Can someone with knowledge comment if charging a battery this way will significantly decrease its longevity? I remember reading that charging with a low current is advisable to preserve battery health.
According to the article: Its latest refrigerant cooling system helps deliver a 35 percent gain in high-temperature lifespan, ensuring that megawatt charging won’t degrade the battery.
Recharging is at some level an issue with current delivery, not just the chemistry. EV batteries are massive arrays of individual cells, so a lot of recharging problems is having the wiring to deliver the current to the batteries optimally.
Then, some chemistries/designs have better cycle endurance, some can probably recharge faster at given depletion levels. When charging an almost totally discharged battery, there's lots of "slots" for the incoming charge to fill, but as it fills up, it will inevitably take more time to locate a "slot" to occupy.
Solid state and semi-solid state may be at play here, since a solid state battery is theoretically more durable as well.
Or, to your point, it is a marketing stunt that doesn't care about cycle endurance. How would we tell? Battery reporting is still horrendous at delineating the tradeoffs/limitations per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930 but hoping that mainstream media don't "gee whiz" science and technology reporting is simply not going to happen, especially in the clickbait era.
A good rule of thumbs with most battery chemistries is that they tend to not like both extremes. This is true for temperature, charge capacity, slightly less true for charging current as very low current tend not to degrade the battery.
> Finally, there’s the BYD Megawatt chargeritself, whose maximum 1,360-kW output whips the 500 kW of Lucid’s new Charging Hub in New York City. The units feature built-in energy storage to reserve juice for when the grid can’t supply it, or for use in China’s rural areas.
Worth mentioning that the peak is pretty short duration. The article talks about power draw dipping to below 500kW. Which makes me think that having a buffer battery, even a small-ish one, could be super useful for load averaging, to knock off this peak load.
This might become moot if the push for 'community batteries' I see over here takes hold. Rather than giant battery arrays 200km away near a solar farm, smaller arrays in your postcode soaking up rooftop solar and offpeak grid. Maybe the business model for the modern service station is to install extra batteries and make money with the excess capacity doing energy arbitrage.
In the UK most are directly from the grid. A few like the InstaVolt charging hub in Winchester have batteries installed on site. These are filled at off peak times using cheap power so there’s less load on the grid and cheaper rates for customers.
That’s not typical currently though and I presume it’s similar elsewhere.
There are already some high-power charging stations with their own demand-side battery storage, here in California. But this assumes low duty cycle. The higher the load factor, the less relevant the battery.
Even with a high percentage of time busy, there's still a wide delta between peak and average power draw (basically every EV slows down its charging the higher the charge percentage). Still lots of opportunity for charge/discharge to reduce the peak grid demand.
It only needs 1360 kilowatt per charging pole... won't happen at scale. It's like those LCD navigation systems in 80s cars - impressive futuristic tech, but not what it actually brought that change.
This doesn't represent a groundbreaking advance despite the framing of the article. They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).
Supplying this kind of energy at scale is not possible currently. So they could deploy a few of these around but they simply can't be ubiquitous. Not to mention charging curves make a big difference as do real-world conditions. Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.
Yeah if I could charge my car in 5 minutes, then it’s much more viable for me to just pull up to a station and then read something for 5 minutes on my phone while it charges. If there’s a decent charging network, then I’d actually find long road trips in an EV viable.
> Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.
For most people charging speed only matters on long trips.
For normal day to day driving those who cannot do their charging at home will often use chargers at their destinations. For example 3 of the 4 grocery stores I shop at have chargers in their parking lots (2 have level 2 charges, and the other has 150 kW DC chargers). If I didn't have home charging I could charge while doing my grocery shopping, and so as long as it finishes by the time I've finished shopping the time doesn't matter.
Even if there are no destination chargers they can use, so charging does involve a special trip, at the rate that BYD demoed (262 miles added in 5 minutes) a typical driver in the US would need 5-15 minutes every week or so.
On long trips generally people want breaks every few hours for the restroom, to stretch, or get food and drinks. At the charging speed BYD demonstrated a large fraction of people on long trips could do all their charging during those breaks, with the charging taking place while they are using the restroom, stretching, or buying their food and drink.
Having done a long road trip at the end of April, I can comfortably say that any time we stopped to get gas, the stop was longer than 5 minutes in general anyway.
> They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).
Valid concern given that's honestly scary from a battery life and safety perspective, especially when coupled with China's downplaying of the fire issues observed with some of their brands...
> Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
You might not, but I will state that I've had many a gas station in the US where for whatever reason below freezing has definitely slowed down the pumps. Even if it was still less than 5 minutes, I'd rather the workflow of 'plug in the charger and then go back and sit in the car' than 'Wait at the pump because you've seen even attended pump kickbacks go wrong and it's state law anyway'...
Supplying even current kinds of fast chargers is not possible done naively; local charging stations split whatever their capacity is between the cars that are plugged in, but allowing for the potential of one or two of those 200kW cars if no others are adjacent.
Roughly the same total amount of energy is needed within the same period of couple days either way, having the capacity to charge faster when possible should be a good thing.
>Do you get full speed if it's below freezing?
I live somewhere where it's reasonably regularly -30F and no electric car does well neither charging nor distance despite claims of battery pre-heating and such. You have to pick a car for the environment it's going to be used in.
5 minutes breaks the point from where charging time is something that has to be planned around to an inconvenience equivalent to hitting a red light after leaving a traditional gas station
On your last point, I would say it depends on how big your car is. I've seen some larger pickup trucks take a hot minute to fill up here in Europe. Granted, these are much less common so it's not a big deal if a farmer needs to come fill up since there are generally plenty of other pumps available.
