8 ms·

How BYD got EV chargers to work almost as fast as gas pumps

152 points by Brajeshwar 8mo ago

https://archive.ph/mlJbq https://archive.ph/mlJbq

soared 8mo ago
Is this how the US falls behind? Missing technological improvements due to blind disagreements with Chinese/etc, combined with inability to update infrastructure? (Unclear how/why but datacenters being stood up so quickly seems like an exception to US’s bad construction)
- dyauspitr 8mo ago
  It’s a purposeful hamstringing of EV so the GOP’s oil and gas supporters can make 3-5 more years of money.
  - skippyboxedhero 8mo ago
    China's low level of corruption wins again
    - raddan 8mo ago
      Unfortunately, a corrupt autocracy with a strategy seems more likely to win the capitalist arms race than a wealthy but feckless democracy. It’s only slightly ironic that said autocracy calls itself communist.
      - skippyboxedhero 8mo ago
        Functioning democracies are inherently authoritarian. The simplistic, textbook definition of dictatorship, which in the West is generally used to define the foreign other, has no basis in reality. This vision holds because it presupposes that the only thing people care about is political freedom, when in reality there can only ever be one political class and political freedom is largely about some other political class trying to take control because the current system doesn't favour them in some way. Western democracies, at their worst, have a largely permanent political class who is elected every year under the pretext of democratic legitimacy. Eastern dictatorshpis, at their best, have a government that is continuously rotated to ensure competent implementation gaining legitimacy from delivery. Both are contextual and the position along the autocracy axis largely depends on implementation. Whether people can actually vote is irrelevant (Europe is generally one of the worst examples of this, elections constantly, most election produce governments that polls under 20% within months...it is very strange that people call this democracy).
- BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
  Data Centre builds are being managed by the tech bro companies aren't they? Don't they follow a much different set of rules than 'public' construction? (for better and worse).
- himata4113 8mo ago
  I mean if you really think about it china already has or is on the verge of: - energy independence - ASML level microchip production - the SOTA of AI - citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy - strong local manufacturing - eastern world support - yuan recognized as a stable world currency But they do suffer from issues as well: - Aging population - Autocracy (or well, one party system) - Brain drain (better funding and security in the US and Europe, US has managed to alienate a lot of very promising figures so it's closer to just Europe, but capital markets in Europe are still hit and miss) It's completely understandable why US is freaking out, china's future still looks a lot more promising than the one US find themselves in.
  - est 8mo ago
    > citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy citizens had no choice.
    - shaneos 8mo ago
      Citizens always have a choice. The cost can be terrible, but there’s always a choice
      - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
        What is that “choice”? Surely you aren’t like those yokels in the south that think a “militia” running in the woods can take on the the US military or even a decent SWAT force
        collingreen 8mo ago
        Being willing to fight for what you think is right even though there is no hope of winning is a choice you can make without being a tacticool yokel that doesn't understand the tech gap between the people and their masters.
        raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
- renewiltord 8mo ago
  For the majority of Americans, “the US falling behind” is not something they care about. The principal thing they care about is not whether the whole is ruined but whether they have an appropriate portion. An American would prefer that a field make 1 unit of rice if everyone got 1/n units. This is different from cultures where the preference is that you maximize your wellbeing (older America) so that if someone could figure out how to make the field make 10 units of rice, it’s okay if he makes 8 units and everyone else gets 2/n units. The modern American cultural optimum aims to minimize |x_i - x_j| while growth cultures attempt to maximize x_i. An ironic reversal of roles.
  - skippyboxedhero 8mo ago
    America is also, fundamentally, a divided country where people disagree over basic things (such as the distribution of rice) and there is a massive industry dedicated to amplifying that division. On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics. Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.
  - pbronez 8mo ago
    Maybe. Agree that zero-sum thinking sucks. You gotta grow the pie. But. You also have to share the big pie. In your example, the current crisis can be represented as: A field exists and produces 1 unit. A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.
  - raddan 8mo ago
    That’s a rather tall argument given that the US is currently experiencing historic income inequality [1]. [1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-united-states https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-u...
- drstewart 8mo ago
  It's how Europe falls behind, you mean. Why do they always get left out of the comparisons? Because they're so far behind anything it would be an insult to include them?
  - Markoff 8mo ago
    you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind though in 3.5 months they are gonna ban EU consumers from buying cheap things directly from AliExpress and groom July 1st you will have to pay 3EUR for each ordered item, including that 1EUR screen protector, because it's much better when you can feed some useless middleman than saving money, thanks EU!
    - temp8830 8mo ago
      > you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind With that logic, every programmer on this site should spend as much time as possible on Facebook. This will make their salary equal to that of a Meta employee! Consuming something is not the same as being able to produce it.
    - drstewart 8mo ago
      DeepSeek is available in the US, so why did anyone imply the US will fall behind in AI tech?
  - giwook 8mo ago
    I think this is probably because Europe is considered part of "the West".
  - orwin 8mo ago
    Europe is third since the 2000s. The pushed the Euro to try to limit it (and from the mouth of someone who was present when they pushed, it was also caused by the black Wednesday of 92, the attacks on currencies increased, and the cost to rebuff them too). And yes, basically, no one should include europe in the comparison until US oil fields are depleted, and even then at best it would be a race for the second place. You can't compete without gas and oil or a huge manufacturing lead, and europe don't have any, and only have specific subset of manufacturing (basically sensors, electronics, avionics, optics, and handmade clothing) that isn't workforce-intensive, nor resource-intensive.
- pjc50 8mo ago
  Data centers are (a) private not public and (b) throwing money at the problem on the assumption of being able to capture a significant chunk of all white collar incomes. And they're running into the public issues already, such as lack of large power transformer availability and noise complaints from trying to generate their own power.
  - Mashimo 8mo ago
    But gas pumps / electric charging stations are also private.
    - bigbadfeline 8mo ago
      Many things are private but some of them are more private than others, the details can be quite intriguing. Plenty of gas pumps to go around, more of them aren't going to provide anybody private with more of what they crave the most which data centers do provide. That's the reason for the push to abandon EVs and reduce their competing demand for scarce electricity. New electric capacity, paid for by the ratepayers, would benefit those same ratepayers if used for EV charging but big biz isn't in the game for them.
- SirFatty 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
    The Chinese are selling their EVs all over the world. There are credible American auto enthusiasts that have got these cars and have been using them in the. US. The superiority of Chinese EVs isn’t propaganda. The gas pumps maybe are just a ruse but we know they are operating in China since unlike the US auto industry the Chinese one is incredibly competitive so if BYD was lying about their gas pumps the nearly 100 other competitors would have called them out
