5 ms·

Tesla rival BYD launches five-minute battery in $30k model

60 points by iamflimflam1 2y ago

demadog 2y ago
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.
- GuestFAUniverse 2y ago
  I don't know what you are talking about. We just rented one with an ICE, because they only have mild-hybrids. We need a 15-20min rest after every ~2h (~120miles) anyway. I cannot refuel unattended, thus the 500+ miles of range are nice, but I would be more than happy to reload a BEV at every stop. 120miles of extra range should be doable, even in just 15min. Considering we could start with at least 80% battery charge, we wouldn't need the full 120miles extra at every stop. I don't see the problem even with small batteries (58kW netto) and the charging rate (e.g. ID3 above 100kWh @ 10-80%). It's only a problem if chargers aren't well maintained, or stupid ICE drivers block a station out of malice (and yes: mainly the same sickheads that are responsible for the current economic debacle).
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  I don't agree that 20-minute charge is "very clearly a bottleneck" on road trips. Never mind "target" shopping, for 2 people to each stetch legs and use the restroom in turn, is already 10 minutes. Get another bottle of water at the attached convenience store, and you're close to the 20 minute mark. And if small children were also involved, then well... If you stop every 2 hours, you don't need the full 20 minutes to fully charge anyway. 20 mins is about where you equal the other, human time constraints. i.e. no longer the bottleneck.
  - Neywiny 2y ago
    When I got my car I had to drive it 1500 miles back to my home and did it alone. I would stop when the tank needed filling. I got maybe 450 miles per tank, so maybe every 6-7 hours or so. That's 10 minutes per 6 hours, which is (10/6 / 20/3 =) 1/4th the overhead you're describing. So I'm agreeing with OC: when it's just me, 20 minutes every 2 hours starts becoming a bit much.
    - sanswork 2y ago
      You're describing a trip to had to do once and the difference in time would be what an extra hour in a 15 hour trip?
      - mcpeepants 2y ago
        But - and hear me out - what if that trip happened _twice_.
        SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
        It's not one-size-fits-all? If you're regularly driving extreme distances and peeing into a bottle while driving, and you don't have access to home or work charging, then your vehicle choice can and should be different at present.
        triceratops 2y ago
        Rent a car.
        sanswork 2y ago
        I save about 10 minutes per week not having to ever go get gas. So even two of these 15 hour trips a year and I'd still be ahead
      - Neywiny 2y ago
        I am. But it's the same for everything. I don't live in a place I can install a car charger. It would be that overhead increase for every time I charged. It would actually be worse if it's not a once in a lifetime (so far) road trip because at least those times I wanted to be stopped for a bit. I'd imagine the times I'm rushing to work and have to stop for gas would get a lot worse with a long charge time.
        SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
        > I'd imagine the times I'm rushing to work and have to stop for gas would get a lot worse with a long charge time. Of course. That's where my other comment is relevant: " "very fast charging" should not be the default, it should be rare. ... the default is overnight at home or during the day at office or a mall, with the software giving you that "topped up as specified, every morning, that's better than what an a ICE vehicle can provide" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43671612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43671612 i.e. with an EV and commute, you can slow charge and also never "stop for gas", ever. The vehicle is just ready, every day. If you "don't live in a place where you can have a car charger" at home or at work, then IMHO an EV is not ideal for you, yet. The infrastructure isn't ready for you, work on that first.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - doubled112 2y ago
    I used to get over 1000km to a tank of fuel. I didn’t stop until I got there. That was in a 2002. What huge quality of life improvements we’ve made…
    - justinrubek 2y ago
      If I felt the need to drive 1000km without a break, I would be supremely glad to have technology that forced me to be more reasonable with my body.
  - Zigurd 2y ago
    Do German cars, in Germany, still have a two hour timer to remind you to take a break?
gnabgib 2y ago
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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40706337
steveharman 2y ago
I can't see President Musk adding electric cars to his tarrif exemption list any time soon...
- willcipriano 2y ago
  Joe Biden put a 100% tarrif on electric vehicles from China already so even removing the new tarrifs would have little effect without also rolling back that one as well. https://apnews.com/article/biden-china-tariffs-electric-vehicles-solar-254546e92f823a78220c195a0a42a10e https://apnews.com/article/biden-china-tariffs-electric-vehi...
- kowabungalow 2y ago
  Perhaps the streets of the US will start to look more like Cuba to the rest of the world.
femto 2y ago
