Chinese EV maker BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank
BYD unveils platform with charging power of 1,000 kW, which would be twice as fast as Tesla’s supercharging
Maybe with a supercapacitor in the station and a chrging cable with the diameter of a fuel hose.
Not really, just make the vehicle 800v and then use the same Amp limits. That's where everyone is out pacing tesla now. Tesla went for amps, the others went for volts
I always imagined that portable future wizard (??nuclear??) power would be as simple as unscrewing a 5 gallon cannister from the back of a vehicle and exchanging it at the power/charging station for money. Like the small 20 lb LPG cooking gas tanks. I still think that electric cars are a phase of tech that cannot be sustainable in terms of money and environmental cost and waste for too long and that it is just transitional in our quest. Hydrogen power was always supposed to be the future in my mind.
Well, you'd need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can't force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they'll lose out on precious markups.
That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.
The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you'd let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you've already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I'm sure it's a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.
I'm all for the idea, mind you. This isn't me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what's stopping us (and the answer is probably "rich people that don't like sharing" as usual).
Hydrogen power is the past not the future it's just a past that never came to be so we sort of feel like it's something futuristic.
It's a great idea in theory but there's so many problems with the idea not least of which is where do you get the hydrogen from? The amount of power that you would need to compress hydrogen into liquid on an industrial scale would practically necessitate dysonsphere.
Hydrogen has extreme structural problems. Hydrogen tanks need constant maintenance, due to how small the molecule is - it's very difficult to contain and prevent corrosion. You then have significant conversion loss between the powerplant-native format of electricity, and the hydrogen. So nothing can be as cheap as pure electricity. Fuelling the car with ammonia that then gets converted to Hydrogen inside the car is the solution to the first problem, but further increases the loss on the second.
What you're describing sounds like a small, high-capacity battery to me! Like a super AA battery. Maybe in 50 years :)
Hydrogen has the same problems tho. Well, except metal/bor hydride, but they have low enery density.
Assuming this is about the same thing as the other BYD charging article I saw a couple days ago, they're using a higher voltage, which would let them charge faster without needing a thicker* cable.
(* The copper need not be thicker, but the insulation might need to be)
Is charging speed really the biggest issue with EV's?
Not really. Mostly need greater density of chargers in some areas. Some older EVs charge kinda slow which is a pain because older EVs also tend to have lower range.
Most people charge almost exclusively at home where speed doesn’t really matter much.
More like charging availability imo. Not everyone has a garage to conveniently charge in after a day's work. If you make charging speeds fast enough like with gas, you can negate that though.
Definitely availability and range. I thought of getting EV here in Thailand but limited range + limited charing coverage + 30min charing time is a real deal breaker.
All of which are very solvable issues and I'm sure my next car will be an EV tho
If you're going on a long road trip, yes.
But is it really?
A 2000 mile road trip with 20 minute charging breaks is gonna add what? 3 and a half hours on top of 30 hours of driving?
Unless you plan on doing a bunch of meth and speeding across the desert, I don't see a scenario where a regular person does 8+ hours of driving and doesn't take a 20 minute break.
I'd like to add that for the once in 20 years that car sees a 2000 mile road trip, I don't think waiting a little bit is actually an issue.
Take an honest reflection, and think, how often are people driving driving more than 300 miles in a single session.
Then think about yourself in the position of the road trip, are you going to sacrifice the lifespan of your battery to go from 20 minutes to 5 minutes charging time?, (especially since it's likely you will spend more than 5 minutes anyway just going to the bathroom, eating some food, etc.)
Only by perception, but it practicality mattered, we wouldn't be ligging around two tons of steel per person everywhere we went.
Stuff I've heard on naysays:
"The battery will blow up!!!!!"
No, it won't if it's a solid state battery - solid state batteries barely even notice such a charging rate, their temperature might change by half a degree from this monster charging rate.
"You can't supply the power because lines"
Modern large commercial buildings already suck down this amount and more.
