 Hi, I'm Shri Perwimba. I'm here at the ID Tech X show. This is Dr. Bryce Jameson from Elix. And he just gave a talk about wireless charging technology from Elix. Thank you so much for taking this time to give a short interview. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal background? So my background is in wireless, is in magnetics for powered conversion. That basically means any way to transfer power from one point to another, you need some sort of magnetic converters, inductors, chokes. And at this point, it's wireless power transfer using magnetic fields. So we have a permanent magnet coupled to another permanent magnet, like effectively a big magnetic gear that we can transfer very high efficiency power from one transmitter to a receiver. So with Elix, what is unique about the technology to change this industry or change this particular space? So Elix is the only wireless charging technology that can transfer power at 60 hertz. This is line frequency. The unique technology means that we have very low EMI. We have low inductive heating. And it's extremely high efficiency. So we don't have some of the same coil to coil losses. It makes it a very flexible modular system. And where is the company at in terms of product development and deployment of technology? So Elix is an early stage startup. We recently raised A round. We're currently fundraising for a B round. And we're in the beta trial stage of what we call the E8K. And that's our level two 7.7 kilowatt wireless charging product. It's designed for EV, e-buses, autonomous vehicles, anything that would charge similarly to a standard plug-in connector. And these early beta trials are in China? We have beta trials both in China and in North America. So we'll have vehicles going into Detroit, into Shenzhen, into autonomous buses, into cars, into logistics vehicles. It's fairly wide range of different applications. Anything from e-mobility to end users to system integrators. In terms of the technology itself, how does this technology compare itself with other potential wireless charging technologies in ways that are better? The crucial difference is how we approach wireless charging. Instead of using a high frequency, a coupled magnetic field, we use a low frequency coupled permanent magnet. And the key difference there means that we can run our system at 1,000 times lower frequency and easily output 60 Hertz clean AC into the charging system. And in your talk, you mentioned about the fact that some of these boxes can be like a heater box and you could have a cat curl up close to it, which is a real problem anywhere. And how does the technology solve this kind of issue? The unique thing about the ELIX technology is that the low frequency first doesn't produce heat in nearby objects. With higher frequency technologies, you have to watch things like foreign objects, even a paperclip, even two receipts stapled together could produce enough heat to start on fire. And so you need to stop the system and run it down until somebody can come out and remove this. With the ELIX system, first, we don't produce the same heat because it's a much lower frequency. Secondly, it can produce repulsive force in some of these materials that can push them away from the charging zone. So it's basically an automatic foreign object detection and removal system, which means the system won't go down and be unavailable if something falls onto the charging pad. That's pretty awesome. There are products that have been deployed in automobiles that are on trials today, right? Do you have some example of a product that you can show? Yeah. In fact, the first product that we ever installed on a vehicle I installed in the back of my car, it's a 7.7 kilowatt charger. We have the only wirelessly charged Chevy bolt in the world from what I can tell so far. I just back it in the parking space every morning at work and it can start to charge automatically. And how does the car see your charger? Does it see it as something different or is it similar to a? No, the way we've installed it, and because it's a 60 Hertz line frequency AC output, the car thinks that it's plugged in. We used a standard connector to connect the J1772 on-board charger or OBC. We just plugged into that system and the vehicle can't tell the difference between wired and wireless charging. But at the same time, we also maintain the ability that we can charge with a wired connection using the same hardware. Can the same technology be deployed from smaller automobiles to very large buses? Of course. The E-Leaks system is designed to be a module. So we've previously done trials where we had a one kilowatt product, but they needed two kilowatts of power. So we installed two chargers, one next to the other, and they both provided one kilowatt of power for a total of the two kilowatts that they needed. In a bus application, we'll be using a lot bigger chargers, a 22 kilowatt module. But the thing about 22 kilowatts or what's still level two charging, it can be done with standard power levels. You don't have to run specialty hardware to get 22 kilowatts. It's a three phase system, but it's not substantially large three phase. The other thing is, when we have 22 kilowatt power electronics, then we just stack them to get 100 or 200 kilowatts depending on how much space is available on the bus. But that 22 kilowatt module can also, it can work backwards to the vehicle. So we don't have a solution where we have one vehicle charger and then one bus charger. We have one product that can be scaled to meet the needs of both EV and E-buses. I think this puts us in a unique place in the market. Absolutely, absolutely. You also mentioned something about a last mile solution in terms of a shuttle type. Tell us a little bit more about that. So last mile autonomous shuttles are really, I think where we are going to see full autonomous drive come to play first. In closed road solutions where EVs, maybe you don't have to have the same problems as in an open road test case, but something where you need to move people around. I'm thinking theme parks we are talking, condo developments, private roads, tourist sites. These are all places where you could have a driverless shuttle taking people on a series of routes or from point A to point B, depending on where the users need to go. The issue is when you start running these vehicles, they have to have a very high uptime but they stop periodically that they can charge and if there's no driver there may be no one to plug it in and wireless is where you can really see the benefits of autonomous without having to have someone at every stop plugging in a vehicle so that it can stay running for the full time. Sure, and so the company has deployed the solution with just 7.7 kilowatt product that's in beta trials now. What does the road map look like for the next two, three years? So next year we intend to finally commercialize this product that we'll finish the beta trials, go to commercialization in our 7.7 kilowatt system. Then what we want to do is develop a 3.3 kilowatt. So it seems like we're going backwards but what we're doing is we're developing a highly efficient 3.3 kilowatt solution for very small car share EVs. So these are another space where EVs are becoming quite dominant, especially in places like China and at 3.3 kilowatts for vehicles that are stopped periodically with a small battery, this is the charging power that some, a lot of the customers have said that they're looking for but at the same time we want to go to higher power and so we're going to develop a 22 kilowatt charging module. Very nearly got there in some of our lab demos but this is going to be the module that we'll stack to get higher power for e-buses, higher power EVs, large scale systems. That will then be used to enhance some of the current EV offerings in the coming years. Excellent. And the company has got facilities in Vancouver, in Canada, in China. Where is all the engineering done and where is the R&D done and where would you manufacture? So ELIX is, we've divided up the company. Effectively the R&D and product development up to alpha stage is all done with our technology team in Vancouver. The team in Shanghai then, we do a technology transfer and they use the experience that they have in mass market development to take it to manufacturing. Then we go to some of our strategic partners, some of our early investors, our major manufacturers in the motor space and we leverage our strategic assets to do OEM and third party manufacturing for sales. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for that. Thank you very much. Thank you for the time. Nice to talk to you. Thanks.