Wireless phone chargers in cars pretty much all suck. At worst, all they do is cook your phone to the point that it’s hot to the touch, and no more charged than when you got in the car. At best, your phone has gained 3% charge but is still stupidly hot to the touch.
That’s if you’re lucky. Most wireless phone chargers in cars come in the form of pads, and because everyone’s phone is shaped differently, those pads have to be large enough to accommodate bigger phones. Even with rubber surfaces, that means phones slide around, eliminating the charger’s efficacy.
Somehow, these issues have persisted for years. Toyota’s most recent design, where you put your phone in a slot in the center console, has been my favorite solution to this problem so far, but it still gets the phone pretty hot. Nissan has just revealed its own modern phone charging design, and it promises to fix both of these problems.
Nissan’s new design is called the Qi2 (pronounced chee-two, not que-eye-too). Like previous iterations of the wireless phone charger, it uses a rubberized mat as a base. But there’s a raised magnetized puck in the middle where you can mount your phone, so it can hold itself in place without sliding around the second you take a corner. From Nissan:
“With the magnetized puck-like surface, drivers can easily place their phone on the charger and know it’s working without needing to adjust it mid-drive,” said Angela Moon, a senior manager of Research and Development at Nissan Technical Center North America (NTCNA) in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
The magnetization doesn’t just help hold the phone in place; it helps it charge more efficiently.
“Proper alignment is critical when it comes to wireless charging,” said Matt Zimmerman, a manager of Research and Development at NTCNA. “Even a few millimeters can cause a big drop in performance. The magnetic puck helps ensure the phone is properly aligned to receive optimal charging – even with modern phones’ large cameras.”
Why it’s taken so long for any manufacturer to do something like this, I’m not sure. iPhones have had magnetized back plates since the iPhone 12, which was released in October 2020. But I’m glad it’s here now.
While the magnet solves the placement and charging issues, it doesn’t solve the heat problem. Nissan’s got a solution for that, too: a fan specifically for the charging area. While this isn’t a new idea, it is an effective one, according to the company:
“Thermal management has been a common challenge in earlier generations of wireless charging systems. The fan greatly reduces the amount of generated heat,” Moon said.
The benefits of the fan are twofold: By reducing the temperature, it not only helps prevent the risk of overheating – which can cause a phone to stop charging while it cools down – it also enhances efficiency.
“Simply put, a phone can charge faster when it’s cooler,” Moon said.
With these two features combined, Nissan promises consistent power delivery of 15 watts—around triple the power of previous-generation chargers, according to the company. That’s also a bit closer to what most car-mounted USB-C ports output, in case you were wondering. Nissan claims its new setup was able to get its test phone, an iPhone 14 Pro, from 10% charged to 90% charged in just 90 minutes, down from four hours.
This wireless charging pad will be available on 2026 Pathfinders and Muranos, so we won’t have to wait long to find out for ourselves whether Nissan’s claims are true. I’ve been let down by dozens of wireless phone chargers at this point in my career, so I really hope this time is different.
Top graphic images: Nissan; Insane Clown Posse/YouTube
The new Cayenne Electric also has this style of charger in its console.
You just realize how dumb Apple can be when they’ve had magsafe chargers that they don’t license to auto manufacturers. How they’ve totally lost the auto UX game with Google, despite having the dominant phone OS. Just baffling.
Is heat really much of an issue? I use nothing but cheap Qi pucks to charge my iPhone at home and it never really even gets warm. Though I assume the faster you try to charge, the hotter it will get (to the detriment of the battery). But I don’t generally need to charge a phone in the car, just maintain the state of charge while using it to navigate.
I’ve used wireless charge pads in sundry rentals and they all seem to work OK enough if they can fit a big phone (some are too small for a Max Pro, which is annoying). But adding the magnet is a no-brainer. Being four years out of touch with the Android world – do most of those have the magnet too now? Or is this mostly an iPhone-only thing?
Yes, heat is really an issue.
I feel like if your charger needs active cooling, you are charging too fast for comfort. Like I said, the pucks I use aren’t fast, but they also don’t even really get warm to the touch.
It would probably good to make this selectable as to high or low output. Like I said, I don’t necessarily want to gain charge, I just want to maintain charge while using the phone, which should be a lesser requirement.
As I believe is stated in the article, the materials and distance between the coils affect how much heat is generated. At-home chargers tend to have thinner covers on the coils so that they are closer together and more efficient. Chargers in automobiles that don’t have magnets tend to have thicker plastic between the coil and the charging surface. So the charging is slower and more heat is generated. If you don’t trust the author of the piece or me you can just google it, since you have no experience with wireless chargers built into cars. It’s a well-known issue.
