23 ms·

Electric vehicles could fully recharge in 5 minutes with new cable design

150 points by gabea 5y ago

wiradikusuma 5y ago
Maybe it's just me being paranoid, but gas/charging stations tend to be in "rugged" environment. If oil cable is slit for whatever reason, you have leaking oil. If power cable is split.. you're electrocuted and dead?
- rightbyte 5y ago
  I drove off with a 30kW charger cable still attached and charging. Ironically during developement of functionality to prevent you from driving off with the cable attached. The connector ripped out at the buss and ground faulted. Nothing spectacular happened.
- loufe 5y ago
  No sane regulating body would approve any dangerous charging systems.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    Nonetheless, I fully expect there to be at least a few deaths and injuries once EVs become more common. Probably not as likely via electrocution, but more likely via something catching fire. There are huge amounts of power being transferred; when (not if) something goes wrong, it tends to be quite catastrophic.
    - jatone 5y ago
      there's a huge amount of power being transferred into your home too. it really isn't a problem to do safely.
    - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
      Maybe, but I can't really fathom public chargers being made/installed without ground-fault and arc-fault protection.
peter_d_sherman 5y ago
Anytime inventors invent a cable which carries more Amperes while remaining cooler, in addition to speeding up electric vehicle charging -- they've also invented something which could be used to create more powerful electromagnets -- than existing ones, given certain design constraints (space, cable width, number of turns, etc., etc.)
Loeffelmann 5y ago
Oh hey look it's our weekly "THIS WILL REVOLUTIONISE ELECTRIC CARS" clickbait article.
eptcyka 5y ago
I wonder what would charging a 100kwh battery in 5 minutes do to the grid, if this was deployed widely.
- pedrocr 5y ago
  Shouldn't be all that much. The total cars on road-trips, where this charging is used, is the same. Individual charges become bigger spikes but the total load of all those road-trips stays the same. For the cases where the total power is not available (e.g., multiple cars plugged in exactly at the same time) the charging station will just throttle the power like it already happens today in chargers that share a supply. What it does help with is a need for fewer chargers in total to support the same number of cars/charges.
JCM9 5y ago
Battery chemistry is also a challenge. Also it’s not just the charging cable but the electrical infrastructure behind that cable that also needs an upgrade. You can’t just pull 2k + amps across an endpoint of the grid without causing potential issues to others nearby, let alone the wiring required send that to the charging point where this cable is used. Interesting research, but this is a much bigger challenge than just the charging cable.
- haroman 5y ago
  Yes, this makes sense. Compatibility also plays a part in here.
- cogman10 5y ago
  Agreed. Also importantly, the more complex the cable is, the more expensive it will be to replace if someone comes along with some bolt sheers and clips the cable. Our "current" (pun intended) cables can deliver 350kW of juice. That's already more than most car battery chemistries can accept for more than a few minutes before doing harm to the battery. Not to mention the fact that even if you could deliver such high amounts of power, that'd translate into insane requirements on the grid, likely necessitating onsite storage to act as a buffer. All in all, the recharge time problem is overblown. There isn't as much need for high speed charge infrastructure as you'd imagine. That's because most charging is happening at home at lower speeds. Your car almost certainly sits idle for more than 8 hours every day which is plenty of time to refill. Fast charging really only matters for long range excursions, which aren't terribly common.
  - niffydroid 5y ago
    I've not read the article yet but I would assume if the battery could take the load, then having charge points where the infrastructure can handle the load and deliver it would be ideal. Like you say as long as you recharge overnight, it should be good for most People
  - mjrpes 5y ago
    There's a large portion of the population who street park and don't have the luxury of charging overnight.
combatentropy 5y ago
It seems to me like the ultimate solution is higher capacity. Imagine a car with a range not of 500 miles but 5,000. This is almost a round trip between New York and Los Angeles. I don't know how long a 10x advance in batteries would take. I guess they don't follow Moore's Law and we get that in the next few years, but maybe in the next few decades. Then there is no need for network of charging stations. People just charge them overnight at home. They don't need fast charging. They just make sure they have enough for the day or, as a buffer, the next few days, which is a couple hundred miles. Most of the time the car's battery could be charged partially, like "only" a 1,000 miles of range. But before a vacation, you make sure you have it fully charged, or at least to a point where it covers your trip plus some buffer for the unexpected. (EDIT: Sorry, you would have less need, not no need --- at least for something as pervasive as our network of gas stations. I was imagining even apartment parking lots having little outlets, but some apartments don't have parking lots and residents park in the street overnight.)
- riffraff 5y ago
  > People just charge them overnight at home. I don't have a garage, I live in a building of 7 apartments and no-one has a parking place. To charge at home I'd need to pull a cable from my second floor window across the road, or sometimes around the corner if I don't find a parking spot in front of the building. So until we put a ludicrous amount of curb-side charging columns, we need fast charging. (I seldom use the car tho, long live public transport)
  - combatentropy 5y ago
