7 ms·
BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank
- reitanuki 2y ago'as quick as filling up a tank' is a bit exaggerated (5 min for 250 miles) but I guess it's impressive that it's getting to the same order of magnitude.
- nikanj 2y agoOh look, a new battery breakthrough. Must be a day that ends in y
- jabiko 2y agoI'm not sure whether this negativity is justified. It seems like a genuine breakthrough that could alleviate the range anxiety of many people who are interested in EVs but not fully convinced.
- orangeboats 2y agoIt's not your typical "battery breakthrough" news though -- the technology is being commercialized as we speak: >The new charging architecture will be initially available in two new EVs – Han L sedan and Tang L SUV priced from 270,000 yuan ($37,330)
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoYou can take several things from this. yes, there is a lot of work going into battery technology at present. There is news most days. It is true that most of the announcements relate to things that are one or more of: an incremental gain, not going to make it to production at all, or not production-ready this year. That's the nature of research. However, a percentage of them are actual. "Five minute charging" is an actual milestone. As in, it is feature parity with ICE vehicles. Once you get to that charging speed, another increase in speed gives steeply diminishing returns, and other aspects of the experience become more important.
- Mashimo 2y ago1 MW charging. Impressive if the battery can handle that on the long run. Though I guess for a lot of users it will not be used often, only on long vacation trips or similar.
- swiftcoder 2y agoYeah, I think the goal of these systems is not that everyone has a MW charger in their home. You still (relatively) slow-charge the car at night, and only use the MW chargers for infrequent highway top-ups
- snizovtsev 2y agoMost likely gas stations will have to buy these systems to keep their business running.
- swiftcoder 2y agoIt's mandatory for gas stations to install at least one EV charger in a lot of EU countries. Spain recently started requiring one EV charger per 20 spaces in every parking structure. The electric transition may not be fast, but it's happening.
- Kuinox 2y agoIn SI unit m means mili and M means mega.
- chadconway 2y agoAwesome to see BYD continue to innovate! I wish Tesla continued to push on powertrain improvements like this rather than making a triangle shaped truck.
- omarforgotpwd 2y agothe triangle truck supports 500 kw charging
- michpoch 2y agoWith a much larger battery. Double the battery and voilà you can charge it at twice the speed.
- eecc 2y agoThe triangle shaped truck was used as a testbed for several innovations: 4 wheel drive (not just for parking gimmicks), size increase of gigapressed parts, first deployment of the 4680 dry process batteries, 48V for the non-traction electrical systems, Ethernet based networking for systems interconnect. It’s literally a concept car in production…
- MegaButts 2y agoThere's a reason most concept cars don't make it to production.
- lupusreal 2y agoWhat are the reasons that truck shouldn't have entered production? I can think of a few myself (pedestrian safety, ugly, not bulletproof and shouldn't even ostensibly be, etc) but none of these reasons seem to be related to the actual technical innovations which are apparently in the truck. So where is the relevance?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
- mansoorsheriff 2y agoWon't too much fast charging deteriorate the battery health faster?
- TachyonicBytes 2y agoThere was an article around here about how battery life actually improves if you ultra-fast charge the battery when you make it. Maybe it will deteriorate it, but it seems that the effect that different charge types have on batteries may not be complete yet.
- eru 2y agoPart of the research is probably making this effect less pronounced?
- pjc50 2y agoSolid-state batteries, which BYD is also working on, mitigate this problem. https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-market-news/2659001-byd-plans-give-solid-state-batteries-clearer-timeline https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-marke...
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y agoI don't know that "fast deterioration of battery health" is an actual widespread problem in EVs made in the last couple of years. In fact, it might be the opposite: "EV Batteries Last Way Longer Than Expected " https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life https://www.wired.com/story/electric-cars-could-last-much-longer-than-most-think/ https://www.wired.com/story/electric-cars-could-last-much-lo...
- est 2y agoIt's a thing when 5V1A phone chargers were popular
- feverzsj 2y agoMeanwhile, there is unidentified source of lithium pollution in Beijing, causing 20 times higher concentrations among pregnant women and newborns[0]. Guess everything has its cost, even for clean energy. [0]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3301053/unusually-high-lithium-levels-among-beijings-pregnant-women-and-newborns-study https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3301053/unus...
- nujabe 2y agoChina supposedly made a breakthrough in battery technology, what does that have to do with lithium pollution in China? You sound bitter about China’s progress.