  - unethical_ban 8mo ago
    Put political freedom aside. Does China not have massive high speed train networks, the best EVs on the planet, the most renewable energy growth on the planet and a competitive domestic AI industry, and hugely more engineering graduates per year than the US? Their trajectory is incredible, and I don't see what burying ones head in the sand does to help the US or Europe or the democratic societies of the world get/stay ahead.
- 1970-01-01 8mo ago
  In a word, yes. In a few words, yes that's the entire situation summary. No long term strategy exists for the entire country.
  - markus_zhang 8mo ago
    There might be no industrial long term planning, but I think it’s because the US operates in a different mode — financial (late) Capitalism.
    - beeflet 8mo ago
      That's the problem with late capitalism- we need an economy that makes people want to get up and early.
      - markus_zhang 8mo ago
        I think it's difficult to turn around, unless the mud is cleansed -- but most likely the mud doesn't want to be cleansed so it would rather take the whole pond with it.
- jmyeet 8mo ago
  China is what happens when you put scientists and engineers in charge [1][2]. 20 years ago China had a single high speed rail link in Shanghai going to the airport. Now they have more than 30,000 miles of high speed rail where they've bootstrapped all the civil engineering, they make their own trains, etc. The system handles over 4 billion trips annually and they built the entire thing for an estimated $900 billion [3], which is now less than the US spends on the military in a single year. Every $1 you spend on the military is $1 you don't spend on housing, healthcare, education, roads, trains and other infrastructure. Eisenhower warned about this 60+ years ago [4]. [1]: https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/All-of-China%27s-presidents-in-the-last-32-years-are-engineers-who-graduated-from-elite-universities./ https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/All-of-China%27s-preside... [2]: https://www.economist.com/china/2023/03/09/many-of-chinas-top-politicians-were-educated-in-the-west https://www.economist.com/china/2023/03/09/many-of-chinas-to... [3]: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2152581/huge-668bn-high-speed-railway-milestone https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2152581/huge-668bn-high... [4]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    On a semi related note, military leaders in the US have been warning about the dangers of the American deficit and have a long history of trying to cut waste by getting rid of weapons programs and military bases they don’t need but are constantly blocked by the civilian leadership in Congress because of the job loss.
  - seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
    Xi is the first President/leader China has had who literally never worked another job outside of politics and doesn’t speak a foreign language. They gave him a degree in chemical engineering when the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution but he never even had to pretend to use it. Hu, Jiang, and Deng actually worked as engineers and spoke languages besides Chinese (Russian and/or English). Despite all that, Xi has done really well for China. I was totally predicting the opposite given that Xi was clearly a departure from the technocratic leaders that previously ran China (I thought Xi was a Mao throwback).
- nxm 8mo ago
  Not a single country can excel at everything, and China heavily subsidizes their auto industry to undercut competition. It is not a fair game.
  - est 8mo ago
    China subsidizes Tesla and European EVs as well.
- testing22321 8mo ago
  It’s not even “falling behind”, it’s willfully jamming heads in sand and actively blocking innovation so the legacy US OEMs can fall further behind and become less relevant. The country is doing the same thing on multiple fronts as fast as possible
mbfg 8mo ago
More importantly, the US has banned these cars in America to give protection to american manufacturers.
- ck2 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ahartmetz 8mo ago
    It happens all the time that a government regulates foreign industries while giving domestic ones relatively free reign. Canada has no car manufacturers. Europe has no Facebooks or Apples. The US doesn't make diesel cars.
    - andyferris 8mo ago
      Canada might not own car manufacturers but they do have factories that build cars for GM, Ford, etc, and these are important to their economy. I thought some were sold in the US even? Chinese companies aren’t exactly building factories in Canada to sell to NAFTA, but I guess Carney figures it’s worthwhile overall?
      - raddan 8mo ago
        Many are made in Canada [1]. I remember traveling to Quebec in the early 2000s and being surprised to see more people driving Fords than back home in the US. I suspect part of BYD’s strategy is to get a foothold in the North American free trade zone. Maybe they won’t be able to export to the US at first. But if I recall correctly, an import US legal principle is that laws/tariffs cannot discriminate against a single company (excluding for national security). So BYD will simply iterate toward a design that satisfies US regulators. I am not familiar with Canadian safety regulations but I would be surprised if they were dramatically different. Unless American car manufacturers can find it in their hearts to sell an affordable car, this is an existential threat. [1] https://www.guideautoweb.com/en/articles/76684/all-the-vehicles-built-in-canada-and-mexico-that-are-sold-in-the-u-s/ https://www.guideautoweb.com/en/articles/76684/all-the-vehic...
netfortius 8mo ago
This [0] is the actual (good) news, linked from the article. [0] https://www.techradar.com/vehicle-tech/hybrid-electric-vehicles/ready-in-5-full-in-9-this-chinese-ev-charges-to-70-percent-in-only-5-minutes-has-a-644-mile-range-and-its-coming-to-europe-in-april https://www.techradar.com/vehicle-tech/hybrid-electric-vehic...
- somewhereoutth 8mo ago
  With 5 minute charging, suddenly conventional gas stations can be used for EVs just as they are for ICE. Nice thing about 'plugging in' as opposed to 'filling up' is that a charging car can be left completely unattended (while you go to pay, get a coffee, or whatever). Seems that the technological barriers have been overcome, now we just need to build out the infrastructure - which could be as simple as retooling existing gas stations. No need to electrify every parking space or such like.
  - airspresso 8mo ago
    Yes, retooling gas stations is the way to go. Already happening in Norway where stations now show the price of kWh in addition to gas and diesel prominently on signs by the road. Charging is just a different kind of pump.
    - seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
      Charging stations don't need all the environmental equipment that gas stations have to catch oil and gas run off. I guess we could convert old gas stations that don’t need extensive environmental cleanup, but building new ones just to charge EVs is huge overkill when you just need some space in a parking lot.
      - airspresso 8mo ago
        That's a good point. Charging stations benefit from being a service station too though, with amenities and a cafe etc, since people want something to do while they charge. So a gas station is a better candidate than a parking lot when decisions are made for where to place the new charging infrastructure. Lots of other factors too of course.
tantalor 8mo ago
https://archive.is/Xp40l https://archive.is/Xp40l
functionmouse 8mo ago
How foolish it must feel to buy a new car without this tech in a world that has this tech, only to fund the people spending our tax money to keep it from us and continue pushing fossil fuels.
- stanski 8mo ago
  I may be in the market for a new car soon, which I hope to keep for at least a decade, so this kind of thing bothers me. I don't want to buy something that's already years behind on efficiency.
- IX-103 8mo ago
  Agreed. I've been on the market for a new car to replace my aging Prius for for the past three years. All of my top choices are "not sold in the US". I don't need a giant fricken SUV to go to work. I don't need 400 miles of range (the other car does that when it's needed). But I do need room to fit the kids and their stuff in the car. There's literally nothing sold in the USA that's suitable for this use case.
christkv 8mo ago
Absolute garbage. Just stop and think for one second what kind of power delivery is required to do this and you will quickly realize that’s it’s not feasible anywhere other than as a demo.
- micromacrofoot 8mo ago
