This past spring, two major Chinese companies announced breakthroughs in battery technology that will enable electric vehicles to drive hundreds of miles on a five-minute charge.
BYD, which is now the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles, has developed a battery that has a peak charging capacity of 1,000 kilowatts, also known as a megawatt.
We also have battery tech that can theoretically be charged that fast. We have for years. Charging a single small test cell in a few seconds is relatively easy. Getting it out of the lab, into a factory working at scale, then in vehicles on the road charging that fast is a very different thing. Those kinds of leaps in battery labs have been a dime a dozen for decades now. In the real world we just get a steady march of slow improvement.
While other automakers may eventually figure out how to build megawatt charging systems, it won’t happen overnight, Fisher said.
They haven’t “rolled out” any chargers that can do what they are claiming with the batteries. As Naz@sh.itjust.works pointed out with the math. That level of charging doubles what even the best 800V systems can do. And there are barley a few dozen of those in the world.
BYD has promised to build 4,000 “megawatt flash charging” stations in China to support its new cars with 1,000-kilowatt charging capacity.
No time table. Nothing real. Just a marketing “promise”.
That’s not what that article says.
We also have battery tech that can theoretically be charged that fast. We have for years. Charging a single small test cell in a few seconds is relatively easy. Getting it out of the lab, into a factory working at scale, then in vehicles on the road charging that fast is a very different thing. Those kinds of leaps in battery labs have been a dime a dozen for decades now. In the real world we just get a steady march of slow improvement.
They haven’t “rolled out” any chargers that can do what they are claiming with the batteries. As Naz@sh.itjust.works pointed out with the math. That level of charging doubles what even the best 800V systems can do. And there are barley a few dozen of those in the world.
No time table. Nothing real. Just a marketing “promise”.
I was pretty irritated when I saw this.
Well, there goes my 15-minute tirade on how much batteries have improved in the last 3 decades.