    Good point. I was imagining outlets eventually in apartment parking lots. But for the many who don't even have a parking spot, and have to park on the street, we still need some public charging stations.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Apartments could install level 2 chargers in parking spaces or on the sides of buildings, but since they'd be an amenity there's usually not much ROI for them, especially in the current market as no well-kept apartment community is under 95% occupancy and has no issue filling vacancies.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> EV charging stations and other types of electronics rely on liquid cooling systems to remove heat from within their wires. Is this true? Are current car charging cables really liquid-cooled? (The tech is interesting, but I'm extremely wary of university press releases and consider them less reliable than the worst yellow press publication). Edit: Found a few examples, some very modern (<2 years) chargers may actually be using liquid cooling already. The new invention presented by Purdue (buried under more than two pages of drivel and self-praise) is that they're evaporating the cooling medium. This is already used e.g. in heat pipes, so the report does seem plausible.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > Are current car charging cables really liquid-cooled? IIRC the version 3.0 supercharger cables are. Not sure about other DC fast chargers, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ones capable of 350kW are. Slower DC chargers and L2 chargers aren't liquid cooled.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
The problem isnt the cable. The latest superchargers are ~250kw dc. Lets even say your battery is 120kwh and you're charging 20-100% to maximize kw. Afterall if you're low or high in batteries it wont charge at 250kw. Thusly lets say we're charging 100kwh. It's simple math to see you'd charge it in roughly 25 minutes. Which is typically what people are seeing with their teslas. If you want to charge faster say 5 minutes. At 500kw it'd be down to probably 15 minutes or so. At 1,000kw or 1MW you'd charge in around 5 minutes. We havent talked about battery chemistry and what have you. That's what we need.
anontrot 5y ago
Interesting, I didn't know the charging cable was the limiting factor. Wouldn't the battery itself have any adverse effects, overheat etc?
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I charge drone batteries (with caution) and their "C" rating determines how fast you can charge them. It is a physical property of the cells. You need a beefier battery (higher "C") to charge at a higher speed, not a better charger. I need more details, as obviously drone batteries are clearly not EV batteries!
  - renton_wal 5y ago
    Charging a modern electric car is like charging many drone batteries at the same time with one power strip. It's not like charging one or two cells. In this case, the "power strip" is passing 50kw and needs active cooling.
    - SigmundA 5y ago
      C rating still applies, charging at 1C is usually "fast" charging for most cells and that takes an hour, charging in 5 minutes is is 12C which is normally "bad", would need lots of active cooling. 50kw would take 2 hours on a 100kwh pack so it would only be 0.5C. To do it in 5 minutes would require 1.2 megawatts of charge rate.
      - wffurr 5y ago
        Good thing lots of EVs have active cooling systems for their battery packs. It doesn't just extend range, it increases charging rates as well.
- wffurr 5y ago
  The cable is one of several bottlenecks in the charging system. Existing DC fast chargers already circulate liquid coolant through the charging cable. That's one reason they are so short and heavy. TBH, it kind of freaks me out to handle even just the 50 kW cables. From the article: "Ultimately, charge times will be dependent on the power output ratings of the power supply and charging cable, and the power input rating of the EV’s battery. To obtain a sub-five minute charge, all three components will need to be rated to 2,500 amperes."
14 5y ago
I always thought that there was degradation issues with higher current charging of the batteries and that that was the limiting factor.
- yuppie_scum 5y ago
  Yes, it’s not recommended to do Tesla Supercharging regularly for this reason. Then there’s the matter of the actual charging infrastructure. It’s not like you can plug a ,as I’ve cable into your 100 amp circuit and it’s gonna work.
- alphabettsy 5y ago
  Owners seem to be reporting this is a non-issue if frequently charging to 80%, but it seems pretty unscientific.
  - asdfaoeu 5y ago
    True but that's because of limits applied to the charging speed.
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hilyen 5y ago
It is too bad electric vehicles still require strip mining, the equipment that does that all run on oil, as well as tires actually producing more pollution than what comes out of the pipe. I fear this is the next greenwashed "recycle and it will all be ok bs". And by that I mean most recycled material, excluding paper, only actually gets recycled in the sub 10% success rate.(you can view that on EPA's website) source: https://www.transportdive.com/news/tire-emissions-exhaust-study-Emissions-Analytics/574231/ https://www.transportdive.com/news/tire-emissions-exhaust-st...
- 0des 5y ago
  I also share this concern; can someone downvoting this offer some context I may be missing here?
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Maybe you are just getting downvoted by the Musk PR bots.
  - hasdf 5y ago
    I didn't downvote but it doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine that industrial mining vehicles will go electric in the near future. Tires are definitely an issue but producing gas involves a lot of trucks as well. Between all the work in oil pumping/refining/distribution there must be quite a bit of rubber burnt! Edit - I think the tire issue definitely needs to be solved, but theres no reason it has to keep us using gas vehicles over electric
    - 0des 5y ago
      > I didn't downvote but it doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine that industrial mining vehicles will go electric in the near future. Ah, I may have miscommunicated my concern, which is that the resources involved/required in the acquisition, sequestration, production, and recycling of batteries may ultimately be more damaging than conventional fuels [in the long run]. It is possible that I am wrong, however, it remains a personal point of concern.
Dylan16807 5y ago
> under five minutes – about the same amount of time it takes to fill up a gas tank 'about' is doing some serious work there. Maybe it's on par with the entire time spent at the gas station, but I'd say "under two minutes" is a better estimate of the actual transfer.
- unpolloloco 5y ago
  Two minutes is shorter than most pumps I've been to recently (and seems to be the theoretical max fill rate). Seems stations are using one actual pump for multiple dispensers. Meaning that it takes more like 5 minutes to actually fill my car from empty. Also, there's the "good enough" argument - 5 minutes gets you to the point where there's no perceivable difference. 5 minute charging would be a game changer. That means urban dwellers could use EVs the same as gas engine cars and that road trips look exactly the same as they do now (presumably gas stations would add EV stations with enough market penetration). This cable isn't the big issue in making that happen, but it's needed. Battery chemistry and power distribution become factors at that point, but we're on the way to solving those issues too