  not feasible yet, keep in mind we regularly transport tons of power in the form of gasoline - an absolutely massive (literally) chain of logistics moving and storing electricity can vastly simplify the process and work like this will mature
- pimlottc 8mo ago
  They claim to have rolled out 4000 fast chargers so far. Although it also says the car that supports the max charging speed hasn’t hit the market yet so seems yet to be proven in the wild.
- somewhereoutth 8mo ago
  > Thousands of FLASH Charging stations have already been installed in China, and BYD has committed to a global rollout that will include an initial wave of FLASH Chargers in Europe. Further details on the plans, and how they will support the Z9GT's arrival, will be revealed in due course. https://bydukmedia.com/en/news-articles/denza-z9gt-to-start-europes-flash-charging-revolution-in-april-ready-in-5,-full-in-9,-cold-add-3.html https://bydukmedia.com/en/news-articles/denza-z9gt-to-start-...
- lima 8mo ago
  They use a buffer battery, it's quite feasible with that.
  - tjoff 8mo ago
    Feels like such a waste for marginal gains? With the range as good as a modern EV the charge time already isn't a particularly that bad. I'd much prefer more chargers (so that you can combine charging with something else you were going to do anyway) than faster ones.
nneonneo 8mo ago
Based on the figures here, they’re claiming around 400 miles of range added in 300 seconds (60% of the full 677 mile range); contrast this with around 100 seconds for a typical gas pump (8 gal/min) and typical efficiency (30 mpg). It suggests that you’d need around 5MW chargers to truly get to the speed of a gas pump. On the other hand, 5 minutes is already a huge improvement over 15-30 minutes, and it’s fast enough to remove much of the friction of recharging an EV. Really wish this kind of tech would come to North America…
- _fizz_buzz_ 8mo ago
  5mins is really as good as it has to be. Almost everyone needs a bathroom break or gets a drink/snack after 400miles.
  - deeg 8mo ago
    Its also fast enough that I don't have to plan for it. I could be running errands, note a low charge, and unless I'm in a big hurry stop for a charge.
  - timbit42 8mo ago
    And you can do that while charging as there is no need to sit and hold a pump handle.
  - Tempest1981 8mo ago
    I sometimes spend 3-5 minutes washing all the windows. But I do dream of making F1-style pit stops on my cross-country treks.
tomohawk 8mo ago
[dead]
ekr 8mo ago
Although the thought of getting an electric car has passed through my mind on a few occasions, I'm not 100% familiar with the intricate technical details. (for some reason, the tax incentives where I live are still in favor of continuing with the small petrol car I have. Taxes are primarily a function of weight in the Netherlands, and anything besides a lightweight Dacia Spring would imply significantly higher monthly expenditure for me). What I'm wondering w.r.t. this article is: wouldn't such fast charging shorten the battery lifespan? I have experience with ebike batteries. Bosch in particular, with very decent 29E samsung cells, that after 70k km or so, basically halved their capacity. I imagine this effect is severily reduced with a car battery because there are a lot more than 10p, so all the wear is distributed more evenly, and 29E are very old technology.
- Toutouxc 8mo ago
  I believe you meant to write “10S” instead of 10p. I’m not 100% sure, but you were talking about e-bike batteries, which are often 36V, made out of 10 cells (or banks of cells) in series. The nominal voltage of most lithium chemistries is 3.6-3.7V. EV batteries have many more cells in series, for example my car is 104S, and 800V cars have (obviously) more than 200 cells in series. And the longevity of car batteries isn’t about wear being distributed “evenly” (a healthy battery can’t really wear “unevenly”, you always load all cells at once). EVs take care of their batteries, they cool them, heat them, balance them periodically, and they don’t actually pull that much power from them. They also keep the cells within pretty conservative voltage limits.
  - ekr 8mo ago
    Indeed, I meant 10S. And what I meant by load being distributed along more cells, is that since you have many more cells, current drawn from each is lower. Which greatly prolongs the lifetime. And hence the question I had with charging too fast. Since discharging faster clearly wears them more quickly, surely charging faster has a similar effect, since it's mostly the reversed process? A question probably easily answered with a query to a LLM.
    - 8mo ago
Tade0 8mo ago
I have a feeling that half the reason they're doing this is that they don't have a good idea how to increase energy efficiency. Case in point: 2026 BMW i3 - 900km WLTP from a 108kWh battery. 2026 Denza Z9 GT - 800km WLTP from a 122kWh pack. The former charges at a maximum of 400kW, while the latter at over twice that which saves... about 10 minutes at the charger after 450km of driving(12 vs 22 minutes approx). Many such examples with Chinese manufacturers putting 700kg battery packs into the vehicles just to be able to say it's this and that kWh. I don't know about anyone here but after 400km or so I'm done and want to at least stretch my legs.
- ZeroGravitas 8mo ago
  This is an NMC vs LFP battery comparison. They have different trade-offs but LFP is gradually taking over from the bottom of the market and heading up market in a classic disruptive manner. They are heavier but cheaper and safer and better longevity.
- jaywee 8mo ago
  I think one of the reasons for this is to have very high throughput charging stations in dense urban areas (like central Beijing).
- flopsamjetsam 8mo ago
  > 2026 BMW i3 - 900km WLTP from a 108kWh battery. I had to do a double take: remembering the i3s as the little almost SmartCar-sized EVs. Great cars, I still see a few around here, but I couldn't imagine them extending the range of those to 900km! Turns out they just released the i3 sedan, which is like a 3-series. And good to see they're making the design similar between the new 3-series and the new i3. I like the i4, but really need something more 3-series in size.
  - sgt 8mo ago
    Yes that new one is not an i3, not even in spirit. The original i3 was super light, quirky, fun, innovative in so many ways. They just didn't sell enough. People wanted more boring cars.
orbital-decay 8mo ago
>Just taking an existing fast charger with 150- or 350-kW capacity and swapping in the latest and greatest 1,500-kW chargers wouldn’t get anyone faster speeds. The system would need all new “pipes”—grid capacity—to actually move that much current. The grid doesn't necessarily mean "pipes" or power lines. You don't build a pipeline to every gas station. Mobile charging robots work pretty well in China.
- tim333 8mo ago
  Also I guess they could put a large battery at the charging station so it can take say a steady 200kw from the grid and be able to kick out 1500kw for ten minutes occasionally. That could also charge from cheap off peak electricity.
  - boringg 8mo ago
    Traffic congestion costs for electricity is going to get wild if we start stacking all sorts of random >= 1.5 MW demands scattered everywhere.
    - stavros 8mo ago
      Imagine if we had a parallel information network that could coordinate the charging times of all these things in real-time.
      - 486sx33 8mo ago
        [dead]
      - boringg 8mo ago
        Fair bit of overhead to pull that off, but interesting.
        stavros 8mo ago
        Not really, all you'd need to do is make a live price ticket that's dependent on congestion and make that available over the network, and economics takes care of the rest.
quantum_state 8mo ago
Big money in US politics is the root of lots bad things happening in the country … some serious change is needed to truly achieve MAGA …
glimshe 8mo ago
Cool! My only concern is that Wired has a very long and consistent history of advertising technologies that don't work quite as they say. So let's hope this is real.
- russli1993 8mo ago
  BYD is shipping both charging stations and cars with blade battery 2.0 first half of 2026. Both economic and premium models can charge from 0 - 97% under 12 minutes. They are also building these charging stations right now and few hundreds are already operational.
RevEng 8mo ago