Where did I say I didn’t trust the information? I am simply asking for clarification and having a discussion, and relating that in the experience I have, heat wasn’t an issue.
And I have PLENTY of experience with built-in chargers in rental cars. None made my phone particularly warm, but evidently that is because they were the lower power standard. Which seemed entirely adequate. So as I also said, it seems like having selectable power output for these things might not be a terrible idea. I certainly have every intention of milking the last moment of usable life out of my ludicrously expensive phone before replacing it.
I’ve never had trouble with overheating my phone on a wireless charger…until I got one integrated in my truck. I don’t know if it’s because it’s recessed and the air flow is worse, or if it’s because Android Auto has a tendency to cook phones too, but I regularly get overheating warnings when using my truck charger.
I’m seriously considering pulling out the dash-mounted magnetic charger that I used in my old truck. The only problem is I’m not sure there’s a good place to mount it in the new one.
I don’t know if any of the phones do, but there are a lot of magnetic cases available these days. That’s how I use my Android with magsafe chargers.
When it’s sitting idle while you sleep, no big deal.
When it’s running navigation and all the other stuff carplay or Android Auto uses, yes very much so.
A regular low-current old-school USB port has no problem keeping my iPhone charged while I use it to navigate from FL to ME and back running it’s own screen. <shrug>
I assume Carplay uses significantly less power since the screen is off.
No screen helps a little, but the GPS and running the processor to handle all the stuff it’s doing still takes a lot. And I’m talking about heat, wireless charging makes more heat the usb
The screen is by far the largest consumer of power in a phone (at least so says my phone in it’s internal power monitoring.
Sure, wireless is by definition less efficient. But at a reasonable power level it doesn’t matter much. This seems to be an unreasonable power level. If you need that much charging, plug the damned thing into a cable.
The wireless charger on my tacoma works pretty well, in terms of keeping it in place / not cooking the phone. But it’s pretty slow and there’s a panel for usb-c right next to it that charges up to 50w (combined), so I’m not totally sure what it’s for. I guess not having wires all over is a good thing.
Either way, this looks pretty solid by Nissan.
The wireless charging pads in our Tesla Model (2021) work perfectly well with iPhones. The phones get warm when actually charging, but that’s normal. And they are in a good position in the car and stay there.
Agree, they work well on our Model X. The material has enough friction that it keeps them from sliding around in most situations.
The phone can launch out of position if you accelerate too hard, though. Adds to the drama.
I turned off the charging pad in my car, all it did was turn my phone into a handwarmer.
Same, except my lovely manufacturer knows better than their users, so they didn’t put in an “off” switch. The very first thing I did when we bought the car was taken apart the center console and unplug that stupid wireless “charger” (phone heater).
The wireless charger sits inside a little cubby that’s the perfect place to stash keys or a card or whatever, except the un-turn-off-able wireless charger would freak out if you put any of those things inside.
Luckily mine had the option to disable it, it’s the perfect place to put a phone and right next to the USB port I actually use to charge.
Also, wireless charging can’t even up with the power usage of Android Auto in my cars.
Let’s add a cover to this system that only opens when the car is stopped. Keep gd hands off gd phones while driving.
It might be because I don’t have a giant phone, but the charging pad in my Impreza isn’t terrible. My phone doesn’t really slide at all and it seems to charge pretty quickly. It will get warm if I leave it in place on very long drives, but it’s never been so hot I’m worried about damage.
iPhones have a safety feature that switches the phone off before permanent damage occurs, at least since iPhone 7. If this safety kicks in, the device is too hot to touch or hold it longer than a few seconds, at least for me (ask me how I know….). I would be very surprised if Android devices didn’t have a similar feature. I could be wrong, but I always thought that damage occurs in the form of reduced longevity of the battery, rather than something sudden and catastrophic.
My acura has little raised walls that keep the phone from sliding around. Not an issue in my car and doesn’t need magnets.
On long drives, I use my phone to connect to my local community radio station’s internet broadcast (KVMR.org). When I attempted to use the Qi charger in my Prius, I found that the phone wasn’t getting enough charge to overcome the engery used to connect and broadcast. Is the amount of energy provided to the phone enough for it to be useful while still using the phone?
YMMV but I’ve found jumping to a Qi2 charger capable of 15W has done a good job of adding battery charge to my phones even while using CarPlay/Android Auto to stream internet radio. Not enough for an appreciable bump during a 5-minute drive in town, but certainly for longer drives.
The latest best chargers, at least for the latest iPhones, go past Qi2 to 25W, using not just fan cooling but thermoelectric cooling. Anker is I think the first out the gate, but others are coming if not already here.