- 0des 5y ago
  Are you perhaps from Europe where vehicles are smaller? Near me, larger trucks are most common, often with two fuel tanks.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    No, US. About a dozen gallons into the tank. But I bet the equivalent of a big two-tank truck will need significantly more than 5 minutes.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    Are those the folks waiting for electric stops to drop down under 10 minutes?
  - jjcon 5y ago
    The most popular truck in the US is the ford f150 which has a 26 gallon tank. The fill rate of gas stations is 10 gallons a minute in the USA (by law - they are capable of much faster fill rates). Even when only looking at trucks we are talking less than a 3 minute fill time for the vast majority of trucks. https://www.edmunds.com/ford/f-150/2021/features-specs/ https://www.edmunds.com/ford/f-150/2021/features-specs/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_pump
hasdf 5y ago
meanwhile i bought a 240v connector for my EV but never paid to have it hooked up because the 120v connector it came with it unexpectedly turned out to be fast enough for my use case. I tend to get down to about 50% battery on my base model3 after a weekend of errands and it will charge back up to 80% overnight I realize this new cable design would be more for on the road quick charging - but I think even that is pretty fast currently.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  This is where somebody pipes up and says unless it can drive 3,000 miles on one charge with 16 kids in the back whilst towing a 60 foot boat then it is useless for everybody.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  30% charge will not work if you are traveling across country through desert and remote areas.
  - jmspring 5y ago
    The Tesla truck, the only model that made sense of you do any back country/rural driving was the three engine 550mi (if I remember right) version. Even then, I would think a generator would need to be carried (and fuel). Rural areas don’t have chargers for the most part. That said, I’ve seen some chargers along 395 in rural NV that surprised me. Until range becomes less of a concern, I’m not getting rid of my Tacoma.
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      This is why I think the by hybrid market will still win for now. Tesla makes sense for people driving short distances but not really long distance trips.
      - 14 5y ago
        Any day now the new battery technology will come to market. Right?
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dheera 5y ago
> To charge an EV faster, a higher current needs to travel through the charging cable Okay that solves the cable problem but charging the battery at 12C? How does one solve that?
iliketrains 5y ago
They achieve this by "charging cable that can deliver a current 4.6 times that of the fastest available EV chargers". However, that also means 4.6^2 = 21 times more losses in the transfer cable since losses are P = I × V = I² × R (where P are losses, I is current, V is voltage, and R is resistance of the cable). Wouldn't be better to increase voltage? I guess that would require changes to cars?
- fzzzy 5y ago
  Yes, it would be better to increase the voltage. But R also decreases as temperature decreases.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    So better to charge in winter than. /s
    - fzzzy 5y ago
      Yes, actually.
- framecowbird 5y ago
  Are the losses significant on such a short cable?
  - pengaru 5y ago
    The cables are already liquid cooled apparently, does that answer your question?
    - framecowbird 5y ago
      The parent comment said that the losses would be 21 times higher. My thought was, surely the losses on a short, liquid cooled cable were pretty negligible to begin with..
- 5y ago
xyst 5y ago
This is huge. Hopefully they can move from the lab to the real world environment conditions in 1-2 years. Would love to start up an electric charging station using these super fast charging cables.
pupppet 5y ago
Why are we emulating a gas station pump at all for electric cars? Why not something you drive over and it self-guides itself to make contact with multiple contact-points beneath the car.
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > Why not something you drive over and it self-guides itself to make contact with multiple contact-points beneath the car Real life. That's why. How is your magical drive-over contact widget going to work after a few years of rain, mud, grit and other wear and tear and abuse ? I would put my money on the "not very well" part of the board. The benefit of the plug-in method is that the connector is stowed away from ground level, away from the elements, in a sheltered position. Edit to add: Also I'm not an electrician, but there could be a little issue of arcing and other issues when it comes to high voltage / high amperage. Have you ever seen an electric train arcing in wet weather ? Imagine being stood right next to that !
  - nuccy 5y ago
    There are EV busses made by ABB in collaboration with other local companies, e.g. TOSA in Geneva [1]. They charge on few stops on the route for some sub-minute (15-30s) periods and can operate the whole day without charging for longer stationary. The contact pads are hidden from weather, so the busses operate all year round for few years already. 1. https://youtu.be/fm3_N4Js3Nw https://youtu.be/fm3_N4Js3Nw
    - bradfa 5y ago
      That's really cool! It's not really something which could be deployed to general purpose personal vehicles, since they come in many shapes and sizes, but it's great to see such an idea executed for buses which seems like a great place for it.
    - MisterTea 5y ago
      Buses are highly predictable compared to a plethora of different automobiles driven by highly unpredictable humans.
cronix 5y ago
Don't batteries degrade faster the faster you charge them?
- binkHN 5y ago
  As I understand it, degradation is lessened so long as the current drops off as the battery nears its full capacity.
- halikular 5y ago
  Yes. This is why this would be stupid with current battery technology. It would require astronomical cooling for the battery packs as well as all the charging infrastructure including the cable. I'm totally fine with ~10 kW for slow charging and 150 - 350 kW with fast charging. It's fast enough.
  - throaway46546 5y ago
    Maybe you could modify the port to pump refrigerant through the battery while it is charging.
diego 5y ago
No, they could not. The cable is not the limiting factor AT ALL. The limiting factor is the speed at which you can insert energy into a battery. Everyone who has ever charged drone batteries knows this. Charge too fast, the batteries catch fire. 5C is doable, but 5 minutes would be 12C.
- cromka 5y ago
  > No, they could not. > battery > charged drone batteries > the batteries catch fire There's more than one "battery" type.
