5 ms·
CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes
- tristanj 5mo agoI did not expect Nio's 5-minute battery swap technology to become obsolete this soon.
- c9lgPZqHNGdC1V1 5mo agoIf anything, Nio battery swap stations would allow car users to swap to newer types of battery as they become available. I say this knowing Nio is one of CATL's most important partners[1]. [1] https://eletric-vehicles.com/catl/catl-calls-nio-an-irreplaceable-strategic-partner-amid-battery-swap-race/ https://eletric-vehicles.com/catl/catl-calls-nio-an-irreplac...
- dirck-norman 5mo ago5 minute swap is not needed for this.
- cestith 5mo agoWell, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable to do instead of charging once every three to five years or so. I guess it depends on the quality and retained capacity on the batteries being swapped in.
- crote 5mo agoThe vast majority of charging is done at home, though. Five-minute-charging/swapping is basically a gimmick to show off to your friends, and only really sees (questionable) use during that once-a-year road trip. The main value in these technologies is to shut up the "But sometimes I want to drive for 20 hours without being forced to take even a single 30-minute break!" pseudo-argument as to why an EV is "impossible" for their lifestyle. Same with the Lucid Air and its 1000km range: basically zero people truly need it, but it needs to exists in order to drag the last few holdouts into the future.
- cestith 5mo agoWhen my road trip is in negative temperatures, I appreciate not having to be in the cold for too long. I think the bigger adoption issue is thoughts of scaling the charging stations. If there’s a line of cars at a liquid fuel pump, one can still get fuel in twenty or thirty minutes. If there’s a line of four cars at every charger and every car takes 15 minutes to charge on average, that’s an hour before you can start.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5mo ago> Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable eh? are you saying that something that is done once every 5 years has to be done inside 5 minutes? I strongly disagree. > charging once every three to five years or so Um, that's not how charging works at all.
- cestith 5mo agoThat’s not how sentences or quotations work at all.
- nfriedly 5mo ago> Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, That sounds like a phone battery, not an EV battery. Modern EVs should last 15-20 years before seeing significant degredation.
- cestith 5mo agoThat was assuming, based on their recharge count, daily 10% to 98% rapid charging. You’d only see that in a vehicle of this range if it’s being used as like a courier vehicle or moving billboard. Pretty much the actual worst cases.
- DennisP 5mo agoThat'd be an interesting situation. They'd probably replace their fleet of batteries gradually, so with each swap sometimes you'd get upgraded, sometimes downgraded. Your range and home charging curves would change with the batteries, and Nio would have to update the battery management software when it puts in a different battery type. But over time, you'd get upgraded on average without having to pay for a new battery, as long as Nio kept updating to keep its batteries competitive.
- xbmcuser 5mo agoNio already has a service to swap to higher capacity battery if you want to go on a long road trip etc. It prices its cars according to battery capacity so even people that chose lower capacity car on purchase still have the option to swap to a higher capacity battery. Though I think the main use for battery swap technology will be for commercial trucking and if I recall correctly Chinese government and OEM are working on standardisation for that so all those truck batteries are swappable no matter which company builds the battery.
- pjc50 5mo agoThis is in fact the main argument to me why swaps would never work at all, economically: the "state" of the battery is a significant part of the value of the car. Being swapped to a worse one makes you several thousand dollars worse off. It only works in a leasing scenario, and everyone hates those.
- sowbug 5mo agoI used to own a truck whose fair market value would double, temporarily, whenever I filled the tank.
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoHow's that any different than putting new tires on a shitbox?
- toast0 5mo agoI think you'd need a contract where you buy (or lease) the car without a battery and lease/rent the battery separately. With some guaranteed offer for a battery with minimum spec X at maximum price Y when you exit the battery program. Preferably, not a mandatory offer, because one hopes specs go up and prices go down over time. Then have you pay something per month for having a battery (maybe depends on the specific battery installed), something per kWh for charge used, plus a rebate per kWh for charge added. Or roll it into usage tiers, whatever. There's lots of people that love leasing cars. I don't understand it, but it makes a lot of people happy?
- newyankee 5mo agoIn a well designed urban environment where cars have space for 2-3 modular batteries with swapping capabilities, I see no reason why taxis etc. need to carry battery payload > 150 km of range needed for local use, which would mean better fuel efficiency as well. Battery swapping done right is integral to this
- 0xfaded 5mo agoSorry, but I giggled at this. A well designed urban environment would have no cars.