"The grid overall can't take 1MW"
So, the 1,000 MW nuclear reactor can't provide 1MW? How about a reactor station with 4 units cranking 4000 MW? How about we add another 1000 in renewables? How about another 800MW with a single gas turbine? How about adding roof solar and a battery bank below ground for the charging station to supplement the power? We haven't even touched hydro or geo yet. Making power is not a problem, and we'll build out the power as we need it.
What about defects in the machine or car? Could that lead to people being struck by lightning coming from the box next to their automobil?
Fairly unlikely, we engineer things to fail safe.
Even if so we have ways to calculate the power going in and coming out, and if there's an imbalance kill everything, that's how gfci and arc fault breakers work.
If the insulation doesn't insulate, that is a risk indeed. There would probably have to be some detection mechanism for damaged insulation on top of regular maintenance checks. I don't know if some wiring in the insulation could measure the integrity. Maybe if the voltage would oscillate regularly, picking up on the induction of those changes might allow detecting if the shielding is inconsistent before it actually becomes threat? I only have half-remembered bits of an intro course on electrical engineering years ago, so maybe I'm way off.
Gas powered cars catch fire all the time
So, the 1,000 MW nuclear reactor can't provide 1MW?
There's some parts inbetween. You would need an extra line just for the charging stations.
Though, a capacitor bank (maybe where the fuel tank was) would be viable.
Modern large commercial buildings already suck down this amount and more.
And how mamy cars in said building? How many will be allowed to charge at the same time? Should we expect same grid for large commercial buildings and rural charging stations?
If there's literally one place in America we need to throw money at, it's the electrical grid.
We have a decades out of date power infrastructure, Europe especially has us beat.
Just like electrification originally, and later the internet, increasing power delivery will have benefits for everyone that pay off for centuries .
Mostly we need to make the grid far smarter.
Evs should be allowed to load coordinate with the grid, so they switch on at the optimum times for grid stability in exchange for major discounts on power.
A superload like this one should have to request clearance, then the grid compensates by reducing 'cheap ev power' in the area, while also requesting evs configured for v2g to be ready to possibly supply.
The supercharger has a slightly higher cost per kwh to make up for this, but that is the cost of convenience.
Countdown until Trump stupidly bans it as it "harms" President Musk.
...
biden basically did that already. ever noticed there are no byds on the road in the us?
i seem to recall it wasn't an outright ban, but unreasonable tariffs on chinese evs specifically. a soft ban, but enough to be as effective.
i seem to recall it wasn’t an outright ban, but unreasonable tariffs on chinese evs specifically.
Yeah, tariffs.
Otherwise, you'd see the subcompact EVs with a 150mile range for about $9,000 US that BYD sells.
No US manufacturer can remotely compete with the cost of EVs from China. Rather than letting people buy cheap EVs, the government decided to tariff them so that they cost as much as a luxury car.
how fast would it cause the battery to degrade, though?
That's the beauty of it. Just get a new one every two years like every other electronic device and you won't need to worry about that. Subscription plans will be available.
ugh, i fear cars will turn into smartphones. its gonna suuuuuuuuuuuuuck
I wish the batteries were modular/interchangeable. You could just pull into a station, remove the spent battery and replace it with a full one, the spent one can then just get recharged and stored at the station for the next user to change out. You could even bring some extra ones in the trunk for a long trip!
Not necessarily as they are using LFP chemistry which has much more cycles than the standard one.
this would be a massive leap for EVs
I’m sure it’s similar to how they trained DeepSeek for $5M when it was really over a $1B…
They make all kinds of false claims.
I wasn’t aware! Thanks for sharing. Here goes my dream of bootstrapping an LLM model in my parents’ garage.
one quick charge for a car, one giant leap for ev king
I always think about an “imaginary” scenario where we all have ultra fast charging like this and plug our cars in at the same time. Would the grid experience a brownout?
