk of the layers separating, which means more maintenance.

Cost per mile. Every kilometre of electrified road needs coils, power electronics and grid connections, and only vehicles with matching receivers can use it.

Access to what lies beneath. Equipment under the lane gets in the way of water, gas and telecom works, which are a constant part of road life.

Meanwhile, the alternative has improved. Battery prices have fallen and ranges have grown since 2015, and rapid chargers are far more common, which weakens the case for rebuilding motorways.

What it means for electric car drivers

For now, charging an electric car in Britain still means plugging in at home, at work or at a public charger. Electric roads are more likely to appear first where vehicles follow fixed routes and stop often, such as buses, taxis at ranks, or delivery vans, because a short charging section can serve many trips.

The 2015 announcement was an early sign of how seriously governments were starting to take the shift away from petrol and diesel. It did not deliver a self-charging motorway, but it helped start a wider debate about where charging should happen and who should pay for it, a debate that is still going on.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

Sources: Based on reporting first published by True Activist (John Vibes) and Bored Panda; images: Highways England; background from Wikipedia: Electric road.

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