Detroit Just Turned a City Street Into a Live EV Charger

Detroit just did something every EV driver has dreamed about: it turned a normal city street into a live charger. Under a quarter-mile of 14th Street, copper coils sit a few inches below the pavement and feed power into electric vehicles that pass over them. The Michigan Department of Transportation’s new wireless charging roadway in the Michigan Central district is the first public EV-charging road in the U.S., and it exists to be used, not just stared at on a lab bench.

How Detroit’s Electric Road Works Under the Asphalt

The tech comes from Electreon, an Israeli company already testing similar setups in Sweden and Israel. Their Michigan Central project plants inductive charging coils under the surface of 14th Street. A compatible EV carries a receiver plate; when the vehicle rolls over an energized coil, the two talk to each other and energy jumps the air gap, topping up the battery at up to roughly 15–16 kW while the driver just…drives.

From the outside, it looks like any fresh stretch of concrete. TIME’s reporter, who test-drove the Ford E-Transit on the road, described the van gaining charge on a tablet display as it rolled over a row of white discs that mark the coils. The street sits beside the Newlab building at Michigan Central, where more than 60 mobility startups watch shuttles and test vehicles run laps over the charged lane. The city plans to extend the system toward a full mile as part of a broader rebuild of Michigan Avenue.

How Detroit’s Electric Road Changes Your Next EV

You can’t just roll your own Tesla onto the lane yet; only vehicles fitted with Electreon hardware talk to the road. For now, that means shuttles, test vans, and eventually buses and delivery trucks. But this is where it starts to matter for you. If fleets pick up charge all day on their routes instead of sitting at plugs, they don’t need giant battery packs. Smaller packs mean cheaper EVs, lighter vehicles, and more range from every kWh you buy. Analysts around the project told the Detroit News that the long game is strategic corridors—bus routes, freight lanes, airport links—where pavement itself keeps vehicles topped up.

My Verdict

You don’t have to live in Detroit for this to change your driving life. This electric road is proof that charging doesn’t always need a cable, a parking space, and half an hour of your time. If projects like this spread to commuter loops and highway ramps, your next EV can be cheaper, lighter, and a lot less stressful on long trips because the road is doing part of the work. For now it’s a quarter-mile science project with copper coils and a test van; give it a few years and you’ll be hunting for the green lane on your own daily route.