  - detaro 5y ago
    ... in that other kinds of batteries are pushed less hard, yes. (since in drones longevity and safety aren't prioritized, the cells get tortured a lot more than would be acceptable in an automotive situation, and chemistry selected along those lines as well)
- jatone 5y ago
  depends on a lot of things, including how the battery charging is laid out in the battery itself. if you have 100 cells and can charge them simultaneously vs 100 cells where you have to charge sequentially you're going to see huge differences in time. every piece of the system impacts this including the cable. if the cable is a bottle neck you need to fix that before any optimizations downstream can be unlocked.
  - hvidgaard 5y ago
    5C is a number indicating how much current you can out into the cell. In this case, 5 times the nominal capacity or 12 minutes. This is on a cell basis, so no matter how you do it, you cannot charge faster unless you have cells with a chemistry that can handle more. In that case you'd already have a 10C or 20C battery if the cooling and electronics could handle it.
  - diego 5y ago
    That is not correct. In order to fully charge a cell in 5 minutes, you need to charge that cell at 12C. That is just not possible with lithium batteries. 5C is pushing it. There is nothing to optimize, you would have to change the battery chemistry. Everything else you mentioned is irrelevant, we are talking about all cells being charged at the same time which is really the only way that makes sense. There is no point in waiting to charge cells.
mianos 5y ago
The limit is the battery chemistry or the chemistry related internal resistance of the battery, not the cable. Lowering the resistance of the cable helps keep the cable cooler, thinner and lowers losses but it is bullshit that lowering the resistance of the cable is going to make a 30 minute charge down to 5 minutes. Of course, if the battery and charger currently takes 10 minutes, maybe.
- ypcx 5y ago
  Forget all that. If we tried to swich half the cars to electric overnight, the power grid would collapse into a permanent blackout. Has anyone estimated the cost and time of upgrading the power grid for electric cars? Is hydrogen delivery from power plants to electric charging stations a viable option to bridge the gap until the grid is upgraded?
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >If we tried to swich half the cars to electric overnight It's a good job nobody is suggesting that then. >Has anyone estimated the cost and time of upgrading the power grid for electric cars? I don't know about the US but in the UK we just need to take generation back to 2002 levels to cover the whole fleet moving to electric.
    - Balero 5y ago
      I think the biggest issue in the UK is how to get cars parked on street to be charged overnight. In towns and cities (and elsewhere too) it is very common to park your car on the street, potentially a good distance away from your home. Where exactly to build the charging infrastructure for people parking like this. I guess if you only need to charge at the same frequency as you would refuel you could have chargers in super market parking lots. Cars charge whilst you do your weekly shop. Or at work, if they have space. I also heard about one idea to have chargers at every street light, as they already have an input from the grid in them. Hopefully this is an issue that can be solved without having to re-wire huge portions of the urban areas.
robomartin 5y ago
Many have mentioned why this isn't going to work from the perspective of practical charging of batteries. What must also be understood is that our electrical grid simply cannot handle massive numbers of electric vehicles hyper-charging, to coin a term. I have said this many times: The problem is power. Many think about electrics in terms of energy. However, power is the problem. If a million cars need to charge in 5 minutes you will set transmission lines on fire and explode transformers (not really, just being dramatic). This is because the energy has to be delivered very quickly, which means we need the capacity to deliver power we simply do not currently have. A full transition to electrics will likely require more than double the production capacity we have today. The models I've used to understand this say we need between 900 and 1400 GW over the current capacity of 1200 GW. And you can't do it with solar. I don't know how to put it yet. There's an inequality developing with regards to electric vehicles. As their numbers increase they will use more and more of a resource that is truly scarce. We don't have enough power generation capacity. I haven't done the math on the threshold yet, but it is there. And so, everyone driving electric cars today and in the next, say, 5 to 10 years, is and will be abusing of a limited resource. This, in a sense, isn't any different from using too much water. We have a limited supply. Some of us have removed most of our lawns and replaced them with either zero water alternatives or very low water plants and shrubs. Others have huge, lush, green lawns both in front and in the back of their homes that consume ridiculous amounts of water. It looks great, but they are doing it at the expense of others who respect the shared resource. This aspect of electrics is going to become a political mess. It isn't there yet, but it will be at some point. My guess is that's the moment when politicians will come out of the woodwork and tax the shit out of electrics. It will be interesting to see what happens then. Nothing is simple.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Large charger banks don't pull directly from the grid. Utilities charge massive amounts for high current draws, for good reasons. They buffer using capacitors or batteries. The vast majority of EVs charge at night when rates are low due to low demand. So while EVs will increase the energy demand on the grid, the peak power demand goes up less. If all of transportation and industry switches away from fossil fuels towards electricity, it'll double energy requirements. But that transition will take decades. Even if all new cars are electric, turning over the entire fleet would take 20 years. Industry is even slower. Luckily wind solar and batteries are cheap, and decreasing in price 10-15% per year, so meeting that demand is going to be relatively easy. Grids are expensive, which is why power generation is going to become increasingly localized.
pigbearpig 5y ago
Ultimately, charge times will be dependent on the power output ratings of the power supply and charging cable, and the power input rating of the EV’s battery. To obtain a sub-five minute charge, all three components will need to be rated to 2,500 amperes. Seems like they're missing that other tiny detail in the title.