I recently got the desktop version of this, and even with my few-years-old phone that is just Magsafe/Qi rather than the new Magsafe¿plus?, it charges way faster since the phone itself isn’t throttling the charging rate to control heat. And I’m only using it with the partial cooling setting, haven’t tried max cooling.
Honestly, that sounds cool … but also expensive. But I’ll definitely be keeping it in mind for our next upgrade down the road.
Anker has a car vent-mount type version, and yeah, it’s not cheap.
works for me, too
Shaggy 2 Dope is such a great mascot. I love clowns.
I can’t believe it has taken this long for a car company to take advantage of Mag Safe.
I really can’t believe that car company was Nissan
Maybe they know which drivers are most likely to be using their phones while driving. That’s good market research.
Nissan drivers here universally have phone clutched firmly in hand while they text away, so this is really kind of pointless for them.
Big Altima\Rogue Energy, yo!
Or holding it flat in their hand up to their face on speaker vs using the bluetooth
I LOVE it when I see all the trophy wives in their luxo-SUVs doing that. WTF – every single on of those things has Bluetooth. I swear those things won’t even run unless the driver is on a phone call. If I was a cop, I would make it my MISSION to write as many tickets as possible for that, as holding a phone while driving is illegal in both of my states.
A guy behind me yesterday morning got yelled at by an unmarked cop car’s PA system for doing that.
GOOD!
Bahahahaha
All cars should have Qi2 or better.
I got a MagSafe compatible case for my Pixel 7, but my Pixel 10 has Qi2 built in.
I got a ProClip mount for my Mazda3 and stuck a Qi2 charging puck on it. So I get wireless charging and a phone mount right below the nav screen.
Brian, you better not try to make me talk to no scientist. Those motherfu**ers be lying, and making me pissed.
The whole world’s got 10,000 people and Santa Claus created all of us equal
Are children small, or just far away??
Nissan’s new attempt to get customers is an arms race for fastest phone charger in a car, now?
It’s better than the arms race of vehicle size.
Here I was thinking this would be an explainer on how magnets work.
No one knows
That’s why I read the story. I thought maybe they had figured it out.
Sadly I don’t think it’s something I expect an answer to in my lifetime.
Well, when one magnet loves another magnet very much…
As long as they’re MagSafe about it.
COTD
Only opposites attract though.
Don’t worry, once you start wireless charging your phone in your 2026 Pathfinder while connected to wireless carplay, it will still get cooked.
Qi is an open standard for inductive charging developed by the Wireless Power Consortium. Qi2 includes the magnetic attachment and I believe also increased the power to 15w. Apple’s MagSafe is compatible with Qi2.
Very good. Now please click all the boxes containing bicycles 🙂 /s I’m still a little wary of using 15W regularly because fast charging usually doesn’t help battery life in the long run, but maybe they’ve gotten better and I’m going from outdated knowledge. It would be nice if pads/pucks had a switch on them, like 2W/5W/15W or something.
I only have about a year’s worth of charging on my iPhone Pro 13 that I started using with MagSafe, so I haven’t had this setup in-place long enough to judge how fast the battery is getting degraded (if at all). But I will say that my phone has never gotten as hot from charging as my 7 Plus did when I accidentally left it in the car during the summer, and I came back to a phone showing the “too hot to operate, must cool before use” error screen.
Until 2023 (when Qi2 was released), magnetically-attached wireless charging was proprietary (Apple-only, a few Android manufacturers did it as well). Android phones didn’t widely adopt Qi2 until 2025.
That explains why my older (S21) phone completely ignores magnets. Thanks.
Isn’t there something called “Mag-Safe:” that is spec’d to allow a magnetic mount surrounding the charge coil? Some of my phone cases have been “Mag-safe” designed.
Agreed phones really need to be centered to work best on wireless pads.
For our 25 Maverick with it’s wireless pad I 3D printed a little rear buffer wall that, based on my length of iPhone16 case, lets me just push the phone in all the way against the back of the charge pad, and it’s centered.
For our 25 Escape PHEV that doesn’t have a wireless charge pad, I just took a cheap wireless charging puck (non-magnetic), plugged it into an unused USB port, and also 3D printed a little puck surround with retaining wall that centers the phone when placed on it..
Got to love 3D printing!
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/c8WsMFdmmlE-mavphonebumperv1
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/cVCmwwOeZpL-wirelesspuckholster1
Magsafe is Apple-proprietary, it’s hard for a manufacturer to justify including hardware that only covers ~30-40% of the phone market (though admittedly a much larger percentage of new-car buyers)
iPhone is roughly ~50% most of the Anglosphere & Japan.
