Even the cheapest EVs on the road in Australia tend to come with a heap of bells and whistles, but after driving so many from all kinds of different companies, I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that the wireless phone charger in the car is just not good.
I’ve just picked up the Subaru Solterra; it’s a good car, at least, for my first night with it. Nothing exceptional just yet, but I’ll save most of my thoughts for the full review next week. The Solterra (also sold as the Toyota BZ4X) has what I assumed would be a really intuitive wireless car phone charger; it’s horizontal on the centre armrest, with a hinging lid that you can fold down, to tuck the device away. It’s not a bad idea, as a dedicated phone slot. It keeps the phone within easy reach and in a good range for wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay range, but even though it’s extremely well sized, especially for a big phone like mine (the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra), it’s not very good at wireless charging.
And this is not unique to the Solterra’s wireless car phone charger, nor is it unique to those fitted to cars to begin with. I hate to say it, but across the board, wireless chargers tend to suck. Typically they’re extremely easy to break, inconsistent to charge, heat the phone up to often uncomfortable levels, and overall are just extremely slow. Apple breaks the habit best with its ‘MagSafe’ wireless charging approach, which magnetises the wireless charger to the back of your device, but this is proprietary tech that requires a specific wireless charger, an iPhone, and if you want the faster charging speeds, a MagSafe compatible case.
Now, I’m not saying that, in optimal conditions, a wireless car phone charger can’t be good, but boy does it seem like the planets need to align. These chargers seem to be no match for the rogue hills of Sydney, which leads to your phone slipping and sliding around on the charger mat. Under heavy acceleration, the phone can slip off the charging mat too, and even fly off it entirely (this was my experience with the extremely powerful MG4 XPOWER). No, to best use these, you need to be so unrealistically gentle on the road.
Wireless phone charger: An annoying distraction
Even when the phone isn’t flying off the mat, things are exceptionally annoying. Disconnecting and reconnecting the charger over and over again leads to the phone constantly making noise and flashing its screen off and on again. It’s extremely distracting if you’re driving, and with the Solterra’s transparent phone lid, it led to my phone’s screen flashing through the top whenever it reactivated charging.
So… How do you make it good? From a design point of view, you want the phone to remain in easy reach of the driver, without it obscuring their view, and obviously without implying that they should use the phone while driving (don’t do this).
The most common approach seems to involve infotainment system hideaways – little ducts that you can just slip the phone into. It’s inoffensive and achieves the intended purpose, but it’s also such a large space that the phone can slip and slide around. Typically, rubber is used to keep the phone from slipping too far, but wireless charging is such a finicky thing that the smallest adjustment will terminate charging altogether. Tesla leans itself to this, though the wireless chargers of the Model Y and Model 3 are at a tilt that the screens can be seen by the driver.
Meanwhile, other cars, such as the Kia EV6 and EV9, have the charger simply located on the centre armrest.
The most interesting solution I’ve seen comes from BMW. In our review of the BMW iX1, we celebrated the phone ‘seatbelt’ that it had to keep the device in place. It’s perhaps a little overengineered, but at least the phone slips less with it.
The worst solution we’ve seen comes from Audi (with the E-Tron GT), which has its wireless car phone charger tucked into the centre console storage box. Here, the phone is tightly pressed into the charger, rubbing up against a wall to keep it snug. In a closed-in box, it makes the phone extremely hot and honestly feels quite unsafe.
So, what do we do here, guys? Well, why even bother? Just switch to what works. Why don’t we offer convenient space for a cable in dedicated phone seating? The Cupra Born did this the best, probably. Its wireless car phone charger was on a bit of a slope, but it was shaped in such a way that allowed for a cable to be ducked through the bottom.
But cables can be ugly, especially if they’re longer than they need to be. So, why not just have a built-in USB-C mount for the phone to slip on to? This would require a bit of tinkering to be an all-purpose solution, given that smartphones vary greatly in size and width, but with the iPhone 15 now switched to USB-C, we can safely assume that smartphones going forward (at least for now) will have the plug type. This way, you’d even be able to quickly charge your device.
At the end of the day, you can just not use it. You can disable wireless charging functionality in your phone’s settings, and there’s typically a setting in your car’s OS to disable the charging mat.
But it sucks to have a feature you won’t use, it’s never a good feeling.
Car companies, come on, make this good. Let’s not treat this like haptic buttons, where we pretend they’re good, and then realise later than we should have that they’re not.
Want more Aussie car news? Here’s every EV we’ve reviewed in the last two years, all the EVs we can expect down under soon, and our guide to finding EV chargers across the country. Check out our dedicated Cars tab for more.
Image: PBS Studios/Gizmodo Australia