Investigation of Commercial Viability and Public Perception of Electrified Roadways with Dynamic Wireless Charging

This paper investigates the commercial viability of and public attitudes towards dynamic wireless charging technology. A cost model that calculates the overall lifecycle cost of ownership for electric vehicles equipped with dynamic charging capabilities is built using both real-world data and realistic assumptions. Results from this model indicate that increasing the penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) on U.S. roadways will rapidly reduce dynamic charging costs. Under certain realistic conditions, a nation-wide breakeven point between dynamic and at-home charging can be achieved at ~21% EV penetration. State-level analyses suggest that Hawaii, California, and the Northeast states have the greatest potential for mass wireless power transfer (WPT) adoption in the near future. Furthermore, the public perception of wireless charging is studied through a sentiment analysis of Twitter data from 2018-2022. WPT-related posts on Twitter are extracted and collated into a dataset of 46,618 tweets. To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first and largest WPT-specific corpus. Sentiment analysis results indicate that the frequency with which dynamic wireless charging is being discussed increased drastically over the study period, while the sentiment with which it is being discussed has remained mildly positive.