150 points by gabea 5y ago

Maybe it's just me being paranoid, but gas/charging stations tend to be in "rugged" environment. If oil cable is slit for whatever reason, you have leaking oil. If power cable is split.. you're electrocuted and dead?

rightbyte 5y ago
I drove off with a 30kW charger cable still attached and charging. Ironically during developement of functionality to prevent you from driving off with the cable attached. The connector ripped out at the buss and ground faulted. Nothing spectacular happened.
loufe 5y ago
No sane regulating body would approve any dangerous charging systems.
- userbinator 5y ago
  Nonetheless, I fully expect there to be at least a few deaths and injuries once EVs become more common. Probably not as likely via electrocution, but more likely via something catching fire. There are huge amounts of power being transferred; when (not if) something goes wrong, it tends to be quite catastrophic.
  - jatone 5y ago
    there's a huge amount of power being transferred into your home too. it really isn't a problem to do safely.
  - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
    Maybe, but I can't really fathom public chargers being made/installed without ground-fault and arc-fault protection.

peter_d_sherman 5y ago

Anytime inventors invent a cable which carries more Amperes while remaining cooler, in addition to speeding up electric vehicle charging -- they've also invented something which could be used to create more powerful electromagnets -- than existing ones, given certain design constraints (space, cable width, number of turns, etc., etc.)

Loeffelmann 5y ago

Oh hey look it's our weekly "THIS WILL REVOLUTIONISE ELECTRIC CARS" clickbait article.

eptcyka 5y ago

I wonder what would charging a 100kwh battery in 5 minutes do to the grid, if this was deployed widely.

pedrocr 5y ago
Shouldn't be all that much. The total cars on road-trips, where this charging is used, is the same. Individual charges become bigger spikes but the total load of all those road-trips stays the same. For the cases where the total power is not available (e.g., multiple cars plugged in exactly at the same time) the charging station will just throttle the power like it already happens today in chargers that share a supply. What it does help with is a need for fewer chargers in total to support the same number of cars/charges.

JCM9 5y ago

Battery chemistry is also a challenge. Also it’s not just the charging cable but the electrical infrastructure behind that cable that also needs an upgrade. You can’t just pull 2k + amps across an endpoint of the grid without causing potential issues to others nearby, let alone the wiring required send that to the charging point where this cable is used. Interesting research, but this is a much bigger challenge than just the charging cable.

haroman 5y ago
Yes, this makes sense. Compatibility also plays a part in here.
cogman10 5y ago
Agreed. Also importantly, the more complex the cable is, the more expensive it will be to replace if someone comes along with some bolt sheers and clips the cable. Our "current" (pun intended) cables can deliver 350kW of juice. That's already more than most car battery chemistries can accept for more than a few minutes before doing harm to the battery. Not to mention the fact that even if you could deliver such high amounts of power, that'd translate into insane requirements on the grid, likely necessitating onsite storage to act as a buffer. All in all, the recharge time problem is overblown. There isn't as much need for high speed charge infrastructure as you'd imagine. That's because most charging is happening at home at lower speeds. Your car almost certainly sits idle for more than 8 hours every day which is plenty of time to refill. Fast charging really only matters for long range excursions, which aren't terribly common.
- niffydroid 5y ago
  I've not read the article yet but I would assume if the battery could take the load, then having charge points where the infrastructure can handle the load and deliver it would be ideal. Like you say as long as you recharge overnight, it should be good for most People
- mjrpes 5y ago
  There's a large portion of the population who street park and don't have the luxury of charging overnight.

combatentropy 5y ago

It seems to me like the ultimate solution is higher capacity. Imagine a car with a range not of 500 miles but 5,000. This is almost a round trip between New York and Los Angeles. I don't know how long a 10x advance in batteries would take. I guess they don't follow Moore's Law and we get that in the next few years, but maybe in the next few decades. Then there is no need for network of charging stations. People just charge them overnight at home. They don't need fast charging. They just make sure they have enough for the day or, as a buffer, the next few days, which is a couple hundred miles. Most of the time the car's battery could be charged partially, like "only" a 1,000 miles of range. But before a vacation, you make sure you have it fully charged, or at least to a point where it covers your trip plus some buffer for the unexpected. (EDIT: Sorry, you would have less need, not no need --- at least for something as pervasive as our network of gas stations. I was imagining even apartment parking lots having little outlets, but some apartments don't have parking lots and residents park in the street overnight.)

riffraff 5y ago
> People just charge them overnight at home. I don't have a garage, I live in a building of 7 apartments and no-one has a parking place. To charge at home I'd need to pull a cable from my second floor window across the road, or sometimes around the corner if I don't find a parking spot in front of the building. So until we put a ludicrous amount of curb-side charging columns, we need fast charging. (I seldom use the car tho, long live public transport)
- combatentropy 5y ago
  Good point. I was imagining outlets eventually in apartment parking lots. But for the many who don't even have a parking spot, and have to park on the street, we still need some public charging stations.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Apartments could install level 2 chargers in parking spaces or on the sides of buildings, but since they'd be an amenity there's usually not much ROI for them, especially in the current market as no well-kept apartment community is under 95% occupancy and has no issue filling vacancies.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

> EV charging stations and other types of electronics rely on liquid cooling systems to remove heat from within their wires. Is this true? Are current car charging cables really liquid-cooled? (The tech is interesting, but I'm extremely wary of university press releases and consider them less reliable than the worst yellow press publication). Edit: Found a few examples, some very modern (<2 years) chargers may actually be using liquid cooling already. The new invention presented by Purdue (buried under more than two pages of drivel and self-praise) is that they're evaporating the cooling medium. This is already used e.g. in heat pipes, so the report does seem plausible.

rootusrootus 5y ago
> Are current car charging cables really liquid-cooled? IIRC the version 3.0 supercharger cables are. Not sure about other DC fast chargers, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ones capable of 350kW are. Slower DC chargers and L2 chargers aren't liquid cooled.