I wonder if Gil Tal has ever used an EV as their daily vehicle. I have had two EVs in the last three years - a Kona and an IONIQ 5. I have greatly enjoyed them both. But one thing was a downside that I just had to accept: poor charging. Granted, I live in the Canadian Prairies full of small towns a fair distance apart. And it's not exactly progressive - I'm actually being taxed for owning an EV. The charging infrastructure is sparse with 50-100kW charges every 100km. On long distance trips I spend 1 hour charging for every 2 hours driving. To say that faster charging wouldn't make a meaningful difference is simply wrong. Sure, it doesn't have to be 5 minutes - even 10-15 would be enough - but current chargers don't get anywhere close to that, even with 350kW, which rarely if ever reach those charging speeds. For driving around the city I never bat an eye. I have a level 2 charger in my garage and there's one at work that is decently priced should I ever need it. I never use a fast charger for local travel. But long distance travel is what people are worried about and having much faster charging would most certainly make a difference for me and for them.
- 2muchcoffeeman 8mo ago
  Not if the charger doesn’t work.
- ranit 8mo ago
  Could you please elaborate on: > I'm actually being taxed for owning an EV.
  - __oh_es 8mo ago
    Some countries charge a road tax or annual vehicle tax, and ev’s are often except as a green incentive
    - phil21 8mo ago
      and some places charge a higher annual fee for EVs due to roads being largely funded by gas taxes. Seems totally fair to me so long as the averages largely line up for both vehicle types.
  - 8mo ago
1270018080 8mo ago
Headlines right next to each other on my HN feed "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance" "How BYD got EV chargers to work almost as fast as gas pumps"
JonChesterfield 8mo ago
If you can get a megawatt into the car batteries without setting them on fire, that's game over for petrol cars. And for the other electric vehicles that haven't worked it out yet. Only reason I'm on petrol is unwillingness to wait an hour to recharge the car. The rest of the infra is fine if that can be done. Array of batteries and/or capacitors at the supply point and draw continuously from the grid. Most entertainingly run a diesel generator on site if that doesn't work out. Lines up well with basing them at the existing fuel stations, got the diesel supply already sorted out. Put a bunch of solar near it when you can. Maybe sell back to grid, nice to have the extra capacity available. All comes down to capital deployment at that point. Do the calculations on how much to charge for slow car charge vs fast charge, fallback to slow with an apology/discount when the infra is struggling etc. Huge news. Iff the cars don't catch fire when plugged in.
- bigstrat2003 8mo ago
  Agreed. Right now EVs are almost strictly superior for day to day usage (only real downside is that the higher weight goes through tires faster). But for road trips, combustion vehicles blow them out of the water. If I'm taking a 12 hour road trip, no way am I going to take an EV if that means I will have to spend an extra hour or two charging it. My wife has an EV and it's genuinely really nice. But until they get the charging experience on par with the speed of filling up a gas tank, we will always have one of our two cars be a combustion car, to give us that extra flexibility for long trips.
  - hbarka 8mo ago
    For once or twice a year road trip I’d just rent a combustion car, otherwise it’ll just be sitting in the garage not good as a daily driver.
    - loeg 8mo ago
      Or just eat an extra few minutes of charging time once or twice a year; it's simply not a big deal. Charging at home saves me so much time relative to getting gas that the occasional road trip wait is already overcompensated for. ICE/hybrid only saves you time if you can't charge at home or do lots of road trip type driving.
gverrilla 8mo ago
Let's go China!
thelastgallon 8mo ago
We need grid scale batteries anyways to capture excess solar (curtailment) at zero cost, or for a profit. Put these in distributed locations that can also charge cars and we solve 2 problems at once.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
wesleyd 8mo ago
Gas pumps in the US are artificially capped at 10 gallons per minute, and a gallon of gasoline is about 33kWh, so petrol cars in the US “charge” at 330kWh/min ~= 20MW. But most cars only turn about a third of that into motion, so let’s say 7MW equivalent? While BYD’s 1.5MW is amazing, it seems a stretch to call it “almost as fast as gas pumps.” Diesel pumps for trucks typically pump much faster too. And diesel is nearer 40kWh/gal. We have a ways to go! (The energy density of oil is amazing: a fully loaded A380 with 84,500 us gallons of jet fuel at 37.5 kWh per, that’s over 3TWh. Which is about twice the capacity of all the li-ion batteries made in 2025. We have a ways to go!)
- thelastgallon 8mo ago
  99.9% of use cases of EVs can charge at home/work/shop, don't need separate infrastructure, logistics and supply chains for delivery of electricity. There is a very small fraction of EV trips that need charging on the go. The vast majority of trips are under 3 (or 5 miles).
  - KolmogorovComp 8mo ago
    > 99.9% of use cases of EVs can charge at home/work/shop This is yet again a very US-centric view where you assume people are living in house with a garage.
    - HWR_14 8mo ago
      Even in the US, only 63% of households have a garage or carport.
    - DroneBetter 8mo ago
      "home" can be substituted for "place where car resides when owner is at home" without meaningfully changing the point
      - Shitty-kitty 8mo ago
        In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's. People that have access to home-charging, worry about range. The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging.
gib444 8mo ago
Rapid charging in the UK is mostly way more expensive than gas (petrol) at around 89p per kWh. I imagine with Iran etc that could push over £1 soon!
casey2 8mo ago
Has there ever been a tariff in all of human history where the technical gap between 2 countries' products has been this large? This is nearly a new product class.
whatever1 8mo ago
Look range is not a huge issue if it is reliably above 200miles. This means that the 60% of that (120miles) covers your typical max commuting radius, and 80% of that the time you typically you would need a toilet break (3-4 hours). My old gas guzzler had a 180-250 miles of range, and I did not have range anxiety (I did have gas cost anxiety tho) The issue always was speed of charging and abundance of chargers. Today things are a bit better as you can find 200kW chargers on the big highways. But still they are not abundant, you need to plan.
torginus 8mo ago
The fundamental problem of high-wattage charges (say 500kW), isn't to deliver power from the charger to the car, but that there needs to be crazy amounts of grid capacity to support them. A house has like 10kW peak sustained power consumption (an apt even less), which it rarely reaches, so a park of these fast chargers need the same infrastructure as a small town. These loads are so huge Cities like Beijing have strong industry and in general have the infrastructure to it, so it's relatively straightforward to install chargers like these. If you go out into the countryside, this infrastructure disappears, and won't see these fast chargers. Most European cities barely have enough capacity to cover urban expansion, never mind to support this. These articles suggest, its just a matter of putting down these stations, and that would solve the charger problem, but in truth, there's often a prerequisite of huge grid upgrades somebody has to build and pay for, which come with the unpleasant sight of these high voltage lines intruding into neighborhoods. I wished articles lambasting the lack of fast chargers also mentioned this as well.
- atoav 8mo ago
  As an certified electrical engineer, this is certainly a problem. The main issue is of course how much copper is burried underground and how big transformer capacity is. The first solution is of course to try avoiding farst charging if possible by charging at home or at work over hours if possible. A faster charge will have to be a more expensive charge. Another solution that could ease things a little is to spread the load on the grid over time by drawing it from some local source (e.g. battery) Imagine a gas station has a beefy energy storage from which it draws the current in short blasts while the battery itself draws it much more spread out over hours. This is essentially how it is done in much smaller scales (in terms of time, energy and actual physical size) on printed circuit boards using capacitors. If you'd draw the current all the way back from the power supply any bursty load would affect the voltage on the power supply and thus show up in other psrts of the circuit. But in the end more electrical energy demand by mobility will lead to more electrical demand, period. And as you rightly pointed out that means more infrastructure, more copper in the ground, bigger transformers, more powerplants.
  - torginus 8mo ago

