BYD's Five-Minute Charging Puts China in the Lead for EVs

Then, some chemistries/designs have better cycle endurance, some can probably recharge faster at given depletion levels. When charging an almost totally discharged battery, there's lots of "slots" for the incoming charge to fill, but as it fills up, it will inevitably take more time to locate a "slot" to occupy.

Solid state and semi-solid state may be at play here, since a solid state battery is theoretically more durable as well.

Or, to your point, it is a marketing stunt that doesn't care about cycle endurance. How would we tell? Battery reporting is still horrendous at delineating the tradeoffs/limitations per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930 but hoping that mainstream media don't "gee whiz" science and technology reporting is simply not going to happen, especially in the clickbait era.

> Finally, there’s the BYD Megawatt chargeritself, whose maximum 1,360-kW output whips the 500 kW of Lucid’s new Charging Hub in New York City. The units feature built-in energy storage to reserve juice for when the grid can’t supply it, or for use in China’s rural areas.

Worth mentioning that the peak is pretty short duration. The article talks about power draw dipping to below 500kW. Which makes me think that having a buffer battery, even a small-ish one, could be super useful for load averaging, to knock off this peak load.

That’s not typical currently though and I presume it’s similar elsewhere.

I think it's hard to economically hit that and give a car that folks are OK driving within limitations.

Mazda tried to do a range extender setup on the MX-30, however it didn't sell that well and my understanding is the range extender wasn't good for hills or highway cases.

Non Range Extender setups, actually typically work better if you're stuck in gas mode than a range extender, mostly because you can use the mechanical energy from the ICE more directly than the losses of something feeding energy directly into the drivetrain. However, once you hit that point anything after 2 or 3 KWh of battery is just dead weight on the car. I'm guessing that's why even the Prius prime is only around 40 miles of range.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the US addiction to huge vehicles (which need even bigger batteries...)

Edit:

Seeing the edit of what I'm replying to, I'll add that yes PHEVs are probably a 'better' option than BEVs for many people, but the cost of a PHEV can be as much or more than a BEV. Look at a Chevrolet Equinox EV vs a Rav4 Prime. The Rav4 Prime is 10K more expensive. Happy to consider a different comparison here but overall nobody has figured out how to make a PHEV that is cheaper than a similar EV.

I think targetting the 99.9th percentile trip is maybe even a bit low. A commuting American has at least two car trips per typical day, probably more like 5. So 1 trip in a thousand means something that comes up more than annually.

We tend to act with a scarcity and "what if" mindset.

It doesn't matter if you never drive 400 miles, or rarely, you're spending money, significant one in case of a car, thus range becomes an issue.

Isn't China free to build a car factory here, with their technology?

I don't know the extent to which demand plays a role. Ford makes F150s because people buy F150s. They have to be forced to make smaller cars, and lose money on them.

How can we fix American industry?

1. China got here by using protectionism and stealing trade secrets. They subsidized their domestic producers and forced foreign entities to partner and train domestic nationals. They used protectionism to leapfrog us. We shouldn't just let them in and destroy our own capacity.

2. Manufacturing is necessary for a country that plans to go to war. America (and every nation!) needs a strong industrial plant to counter its enemies. Without the ability to switch to making warplanes, tanks, and drones, you'll be unable to fight a drawn out war.

3. We're really not that far behind and our industry will be fine. There's way too much panic here.

> For those worried about national self-sufficiency, the answer can be public transit, not cars.

This is highly opinionated r/fuckcars anti-"carbrain" (as they call it). This does not work in America. It's an opinion of city dwellers who have no exposure to the rest of the country.

Self-driving cars will transform public Transit in this country to be more automotive and less rail based. Not the other way around.

It can work fine in normal situations, but any kind of stress, and anyone without a car is completely stuck. Bad weather, labor strike, high demand, evacuation, moving day, there's a politician in town and roads are closed, there's a celebrity/show in town and you want to go somewhere else, power outage, windstorm and some roads are closed.

Any kind of stress and public transit fails. Which makes it the opposite of self sufficiency.

And no, the answer cannot be public transit. Public transit won't be a valid response to the next Pearl Harbor.

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.

China also has extreme climates.

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.

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'...

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!

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.

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

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.