I’ll take a wild guess and say that if your car has a wireless charger, it’s slow and unreliable, and you probably don’t love using it. (McLaren owners may disagree.) There are multiple reasons for this. Manufacturers go to great lengths to design trays to keep devices in place, but they often fail at that task. And wireless charging also loses a considerable amount of energy to heat, which, coupled with the demands of Bluetooth streaming and navigation, leaves your phone toasty and unresponsive. Fortunately, things are about to get a lot better for in-car wireless charging, and the 2026 Nissan Pathfinder offers a window into that future.
When Nissan first shared details on the Pathfinder’s refresh for the coming year, it said that the new SUV would have an improved wireless charger with a magnetic mounting system and cooling fans. Honestly, I read that and just shrugged; for years, manufacturers have been telling us that they’ve heard customer complaints and finally gotten this right. Of course, they hadn’t even come close. But the new Pathfinder and Murano are the first vehicles in the U.S. to employ the new Qi2 wireless charging standard, and Qi2 really appears to be the long-overdue solution to this problem.
I got to sample the new system in a 2026 Pathfinder yesterday. And while I can’t talk behind-the-wheel impressions just yet, I can speak on the charger, which is, I think, a bigger deal than people realize. The Qi2 standard operates at higher wattage than the basic Qi systems in cars today—15 watts instead of 5 watts. You’d still probably charge faster with a wired 15W brick as opposed to a pad because inductive charging is less efficient, but this is still a noticeable boost.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter how many watts you’re pushing if the phone in question can’t stay on the damn coils, which is where Qi2’s real innovation comes in: magnets. The Wireless Power Consortium—a group including Apple, Google, Samsung, and many other tech firms, that aims to develop common standards—worked with Apple’s MagSafe engineers specifically to establish a consensus on magnet positioning, so that all Qi2-equipped phones, no matter who makes them, will be properly aligned on a Qi2 pad.
And those magnets are strong—seemingly stronger than MagSafe, which has never really been fit for automotive duty alone. The Pathfinder’s implementation incorporates a raised puck that I actually didn’t realize was magnetized at first. That’s really my mistake, though, because my iPhone 17 currently lives in a cheapo case that doesn’t have magnets of its own. Once I knew better, I took my phone out of its case and plopped it right on the charger. Sure enough, it was a rigid bind. The little puck has tiny vents along its sides, and I suspect that’s where the cooling comes from.
In a perfect world, the tech and car industries would’ve figured all this out ages ago. And it certainly doesn’t help that automotive product cycles are as lengthy as they are, which is why even though this spec was decided midway through 2023, the first vehicles to actually include it are only launching now. Still, as someone who lost all hope for decent in-car wireless charging years ago, I’m just pleased we’re getting there at all. Now, if manufacturers could offer a way to retrofit older cars with new pads that actually work, then we’d really be talking.
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