152 points by Brajeshwar 8mo ago

https://archive.ph/mlJbq https://archive.ph/mlJbq

Is this how the US falls behind? Missing technological improvements due to blind disagreements with Chinese/etc, combined with inability to update infrastructure? (Unclear how/why but datacenters being stood up so quickly seems like an exception to US’s bad construction)

dyauspitr 8mo ago
It’s a purposeful hamstringing of EV so the GOP’s oil and gas supporters can make 3-5 more years of money.
- skippyboxedhero 8mo ago
  China's low level of corruption wins again
  - raddan 8mo ago
    Unfortunately, a corrupt autocracy with a strategy seems more likely to win the capitalist arms race than a wealthy but feckless democracy. It’s only slightly ironic that said autocracy calls itself communist.
    - skippyboxedhero 8mo ago
      Functioning democracies are inherently authoritarian. The simplistic, textbook definition of dictatorship, which in the West is generally used to define the foreign other, has no basis in reality. This vision holds because it presupposes that the only thing people care about is political freedom, when in reality there can only ever be one political class and political freedom is largely about some other political class trying to take control because the current system doesn't favour them in some way. Western democracies, at their worst, have a largely permanent political class who is elected every year under the pretext of democratic legitimacy. Eastern dictatorshpis, at their best, have a government that is continuously rotated to ensure competent implementation gaining legitimacy from delivery. Both are contextual and the position along the autocracy axis largely depends on implementation. Whether people can actually vote is irrelevant (Europe is generally one of the worst examples of this, elections constantly, most election produce governments that polls under 20% within months...it is very strange that people call this democracy).
BLKNSLVR 8mo ago
Data Centre builds are being managed by the tech bro companies aren't they? Don't they follow a much different set of rules than 'public' construction? (for better and worse).
himata4113 8mo ago
I mean if you really think about it china already has or is on the verge of: - energy independence - ASML level microchip production - the SOTA of AI - citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy - strong local manufacturing - eastern world support - yuan recognized as a stable world currency But they do suffer from issues as well: - Aging population - Autocracy (or well, one party system) - Brain drain (better funding and security in the US and Europe, US has managed to alienate a lot of very promising figures so it's closer to just Europe, but capital markets in Europe are still hit and miss) It's completely understandable why US is freaking out, china's future still looks a lot more promising than the one US find themselves in.
- est 8mo ago
  > citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy citizens had no choice.
  - shaneos 8mo ago
    Citizens always have a choice. The cost can be terrible, but there’s always a choice
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      What is that “choice”? Surely you aren’t like those yokels in the south that think a “militia” running in the woods can take on the the US military or even a decent SWAT force
      - collingreen 8mo ago
        Being willing to fight for what you think is right even though there is no hope of winning is a choice you can make without being a tacticool yokel that doesn't understand the tech gap between the people and their masters.
        raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
renewiltord 8mo ago
For the majority of Americans, “the US falling behind” is not something they care about. The principal thing they care about is not whether the whole is ruined but whether they have an appropriate portion. An American would prefer that a field make 1 unit of rice if everyone got 1/n units. This is different from cultures where the preference is that you maximize your wellbeing (older America) so that if someone could figure out how to make the field make 10 units of rice, it’s okay if he makes 8 units and everyone else gets 2/n units. The modern American cultural optimum aims to minimize |x_i - x_j| while growth cultures attempt to maximize x_i. An ironic reversal of roles.
- skippyboxedhero 8mo ago
  America is also, fundamentally, a divided country where people disagree over basic things (such as the distribution of rice) and there is a massive industry dedicated to amplifying that division. On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics. Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.
- pbronez 8mo ago
  Maybe. Agree that zero-sum thinking sucks. You gotta grow the pie. But. You also have to share the big pie. In your example, the current crisis can be represented as: A field exists and produces 1 unit. A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.
- raddan 8mo ago
  That’s a rather tall argument given that the US is currently experiencing historic income inequality [1]. [1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-united-states https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-u...
drstewart 8mo ago
It's how Europe falls behind, you mean. Why do they always get left out of the comparisons? Because they're so far behind anything it would be an insult to include them?
- Markoff 8mo ago
  you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind though in 3.5 months they are gonna ban EU consumers from buying cheap things directly from AliExpress and groom July 1st you will have to pay 3EUR for each ordered item, including that 1EUR screen protector, because it's much better when you can feed some useless middleman than saving money, thanks EU!
  - temp8830 8mo ago
    > you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind With that logic, every programmer on this site should spend as much time as possible on Facebook. This will make their salary equal to that of a Meta employee! Consuming something is not the same as being able to produce it.
  - drstewart 8mo ago
    DeepSeek is available in the US, so why did anyone imply the US will fall behind in AI tech?
- giwook 8mo ago
  I think this is probably because Europe is considered part of "the West".
- orwin 8mo ago
  Europe is third since the 2000s. The pushed the Euro to try to limit it (and from the mouth of someone who was present when they pushed, it was also caused by the black Wednesday of 92, the attacks on currencies increased, and the cost to rebuff them too). And yes, basically, no one should include europe in the comparison until US oil fields are depleted, and even then at best it would be a race for the second place. You can't compete without gas and oil or a huge manufacturing lead, and europe don't have any, and only have specific subset of manufacturing (basically sensors, electronics, avionics, optics, and handmade clothing) that isn't workforce-intensive, nor resource-intensive.
pjc50 8mo ago
Data centers are (a) private not public and (b) throwing money at the problem on the assumption of being able to capture a significant chunk of all white collar incomes. And they're running into the public issues already, such as lack of large power transformer availability and noise complaints from trying to generate their own power.
- Mashimo 8mo ago
  But gas pumps / electric charging stations are also private.
  - bigbadfeline 8mo ago
    Many things are private but some of them are more private than others, the details can be quite intriguing. Plenty of gas pumps to go around, more of them aren't going to provide anybody private with more of what they crave the most which data centers do provide. That's the reason for the push to abandon EVs and reduce their competing demand for scarce electricity. New electric capacity, paid for by the ratepayers, would benefit those same ratepayers if used for EV charging but big biz isn't in the game for them.
SirFatty 8mo ago
[flagged]
- hshdhdhj4444 8mo ago
  The Chinese are selling their EVs all over the world. There are credible American auto enthusiasts that have got these cars and have been using them in the. US. The superiority of Chinese EVs isn’t propaganda. The gas pumps maybe are just a ruse but we know they are operating in China since unlike the US auto industry the Chinese one is incredibly competitive so if BYD was lying about their gas pumps the nearly 100 other competitors would have called them out
- unethical_ban 8mo ago
  Put political freedom aside. Does China not have massive high speed train networks, the best EVs on the planet, the most renewable energy growth on the planet and a competitive domestic AI industry, and hugely more engineering graduates per year than the US? Their trajectory is incredible, and I don't see what burying ones head in the sand does to help the US or Europe or the democratic societies of the world get/stay ahead.
1970-01-01 8mo ago
In a word, yes. In a few words, yes that's the entire situation summary. No long term strategy exists for the entire country.
- markus_zhang 8mo ago
  There might be no industrial long term planning, but I think it’s because the US operates in a different mode — financial (late) Capitalism.
  - beeflet 8mo ago
    That's the problem with late capitalism- we need an economy that makes people want to get up and early.
    - markus_zhang 8mo ago
      I think it's difficult to turn around, unless the mud is cleansed -- but most likely the mud doesn't want to be cleansed so it would rather take the whole pond with it.
jmyeet 8mo ago
China is what happens when you put scientists and engineers in charge [1][2]. 20 years ago China had a single high speed rail link in Shanghai going to the airport. Now they have more than 30,000 miles of high speed rail where they've bootstrapped all the civil engineering, they make their own trains, etc. The system handles over 4 billion trips annually and they built the entire thing for an estimated $900 billion [3], which is now less than the US spends on the military in a single year. Every $1 you spend on the military is $1 you don't spend on housing, healthcare, education, roads, trains and other infrastructure. Eisenhower warned about this 60+ years ago [4]. [1]: https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/All-of-China%27s-presidents-in-the-last-32-years-are-engineers-who-graduated-from-elite-universities./ https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/All-of-China%27s-preside... [2]: https://www.economist.com/china/2023/03/09/many-of-chinas-top-politicians-were-educated-in-the-west https://www.economist.com/china/2023/03/09/many-of-chinas-to... [3]: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2152581/huge-668bn-high-speed-railway-milestone https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2152581/huge-668bn-high... [4]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  On a semi related note, military leaders in the US have been warning about the dangers of the American deficit and have a long history of trying to cut waste by getting rid of weapons programs and military bases they don’t need but are constantly blocked by the civilian leadership in Congress because of the job loss.
- seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
  Xi is the first President/leader China has had who literally never worked another job outside of politics and doesn’t speak a foreign language. They gave him a degree in chemical engineering when the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution but he never even had to pretend to use it. Hu, Jiang, and Deng actually worked as engineers and spoke languages besides Chinese (Russian and/or English). Despite all that, Xi has done really well for China. I was totally predicting the opposite given that Xi was clearly a departure from the technocratic leaders that previously ran China (I thought Xi was a Mao throwback).
nxm 8mo ago
Not a single country can excel at everything, and China heavily subsidizes their auto industry to undercut competition. It is not a fair game.
- est 8mo ago
  China subsidizes Tesla and European EVs as well.
testing22321 8mo ago
It’s not even “falling behind”, it’s willfully jamming heads in sand and actively blocking innovation so the legacy US OEMs can fall further behind and become less relevant. The country is doing the same thing on multiple fronts as fast as possible