- looofooo0 2y agoWe used to poison people with lead. Stopping lithium spreading seems like an easy task.
- feverzsj 2y agoIf China pays extra cost to deal with pollution, their ev won't be that cheap.
- grumpy-de-sre 2y agoHalf the authors on that paper are employed by the Chinese academy of sciences. Doesn't look like brushing it under the rug to me. More than likely it'll turn out to be something that can be easily and relatively inexpensively mitigated.
- feverzsj 2y agoSadly, all reports on this paper have been removed from every media in China in a single night. Academics are only allowed to be discussed among academics.
- thiago_fm 2y agoI live in Germany, which has its automobile industry being shredded into pieces by China, and it's for a good reason though. China is so ahead of the west in EVs, their battery tech, supply chain and also expertise is so amazing. In China, you can buy even a car with swappable batteries. They are also extremely cheap in comparison to the West. For people that live in the best Chinese cities and work in a white collar job, it's very cheap as well. Cheaper than it is in America or Europe as the purchase parity there is much higher. The West needs to drop the "free markets economics" and heavily invest and subsidize EVs, they are the future. We can't afford to wait 10 years and lag behind so much, China will end up producing all cars in the world and that's millions of well-paid jobs. Go to Brazil and you'll see how many BYDs are everywhere. China will unfortunately eat the entire third-world car market, which has long been a good line of profit to US/EU car manufacturers.
- jansan 2y ago> I live in Germany, which has its automobile industry being shredded into pieces by China, and it's for a good reason though. This is wrong. In the past German car makers made a great profit from selling cars in China and had a really good time. Now the Chinese have learned to build their own cars, which lead to a significant loss of market share for German and other foreign car makers. But German car makers are still quite profitable. For example BMW just announced a profit of 7.68B Euros, and are still the largest exporter of cars in the USA (yes, exporter). The race is still on, and despite strong competition from Chinese car manufacturers, German car makers are everything but "shredded into pieces".
- whiteboardr 2y agoPlus the above example of the culture of finger pointing, hence avoiding accountability for the lack of vision. Getting into the game too late and wasting a ton of cash on cars that miss actual target-user’s needs and wallets. Unfortunately, this is a pattern having emerged in Germany since quite a while - it’s either the pandemic, putin, the government, china or whatever is en vogue to put blame on. German engineering prowess is dying a slow death caused by their own ignorance of their arrogance. They are still selling cars for the badge but people are slowly realizing that things have changed.
- incompatible 2y agoThat's 1000 amps at 1000 volts.
- httpz 2y agoOr 1300 horsepower
- incompatible 2y agoThat's just a rough conversion for 1 megawatt. I was curious about the actual voltage and current they were using, since the article didn't say much.
- adrian_b 2y agoThe values posted above cannot be far from the real values. Perhaps they use something like 700 A at 1400 V. It is unlikely that they use a voltage over 1500 V, because the semiconductor switches used in the converter become much more expensive at higher voltages. A current of 700 A or even 1000 A can be easily handled by a single IGBT module. There are much bigger semiconductor switches that can handle several thousand ampere currents.
- incompatible 2y agoI should have been clearer, I did a web search and found other articles, which based on marketing information from the company, say it's 1000A and 1000V. https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/byd-confirms-1000v-super-e-platform-fast-charging-400km-5-minutes/ https://electrek.co/2025/03/17/byd-confirms-1000v-super-e-pl...
- dist-epoch 2y agoWhat kind of wires do you need to handle that power? Reminds me of this picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/CERN-cables-p1030764.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/CERN-cab...
- voidUpdate 2y ago1MW charging? wow, that's a lot. I hope they have a suitable explosion containment pie dish in case something shorts
- numpad0 2y agoBattery charging/discharging speed is limited not by capacity but by current relative to capacity. Li-ion batteries can generally be recharged in constant current mode without significant degrading up to "4C" - 4x its mAh rating, above a low threshold below which it's not yet safe to charge at full speed, and below ~80% where it's no longer safe to charge with constant current but charging has to switch to low current constant voltage mode. Cutting down charging time to below 1/4th standard Earth hours require material science breakthroughs(hard). While this system might be useful for charging a 4MWh train packs, or a 1MWh semi pack with a not insignificant degradation penalty, this does not accelerate charging for most EV users even if this was to be deployed widely.