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

The problem isnt the cable. The latest superchargers are ~250kw dc. Lets even say your battery is 120kwh and you're charging 20-100% to maximize kw. Afterall if you're low or high in batteries it wont charge at 250kw. Thusly lets say we're charging 100kwh. It's simple math to see you'd charge it in roughly 25 minutes. Which is typically what people are seeing with their teslas. If you want to charge faster say 5 minutes. At 500kw it'd be down to probably 15 minutes or so. At 1,000kw or 1MW you'd charge in around 5 minutes. We havent talked about battery chemistry and what have you. That's what we need.

anontrot 5y ago

Interesting, I didn't know the charging cable was the limiting factor. Wouldn't the battery itself have any adverse effects, overheat etc?

SavantIdiot 5y ago
My thoughts exactly. I charge drone batteries (with caution) and their "C" rating determines how fast you can charge them. It is a physical property of the cells. You need a beefier battery (higher "C") to charge at a higher speed, not a better charger. I need more details, as obviously drone batteries are clearly not EV batteries!
- renton_wal 5y ago
  Charging a modern electric car is like charging many drone batteries at the same time with one power strip. It's not like charging one or two cells. In this case, the "power strip" is passing 50kw and needs active cooling.
  - SigmundA 5y ago
    C rating still applies, charging at 1C is usually "fast" charging for most cells and that takes an hour, charging in 5 minutes is is 12C which is normally "bad", would need lots of active cooling. 50kw would take 2 hours on a 100kwh pack so it would only be 0.5C. To do it in 5 minutes would require 1.2 megawatts of charge rate.
    - wffurr 5y ago
      Good thing lots of EVs have active cooling systems for their battery packs. It doesn't just extend range, it increases charging rates as well.
wffurr 5y ago
The cable is one of several bottlenecks in the charging system. Existing DC fast chargers already circulate liquid coolant through the charging cable. That's one reason they are so short and heavy. TBH, it kind of freaks me out to handle even just the 50 kW cables. From the article: "Ultimately, charge times will be dependent on the power output ratings of the power supply and charging cable, and the power input rating of the EV’s battery. To obtain a sub-five minute charge, all three components will need to be rated to 2,500 amperes."

14 5y ago

I always thought that there was degradation issues with higher current charging of the batteries and that that was the limiting factor.

yuppie_scum 5y ago
Yes, it’s not recommended to do Tesla Supercharging regularly for this reason. Then there’s the matter of the actual charging infrastructure. It’s not like you can plug a ,as I’ve cable into your 100 amp circuit and it’s gonna work.
alphabettsy 5y ago
Owners seem to be reporting this is a non-issue if frequently charging to 80%, but it seems pretty unscientific.
- asdfaoeu 5y ago
  True but that's because of limits applied to the charging speed.

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hilyen 5y ago

It is too bad electric vehicles still require strip mining, the equipment that does that all run on oil, as well as tires actually producing more pollution than what comes out of the pipe. I fear this is the next greenwashed "recycle and it will all be ok bs". And by that I mean most recycled material, excluding paper, only actually gets recycled in the sub 10% success rate.(you can view that on EPA's website) source: https://www.transportdive.com/news/tire-emissions-exhaust-study-Emissions-Analytics/574231/ https://www.transportdive.com/news/tire-emissions-exhaust-st...

0des 5y ago
I also share this concern; can someone downvoting this offer some context I may be missing here?
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Maybe you are just getting downvoted by the Musk PR bots.
- hasdf 5y ago
  I didn't downvote but it doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine that industrial mining vehicles will go electric in the near future. Tires are definitely an issue but producing gas involves a lot of trucks as well. Between all the work in oil pumping/refining/distribution there must be quite a bit of rubber burnt! Edit - I think the tire issue definitely needs to be solved, but theres no reason it has to keep us using gas vehicles over electric
  - 0des 5y ago
    > I didn't downvote but it doesn't seem like a stretch to imagine that industrial mining vehicles will go electric in the near future. Ah, I may have miscommunicated my concern, which is that the resources involved/required in the acquisition, sequestration, production, and recycling of batteries may ultimately be more damaging than conventional fuels [in the long run]. It is possible that I am wrong, however, it remains a personal point of concern.

Dylan16807 5y ago

> under five minutes – about the same amount of time it takes to fill up a gas tank 'about' is doing some serious work there. Maybe it's on par with the entire time spent at the gas station, but I'd say "under two minutes" is a better estimate of the actual transfer.