I studied this a bit in my MS and the answer is... probably not. "The grid will collapse" has been an anti-technology or pro fossil fuel talking point for a very long time, whether* its arguing against renewables or against personal computers or against AC units. The most recent was solar. Grid operators were adamant that solar would crash the grid if it accounted for more than 10%, then 20%, then 30% and so on and it never happened. Now it's onto EVs being the grid destroyer.
The reality is that production and use is not all that hard to predict. Ultrafast charging will eat some power, but that isn't going to be the norm for wide EV adoption. Public charging will cost more money and be less convenient than charging at home or work over a longer duration. Home chargers are capping around 30-35 amps, generally overnight when grid demand is low. Couple this with the combined low cost for residential solar to change at even lower rates depending on your state/nation's hostility to solar.
Now, if every car was replaced with an EV tomorrow, the grid would struggle. But that's not going to happen. Adoption will be a long slow process and energy producers will increase output on pace as demand forecasts increase. A good parallel to this is Air Conditioning adoption. That's another high demand appliance that went from rare to common. The grid has its challenges, but now the AC usage is forcastable and rarely challenges the grid.
Is it a challenge, especially with higher renewable mixtures, yes. Can utilities fumble? Of course. Will it be a widespread brownout every day during commute hours? Not likely.
Also, just to indicate the orders of magnitude: The German electiricty grid roughly operates at a power of 200 000 MW on average.
Source (the colorful graph in the middle of the page). (Be mindful that the absolute numbers in the graph are given in "MWh per 15 minutes" (power*time/time), so to get the Watt number (power) at any given time, one has to multiply the number by 4.)
Great reply, thank you!
If you truly have an "MS" then it should be trivial for you to do the math and calculate the power requirements of even a dozen cars being charged at the rate of 1 Megawatt each.
A bare 12 chargers, the equivalent of a single small gas station, would certainly collapse the grid its attached to. These kinds of charging rates aren't possible outside the parking lot of a power plant.
Things like that can definitely be accomodated. A famous example is how the UK would keep pumped storage hydro power ready for moments like half time in major football games or breaks in popular TV shows, because the entire country would pretty much simultaneously put their kettles on
Charging a car is a much bigger draw than powering a kettle, obviously, but the point is that these things tend to be reasonably predictable and we are able to ccount for them if we know they are coming
Combined cycle natural gas plant operator in the US here. Bridging the gap between low demand and high demand times is a big part of why it's so challenging to try to reduce fossil fuel power solutions. The grid is basically a pressurized pipeline, and it's only reliable if that pressure is maintained no matter how many "faucets" get opened or closed. Green energy solutions aren't really able to raise that "pressure" unless we build significantly more than we need and keep a bunch of them off most of the time until peak conditions demand them. Nuclear is extremely slow (relatively speaking) to (safely) alter output to meet demand, so its best usecase is for baseloading as much as possible. But with a natural gas plant, I can put my foot on the gas pedal, figuratively speaking. It's fucking terrible for the environment, but that's the cost of everybody insisting on consuming so much goddamn electricity all the time. If you don't like it, stop supporting power hogs like data centers by using AI bullshit and cloud storage and web hosting and media streaming.
This is a complicated problem, and complicated problems almost never have simple solutions. I wish we could minimize the problem of what happens when 100M+ EVs get plugged in at 7pm on a Tuesday by already having put together a strong public transportation infrastructure that people feel comfortable and safe using, but the time to start doing that was probably during the gas shortage in the 70s when we saw how overly reliant we were on cars. It's probably not too late to start, but it's gonna be a challenging transition now no matter what we do.
Nice! Glad I asked
Perfect application and apropos name for 'surge' pricing
The hurdle to this kind of fast charging isn't the tech in the car nor is it the tech in the charger. It's powering the fucking things.
A charging station the size of a small gas station that can handle a dozen cars at once, basically 6 islands with a pump / charger on each side, would require a nuclear reactor sitting out back to supply the required 1.2 Megawatts of power!