- horsawlarway 5mo agoFrankly - I agree with this take. If anything - my opinion at this point is that cars were a mistake in vehicle sizing caused by internal combustion engines. For the vast, vast majority of ubran transit, something akin to a bike in size seems to make more sense. We see this already in urban regions in India/Asia where scooters are the predominate transportation method, and I think even traditional scooters are heavy enough to be problematic. But a class 2 ebike (so throttle with no need to pedal) can weigh as little as 40lbs (20kg), and go 30 miles at 20mph. It's insane that we're not designing urban transit for bikes at this point. Much better density, much safer, much easier to store and park, much cheaper to operate and license.
- vfclists 5mo agoCars,those urban monstrosities the vehicles that weigh over 25 times their payload and take up 20 times the space on the roads. Should I adjust the figures for American sizes? Should I also add that they are engineered to travel at speeds over 120 mph and usually ply the trade environments where 30 mph is a dangerous speed?
- postalrat 5mo agoAmazing machines. Can't wait till I can buy something a bit bigger that can also travel to other planets
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- maeln 5mo agoWe should always take marketing number with a huge grain of salt, so the 10 to 98% in 7 minutes remain to be seen. Also, there is the question of if it lowers the battery lifespan faster than charging at lower power. It is does, there might still be a point in battery swap, especially for public transport systems (for bus). A public transit operator might want to have more battery than vehicle, so that they can rotate the battery regularly and charge them at lower power, to diminish and distribute the wear on battery. But that's obviously a big if and a more niche usage.
- xbmcuser 5mo agothe life span stat with the current battery tech is mostly useless for a normal car. 300 mile range most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years. The battery degradation is not that bad in the first place.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5mo ago> most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years. When it comes to as-fast-as-possible charging, I think you can divide that number by at least 10. Slow charging while parked overnight or during the day should still be the most common case by far for most users. Very fast charging is important for road trips, but it is not the usual case.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- antonkochubey 5mo agoFirst, with range decreasing, number of charge cycles per mile, and therefore rate of wear, will increase. Second, average age of car on the road is above 10 years in most countries; and those that drive old cars definitely do not have €26,500* spare to swap their EV's battery for a new one. *That's what Audi charges here for e-tron 50 battery replacement, which are already starting to fail for many owners
- rcxdude 5mo agoSwapping does help reduce the high peak power demands that fast charging has. There's limited places where you can get the infrastructure to install a bank of chargers capable of this kind of speed (though, one potential approach is having a local block of batteries near the charger, but you are then paying the efficiency cost of another battery round-trip, and the cost of the batteries which will get a lot of wear and tear themselves)
- NetMageSCW 5mo agoBut if you need batteries that gives you the opportunity to install solar and reduce your costs more than the efficiency hit.
- crote 5mo agoThe charging station's batteries don't have to use the same chemistry though, as they aren't space- and weight-constrained like EV batteries are. You can optimize for durability and cost instead. Having station-based storage also allows the station to participate on the energy market and purchase only when electricity is cheap. It could even do double duty by selling back electricity from storage during periods of high grid demand! Heck, pair it with a local grid storage battery which is going to be built anyways and you basically get it for free.
- wakawaka28 5mo agoStation batteries are an additional toxic inextinguishable fire hazard and expense to consider. I wonder what is the efficiency loss in charging one battery to turn around and charge another too. But you are generally right: stationary batteries do not need to be lightweight like the ones in cars.
- perching_aix 5mo agoSaw this yesterday, did not expect the competition around Donut's batteries to heat up this much and this quickly. Even the gravimetric density is fairly close, CATL's claim is 350 Wh/kg, compared to Donut's 400 Wh/kg. The safety and durability (plus no lithium) prospects of Donut's V1 battery are still big though (if the thing is actually real).
- bayesianbot 5mo agoFeels quite clear Donut doesn't have much - no meaningful new tests released for many weeks already and some executive of Nordic Nano sued Donut Lab and said their claims were misleading. I haven't really followed that closely myself, but I've noticed the people who I saw defending Donut before have gone really quiet about it lately.