unpolloloco 5y ago
Two minutes is shorter than most pumps I've been to recently (and seems to be the theoretical max fill rate). Seems stations are using one actual pump for multiple dispensers. Meaning that it takes more like 5 minutes to actually fill my car from empty. Also, there's the "good enough" argument - 5 minutes gets you to the point where there's no perceivable difference. 5 minute charging would be a game changer. That means urban dwellers could use EVs the same as gas engine cars and that road trips look exactly the same as they do now (presumably gas stations would add EV stations with enough market penetration). This cable isn't the big issue in making that happen, but it's needed. Battery chemistry and power distribution become factors at that point, but we're on the way to solving those issues too
0des 5y ago
Are you perhaps from Europe where vehicles are smaller? Near me, larger trucks are most common, often with two fuel tanks.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  No, US. About a dozen gallons into the tank. But I bet the equivalent of a big two-tank truck will need significantly more than 5 minutes.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  Are those the folks waiting for electric stops to drop down under 10 minutes?
- jjcon 5y ago
  The most popular truck in the US is the ford f150 which has a 26 gallon tank. The fill rate of gas stations is 10 gallons a minute in the USA (by law - they are capable of much faster fill rates). Even when only looking at trucks we are talking less than a 3 minute fill time for the vast majority of trucks. https://www.edmunds.com/ford/f-150/2021/features-specs/ https://www.edmunds.com/ford/f-150/2021/features-specs/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_pump

hasdf 5y ago

meanwhile i bought a 240v connector for my EV but never paid to have it hooked up because the 120v connector it came with it unexpectedly turned out to be fast enough for my use case. I tend to get down to about 50% battery on my base model3 after a weekend of errands and it will charge back up to 80% overnight I realize this new cable design would be more for on the road quick charging - but I think even that is pretty fast currently.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
This is where somebody pipes up and says unless it can drive 3,000 miles on one charge with 16 kids in the back whilst towing a 60 foot boat then it is useless for everybody.
encryptluks2 5y ago
30% charge will not work if you are traveling across country through desert and remote areas.
- jmspring 5y ago
  The Tesla truck, the only model that made sense of you do any back country/rural driving was the three engine 550mi (if I remember right) version. Even then, I would think a generator would need to be carried (and fuel). Rural areas don’t have chargers for the most part. That said, I’ve seen some chargers along 395 in rural NV that surprised me. Until range becomes less of a concern, I’m not getting rid of my Tacoma.
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    This is why I think the by hybrid market will still win for now. Tesla makes sense for people driving short distances but not really long distance trips.
    - 14 5y ago
      Any day now the new battery technology will come to market. Right?

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dheera 5y ago

> To charge an EV faster, a higher current needs to travel through the charging cable Okay that solves the cable problem but charging the battery at 12C? How does one solve that?

iliketrains 5y ago

They achieve this by "charging cable that can deliver a current 4.6 times that of the fastest available EV chargers". However, that also means 4.6^2 = 21 times more losses in the transfer cable since losses are P = I × V = I² × R (where P are losses, I is current, V is voltage, and R is resistance of the cable). Wouldn't be better to increase voltage? I guess that would require changes to cars?

fzzzy 5y ago
Yes, it would be better to increase the voltage. But R also decreases as temperature decreases.
- hulitu 5y ago
  So better to charge in winter than. /s
  - fzzzy 5y ago
    Yes, actually.
framecowbird 5y ago
Are the losses significant on such a short cable?
- pengaru 5y ago
  The cables are already liquid cooled apparently, does that answer your question?
  - framecowbird 5y ago
    The parent comment said that the losses would be 21 times higher. My thought was, surely the losses on a short, liquid cooled cable were pretty negligible to begin with..
5y ago

xyst 5y ago

This is huge. Hopefully they can move from the lab to the real world environment conditions in 1-2 years. Would love to start up an electric charging station using these super fast charging cables.

pupppet 5y ago

Why are we emulating a gas station pump at all for electric cars? Why not something you drive over and it self-guides itself to make contact with multiple contact-points beneath the car.

traceroute66 5y ago
> Why not something you drive over and it self-guides itself to make contact with multiple contact-points beneath the car Real life. That's why. How is your magical drive-over contact widget going to work after a few years of rain, mud, grit and other wear and tear and abuse ? I would put my money on the "not very well" part of the board. The benefit of the plug-in method is that the connector is stowed away from ground level, away from the elements, in a sheltered position. Edit to add: Also I'm not an electrician, but there could be a little issue of arcing and other issues when it comes to high voltage / high amperage. Have you ever seen an electric train arcing in wet weather ? Imagine being stood right next to that !
- nuccy 5y ago
  There are EV busses made by ABB in collaboration with other local companies, e.g. TOSA in Geneva [1]. They charge on few stops on the route for some sub-minute (15-30s) periods and can operate the whole day without charging for longer stationary. The contact pads are hidden from weather, so the busses operate all year round for few years already. 1. https://youtu.be/fm3_N4Js3Nw https://youtu.be/fm3_N4Js3Nw
  - bradfa 5y ago
    That's really cool! It's not really something which could be deployed to general purpose personal vehicles, since they come in many shapes and sizes, but it's great to see such an idea executed for buses which seems like a great place for it.
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    Buses are highly predictable compared to a plethora of different automobiles driven by highly unpredictable humans.

cronix 5y ago

Don't batteries degrade faster the faster you charge them?

binkHN 5y ago
As I understand it, degradation is lessened so long as the current drops off as the battery nears its full capacity.
halikular 5y ago
Yes. This is why this would be stupid with current battery technology. It would require astronomical cooling for the battery packs as well as all the charging infrastructure including the cable. I'm totally fine with ~10 kW for slow charging and 150 - 350 kW with fast charging. It's fast enough.
- throaway46546 5y ago
  Maybe you could modify the port to pump refrigerant through the battery while it is charging.

diego 5y ago

No, they could not. The cable is not the limiting factor AT ALL. The limiting factor is the speed at which you can insert energy into a battery. Everyone who has ever charged drone batteries knows this. Charge too fast, the batteries catch fire. 5C is doable, but 5 minutes would be 12C.