So we're either going to have to get comfy with having an SMR sitting next to every charging station or we're going to have to get over this idea of charging an EV pack in 5 minutes.
The hurdle to this kind of fast charging isn't the tech in the car nor is it the tech in the charger. It's powering the fucking things.
Agreed.
would require a nuclear reactor sitting out back to supply the required 1.2 Megawatts of power!
Eh....
At 5 minutes a car, each charger would be able to accommodate 12 cars per hour. The 12-charger station, fed by that nuclear reactor, would be able to handle 144 per hour.
A typical gas station that size has an 8500 gallon tank, and refills 2-5 times per week. That amount of fuel will serve somewhere between 1000 to 3000 cars per week, or about 6 to 18 cars per hour.
This doesn't call for a nuclear reactor at the station. This calls for a sufficiently large battery pack at each station that can "trickle" charge continuously. I say "trickle" - if I did my math right, it would be about as much power as 15 hot tubs or 60 water heaters. About as much as a grocery store, with all its freezers, refrigerators, lights, HVAC, etc.
Certainly a lot of power, but certainly not outside the realm of possibility. On-site solar installations could offset a significant percentage of that demand.
People just have the wrong idea about EV charging. They think of it like a gas car, wait until you're low, then go somewhere to fill up. But really, it’s more like charging your phone. You plug it in at home, go to bed, wake up, and it’s ready. You’re not constantly thinking about it.
Fast charging is for road trips, not everyday driving. You’re not supposed to be scrambling to find a charger every couple of days. Ideally, you start each morning with 80%, go about your day, come home, plug in, and do it all over again. You’re never really "empty" unless you seriously mess up. And the whole "how long does it take to charge?" thing, isn't really all that relevant. You’re not sitting there watching it, it just happens while you’re doing other things.
People are stuck on the idea of gas stations, but with an EV, your "gas station" is literally your house.
So ideally it wouldn't be handling 12 cars at once it'd be handling one or two.
Unfortunately, the infrastructure for the standard use case you talk about isn't pervasive enough. Most apartments don't have chargers at all, let alone one per apartment. You can drive by a Tesla or DC fast charge station at almost any time of day in a big city and see a line of cars waiting to use the small number of chargers. People are taking naps in their car in a bank parking lot while charging. Kudos to them for embracing the inconvenience of not charging at home to help the environment, but I never would have bought my 2 EVs if I didn't have charging at home.
Yeah this is the idea. Personally I think charging needs more emphasis on at-work and apartment charging because if you don’t live at a house, you essentially rely on public charging which isn’t good for the battery.
Also more hotels should have charging. Having to drive 15 minutes away just to charge is annoying.
I wouldn't buy a car I couldn't take on a road trip though, even if it's only a few times a year.
And everyone tends to go on a road trip at a similar time, too.
15 MW power needed, while a single reactor gives 500 to 1000 MW. The usual nuclear plant and power lines seem more likely.
A large office building will have an incoming main in the hundreds of amps range, some are over a thousand, meaning 500+ KW.
Getting that much power to a site isn't ridiculously hard to do.
That’s actually a great point. The power grid can’t handle that.
That article is light on details. Trying to push 1000kW into an 800V drive train (current state of the art) is going to generate a LOT of heat. Is BYD going to increase the drivetrain voltage in order to bring required amperage down (and heat gen with it)? A lot of car makers haven't even made it to 800 yet.
My car could charge in well under 15 minutes if any charger in my area could make it to the advertised 350kW. My high water mark so far (after 3 months) is 185kW. Usually its closer to 80.
All EV batteries are already thermally constrained more or less. The only way this really works and scales is if they integrate cooling into the charging standards so that theres like a coolant hookup on the charge cable. Or if they've got some secret superconducting tech.
Those batteries are gonna be (sorry) LIT.
Like, on fire. Like, from the massive charging rate.