- yorwba 5mo agoDonut's website claims that they will release the next test result in 7 days, so you can check next week whether those people will have something new to talk about: https://idonutbelieve.com https://idonutbelieve.com
- jonkoops 5mo agoI sincerely hope Donut really has an ace up their sleeve, we could really use some domestic competition against China here in the EU. I sincerely hope that the next update from them is something solid (pun intended), and not 'what color is the battery'.
- audunw 5mo agoI find the talk around Donut so weird. At CES we were told they had nothing because they hadn’t shared third party test. They then shared third party tests remarkably fast. From the dating of VTT reports it’s clear they shared it as soon as VTT finalised their reports. Now they have nothing because they haven’t released enough tests fast enough? It’s clear they have something very interesting. We’re mainly missing low temp and energy density test. If they have something real, obviously they’re saving density for last (near the time real customers get their hand on the bike), since it will give them huge amount of attention. Can’t fault them for milking what they’ve got (if they got it) for all the marketing hype it’s worth. We’re also missing cycle life test but the claims can’t really be fully tested in a reasonable time. So even if their tests show projections that indicate high cycle life, people will doubt it, or shift the focus to ageing effects. So personally I don’t care much, we just have to see how it works out in real life. The lawsuit incidentally reveal their connection to partners which does reveal that there’s something real there. Another criticism was that the couldn’t have developed all the tech from scratch themselves in such a short time, and now it’s clear they didn’t, they’re using tech licensed by other companies with real competence in the field. If it’s as good as they say with zero caveats and can be manufactured at scale is another matter
- SideburnsOfDoom 5mo agoNeither article mentions what specs - voltage and kW - are used when doing this very fast charging. Does anyone know? Assuming it's not just the current high-end spec of 800v? It matters because higher current requires heavier equipment to generate it and heavier cables too.
- adrian_b 5mo agoThe other company that makes batteries that charge this fast, BYD, also makes appropriate chargers, which use a somewhat higher voltage, of 1000 V. Those chargers can provide up to 1000 A.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5mo agoYes, I am aware that BYD has demonstrated a 1000 kW charging system. In their case it's literally the headline (1) or subheading in other articles (2) Which is very much in contrast with this article not mentioning these numbers at all. It's odd. Are you saying that you know that this CATL charger has the same specs despite this? That was my question, really. 1) "BYD Unveils ... Megawatt Flash Charging " https://www.byd.com/en/news-list/BYD-Unveils-Super-e-Platform-Megawatt-Flash-Charging-Electric-Vehicles-Matching-Refueling-Speeds.html https://www.byd.com/en/news-list/BYD-Unveils-Super-e-Platfor... "BYD's 1st 1,000-kW ultrafast" https://cnevpost.com/2025/03/26/byd-1st-1000-kw-charging-stations-ready-apr/ https://cnevpost.com/2025/03/26/byd-1st-1000-kw-charging-sta... 2) Subhead: "BYD unveils platform with charging power of 1,000 kW" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/18/byd-ev-fast-charging-system-petrol-fuel-speed https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/18/byd-ev-fa...
- adrian_b 5mo agoI do not know more than is said in this press release, but I assume that they have coordinated to use identical charger specs, otherwise both would lose. It is said that there already are hundreds of such fast chargers installed, so at this point it would not make sense to try to install other incompatible chargers or to make cars incompatible with the existing fast chargers. I assume that the chargers are more or less compatible with the older chargers, but they must be able to negotiate a higher charging voltage and higher maximum charging currents. When either the vehicle or the charger does not support the higher voltages and currents, they should fall back to an older and slower charging mode.
- sandworm101 5mo ago> have a minute to plug in? Still sufficient to get from 10 to 35 percent state of charge. Scaling that to something the size of an EV pack will require one massive cable/connector. Call it 5kw/h in 1/60 hours, thats 3000kw, at 700v thats still roughly 4000 amps. (Please correct my head math.) Charging one car could suck up more power than an entire neighbourhood. Say four or five chargers operating at once ... every roadside charging station will need its own electrical substation.
- jcsager 5mo agoFjord ferries in Norway are up around that sort of charge rate, but for 30 mins instead of 5. That kind of battery charging performance is pure marketing until our local LV supply network is uplifted!
- beej71 5mo agoI was so impressed by this when I saw it. Big-ass cable. :) Great ferry trip.
