Does anyone have any good or bad experience with the wireless charger? My iPhone 16, after being connected for about 30 minutes on a drive using wireless CarPlay finishes up with the same charge level it started. In contrast, the same journey connected via USB-C cable will add about 20 points of charge. It seems like the wireless charging is more of a charge maintainer and not a charger. Thoughts?

 

I am giving up on the wireless charger now, it is a nice design to have air vents behind the charging pad, but then I found the vents should be connected with the A/C of the car. So in this cold January, it is blowing hot air to my phone. After driving for about 30 minutes, CarPlay will become laggy and buggy.

Also 80% of the time when I place my phone in the wireless charger, I will forget about it.

So right now I’m keeping two cables in the car for emergency, but my phone will not be charged while I’m driving.

 

I had a loaner ‘25 Countryman the last time I got our Clubman serviced. I was surprised to have the same experience with the charging pad that you had.

The phone didn’t lose charge, but it didn’t charge more either.

At least the phone didn’t overheat like it does in our ‘19 JCW 2-door.

 

Good thing it gives you a warning that you left your phone in the charger when you turn off your car and open the door!

 

Must be a very low charge rate?

The older design was pretty good, other then some phones did not fit as they were too big.

https://www.ecstuning.com/b-genuine-...f/84102449887/

 

Google’s AI bot says this:

• The 2025 Mini Cooper's wireless charging rate supports up to 15 watts for Android phones and up to 7.5 watts for Apple phones.

but can’t provide an online reference to support it.

Even at 7.5 W you’d expect the charge rate to exceed the amount of power being drawn by the phone, thus increasing the state of charge of the phone over time.

 

Yep, i had a loaner fully loaded Genesis and it would not charge my phone more using the carplay. Its pretty much just kept it at the same rate.

 

I did hear back from Customer Care:
When you are using features like CarPlay/Android Auto and streaming media while wirelessly charging your phone, the phone's battery will not actually increase much in charge. This is because the power being provided by the wireless charger is not enough to offset the battery drain from the active usage.
In this scenario, the wireless charger becomes more of a "battery tender" rather than a way to actively charge the battery. The low amperage of wireless charging is not sufficient to overcome the battery drain from the other concurrent activities.
In other words, the wireless charging is not able to keep up with the battery consumption from the resource-intensive tasks you are performing, so the battery level will remain steady or even slowly decrease, rather than increasing. The wireless charger is just maintaining the battery level rather than actively charging it.

 

And yet, when I look up how much power is used when using wireless CarPlay, what is see is “1-3 Watts”.

Weird.

 

Just a quick update about this. With the latest update for OS9 of April 2025, it is still only maintaining battery level instead of charging. I hope they fix this via future updates.

 

Wireless charging will always be less efficient than a directly wired connection. Even if a wireless charger is rated for a certain wattage, the actual charge rate will be lower than that rating due to the induction loss. Most wireless chargers I've seen in vehicles will, at best, keep the battery level stable when there's a connection using data streaming and especially GPS. For longer trips it's better to hardwire if you need battery capacity topped off when you conclude the drive.

 

The wireless charge set up makes a great napkin dispenser

 

It would be a lie to say they’ve put in place a 7.5W charging plate and then try to brush off its inability to charge the phone was due to “induction losses”.

That’s what the darned thing does is charge a phone inductively. And that’s what the 7.5W power rating means, or at least it should.

It’s a mystery what’s going on here, all of the many other manufacturers who sell inductive cell phone chargers seem to know how to do this.

For an iPhone, the little original size charging cubes only put out 5W, and that was able to charge the phone while using it.

Someone either really blew it here or MINI, for some undisclosed reason, reduced the output of the charging pad and didn’t bother to tell anyone.

 

There's no way that's accurate. Most phones use enough power to warm or legit heat up when using Carplay or AA. What you're seeing is probably just that app's CPU usage or something. That probably isn't including the power draw of GPS and WiFi data streaming, which are two of the larger power draws.

 

Again like most of the car, they have done a half arsed job. The plate in the electics looks pretty good as its flat but the upright and elastic band in the F66 is awful in my experiance. Its very picky on location of the phone.

I do use Android (Pixel 9) and it works OK althogh its very slow to charge, The USB C ports are also low wattage (someone on another thread recons 13W) and so its related for sure.

They really need to do better as other manufacturers seem to do it fine.

 

I stopped using the U25’s wireless charger and now I use the bracket charger

 

I use mine to hold the garage door opener. I also turned the charger off.