mbfg 8mo ago

More importantly, the US has banned these cars in America to give protection to american manufacturers.

ck2 8mo ago
[flagged]
- ahartmetz 8mo ago
  It happens all the time that a government regulates foreign industries while giving domestic ones relatively free reign. Canada has no car manufacturers. Europe has no Facebooks or Apples. The US doesn't make diesel cars.
  - andyferris 8mo ago
    Canada might not own car manufacturers but they do have factories that build cars for GM, Ford, etc, and these are important to their economy. I thought some were sold in the US even? Chinese companies aren’t exactly building factories in Canada to sell to NAFTA, but I guess Carney figures it’s worthwhile overall?
    - raddan 8mo ago
      Many are made in Canada [1]. I remember traveling to Quebec in the early 2000s and being surprised to see more people driving Fords than back home in the US. I suspect part of BYD’s strategy is to get a foothold in the North American free trade zone. Maybe they won’t be able to export to the US at first. But if I recall correctly, an import US legal principle is that laws/tariffs cannot discriminate against a single company (excluding for national security). So BYD will simply iterate toward a design that satisfies US regulators. I am not familiar with Canadian safety regulations but I would be surprised if they were dramatically different. Unless American car manufacturers can find it in their hearts to sell an affordable car, this is an existential threat. [1] https://www.guideautoweb.com/en/articles/76684/all-the-vehicles-built-in-canada-and-mexico-that-are-sold-in-the-u-s/ https://www.guideautoweb.com/en/articles/76684/all-the-vehic...

netfortius 8mo ago

This [0] is the actual (good) news, linked from the article. [0] https://www.techradar.com/vehicle-tech/hybrid-electric-vehicles/ready-in-5-full-in-9-this-chinese-ev-charges-to-70-percent-in-only-5-minutes-has-a-644-mile-range-and-its-coming-to-europe-in-april https://www.techradar.com/vehicle-tech/hybrid-electric-vehic...

somewhereoutth 8mo ago
With 5 minute charging, suddenly conventional gas stations can be used for EVs just as they are for ICE. Nice thing about 'plugging in' as opposed to 'filling up' is that a charging car can be left completely unattended (while you go to pay, get a coffee, or whatever). Seems that the technological barriers have been overcome, now we just need to build out the infrastructure - which could be as simple as retooling existing gas stations. No need to electrify every parking space or such like.
- airspresso 8mo ago
  Yes, retooling gas stations is the way to go. Already happening in Norway where stations now show the price of kWh in addition to gas and diesel prominently on signs by the road. Charging is just a different kind of pump.
  - seanmcdirmid 8mo ago
    Charging stations don't need all the environmental equipment that gas stations have to catch oil and gas run off. I guess we could convert old gas stations that don’t need extensive environmental cleanup, but building new ones just to charge EVs is huge overkill when you just need some space in a parking lot.
    - airspresso 8mo ago
      That's a good point. Charging stations benefit from being a service station too though, with amenities and a cafe etc, since people want something to do while they charge. So a gas station is a better candidate than a parking lot when decisions are made for where to place the new charging infrastructure. Lots of other factors too of course.

tantalor 8mo ago

https://archive.is/Xp40l https://archive.is/Xp40l

functionmouse 8mo ago

How foolish it must feel to buy a new car without this tech in a world that has this tech, only to fund the people spending our tax money to keep it from us and continue pushing fossil fuels.

stanski 8mo ago
I may be in the market for a new car soon, which I hope to keep for at least a decade, so this kind of thing bothers me. I don't want to buy something that's already years behind on efficiency.
IX-103 8mo ago
Agreed. I've been on the market for a new car to replace my aging Prius for for the past three years. All of my top choices are "not sold in the US". I don't need a giant fricken SUV to go to work. I don't need 400 miles of range (the other car does that when it's needed). But I do need room to fit the kids and their stuff in the car. There's literally nothing sold in the USA that's suitable for this use case.

christkv 8mo ago

Absolute garbage. Just stop and think for one second what kind of power delivery is required to do this and you will quickly realize that’s it’s not feasible anywhere other than as a demo.

micromacrofoot 8mo ago
not feasible yet, keep in mind we regularly transport tons of power in the form of gasoline - an absolutely massive (literally) chain of logistics moving and storing electricity can vastly simplify the process and work like this will mature
pimlottc 8mo ago
They claim to have rolled out 4000 fast chargers so far. Although it also says the car that supports the max charging speed hasn’t hit the market yet so seems yet to be proven in the wild.
somewhereoutth 8mo ago
> Thousands of FLASH Charging stations have already been installed in China, and BYD has committed to a global rollout that will include an initial wave of FLASH Chargers in Europe. Further details on the plans, and how they will support the Z9GT's arrival, will be revealed in due course. https://bydukmedia.com/en/news-articles/denza-z9gt-to-start-europes-flash-charging-revolution-in-april-ready-in-5,-full-in-9,-cold-add-3.html https://bydukmedia.com/en/news-articles/denza-z9gt-to-start-...
lima 8mo ago
They use a buffer battery, it's quite feasible with that.
- tjoff 8mo ago
  Feels like such a waste for marginal gains? With the range as good as a modern EV the charge time already isn't a particularly that bad. I'd much prefer more chargers (so that you can combine charging with something else you were going to do anyway) than faster ones.