cromka 5y ago
> No, they could not. > battery > charged drone batteries > the batteries catch fire There's more than one "battery" type.
- detaro 5y ago
  ... in that other kinds of batteries are pushed less hard, yes. (since in drones longevity and safety aren't prioritized, the cells get tortured a lot more than would be acceptable in an automotive situation, and chemistry selected along those lines as well)
jatone 5y ago
depends on a lot of things, including how the battery charging is laid out in the battery itself. if you have 100 cells and can charge them simultaneously vs 100 cells where you have to charge sequentially you're going to see huge differences in time. every piece of the system impacts this including the cable. if the cable is a bottle neck you need to fix that before any optimizations downstream can be unlocked.
- hvidgaard 5y ago
  5C is a number indicating how much current you can out into the cell. In this case, 5 times the nominal capacity or 12 minutes. This is on a cell basis, so no matter how you do it, you cannot charge faster unless you have cells with a chemistry that can handle more. In that case you'd already have a 10C or 20C battery if the cooling and electronics could handle it.
- diego 5y ago
  That is not correct. In order to fully charge a cell in 5 minutes, you need to charge that cell at 12C. That is just not possible with lithium batteries. 5C is pushing it. There is nothing to optimize, you would have to change the battery chemistry. Everything else you mentioned is irrelevant, we are talking about all cells being charged at the same time which is really the only way that makes sense. There is no point in waiting to charge cells.

mianos 5y ago

The limit is the battery chemistry or the chemistry related internal resistance of the battery, not the cable. Lowering the resistance of the cable helps keep the cable cooler, thinner and lowers losses but it is bullshit that lowering the resistance of the cable is going to make a 30 minute charge down to 5 minutes. Of course, if the battery and charger currently takes 10 minutes, maybe.

ypcx 5y ago
Forget all that. If we tried to swich half the cars to electric overnight, the power grid would collapse into a permanent blackout. Has anyone estimated the cost and time of upgrading the power grid for electric cars? Is hydrogen delivery from power plants to electric charging stations a viable option to bridge the gap until the grid is upgraded?
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >If we tried to swich half the cars to electric overnight It's a good job nobody is suggesting that then. >Has anyone estimated the cost and time of upgrading the power grid for electric cars? I don't know about the US but in the UK we just need to take generation back to 2002 levels to cover the whole fleet moving to electric.
  - Balero 5y ago
    I think the biggest issue in the UK is how to get cars parked on street to be charged overnight. In towns and cities (and elsewhere too) it is very common to park your car on the street, potentially a good distance away from your home. Where exactly to build the charging infrastructure for people parking like this. I guess if you only need to charge at the same frequency as you would refuel you could have chargers in super market parking lots. Cars charge whilst you do your weekly shop. Or at work, if they have space. I also heard about one idea to have chargers at every street light, as they already have an input from the grid in them. Hopefully this is an issue that can be solved without having to re-wire huge portions of the urban areas.

robomartin 5y ago

Many have mentioned why this isn't going to work from the perspective of practical charging of batteries. What must also be understood is that our electrical grid simply cannot handle massive numbers of electric vehicles hyper-charging, to coin a term. I have said this many times: The problem is power. Many think about electrics in terms of energy. However, power is the problem. If a million cars need to charge in 5 minutes you will set transmission lines on fire and explode transformers (not really, just being dramatic). This is because the energy has to be delivered very quickly, which means we need the capacity to deliver power we simply do not currently have. A full transition to electrics will likely require more than double the production capacity we have today. The models I've used to understand this say we need between 900 and 1400 GW over the current capacity of 1200 GW. And you can't do it with solar. I don't know how to put it yet. There's an inequality developing with regards to electric vehicles. As their numbers increase they will use more and more of a resource that is truly scarce. We don't have enough power generation capacity. I haven't done the math on the threshold yet, but it is there. And so, everyone driving electric cars today and in the next, say, 5 to 10 years, is and will be abusing of a limited resource. This, in a sense, isn't any different from using too much water. We have a limited supply. Some of us have removed most of our lawns and replaced them with either zero water alternatives or very low water plants and shrubs. Others have huge, lush, green lawns both in front and in the back of their homes that consume ridiculous amounts of water. It looks great, but they are doing it at the expense of others who respect the shared resource. This aspect of electrics is going to become a political mess. It isn't there yet, but it will be at some point. My guess is that's the moment when politicians will come out of the woodwork and tax the shit out of electrics. It will be interesting to see what happens then. Nothing is simple.

bryanlarsen 5y ago
Large charger banks don't pull directly from the grid. Utilities charge massive amounts for high current draws, for good reasons. They buffer using capacitors or batteries. The vast majority of EVs charge at night when rates are low due to low demand. So while EVs will increase the energy demand on the grid, the peak power demand goes up less. If all of transportation and industry switches away from fossil fuels towards electricity, it'll double energy requirements. But that transition will take decades. Even if all new cars are electric, turning over the entire fleet would take 20 years. Industry is even slower. Luckily wind solar and batteries are cheap, and decreasing in price 10-15% per year, so meeting that demand is going to be relatively easy. Grids are expensive, which is why power generation is going to become increasingly localized.

pigbearpig 5y ago

Ultimately, charge times will be dependent on the power output ratings of the power supply and charging cable, and the power input rating of the EV’s battery. To obtain a sub-five minute charge, all three components will need to be rated to 2,500 amperes. Seems like they're missing that other tiny detail in the title.