This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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!
The problem is the form factor. They're broad, flat batteries under the floor of the car, because that's the most available space when you take out the drivetrain. If you wanted to make them swappable, you'd have to sacrifice the space under the hood or the trunk. Or the passenger space. And all that comes with their own safety concerns.
They can drop the battery out from underneath…. You’re not seriously suggesting that this would be done by users and not automatically? The easiest place for this would be exactly where it is now, underneath EVERYTHING.
It’s not like you are gonna man handle the battery yourself in and out of these dude.
The precedence is there, there’s scooters that already utilize this exact exchanging. Hell forklifts figured this out decades ago… and you want to make it sound like it would be an issue in todays age? Semis have used it for years too, why do you think they would go back to manually doing it? Even if the batteries were light enough to move by hand, you would spend more time unplugging and plugging them back in than it would be to charge them….
There is a company that does this in China. You lease the battery, and pay roughly the same amount as a tank of fuel to swap it, so not a cheap process, and it only works on a small number of vehicles. They're also losing money hand over fist, and aren't likely to last very long.
Also, a long trip is precisely when I need all my trunk space.
Yeah, I've thought about this too, but real use cases would be rare and maybe somewhere along highways for long trips, but you'd need a lot of stations in hard to predict locations to make it something people could use. Most of the time a simple recharge at night at the domicile would suffice. Add trying to get battery form factors standardized when companies can't even agree on a universal charger and challenges to upgrading vehicle frames and design if such a standard was ever adopted and it just seems unsustainable.
I have a Chinese flashlight and the battery trademark is so unfortunate (soonfire) like WTF. Lol.
That dying batteries last goal is to provide you with light. How inspiring.
And heat and depression treatment! (Lithium)
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 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.)
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.
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.
Thats a great point as well, if you live in an apartment the best you can hope for is if you have a garage with an outlet and your apartment complex hasn't cracked down on you plugging in that way, but that's like 20 miles charge in several hours.
People are taking naps in their car in a bank parking lot while charging.
Missed opportunity, right there, because even the operators still think in terms of "gas station". Get a plot of land with a nice view, build a cafe, build a couple of charging stations. Make it a destination people want to go to regardless whether they need a fill-up or not.
Heck, whatever happened to car cinemas.
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.
The other annoying thing is when you find a L2 charger at a hotel that is actually just an L1 charger in disguise.
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.