- g4cg54g54 5mo agochargers of that size generally have there own internal (sometimes even shared by multiple receptacles) batteries
- SECProto 5mo ago> Call it 5kw/h in 1/60 hours, thats 3000kw, at 700v thats still roughly 4000 amps. (Please correct my head math.) 5 kWh * 60 = 300 kW at 800V (typical charging voltage) that is 375A (still huge, but an order of magnitude less)
- baq 5mo agosubstation...? more like an SMR
- dgacmu 5mo agoWhat's nice there, though, is that the total amount of _energy_ needed at a charging station is roughly fixed(), regardless of how fast you charge the cars. So if you're provisioned for the needed total energy inflow, you can to a reasonable degree compensate for having a more bursty high-rate charging load by having some amount of local energy storage as a buffer. () - Assuming you provision for the highest-traffic-volume day. Ignoring potential induced demand of making it a little easier to drive, which I suspect is pretty bounded - people need pee and stretch breaks anyway.
- viraj_shah 5mo agoI didn't see a number for cycle life. That'd be my biggest question here. You can charge in less than 7 minutes but how many times before performance (capacity) degrades?
- est 5mo agoChina had many >1M KM electric taxies. Usually they degrade after 200,000 km, and they are like 2 generations behind the latest ones.
- djcannabiz 5mo agoright at the end “After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said.”
- phh 5mo agoTFA says "After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said." I can't really judge whether 1000 charges is a reasonable target for a car, though i think that 1000 fast charges is reasonable. It should probably be able to push to 5000 slow charges and 500 fast charges, which should fit a lot of use-cases.
- dgacmu 5mo agoIf you get 400km per charge using 88% of the battery (98% -> 10%), that's 400,000km (258,000 miles) before you're down to 90%, at which point you have likely worn out an awful lot of other things with the car. Admitting that I have the luxury of an urban, low-driving lifestyle: I'm 50. That battery would literally last the rest of my driving life and have room to spare.
- JMKH42 5mo agoUnderstanding battery degredation takes a lot of nuance. If you do nothing but charge and discharge quickly at some given temperature, you degrade to 90% in 1,000 cycles. But the battery also degrades over time, the hotter it is the more, the higher the SOC the more. So you have to add on that calendar degradation, to that 10% loss from just charging. Total degradation in practice will vary a lot, based on users charging and storage practices. Most of the time in practice it seems some fault will brick a battery before it degrades too much in total capacity.
- skc 5mo agoBattery and solar panel advancements have been the most interesting story in tech for going on a decade in my opinion. Wish I could fast forward 50 years and see what the world will look like.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- chris_va 5mo agoThe poor grid. The US added basically 0% extra transmission capacity last year. ... Now your local charging station will require a nuclear plant to keep up with ~1MW per car.
- WarmWash 5mo agoThe whole fast charge thing is mostly marketing to convert people from "gas car mindset" into getting an EV. The reality of the situation is that most people who buy an EV will use fast charging only a few times a year. The majority will be charging overnight to recuperate their daily use, which amounts to drawing <1% of a MW. The grid, in it's current form, is totally capable of this. What would be a strain though is large ultra fast charging stations along major travel corridors. But I'd still wager that those will be overkill for most.
- hangonhn 5mo agoWait. You're missing something. Charging was what stopped me from getting an EV when I was a renter. In a world where I can recharge in 7 to 10 minutes, it becomes a lot more feasible for a renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities. A renter can just pull up to a recharging station. Wait 7 to 10 minutes or (maybe 5 if they don't mind a half charge) and be off.
- WarmWash 5mo agoRenters shouldn't get EVs if they cannot charge at home. Which sucks, but the majority of people (2/3) don't rent.
- DonsDiscountGas 5mo agoWith last year's battery tech sure, but not next year's apparently
- SideburnsOfDoom 5mo ago> renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities. Assuming that your car is parked for 18 hours of the day or more (and if it is not, you're a courier, taxi driver or similar) the question is not "do I own or rent the place where I live?" it is "How do I get electricity to where the car is normally parked?" If you solve that with a L2 charger - at night or during the day, you're good. Then recharge time becomes irrelevant as you don't stand there waiting for it, and it happens as part of daily routine. You don't have to regularly pay attention to "When do I have to go get fuel?", it's just done daily. Electricity is found nearly everywhere, you do not have to treat it as something found only at a special fuelling station. EVS are unlike gas cars in that respect.
- DonsDiscountGas 5mo agoWhat's cost? When do they ship?