- seedless-sensat 2y agoI think you jumped to the wrong conclusion. Another news source suggests proper groundbreaking 10C charging:for a standard EV > the BYD’s pile supports the 10C charging. It can charge 400 km in 5 minutes. It is two kilometers in one second! During the live test, this station reached the 1 MW level of power in 10 seconds (while charging Han L EV and Tang L EV). The car’s charging time from 7% to 50% was just 4.5 minutes.
- ptero 2y agoA nitpick on the math you cite: 400km in 5 min (300 sec) is not 2 km per sec. The bigger open question is what is the degradation penalty for 10C charging. This doesn't matter for a demonstrator but is critical for consumer use.
- trq01758 2y agoForget 4C, these have new 10C lithium iron phosphate batteries.
- bmicraft 2y agoThat's the thing, the manufacturer can rate the cells at any C they want. The real question isn't whether these are "rated" for 10C, but how much degregation these will show after 1000 cycles at 10C. Cooling systems will also play into this: If we assume 5% charging losses that's 50kW that will need to be dissipated while charging for the cells not to heat up - no small feat even if the losses are lower.
- Arch-TK 2y agoWhen will these cars have a breakthrough in terms of UI and privacy (let's ignore the cost for a moment). I don't want to spend a shitload of money on an iPhone with wheels which doesn't even come with all the privacy promises apple makes and which is full of dark patterns, subscription models, and proprietary interfaces (talking about apple carplay, android auto, feature allowing you to use spotify, etc. The mere fact the car has these makes me not want to buy it, even though I would never use them. Paying money to have a hardcoded e.g. spotify client in my car is encouraging exactly the wrong design practices.).
- mavhc 2y agoBuy a cheap EV. Remove the antenna, privacy problem solved. Use your phone for satnav and streaming audio via bluetooth. Same as with a TV, you get it cheaper because they're expecting you to subscribe, so you don't and profit.
- OrderlyTiamat 2y agoDo you know of someone who has successfully done this?
- _heimdall 2y agoIs that feasible? I looked into removing OnStar in a first gen Chevy Volt but from what I found its so deeply integrated into the entertainment system that many things just can't work without it.
- timeon 2y agoThis is is not just problem for the owners but anyone else. All those cameras are privacy problem in general (sometimes used also with parked cars - like in case of Tesla).
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y agoNever. The government wants you to drive "an iPhone with wheels" because it comes with a convenient spying device. Means they don't need to put up a network of cameras to track you (some do anyway). It probably also bundles a remote kill switch just in case you offend some bureaucrat or just if you expend all your future energy ration. The suggestion to remove the antenna will probably make it fail a government "safety" inspection.
- kelseydh 2y agoPeople in America and Canada where there is a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs don't appreciate what they are missing out on. For ~$60k you can buy vehicles like the Li Auto L9 that are nicer than a brand new Rolls Royce. The value for price you get blows other manufacturers out of the water. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tjnq2usV51c https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tjnq2usV51c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwO-OcNUzyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwO-OcNUzyg
- pcdoodle 2y agoAnd will probably look like trash in 5 years due to the headliner drooping, fabric fraying, electronics crapping out, etc. Also good luck getting any replacement parts down the road wherever you live.
- kelseydh 2y agoSorry but this is cope. Why do you assume the build quality must be disastrously bad? In Australia where there is no tariff on Chinese EV's there are many Chinese vehicles on the road now -- this logically suggests an expansion of repair support will trickle into Australia also. China is not just beating the U.S. on price, they are beating their manufacturers on quality and features. I'm not suggesting Toyota levels of reliability yet, but Tesla doesn't have a track record of reliability either. These Chinese EV's are easily as good as a Tesla, and better given advanced features like LIDAR that Elon cut from Tesla's.
- bob1029 2y ago> peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW) Obvious safety concerns aside, I really worry that we are losing perspective on what the grid is capable of and the possibility that distributed technology won't get us to the ideal outcome fast enough. The power plant nearest to me could only handle ~1000 instances of this kind of charging before it is completely saturated. The transmission (transformer) infrastructure is the biggest bottleneck. Even if Entergy built several additional gigawatts of capacity on their existing site, they'd have no way to deliver it. Tesla would have to install supercharging stations in their switch yard and figure out how to operate at much higher supply voltages.
- proaralyst 2y agoWell, the chargers won't be pulling 1MW continuously, so you can smooth this out by installing batteries with the chargers. The grid demand becomes a more constant trickle into the batteries co-located with the charger
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoNo need for batteries when supercapacitors will do.