If Nissan could offer some predatory phone plans built into their financing, they might have a viable business plan here.
MagSafe has been available on Android phones via third-party cases for some time and now the Qi2 standard is essentially open-source MagSafe. Nissan is smart to adopt this now and I look forward to seeing more companies do so.
Also Apple-Proprietary = Licensing fees.
If you want to sell something that infringes on their trademark, you gotta pay for it.
The phone cases are either paying Apple, or are small enough that they hope Apple doesnt sue them into oblivion.
If a car mfg wants to do magnetic alignment wireless charging without extra money, they needed to wait for an open standard like Qi2.
“Qi2 (officially “Qi v2.0 Magnetic Power Profile”) borrows Apple’s magnet layout and bakes it into the WPC’s next-gen spec.
Any Qi2-certified phone or charger must use that ring, guaranteeing perfect alignment and a launch speed of 15W—no licensing from Apple required.”
https://www.anker.com/ca/blogs/content/what-is-magsafe
Right, Apple shared the Magsafe design with Qi consortium (or whatever it’s called) to be used in Qi2. Meanwhile, with the right actively cooled charger, the latest iPhones can do 25W. I don’t know whether there are Androids doing this also. At least as I understand it so far, Apple basically shared their soon-to-be-superceded design to become Qi2.
Android phones can also do 25w on Qi2 (at least the fancy ones).
The problem is that the cars being released now were in development before Qi2 existed. Future cars will have more of this.
I will pay an absurd amount of money for a kit to retrofit something like this in place of the shitty wireless charger I have now in the Cadillac.
There are model-specific wireless chargers w/ built-in fans on ebay (and probably Aliexpress) to retrofit for cars that didn’t come with it, but the best solution is the vent mount style, even if it’s not the most elegant. I can charge wirelessly at 15w while running AA wirelessly and the phone is still cool to the touch.
So they added a MagSafe puck? Are they actually the first to do that?
I 3d printed a simple tray a while back to hold two cheapo pucks in the center console so I could charge my phone without it flying around. Who knew I was at the forefront of automotive technology! Mine is angled so I can see the screen and is covered with microsuede fabric cuz I’m just fancy like that.
I have an Apple puck in my center armrest plugged into a USB-C in there. That works for Magsafe devices, but I also left the regular tray in the center console that works for anyone with a Qi-enabled device. I never had any issues with pads before, they’re the best solution for the broadest array of phones and cases. Probably why they stuck around for so long.
Besides, there are tons of aftermarket magnetized charging solutions. This always feels like the OEMs trying to stay ahead of the aftermarket and never quite getting there…like with so many other things.
As someone incapable of making … literally anything, this is impressive!
To be fair, you haven’t actually seen it. lol
I feel this in my soul. Most of my 3d printed designs these days are done in OpenSCAD and making aesthetically pleasing parts in that system takes about 10x as long, so I mostly don’t bother. 🙂
My X3 has some kind of a retrofit pad where the ashtray would normally be, since as of 2022 society has clearly traded one casual stimulant (nicotine) for another (social media). So it makes sense…
Don’t forget, though, that in order to use the magnetized charging pad, you’ll need a Magsafe case, and those tend to be thinner and less durable than, say, an Otterbox Commuter or Defender.
My wife has an OG-style case (iphone 13) and can still charge on the traditional pad, but the magnetized one would just cause it to fall out of place. Keep in mind there are a lot of wireless-capable phones without magnetization, so the pads were a way to make them work better for everyone.
I love my Otterbox Magsafe case for the convenience, but it doesn’t protect for sh*t. I’m still not sure the tradeoff works for me.
I assume phones soon will have no external ports of any kind, until that time I will use a cord and after that time I will use an aftermarket wireless one until that day in the future I end up with a newer car. Good for Nissan for making an effort to improve things.
I have am air cooled wireless charger on my daily driver, and it works great! Handlebar phone mount FTW!
Excellent point. But cars have no handlebars, so we may have to tinker with this. How about we point the phone charge not in the center console, but just outside the side window just inside the mirror? We can probably fit a mount there and it will keep things cool as long as the car is moving.
You can use a handlebar mount on the steering wheel! What could possibly go wrong…?
I would just like to say, these are all good ideas.
Here’s another one – since you need to see the phone but it’s illegal to touch the phone in most places – stick it to the outside of the sunroof! Excellent cooling, and the ultimate “heads up” display!
My GR Corolla HAD a wireless charger & it was terrible. I swapped it out for the cubby that comes w/ cars that don’t have it, and it added a bit of storage for change plus a good spot for a switch for the Hella 500s I mounted.