So, passed as perfectly safe by Volvo, which should serve to convince the most rabid spreaders of FUD, if the fact that inductively charged buses have been running for ten years in some Italian cities without signs of heaps of dead Italians in the streets.

Wait a minute it took 2.5 hours to charge a 24 kW Battery at 20 kW, that is only 48% efficiency, that is horrible!

@EP:
Driving a bus, a taxi or a delivery vehicle, all early target markets for inductive charging, plugging ins is far from a negligible inconvenience.
In crowded streets and pavements of European and Asian cities there is also simply nowhere to put sidewalk chargers, and their trailing wires are hazardous.
Vandalism is also held in check, and durability should be much greater.
All in all, the advantages are considerable, and far from limited to the time it takes to plug in.

The bus would be better off with a Busbaar, and the taxi with a Supercharger.  For anti-vandalism and space saving, the wired bits can be put on overhead swing-arms and possibly integrated with existing light poles.  A Bluetooth or smart phone command would swing the arm down and bring the connector within reach, and the vehicle might have auto-eject for the connector after which it would swing back up out of harm's way until called upon again.

This really speaks better to the needs of taxis, which have to be on the go all the time to make money.  Being able to suck down power at the rate of 80 kW would allow something like a Tesla Model X to be a premier NYC taxi; just a few minutes at a taxi stand every few hours would be enough to keep one going 24/7.  The downtime for inductive charging would be far greater.

Plugging in is so easy and simple, only lazy people would find it onerous enough to spend many hundreds for an inductive charger.  You are getting in and out of the car anyway, and the connector is right there.  It is literally 2 seconds.

If your parking is that crowded, are you going to be able to achieve the necessary alignment between the charger pad and the vehicle's pickup coil?  Wires either reach or they don't.

@EP:
Likely the road will be marked into charging sections, and the more EVs there are, the more people will align with the chargers, making it easier for the next guy to park in the right place.

Seriously, most places there is simply no room for the street furniture involved in other forms of charging.

Have a look on Streetview at the streets in Bristol, England where I live.
And that is more typical of most cities around the world than streets in the US are.

Both sides of the street are solid with parked cars, with only a narrow road in between and narrow pavements in many places.

Wireless chargers made in the hundreds of millions are likely to become fairly cheap.

Installing them in all the places we park is likely to be done over time. When it's time to resurface a street/parking lot all the parking spots will be wired.

With automatic parking and the ability to have the car's receiver lowered so that it is very close proximately to sending unit should decrease the energy loss to well under 5%.

Electricity is already cheap and on the way to being cheaper. 5% more than a two cents per mile is not really money. A dollar a month.

Cars will be able to communicate with the sending unit, relaying the amount of charge desired and where to send the bill.

The convenience will be so great and the cost margin so low that my guess is we'll go to large scale wireless charging.

Even the aesthetic gain of not having charging units adding clutter to our streets will be valued by some.

Assuming we get higher capacity batteries and EVs become our future I can see how convenient charging is likely to become. No more stopping at gas stations. Your car should be charged whenever you get in.

Your car will know your daily driving pattern. If you are going further you'll punch in/speak your destination and your car/GPS will take over and keep you informed as to when and where to stop for a recharge. You'll probably be able to dial in your food preferences/need for a dog walk/whatever so that your charge point fits your specific needs.

I note that my link ended up showing Bolivia! :-)

Reality check: People plug in their cell phones, laptop PC, tablet PC, cordless drills, etc. all the time. What percentage of them use inductive charging?

Let's guess at some reasons why inductive charging is not widely used:
1. Added weight and bulk to the mini-appliances.
2. Added cost.
3. Electromagnetic inteference?
4. Noise?
5. Lower efficiency.

Now then, placing induction coils under the pavement and burying wires to them is going to be expensive. Placing extension cords flushed with the ground surface is a heck of a lot cheaper. I don't see why cars parked on the roadside can't be charged with extension cords plugged into sockets outside the house.

Why adding more to the infrastructure cost of PEV's when the beauty of using PEV's is inherent in taking advantage of existing grid infrastructure that is already paid for? Along the same logic, why adding to the infrastructure cost of BEV's by building fast-charging stations for PEV's, when PHEV's can take advantage of existing liquid fuel fillup infrastructure to the tune of 22MW of speed! There is no way that a BEV fast-charging station can match that kind of speed!

@EP:
'How well do wireless chargers work under historic cobblestones? Oh, right... they don't.'

What percentage of the streets of 'Olde Europe' do you imagine are covered with cobblestones?
Or the streets of Tokyo, even more pushed for space?

Did you actually look at the link I provided to the streets around here?

If so, where in the world do you imagine that charging units could go?

I would also be interested in your source for the notion that they won't work through cobblestones, which are anyway in the rare places they still exist almost exclusively in pedestrian precincts.

'Wireless would require scheduling a re-paving operation, laying out defined parking spaces with clearly marked induction pads, putting in all the hardware (including lots of electronics), and either marking the failed parts as unavailable or tearing pavements up and replacing them promptly when things quit. Using lots of electronics means replacing lots of electronics when the inevitable failures occur.'

Or they could simply be put in when the road was scheduled for re-surfacing anyway, as it won't happen overnight.

I don't know why you think there are 'lots of electronics' in under the road pads, but not in streetside chargers.

Under the road they may be more difficult to repair, but they are a heck of a lot less likely to need it.

If you think that they are going to allow wires simply to be strung up overhead in Europe, you are greatly mistaken.

Again, have a look at the link I gave, and get serious about thinking about how it would be possible to charge the vast numbers of cars there.

'Wireless charging makes no sense for high-power charging or V2G.'

Based on what assumptions and studies?
I don't know about V2G, but high power inductive charging is up and running:

http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/10/utah-based-wave-nabs-1-4m-to-bring-wireless-electric-buses-to-a-dozen-cities-exclusive/

From memory I think they give the figures in the video, but in any case it gives a pretty good belt of power.

Charging through a wire is OK for folk with garages, which presumably is almost everyone with an electric vehicle today, but utterly impractical in most places in the world, and difficult for road side cars even where possible.

I won't even get into the notion of running wires across the pavement - is there a lawyer in the house?

If battery electric cars are going to become the predominant for of transport, then the only way it can be made to work is by using inductive charging.

Perhaps wired charging could remain dominant in the US, but economies of scale, as well as convenience, likely mean that even in regions like the US inductive will win out.

Notions that because most people don't inductively charge their toothbrush, they won't charge their cars that way, ignores the fact that most people don't take their toothbrush out into the road to charge it.

where in the world do you imagine that charging units could go?

I see light poles rooted on the outside of the sidewalks.  Poles like that could support overhead swing-arms with charging cables.

If you were using inductive chargers, where would you put inverter electronics?  How would you cool it?  You're talking kiosk-size installations.  An overhead swing-arm like a knuckle-boom crane seems much easier to site to me; it takes up no space at ground level, would be well above head level except for the business end and could retract on gas pistons when not in use.

I don't know why you think there are 'lots of electronics' in under the road pads, but not in streetside chargers.

Because there is essentially nothing to a J1772-style "charger" except a 12-volt bipolar power supply, a ground-fault sensor, a power relay and a microcontroller for smarts.  You could fit most of it into the connector.  It's basically a smart power cord.

'Wireless charging makes no sense for high-power charging or V2G.'

Based on what assumptions and studies?

Based on what electronics cost and the doubled cost of making an inductive system bidirectional.  It's a whole lot of expense to eliminate a couple of wires and a connector, and there are worthwhile things you lose the ability to do.