nneonneo 8mo ago

Based on the figures here, they’re claiming around 400 miles of range added in 300 seconds (60% of the full 677 mile range); contrast this with around 100 seconds for a typical gas pump (8 gal/min) and typical efficiency (30 mpg). It suggests that you’d need around 5MW chargers to truly get to the speed of a gas pump. On the other hand, 5 minutes is already a huge improvement over 15-30 minutes, and it’s fast enough to remove much of the friction of recharging an EV. Really wish this kind of tech would come to North America…

_fizz_buzz_ 8mo ago
5mins is really as good as it has to be. Almost everyone needs a bathroom break or gets a drink/snack after 400miles.
- deeg 8mo ago
  Its also fast enough that I don't have to plan for it. I could be running errands, note a low charge, and unless I'm in a big hurry stop for a charge.
- timbit42 8mo ago
  And you can do that while charging as there is no need to sit and hold a pump handle.
- Tempest1981 8mo ago
  I sometimes spend 3-5 minutes washing all the windows. But I do dream of making F1-style pit stops on my cross-country treks.

tomohawk 8mo ago

[dead]

ekr 8mo ago

Although the thought of getting an electric car has passed through my mind on a few occasions, I'm not 100% familiar with the intricate technical details. (for some reason, the tax incentives where I live are still in favor of continuing with the small petrol car I have. Taxes are primarily a function of weight in the Netherlands, and anything besides a lightweight Dacia Spring would imply significantly higher monthly expenditure for me). What I'm wondering w.r.t. this article is: wouldn't such fast charging shorten the battery lifespan? I have experience with ebike batteries. Bosch in particular, with very decent 29E samsung cells, that after 70k km or so, basically halved their capacity. I imagine this effect is severily reduced with a car battery because there are a lot more than 10p, so all the wear is distributed more evenly, and 29E are very old technology.

Toutouxc 8mo ago
I believe you meant to write “10S” instead of 10p. I’m not 100% sure, but you were talking about e-bike batteries, which are often 36V, made out of 10 cells (or banks of cells) in series. The nominal voltage of most lithium chemistries is 3.6-3.7V. EV batteries have many more cells in series, for example my car is 104S, and 800V cars have (obviously) more than 200 cells in series. And the longevity of car batteries isn’t about wear being distributed “evenly” (a healthy battery can’t really wear “unevenly”, you always load all cells at once). EVs take care of their batteries, they cool them, heat them, balance them periodically, and they don’t actually pull that much power from them. They also keep the cells within pretty conservative voltage limits.
- ekr 8mo ago
  Indeed, I meant 10S. And what I meant by load being distributed along more cells, is that since you have many more cells, current drawn from each is lower. Which greatly prolongs the lifetime. And hence the question I had with charging too fast. Since discharging faster clearly wears them more quickly, surely charging faster has a similar effect, since it's mostly the reversed process? A question probably easily answered with a query to a LLM.
  - 8mo ago

Tade0 8mo ago

I have a feeling that half the reason they're doing this is that they don't have a good idea how to increase energy efficiency. Case in point: 2026 BMW i3 - 900km WLTP from a 108kWh battery. 2026 Denza Z9 GT - 800km WLTP from a 122kWh pack. The former charges at a maximum of 400kW, while the latter at over twice that which saves... about 10 minutes at the charger after 450km of driving(12 vs 22 minutes approx). Many such examples with Chinese manufacturers putting 700kg battery packs into the vehicles just to be able to say it's this and that kWh. I don't know about anyone here but after 400km or so I'm done and want to at least stretch my legs.

ZeroGravitas 8mo ago
This is an NMC vs LFP battery comparison. They have different trade-offs but LFP is gradually taking over from the bottom of the market and heading up market in a classic disruptive manner. They are heavier but cheaper and safer and better longevity.
jaywee 8mo ago
I think one of the reasons for this is to have very high throughput charging stations in dense urban areas (like central Beijing).
flopsamjetsam 8mo ago
> 2026 BMW i3 - 900km WLTP from a 108kWh battery. I had to do a double take: remembering the i3s as the little almost SmartCar-sized EVs. Great cars, I still see a few around here, but I couldn't imagine them extending the range of those to 900km! Turns out they just released the i3 sedan, which is like a 3-series. And good to see they're making the design similar between the new 3-series and the new i3. I like the i4, but really need something more 3-series in size.
- sgt 8mo ago
  Yes that new one is not an i3, not even in spirit. The original i3 was super light, quirky, fun, innovative in so many ways. They just didn't sell enough. People wanted more boring cars.

orbital-decay 8mo ago

>Just taking an existing fast charger with 150- or 350-kW capacity and swapping in the latest and greatest 1,500-kW chargers wouldn’t get anyone faster speeds. The system would need all new “pipes”—grid capacity—to actually move that much current. The grid doesn't necessarily mean "pipes" or power lines. You don't build a pipeline to every gas station. Mobile charging robots work pretty well in China.

tim333 8mo ago
Also I guess they could put a large battery at the charging station so it can take say a steady 200kw from the grid and be able to kick out 1500kw for ten minutes occasionally. That could also charge from cheap off peak electricity.
- boringg 8mo ago
  Traffic congestion costs for electricity is going to get wild if we start stacking all sorts of random >= 1.5 MW demands scattered everywhere.
  - stavros 8mo ago
    Imagine if we had a parallel information network that could coordinate the charging times of all these things in real-time.
    - 486sx33 8mo ago
      [dead]
    - boringg 8mo ago
      Fair bit of overhead to pull that off, but interesting.
      - stavros 8mo ago
        Not really, all you'd need to do is make a live price ticket that's dependent on congestion and make that available over the network, and economics takes care of the rest.

quantum_state 8mo ago

Big money in US politics is the root of lots bad things happening in the country … some serious change is needed to truly achieve MAGA …

glimshe 8mo ago

Cool! My only concern is that Wired has a very long and consistent history of advertising technologies that don't work quite as they say. So let's hope this is real.

russli1993 8mo ago
BYD is shipping both charging stations and cars with blade battery 2.0 first half of 2026. Both economic and premium models can charge from 0 - 97% under 12 minutes. They are also building these charging stations right now and few hundreds are already operational.

RevEng 8mo ago

I wonder if Gil Tal has ever used an EV as their daily vehicle. I have had two EVs in the last three years - a Kona and an IONIQ 5. I have greatly enjoyed them both. But one thing was a downside that I just had to accept: poor charging. Granted, I live in the Canadian Prairies full of small towns a fair distance apart. And it's not exactly progressive - I'm actually being taxed for owning an EV. The charging infrastructure is sparse with 50-100kW charges every 100km. On long distance trips I spend 1 hour charging for every 2 hours driving. To say that faster charging wouldn't make a meaningful difference is simply wrong. Sure, it doesn't have to be 5 minutes - even 10-15 would be enough - but current chargers don't get anywhere close to that, even with 350kW, which rarely if ever reach those charging speeds. For driving around the city I never bat an eye. I have a level 2 charger in my garage and there's one at work that is decently priced should I ever need it. I never use a fast charger for local travel. But long distance travel is what people are worried about and having much faster charging would most certainly make a difference for me and for them.