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.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  In general, 1) Concerns about EV Battery durability are overblown. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life 2) "very fast charging" should not be the default, it should be rare. It's there to answer the other concern: "But what if I want to road trip?". As you say, the default is overnight at home or during the day at office or a mall, with the software giving you that "topped up as specified, every morning", that's better than what an a ICE vehicle can provide. You can decide for yourself how valid these concerns really are, and to what extent EV critics like to inflate them beyond what's real. But nevertheless, they are being addressed.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  Not everyone is a home owner where they can have chargers. Many people in Europe live in apartments and use street parking so charging points are sparse.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Some EVs like Tesla burns battery while parked, and external power is effectively a requirement for extended parking, or so I've heard.
    - lathiat 2y ago
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
BYD needs to create a replaceable battery standard. You go in, your battery gets replaced, ready to go.
- triceratops 2y ago
  If you can get 250 miles between 15 and 85% charge, and you can charge to 80% in about 20 minutes, it's more than good enough. Just space charging stations closer together and more chargers.
- floydnoel 2y ago
  batteries are not light, that would be wasting a lot of energy to shuffle batteries around. not great for the environment. battery packs are often structural components, this idea would make that impossible, reducing durability and safety. not all batteries are identical. there are many different capacities and wear levels. imagine bringing in your new car for electricity and getting an old battery back. the battery is a huge portion of the cost of the car- now you have an old one!
  - kowabungalow 2y ago
    One has to make a lot of capacity decisions around how well the unreplaced battery is going to perform years out if they are complex to replace, lugging around all that extra is also not good for (the environment or) a consumer who may be better served by half capacity batteries replaced twice as often, etc.
  - sanswork 2y ago
    If you make them swappable then your concerns don't really exist. The service station would handle testing batteries and recycling falling ones, they would be uniform by design and it wouldn't matter if you got an older set since you'd be getting them swapped next stop anyhow.
  - icegreentea2 2y ago
    I don't think the energy waste shuffling batteries around would be anything significant relative to the actual energy usage of driving cars around. The rest of your points are things that battery swapping needs to address. But yet here we are - a Chinese EV company has 3000 battery swap stations in operation: https://cnevpost.com/2024/12/31/nio-adds-record-high-swap-stations-last-day-2024/ https://cnevpost.com/2024/12/31/nio-adds-record-high-swap-st...
ksec 2y ago
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.
- tim333 2y ago
  The death of the UK motor industry was largely self inflicted by putting the companies together into British Leyland and nationalising it.
addicted 2y ago
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.
- rasz 2y ago
  >Too many companies, especially in the EV space (Tesla is awful at this) will announce tech years in advance and often not even deliver. Isnt it deliberate to generate Osbourne effect? For example Toyota with its "solid state really coming in soon" while company has no EV plans whatsoever.
  - tim333 2y ago
    Toyota has several evs such as the bZ4X.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
      It's true that Toyota has at least 1 semi-successful, moderately well reviewed EV, the bZ4X. It's not a "compliance car", trust Toyota, honest!. It's also true that Toyota lags others on it's line-up of EVs, especially considering their early leadership on hybrids such as the Prius. Some would even say that Toyota don't want to push EVs too hard, lest they eat into their business with hybrids. It's also also true that press releases saying "solid state really coming in soon" are a thing that Toyota does a lot. Actual shipping products with those solid state batteries, not so much. The bZ4X does not have a solid state battery.
      - tim333 2y ago
        I think Toyota never really believed in EVs and said as much. But I assume if they say they have a solid state battery on the way it'll turn up some time. I've owned three Toyotas and always found them quite reliable, both the cars and the company.
fatalhesitation 2y ago
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-hands-skeptical-byds-claim-five-minute-charging/ https://www.theinformation.com/articles/electric-battery-han...
- tim333 2y ago
  I found that site a complete pain the the arse when I gave it my email and the spammed me relentlessly and wouldn't unsubscribe. I ended up telling I'd changed to another email to stop my inbox clogging. Battery tech is improving so some of the "catch fire, if subjected to consecutive five-minute charges" is probably fixed.
waltercool 2y ago
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60 points by iamflimflam1 2y ago

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.

