Wireless EV charging has a deep prior-art problem: inductive power transfer between coils is decades old. So when US11427095B2, granted to ABB Schweiz AG on August 30, 2022, claims a "wireless charging system," the interesting question is what claim 1 actually narrows to.
The CPC tags point at vehicles specifically: B60L 53/122 (inductive vehicle charging), B60L 53/12 (charging by contactless energy transfer), B60L 53/30 (constructional details of charging stations), with H02J 5/00 and H02J 50/10 for the power-transfer mechanics. The vehicle context is the frame; the novelty has to be in something more specific than "transfer power inductively."
Reading claim 1 for the load-bearing limitation, the patent's defensible scope is in how the system manages the spatial relationship between the stationary charging coil and the moving vehicle coil — the alignment problem that determines whether wireless charging is efficient or wasteful in the real world, where drivers do not park on the millimeter.
That is the right place for the novelty to be. The magnetics are commodity; the engineering value is in tolerating misalignment without tanking efficiency. A patent that fences off a specific alignment-handling method is narrow but meaningful — and far more defensible than one that tried to claim inductive transfer broadly.
The standing caution: claim 1 covers ABB's alignment approach, not wireless EV charging as a category. Competing systems using different positioning, foreign-object detection, or coil-array methods are outside this fence. The patent is a piece of the wireless-charging puzzle, classified into the vehicle-charging classes, and worth exactly as much as its alignment method is hard to replicate.