A 20-ton electric delivery truck has to haul its own fuel tank, and that tank is a battery: heavy, expensive and slow to refill. Honda’s idea is to leave part of that battery in the road.
On October 5, Honda announced the project alongside construction giant Taisei Corporation and its paving subsidiary Taisei Rotec. Together they’ve developed the foundations of a road system that feeds EVs electricity wirelessly while they drive, with heavy commercial trucks as the headline target.
How it works
The system is magnetic induction, the same basic physics as the charging pad under your phone, scaled up dramatically and buried in asphalt. Honda’s terminology splits it into two halves:
- Ground Assembly (GA): transmitter units embedded in the road.
- Vehicle Assembly (VA): a receiver mounted under the vehicle.
Each company owns a piece. Honda supplies high-power-density transmitter and receiver hardware. Taisei provides a fast-responding DC power supply system. Taisei Rotec handles the unglamorous but critical part: embedding the hardware in pavement without wrecking the road.
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The target is up to 150 kW, aimed squarely at trucks with a gross vehicle weight around 20 tons.
The clever bit is the box in the road
The most interesting engineering claim is about packaging. Honda says each buried unit integrates the inverter and the coil into a single module, which it calls a world first, and runs on DC power distribution.
Inductive charging needs high-frequency alternating current at the coil. Conventional layouts convert power to high-frequency AC in a roadside cabinet, then push it through cables to the coils. Long runs of high-frequency AC are lossy and finicky. Putting the inverter right at each coil means the road only has to carry ordinary DC along its length, and each segment can generate its own high-frequency field locally.
The practical benefit should be responsiveness. A segment that can switch on fast when a truck rolls over it, and off again right after, wastes less energy and keeps magnetic fields from lingering under empty pavement. Honda specifically lists electromagnetic field leakage as a problem the team worked on, though the release doesn’t publish exposure figures.
The pavement problem nobody talks about
Anyone who’s driven a truck lane on an interstate knows what heavy axles do to asphalt: ruts, cracks, potholes. Now imagine electronics living underneath.
That’s why the durability testing number in Honda’s release is the most telling detail. The team plans testing equivalent to 1 million wheel loads at 49 kN per wheel. That’s roughly 5 metric tons pressing down per wheel, about what a fully loaded truck axle puts on the road. Passing that test would show the hardware survives years of punishment rather than a polite demo.
It also raises maintenance questions the release doesn’t answer. Roads get milled and repaved on a cycle. Snowplows scrape. Utility crews dig. Every one of those routine jobs becomes more complicated, and more expensive, when there’s a power grid inside the pavement. Whoever owns the road will need new repair procedures, new crew training and spare modules on the shelf.
Where and when
Early validation happened on Taisei’s existing T-FIELD/SATTE test track. Construction on a second test road, T-FIELD/TAMURA, begins in late 2026. The real exam comes from April 2027, when the partners and highway operator NEXCO East plan demonstration testing on the Tateyama Expressway in Chiba Prefecture, near Tokyo.
Why trucks first
Honda doesn’t spell out its reasoning, but the logic is easy to reconstruct. Long-haul electric trucks need enormous batteries that eat into payload and cost a fortune. If highway segments can top up a truck on the move, the truck could carry a smaller pack, haul more freight and spend less time parked at a charger. Freight routes are also predictable, which makes them ideal for targeted electrified lanes.
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The U.S. has dipped a toe in, too. Michigan’s DOT and Detroit opened a quarter-mile charging roadway on 14th Street in 2023, using a Ford E-Transit van equipped with a receiver for testing. Honda’s project is aiming at much heavier vehicles and much higher speeds.
What it means for you
If you’re shopping for an EV, nothing here changes your decision. This is infrastructure research, with public-road testing still more than a year away and no announced production vehicle using it.
If in-road charging proves durable and affordable, the first payoff will show up in freight, then possibly buses and fleet vehicles. Passenger cars would come last, if at all, and only after standards, road funding and liability questions get sorted out.
For now, it’s an engineering problem with a very heavy proof requirement: survive a million truck tires, then we’ll talk.
Would you rather road money go to buried chargers for freight lanes, or to more plugs you’d actually use?