GuestFAUniverse 2y ago
I don't know what you are talking about. We just rented one with an ICE, because they only have mild-hybrids. We need a 15-20min rest after every ~2h (~120miles) anyway. I cannot refuel unattended, thus the 500+ miles of range are nice, but I would be more than happy to reload a BEV at every stop. 120miles of extra range should be doable, even in just 15min. Considering we could start with at least 80% battery charge, we wouldn't need the full 120miles extra at every stop. I don't see the problem even with small batteries (58kW netto) and the charging rate (e.g. ID3 above 100kWh @ 10-80%). It's only a problem if chargers aren't well maintained, or stupid ICE drivers block a station out of malice (and yes: mainly the same sickheads that are responsible for the current economic debacle).
SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
I don't agree that 20-minute charge is "very clearly a bottleneck" on road trips. Never mind "target" shopping, for 2 people to each stetch legs and use the restroom in turn, is already 10 minutes. Get another bottle of water at the attached convenience store, and you're close to the 20 minute mark. And if small children were also involved, then well... If you stop every 2 hours, you don't need the full 20 minutes to fully charge anyway. 20 mins is about where you equal the other, human time constraints. i.e. no longer the bottleneck.
- Neywiny 2y ago
  When I got my car I had to drive it 1500 miles back to my home and did it alone. I would stop when the tank needed filling. I got maybe 450 miles per tank, so maybe every 6-7 hours or so. That's 10 minutes per 6 hours, which is (10/6 / 20/3 =) 1/4th the overhead you're describing. So I'm agreeing with OC: when it's just me, 20 minutes every 2 hours starts becoming a bit much.
  - sanswork 2y ago
    You're describing a trip to had to do once and the difference in time would be what an extra hour in a 15 hour trip?
    - mcpeepants 2y ago
      But - and hear me out - what if that trip happened _twice_.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
        It's not one-size-fits-all? If you're regularly driving extreme distances and peeing into a bottle while driving, and you don't have access to home or work charging, then your vehicle choice can and should be different at present.
      - triceratops 2y ago
        Rent a car.
      - sanswork 2y ago
        I save about 10 minutes per week not having to ever go get gas. So even two of these 15 hour trips a year and I'd still be ahead
    - Neywiny 2y ago
      I am. But it's the same for everything. I don't live in a place I can install a car charger. It would be that overhead increase for every time I charged. It would actually be worse if it's not a once in a lifetime (so far) road trip because at least those times I wanted to be stopped for a bit. I'd imagine the times I'm rushing to work and have to stop for gas would get a lot worse with a long charge time.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
        > I'd imagine the times I'm rushing to work and have to stop for gas would get a lot worse with a long charge time. Of course. That's where my other comment is relevant: " "very fast charging" should not be the default, it should be rare. ... the default is overnight at home or during the day at office or a mall, with the software giving you that "topped up as specified, every morning, that's better than what an a ICE vehicle can provide" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43671612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43671612 i.e. with an EV and commute, you can slow charge and also never "stop for gas", ever. The vehicle is just ready, every day. If you "don't live in a place where you can have a car charger" at home or at work, then IMHO an EV is not ideal for you, yet. The infrastructure isn't ready for you, work on that first.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- doubled112 2y ago
  I used to get over 1000km to a tank of fuel. I didn’t stop until I got there. That was in a 2002. What huge quality of life improvements we’ve made…
  - justinrubek 2y ago
    If I felt the need to drive 1000km without a break, I would be supremely glad to have technology that forced me to be more reasonable with my body.
- Zigurd 2y ago
  Do German cars, in Germany, still have a two hour timer to remind you to take a break?

gnabgib 2y ago

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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40706337

steveharman 2y ago

I can't see President Musk adding electric cars to his tarrif exemption list any time soon...

willcipriano 2y ago
Joe Biden put a 100% tarrif on electric vehicles from China already so even removing the new tarrifs would have little effect without also rolling back that one as well. https://apnews.com/article/biden-china-tariffs-electric-vehicles-solar-254546e92f823a78220c195a0a42a10e https://apnews.com/article/biden-china-tariffs-electric-vehi...
kowabungalow 2y ago
Perhaps the streets of the US will start to look more like Cuba to the rest of the world.

femto 2y ago

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.

SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
In general, 1) Concerns about EV Battery durability are overblown. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life 2) "very fast charging" should not be the default, it should be rare. It's there to answer the other concern: "But what if I want to road trip?". As you say, the default is overnight at home or during the day at office or a mall, with the software giving you that "topped up as specified, every morning", that's better than what an a ICE vehicle can provide. You can decide for yourself how valid these concerns really are, and to what extent EV critics like to inflate them beyond what's real. But nevertheless, they are being addressed.
FirmwareBurner 2y ago
Not everyone is a home owner where they can have chargers. Many people in Europe live in apartments and use street parking so charging points are sparse.
- numpad0 2y ago
  Some EVs like Tesla burns battery while parked, and external power is effectively a requirement for extended parking, or so I've heard.
  - lathiat 2y ago

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

BYD needs to create a replaceable battery standard. You go in, your battery gets replaced, ready to go.

triceratops 2y ago
If you can get 250 miles between 15 and 85% charge, and you can charge to 80% in about 20 minutes, it's more than good enough. Just space charging stations closer together and more chargers.
floydnoel 2y ago
batteries are not light, that would be wasting a lot of energy to shuffle batteries around. not great for the environment. battery packs are often structural components, this idea would make that impossible, reducing durability and safety. not all batteries are identical. there are many different capacities and wear levels. imagine bringing in your new car for electricity and getting an old battery back. the battery is a huge portion of the cost of the car- now you have an old one!
- kowabungalow 2y ago
  One has to make a lot of capacity decisions around how well the unreplaced battery is going to perform years out if they are complex to replace, lugging around all that extra is also not good for (the environment or) a consumer who may be better served by half capacity batteries replaced twice as often, etc.
- sanswork 2y ago
  If you make them swappable then your concerns don't really exist. The service station would handle testing batteries and recycling falling ones, they would be uniform by design and it wouldn't matter if you got an older set since you'd be getting them swapped next stop anyhow.
- icegreentea2 2y ago
  I don't think the energy waste shuffling batteries around would be anything significant relative to the actual energy usage of driving cars around. The rest of your points are things that battery swapping needs to address. But yet here we are - a Chinese EV company has 3000 battery swap stations in operation: https://cnevpost.com/2024/12/31/nio-adds-record-high-swap-stations-last-day-2024/ https://cnevpost.com/2024/12/31/nio-adds-record-high-swap-st...

ksec 2y ago

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.

tim333 2y ago
The death of the UK motor industry was largely self inflicted by putting the companies together into British Leyland and nationalising it.

addicted 2y ago

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.

rasz 2y ago
>Too many companies, especially in the EV space (Tesla is awful at this) will announce tech years in advance and often not even deliver. Isnt it deliberate to generate Osbourne effect? For example Toyota with its "solid state really coming in soon" while company has no EV plans whatsoever.
- tim333 2y ago
  Toyota has several evs such as the bZ4X.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
    It's true that Toyota has at least 1 semi-successful, moderately well reviewed EV, the bZ4X. It's not a "compliance car", trust Toyota, honest!. It's also true that Toyota lags others on it's line-up of EVs, especially considering their early leadership on hybrids such as the Prius. Some would even say that Toyota don't want to push EVs too hard, lest they eat into their business with hybrids. It's also also true that press releases saying "solid state really coming in soon" are a thing that Toyota does a lot. Actual shipping products with those solid state batteries, not so much. The bZ4X does not have a solid state battery.
    - tim333 2y ago
      I think Toyota never really believed in EVs and said as much. But I assume if they say they have a solid state battery on the way it'll turn up some time. I've owned three Toyotas and always found them quite reliable, both the cars and the company.

fatalhesitation 2y ago

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-hands-skeptical-byds-claim-five-minute-charging/ https://www.theinformation.com/articles/electric-battery-han...

tim333 2y ago
I found that site a complete pain the the arse when I gave it my email and the spammed me relentlessly and wouldn't unsubscribe. I ended up telling I'd changed to another email to stop my inbox clogging. Battery tech is improving so some of the "catch fire, if subjected to consecutive five-minute charges" is probably fixed.

waltercool 2y ago

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