Honda's wireless charging road is a 300-metre test, scheduled for 2027

East Nippon Expressway Company has marked out a stretch of the E14 Tateyama Expressway, on the main line near Kimitsu parking area in Chiba, for a demonstration of wireless charging while a vehicle is moving. The powered work sits within about 300 metres. NEXCO East's project announcement, first issued in 2020 and still the plan Honda's release points to, has it run several times from fiscal 2027, which in Japan begins on 1 April 2027. Two teams are booked. One is Honda R&D with Taisei. The other is Toyota with Denso and Obayashi. The Graduate School of Frontier Sciences at the University of Tokyo, through the Fujimoto-Shimizu Laboratory, is supporting the project. Traffic on that lane is not receiving electricity from it now.

Honda’s release of 5 October 2026 is the parts list for its side of the trial. With Taisei Corporation and Taisei Rotec, Honda R&D says it has developed the underlying technology for a magnetic-coupling wireless power transfer road. Wireless power transfer, WPT, moves energy across a gap with magnetic fields rather than a cable. Dynamic WPT, or DWPT, does it while the vehicle is moving. Honda dates its own DWPT work to 2021. The joint work with the two Taisei companies started in 2025. A demonstration on public roads is planned from fiscal 2027. The release names no price for the road and no date when a buyer could specify a car that uses it.

The system Honda describes has three components. Taisei supplies the ground-side direct-current power source. Direct current, DC, is the form the road electronics use, rather than the alternating current of a household socket. Honda’s ground assembly, the GA, is the part buried in the pavement. Several GA units share a DC connection. Each unit combines the inverter and the transmitting coil, which Honda says has been done as a single DWPT unit for the first time in the world. The footnote limits that to the first such unit publicly disclosed as of the end of September 2026, based on research by Honda. It is Honda’s account of disclosure. The vehicle assembly, the VA, is the receiver on the vehicle, also Honda’s. Taisei Rotec’s share is the construction method: milling the units into pavement that already exists, and making a later replacement practical.

NEXCO East says the coils transmit only when they detect a vehicle equipped for in-motion wireless transfer. A car, bus or truck without that receiver gets nothing by driving over the lane. NEXCO’s reason for trying it is a longer range from a smaller battery, and the company names plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell vehicles as well as battery-electric ones. Honda’s sequence is narrower at the start. Practical use is aimed first at logistics and transport, and the pavement work is sized for large vehicles of about 20 tons gross, Honda’s figure.

Honda says a closed test roadway at T-FIELD/SATTE has already been used to check three problems: whether the buried units and the pavement can take that heavy traffic, whether the DC supply can respond and stay stable, and whether the units can be installed and later upgraded. The durability loading that would stand in for years of wheels is still ahead of that claim.

From late 2026 the three companies plan a test-drive road at Taisei’s site in Tamura. The English release labels it T-FIELD/TAMRA. The work listed for that road is a loading test equivalent to one million wheel loads at 49 kilonewtons per wheel, using actual vehicles; a check of DWPT performance; and a check of electromagnetic-field leakage. After that phase, the release places a further verification: power at levels of up to 150 kW for large commercial vehicles, and reliability while vehicles travel at high speed. The 150 kW figure is that later verification. It is not a result Honda reports from the Tateyama Expressway, and it is not a result reported from SATTE.

Jiji, in an English report carried by Nippon.com on 5 October 2026, quotes Honda R&D engineer Taku Ueda:

We hope to provide the new option of receiving electricity while driving, as a technology to expand the potential of EVs.

Jiji says demonstrative tests on an expressway in Chiba Prefecture are set for fiscal 2027 or later, and that practical use is aimed at logistics and transport. On the industrial split, Jiji credits Taisei with the road design and the power source. Honda’s release keeps Taisei on the DC supply, Taisei Rotec on the embedding method, and Honda on the buried coil units and the receiver. The expressway timing agrees. The parts list is fuller in the release.

NEXCO calls the Tateyama Project Japan’s first DWPT verification on an expressway main line, inside its moVision programme for next-generation expressways. Honda’s “first” is a different claim, about a coil-and-inverter unit disclosed by the end of September 2026. Neither sentence says a driver can use the lane.

The release gives no efficiency. It gives no cost. It gives no measured energy delivered on a public road, because that road is not equipped yet. The demonstration is confined to about 300 metres. At 100 km/h a vehicle covers that distance in about 11 seconds. How many watt-hours those seconds would add depends on power, alignment and whether every metre of the stretch is actually transmitting. None of that has been measured on E14.

Honda plans to show the work at Japan Mobility Show Bizweek in Makuhari, 13 to 16 October 2026, and at the ITS World Congress in Gangneung, 19 to 23 October 2026. Those are display dates. The first public-road electricity in this programme, on the schedule Honda and NEXCO East have both published, is fiscal 2027 on the Tateyama Expressway, shared with a second team and still limited to a few hundred metres near Kimitsu.