Umer Anwer stops on the street near Tesla Inc’s Brooklyn showroom and grabs his smartphone. He’s looking for a spot to charge his electric car, and the Tesla charging plugs won’t work with the Nissan Leaf he’s driving. In fact, he would prefer not to bother with a plug at all.
Hevo Inc, the wireless-charging startup where Anwer is chief technology officer, aims to overturn the burgeoning industry that’s busy building out a global infrastructure to provide power to electric cars through public plugs. There were about 582,000 public charging outlets worldwide at the end of 2017, according to a recent report by Bloomberg NEF, and that number is forecast to grow by nearly 30% this year. Virtually every one of these charging locations uses plugs.