Sweden is building the world’s first permanent electric road that will charge EVs while they’re on the move. 

The country has already piloted four temporary electrified roads, including in the city of Lund, in Southern Sweden (pictured above). But this 21 km (13-mile) stretch of road is going to be permanent. 

The electrified road is being built by Swedish transport administration Trafikverket, which is currently working procuring a contractor for the project. Trafikverket has not yet chosen its charging technology for the groundbreaking project, but design and construction is expected to complete in 2025, and it will come online shortly afterward. 

Trafikverket is considering such options – which it’s already piloted – as overhead power lines (ie, how trams operate); ground-level electric rails in the road that transmit energy to the EV through a conductive pickup beneath the vehicle, or road-embedded inductive coils that transfers power to the vehicles. 

The electrified highway will be on the E20 motorway, between Hallsberg and Örebro. The motorway runs between Stockholm in the north, through Gothenburg, and Malmö in the south – and it was deliberately chosen because it’s a busy traffic corridor for the commercial transport of goods. It also has the power supply needed. 

Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology released a study in March suggesting that a combination of electric roads on 25% of the busiest national and European roads and EV home charging would be optimal for the transition to EVs. And the researchers argue that if that happened, then the batteries in EVs could be made “significantly smaller, at best only one-third of the current size.”