What's the battery durability like with 5 minute flash charging? EV makers quote durability and charging speed, but gloss over the fact that it's typically "either/or" because fast charging normally reduces the life of a battery (as can charging to 100%). Does the charging speed outweigh impact on battery life in this case?
Current electric cars work well because you can fill them at home, reserving the need to fast charge to 100% for special occasions. If you have a home charger there's no need to stick to the same refueling regime as a petrol car, so there's limited advantage in being able to "treat the car like a petrol car".
5 minute charging is good, but put it in context until we have "perfect" batteries that have no significant limitations.
I find this site extremely valuable to fact check hype-driven speculation in all things tech. I work in metal processing, downstream from battery tech, so I thought I might contribute here with a bit of cautious skepticism:
"It’s long been possible to charge so quickly once, twice or perhaps even a handful of times over the 1,000-cycle lifetime of a typical EV battery with the 300-mile driving range most motorists demand, they said. But such a battery would burn up, and possibly catch fire, if subjected to consecutive five-minute charges for many hundreds of cycles, industry hands said."
and then,
"Batteries are all about trade-offs between range, weight and charging time. Building a battery that can handle a huge jolt of electricity at once would limit the EV’s range to 100 or 150 miles. The reason is the balance between the electrodes. To enable lithium ions to move that fast into the negative electrode—the anode—it must be made ultrathin. But if you make the anode thinner, you have to make the positive electrode—the cathode—thinner, too, which reduces its capacity to hold energy. That decreases the driving range.
In addition, producing that huge jolt would require costly upgrades to charging stations and the power grid, which at the moment can’t meet such a demand. The cost to build a small four-charger station would be well over $1 million, according to Quincy Lee, CEO of Electric Era, a charging station company. Part of that cost is the large batteries the stations would require to buttress grid power."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/electric-battery-han...
I can't see President Musk adding electric cars to his tarrif exemption list any time soon...
Related BYD unveils battery system that charges EVs in five minutes (24 points, 27 days ago, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43390262
BYD and CATL aim to launch new EV batteries with 6C charge rate (38 points, 10 months ago, 46 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40706337
This is huge. The 20-30 minute charge is very clearly a bottleneck, despite owners saying its a good opportunity to go into Target and do some shopping.
And this trend will continue to accelerate. It is far easier for Chinese Car marker to catch up in ride comfort, safety, usability than others catching up to battery tech.
It is sad but we may the loss some German / Japanese brands. Just like a lot UK car brand disappeared in the 70 to 90s.
BYD needs to create a replaceable battery standard. You go in, your battery gets replaced, ready to go.
What’s impressive about this, and promising about BYD in general, is that they revealed an actual product weeks after revealing the technology.
This is very Apple at its peak’esque.
Too many companies, especially in the EV space (Tesla is awful at this) will announce tech years in advance and often not even deliver.
When we first heard about this 5 min charger a few months ago I fully expected it to be available in a car at least years from now if ever.