2muchcoffeeman 8mo ago
Not if the charger doesn’t work.
ranit 8mo ago
Could you please elaborate on: > I'm actually being taxed for owning an EV.
- __oh_es 8mo ago
  Some countries charge a road tax or annual vehicle tax, and ev’s are often except as a green incentive
  - phil21 8mo ago
    and some places charge a higher annual fee for EVs due to roads being largely funded by gas taxes. Seems totally fair to me so long as the averages largely line up for both vehicle types.
- 8mo ago

1270018080 8mo ago

Headlines right next to each other on my HN feed "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance" "How BYD got EV chargers to work almost as fast as gas pumps"

JonChesterfield 8mo ago

If you can get a megawatt into the car batteries without setting them on fire, that's game over for petrol cars. And for the other electric vehicles that haven't worked it out yet. Only reason I'm on petrol is unwillingness to wait an hour to recharge the car. The rest of the infra is fine if that can be done. Array of batteries and/or capacitors at the supply point and draw continuously from the grid. Most entertainingly run a diesel generator on site if that doesn't work out. Lines up well with basing them at the existing fuel stations, got the diesel supply already sorted out. Put a bunch of solar near it when you can. Maybe sell back to grid, nice to have the extra capacity available. All comes down to capital deployment at that point. Do the calculations on how much to charge for slow car charge vs fast charge, fallback to slow with an apology/discount when the infra is struggling etc. Huge news. Iff the cars don't catch fire when plugged in.

bigstrat2003 8mo ago
Agreed. Right now EVs are almost strictly superior for day to day usage (only real downside is that the higher weight goes through tires faster). But for road trips, combustion vehicles blow them out of the water. If I'm taking a 12 hour road trip, no way am I going to take an EV if that means I will have to spend an extra hour or two charging it. My wife has an EV and it's genuinely really nice. But until they get the charging experience on par with the speed of filling up a gas tank, we will always have one of our two cars be a combustion car, to give us that extra flexibility for long trips.
- hbarka 8mo ago
  For once or twice a year road trip I’d just rent a combustion car, otherwise it’ll just be sitting in the garage not good as a daily driver.
  - loeg 8mo ago
    Or just eat an extra few minutes of charging time once or twice a year; it's simply not a big deal. Charging at home saves me so much time relative to getting gas that the occasional road trip wait is already overcompensated for. ICE/hybrid only saves you time if you can't charge at home or do lots of road trip type driving.

gverrilla 8mo ago

Let's go China!

thelastgallon 8mo ago

We need grid scale batteries anyways to capture excess solar (curtailment) at zero cost, or for a profit. Put these in distributed locations that can also charge cars and we solve 2 problems at once.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

wesleyd 8mo ago

Gas pumps in the US are artificially capped at 10 gallons per minute, and a gallon of gasoline is about 33kWh, so petrol cars in the US “charge” at 330kWh/min ~= 20MW. But most cars only turn about a third of that into motion, so let’s say 7MW equivalent? While BYD’s 1.5MW is amazing, it seems a stretch to call it “almost as fast as gas pumps.” Diesel pumps for trucks typically pump much faster too. And diesel is nearer 40kWh/gal. We have a ways to go! (The energy density of oil is amazing: a fully loaded A380 with 84,500 us gallons of jet fuel at 37.5 kWh per, that’s over 3TWh. Which is about twice the capacity of all the li-ion batteries made in 2025. We have a ways to go!)

thelastgallon 8mo ago
99.9% of use cases of EVs can charge at home/work/shop, don't need separate infrastructure, logistics and supply chains for delivery of electricity. There is a very small fraction of EV trips that need charging on the go. The vast majority of trips are under 3 (or 5 miles).
- KolmogorovComp 8mo ago
  > 99.9% of use cases of EVs can charge at home/work/shop This is yet again a very US-centric view where you assume people are living in house with a garage.
  - HWR_14 8mo ago
    Even in the US, only 63% of households have a garage or carport.
  - DroneBetter 8mo ago
    "home" can be substituted for "place where car resides when owner is at home" without meaningfully changing the point
    - Shitty-kitty 8mo ago
      In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's. People that have access to home-charging, worry about range. The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging.

gib444 8mo ago

Rapid charging in the UK is mostly way more expensive than gas (petrol) at around 89p per kWh. I imagine with Iran etc that could push over £1 soon!

casey2 8mo ago

Has there ever been a tariff in all of human history where the technical gap between 2 countries' products has been this large? This is nearly a new product class.

whatever1 8mo ago

Look range is not a huge issue if it is reliably above 200miles. This means that the 60% of that (120miles) covers your typical max commuting radius, and 80% of that the time you typically you would need a toilet break (3-4 hours). My old gas guzzler had a 180-250 miles of range, and I did not have range anxiety (I did have gas cost anxiety tho) The issue always was speed of charging and abundance of chargers. Today things are a bit better as you can find 200kW chargers on the big highways. But still they are not abundant, you need to plan.

torginus 8mo ago

The fundamental problem of high-wattage charges (say 500kW), isn't to deliver power from the charger to the car, but that there needs to be crazy amounts of grid capacity to support them. A house has like 10kW peak sustained power consumption (an apt even less), which it rarely reaches, so a park of these fast chargers need the same infrastructure as a small town. These loads are so huge Cities like Beijing have strong industry and in general have the infrastructure to it, so it's relatively straightforward to install chargers like these. If you go out into the countryside, this infrastructure disappears, and won't see these fast chargers. Most European cities barely have enough capacity to cover urban expansion, never mind to support this. These articles suggest, its just a matter of putting down these stations, and that would solve the charger problem, but in truth, there's often a prerequisite of huge grid upgrades somebody has to build and pay for, which come with the unpleasant sight of these high voltage lines intruding into neighborhoods. I wished articles lambasting the lack of fast chargers also mentioned this as well.

atoav 8mo ago
As an certified electrical engineer, this is certainly a problem. The main issue is of course how much copper is burried underground and how big transformer capacity is. The first solution is of course to try avoiding farst charging if possible by charging at home or at work over hours if possible. A faster charge will have to be a more expensive charge. Another solution that could ease things a little is to spread the load on the grid over time by drawing it from some local source (e.g. battery) Imagine a gas station has a beefy energy storage from which it draws the current in short blasts while the battery itself draws it much more spread out over hours. This is essentially how it is done in much smaller scales (in terms of time, energy and actual physical size) on printed circuit boards using capacitors. If you'd draw the current all the way back from the power supply any bursty load would affect the voltage on the power supply and thus show up in other psrts of the circuit. But in the end more electrical energy demand by mobility will lead to more electrical demand, period. And as you rightly pointed out that means more infrastructure, more copper in the ground, bigger transformers, more powerplants.
- torginus 8mo ago