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This doesn't represent a groundbreaking advance despite the framing of the article. They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).

Supplying this kind of energy at scale is not possible currently. So they could deploy a few of these around but they simply can't be ubiquitous. Not to mention charging curves make a big difference as do real-world conditions. Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.

Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.




> Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.

This isn't really relevant. The question is if charging speed is sufficient and it's hard to see five minutes being a deal breaker in any scenario.

Meanwhile, gas cars are still a dead end pollution wise, unless you are pro-dead earth I guess. So there is that.


Yeah if I could charge my car in 5 minutes, then it’s much more viable for me to just pull up to a station and then read something for 5 minutes on my phone while it charges. If there’s a decent charging network, then I’d actually find long road trips in an EV viable.


Filling a car with gas usually takes 5 minutes


> Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.

China also has extreme climates.


Good point - so those questions hold for China too. They weren't covered in the article.


Yes, but you should refrain from claims as "it is not ground breaking because X" if you haven't researched the topic. Not covered by the article doesn't prove anything. This kind of articles is supposed to be an introduction to the topic.


Sounds like you have so info that could correct my misunderstanding, please provide!


The point is you should look for information before stating it as factual.


Beijing gets down to -20C in winter and I've experienced 40+ in Shanghai so it's not even out in the sticks either


> Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.

For most people charging speed only matters on long trips.

For normal day to day driving those who cannot do their charging at home will often use chargers at their destinations. For example 3 of the 4 grocery stores I shop at have chargers in their parking lots (2 have level 2 charges, and the other has 150 kW DC chargers). If I didn't have home charging I could charge while doing my grocery shopping, and so as long as it finishes by the time I've finished shopping the time doesn't matter.

Even if there are no destination chargers they can use, so charging does involve a special trip, at the rate that BYD demoed (262 miles added in 5 minutes) a typical driver in the US would need 5-15 minutes every week or so.

On long trips generally people want breaks every few hours for the restroom, to stretch, or get food and drinks. At the charging speed BYD demonstrated a large fraction of people on long trips could do all their charging during those breaks, with the charging taking place while they are using the restroom, stretching, or buying their food and drink.


5 minutes is reasonable.

Having done a long road trip at the end of April, I can comfortably say that any time we stopped to get gas, the stop was longer than 5 minutes in general anyway.

> They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).

Valid concern given that's honestly scary from a battery life and safety perspective, especially when coupled with China's downplaying of the fire issues observed with some of their brands...

> Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.

You might not, but I will state that I've had many a gas station in the US where for whatever reason below freezing has definitely slowed down the pumps. Even if it was still less than 5 minutes, I'd rather the workflow of 'plug in the charger and then go back and sit in the car' than 'Wait at the pump because you've seen even attended pump kickbacks go wrong and it's state law anyway'...


Supplying even current kinds of fast chargers is not possible done naively; local charging stations split whatever their capacity is between the cars that are plugged in, but allowing for the potential of one or two of those 200kW cars if no others are adjacent.

Roughly the same total amount of energy is needed within the same period of couple days either way, having the capacity to charge faster when possible should be a good thing.

>Do you get full speed if it's below freezing?

I live somewhere where it's reasonably regularly -30F and no electric car does well neither charging nor distance despite claims of battery pre-heating and such. You have to pick a car for the environment it's going to be used in.


5 minutes breaks the point from where charging time is something that has to be planned around to an inconvenience equivalent to hitting a red light after leaving a traditional gas station


On your last point, I would say it depends on how big your car is. I've seen some larger pickup trucks take a hot minute to fill up here in Europe. Granted, these are much less common so it's not a big deal if a farmer needs to come fill up since there are generally plenty of other pumps available.

5 minutes is hugely impressive for our current day and we need to remember these moments as the tech continues to get better. This is just the beginning of EV infrastructure!


To your point about charging speeds, a battery with a max charge rate of 1MW could pull 350kW (common enough in the USA) for 10-90% in nearly all conditions. Being able to add a 250 miles of range in 10 minutes in all conditions would definitely be close enough to a gas car for me. If I could buy this today in the USA it would be a game changer for road trips.


Aren't they just doing what some phones now do which is splitting the battery and charging smaller chunks in parallel? So instead of one giant battery you have 2 or more smaller ones each of which can be charged a lot faster than one large one. Of course it makes management more complicated.


That's not how batteries work. The charging time is measured in "C"s which is a weird unit where 1C means you can fully charge the battery of any size in 1 hour. 2C means half an hour.

But it's already independent of the size of the battery. You don't really get any increase on the max charging speed by dividing it up differently, any more than you can create cake by cutting a whole cake into pieces.

The way to improve it is with battery chemistry, and probably with more capable power electronics.


> Do you get full speed if it's below freezing?

If you've got a 1-megawatt power supply, there are things you can do about that.


This represents a huge advance. In functional useful societies, they will be able to develop adequate power infrastructure.

The article also mentions that the charger has its own battery reserves, which it can fill in between fill-ips, and then use to help provide those high peaks. Load averaging.

Then there's your list of gotchas. Oh will it work in the cold? Will it work in heat? Ok yeah maybe that will diminish charge rate maybe. But this habit of looking for problems, looking for reasons to discredit and ignore is a horrible perspective, risks ignoring so much possibility because of such a negative minded orientation.

5 minutes is more than good, imo. At. If you think about the steps before and after filling up, there's a couple minutes of pulling off the road, turning off the car, getting out, walking around, setting up payment, opening the fill up, selecting fuel grade, inserting the filler. You can absolutely speed race this down to 2-3 minutes, but but usually a gas station stop is 5-10 minutes of lost time for most people today. It feels like 5 minutes of waiting is really not a big deal. Is it slower? Yes. But is it significantly slower? Not really, not usually.

It's just so sad having such energy poured into negative mental energy, into convincing people against doing better things. The world deserves better than to be beholden to pestilences of the mind.


What current or future planned power source can deliver 1MW power to even the amount of fast chargers currently in existence?! Small modular reactors at every charging station?

The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Station in my home state of Maryland outputs 1700MW on a typical day. This is enough to power a third of the homes in the state. According to some estimates I found, there are more than 1450 EV charging stations of all types in the state (not enough even for current EV adoption and many are L2 chargers). I can't find over what timescale each charger uses 1MW (per second?) but let's say it's 1MW of power for the 5 minute charge. Let's say each 1MW charger is used twice per day for a single charge each. If all 1450 chargers are used twice per day (2MW/day), you've now exceeded the output of Calvert Cliffs. This is the scale we're talking about.

It's not negative to point out these absurdities, it's vitally important because many jurisdictions are getting ready to ban the sales of new gas cars in 5 years. People depend on working cars for their livelihoods.


We do need to be planning for more energy capacity yes. Ideally our net charge capacity is growing.

But it's worth pointing out that if there's 1450 chargers today & many of them are L2, replacing them with 1MW chargers wouldn't actually change the energy demand at all. It would just be faster charging, not more net charging; people wouldn't be likely to be driving more all of a sudden (ok, ride-share drivers would be on the road a slight bit more).

But yes, we do need to be building more energy capacity (something that places other than the US are doing effectively).




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