- aitchnyu 2y agoWhich supercapacitors are sold and have car-scale energy?
- tgv 2y agoSo you might have to wait an hour for your 5 minute charging time? Doesn't sound like a killer feature.
- mjmas 2y agothe idea would be to slowly charge the capacitor to its capacity in the breaks between the charger being used. That way when you arrive at the charger, the capacitor would be fairly full and able to quickly transfer that energy to your car. The charger would then replenish that capacitor more slowly (meaning that the charger wouldn't be able to be used for a bit).
- erk__ 2y agoThe article does not really say anything about the system, but I wonder how this differ from MCS [0] which allows up 3.75MW theoretically and should (fingers crossed) begin to slowly roll out in Europe for trucks this year. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Charging_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Charging_System
- internet_points 2y agoI'd prefer standardized, swappable batteries. Imagine driving up to a gas^Wbattery station, you place your car at a certain spot and your old battery drops out and a new one is inserted and off you go, not even having to leave the car. The old battery is charged slowly, cheaply and safely, while you're on the road again 5 minutes before that one guy still filling diesel.
- woile 2y agoI think Taiwan is like this, but with ev scooters. There are big battery walls, and you take and swap. I think it's fantastic for a town.
- TheAlchemist 2y agoWow, I've just googled it and seen a video about it - pretty amazing !
- codewench 2y agoGogogo - very popular, and pretty extensive coverage [0]. The only problem is the scooters themselves are so quiet they sneak up behind you on the street. [0] www.gogoro.com/gogoro-network
- diggan 2y agoSilence (https://www.silenceuk.com/ https://www.silenceuk.com/) has scooters and "microcars" with swappable batteries. If I remember correctly, their batteries might have wheels as well so they're easier to move around, since they weight a bit.
- ralferoo 2y agoThere are guys who ride around swapping the batteries in public rental bikes too - they send an alert when the batteries are low and a guy just drives around swapping ones near his current location. The batteries are small compared to what you'd need for a car - they're maybe slightly larger than a standard lead-acid battery.
- heisenbit 2y ago5 min charging would be a game changer as it reduces the need for larger batteries which lowers cost and weight again impacting cost.
- michpoch 2y agoThat's not so simple. If you reduce the battery size and therefore the range, then you need to deploy the 1 MW chargers much more densely. We already have a trouble with that.
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoThe comments here are more interesting than the article. Often on HN that statement would mean that someone with relevant technical experience has commented, but not this time. Instead the comments on a fairly mundane incremental improvement in technology are full of concern trolling, whataboutism, nitpicking and cope. This suggests to me that people are starting to absorb the information that China is ahead in this area of tech and they are emotionally uncomfortable with that reality.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- poisonborz 2y agoPipe dreams, charging with extreme wattage is not where the research should be concentrated at. > peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW) Who will deliver this in the next decades at scale? In western EU you find 150W poles at most, and that's like 10 stations/120km.
- scarab92 2y agoMy guess is that charging stations will buffer the power in high discharge capacity battery banks rather than pulling it directly from the grid in real time. Don’t many Tesla supercharger sites already do that? On batteries, my understanding is that we’ve been able to charge at these rates for quite a while now, but doing so results in a lot of heat which reduces cycle life. Have BYD solved that limiting issue?
- SapporoChris 2y agoIt's designed for China by China, the western EU limitations are not applicable. As to who will deliver this in the next decades at scale? I can only speculate: China.
- sandos 2y agoAccording to chargefinder there are hundreds, if not thousands of chargers all over Western EU with 350kW charing at least!
- poisonborz 2y agoEven 350kw (by far the newest batch) is a fraction of what would be needed here. Regardless, those station numbers are also misleading. As I wrote such chargers are most often in islands of 10-20 poles so you can divide that number. Plus 350kw is almost always shared per two stations - meaning you get half if both sides of the charger is occupied.
- sharpshadow 2y agoMeanwhile in the US people sacrifice their leading EV company over personal objections.
- throwaway77385 2y agoPretty sure it was sacrificed by its owner (and let's be clear here, NOT founder...) Also, people are very quick to declare something "dead" or "sacrificed". Financially speaking, Elon has become an invincible god that would be fine even if all his companies went right down to 0. TSLA is going to find some kind of bottom after which some 'institutional investor' from Saudi Arabia will bail them out....