Cars are becoming increasingly high-tech with all sorts of gadgetry all over the place. The Mopar division at Chrysler is introducing an industry first this summer by adding an in-vehicle wireless charging system.

The idea is going to be a familiar one to most readers of Mobile Magazine. There’s a special case for your phone, an inductive charging mat, and no need for a wire to connect the two. This is much the same kind of technology that we see with products like the PowerMat, except this one will be installed directly in the center console of your car.

As a $200 option, the wireless charging system will be first offered this summer in the 2013 Dodge Dart. I imagine they’ll eventually roll out the option to other Chrysler vehicles too. I certainly hope that the mat has been designed with some special non-slip material, because I’d hate to see phones flying all over the place when you take a hard turn, accelerate quickly, or brake suddenly.

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Wireless charging isn’t exactly a new thing, but it also hasn’t taken off as much as we would have expected. You can waltz into any number of electronics retail stores and find that they are selling Powermat or some other variation on the inductive charging thing. The problem is that you have to buy a special adapter or case for every device you want to charge.

Texas Instruments is apparently trying to change that with the bqTESLA kit. This is the industry’s first Qi-certified wireless power development kit and it should be able to work with smartphones, digital cameras, and all sorts of other portable devices. Unlike Powermat, this solution is designed so that the receiver is already built into the target device.

No need for proprietary adapters for charging. By working with the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), the Qi certification on this TI development could work to promote standardization among wireless power systems. The charger takes electricity and converts it to a wireless signal. The receiver gets this wireless signal and converts it back to electricity.

The bqTESLA development kit is avaialble now from Texas Instruments, offering up to 5 watts of power at a time. TI says that you don’t need any additional software to make it work. If you’re feeling like MacGyver’ing together your own wireless solution, you can pick up one of these kits for a cool $500.

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Instead of forcing you into an unnecessarily bulky case, Powermat is now offering swappable batteries. You simply pull out the OEM battery from your chosen device and switch it for one of the Powermat ones. From there, you can place your phone (or whatever) onto the mat and it’ll charge.

This obviously won’t work with the iPhone and iPod, since they don’t have user-swappable batteries, but it should work for most other devices. Powermat says that the batteries will be made available for HTC, BlackBerry, Nokia, LG, Samsung, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson phones.

The receiver cases are still going to kick around, but they’ll be changed for silicone version instead. The Powermat chargers themselves will be offered as Powermat 1X, Powermat 2X, and Powermat 3X, corresponding to the number of charging spots each one has. There’s also a Powermat 3X Netbook that’ll charge a netbook and two other gadgets.

Source: Gizmodo

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