5 minutes is hugely impressive for our current day and we need to remember these moments as the tech continues to get better. This is just the beginning of EV infrastructure!
To your point about charging speeds, a battery with a max charge rate of 1MW could pull 350kW (common enough in the USA) for 10-90% in nearly all conditions. Being able to add a 250 miles of range in 10 minutes in all conditions would definitely be close enough to a gas car for me. If I could buy this today in the USA it would be a game changer for road trips.
Aren't they just doing what some phones now do which is splitting the battery and charging smaller chunks in parallel? So instead of one giant battery you have 2 or more smaller ones each of which can be charged a lot faster than one large one. Of course it makes management more complicated.
That's not how batteries work. The charging time is measured in "C"s which is a weird unit where 1C means you can fully charge the battery of any size in 1 hour. 2C means half an hour.
But it's already independent of the size of the battery. You don't really get any increase on the max charging speed by dividing it up differently, any more than you can create cake by cutting a whole cake into pieces.
The way to improve it is with battery chemistry, and probably with more capable power electronics.
This represents a huge advance. In functional useful societies, they will be able to develop adequate power infrastructure.
The article also mentions that the charger has its own battery reserves, which it can fill in between fill-ips, and then use to help provide those high peaks. Load averaging.
Then there's your list of gotchas. Oh will it work in the cold? Will it work in heat? Ok yeah maybe that will diminish charge rate maybe. But this habit of looking for problems, looking for reasons to discredit and ignore is a horrible perspective, risks ignoring so much possibility because of such a negative minded orientation.
5 minutes is more than good, imo. At. If you think about the steps before and after filling up, there's a couple minutes of pulling off the road, turning off the car, getting out, walking around, setting up payment, opening the fill up, selecting fuel grade, inserting the filler. You can absolutely speed race this down to 2-3 minutes, but but usually a gas station stop is 5-10 minutes of lost time for most people today. It feels like 5 minutes of waiting is really not a big deal. Is it slower? Yes. But is it significantly slower? Not really, not usually.
It's just so sad having such energy poured into negative mental energy, into convincing people against doing better things. The world deserves better than to be beholden to pestilences of the mind.
What current or future planned power source can deliver 1MW power to even the amount of fast chargers currently in existence?! Small modular reactors at every charging station?
The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Station in my home state of Maryland outputs 1700MW on a typical day. This is enough to power a third of the homes in the state. According to some estimates I found, there are more than 1450 EV charging stations of all types in the state (not enough even for current EV adoption and many are L2 chargers). I can't find over what timescale each charger uses 1MW (per second?) but let's say it's 1MW of power for the 5 minute charge. Let's say each 1MW charger is used twice per day for a single charge each. If all 1450 chargers are used twice per day (2MW/day), you've now exceeded the output of Calvert Cliffs. This is the scale we're talking about.
It's not negative to point out these absurdities, it's vitally important because many jurisdictions are getting ready to ban the sales of new gas cars in 5 years. People depend on working cars for their livelihoods.
still don't get the point of huge batteries. in USA average commute is about 20 miles one way. seems like a 75mile battery + gas is both more practical and requires less infra.
edit: it seems some are confused. I'm saying a PHEV is superior to BEV.
> seems like a 75mile battery + gas is both more practical and requires less infra
I think it's hard to economically hit that and give a car that folks are OK driving within limitations.
Mazda tried to do a range extender setup on the MX-30, however it didn't sell that well and my understanding is the range extender wasn't good for hills or highway cases.
Non Range Extender setups, actually typically work better if you're stuck in gas mode than a range extender, mostly because you can use the mechanical energy from the ICE more directly than the losses of something feeding energy directly into the drivetrain. However, once you hit that point anything after 2 or 3 KWh of battery is just dead weight on the car. I'm guessing that's why even the Prius prime is only around 40 miles of range.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the US addiction to huge vehicles (which need even bigger batteries...)
Edit:
Seeing the edit of what I'm replying to, I'll add that yes PHEVs are probably a 'better' option than BEVs for many people, but the cost of a PHEV can be as much or more than a BEV. Look at a Chevrolet Equinox EV vs a Rav4 Prime. The Rav4 Prime is 10K more expensive. Happy to consider a different comparison here but overall nobody has figured out how to make a PHEV that is cheaper than a similar EV.
let's look at a car that's available as all options: the kia Niro - and let's look at the 2022 since I found the info easily:
$28,790: MSRP of the 2022 Niro L HEV (hybrid)
$34,390: MSRP of the 2022 Niro EX PHEV (plug-in hybrid with an electric range of 51 kms.
$46,790: starting price of the 2022 Niro EX EV (all battery electric vehicle with a range of 386 kms)
it's just simple math. if you take a 400 mile road trip 4 times a year, and your electricity is totally free for the sake of example, gas is 5 bucks a gallon, how long does it take for the EV to pay itself off, assuming the regular commute is 40km daily otherwise? answer is almost 15 years. doesn't make any sense.
There is some market for a 2nd vehicle in a family which has more limitations. But the biggest market is for a do-everything vehicle. The question isn't what is the mean or median commute, its what is the 99.9th percentile journey. Sure it can get you to work and back, but can it get you to grandmother's house for Thanksgiving dinner?
I think targetting the 99.9th percentile trip is maybe even a bit low. A commuting American has at least two car trips per typical day, probably more like 5. So 1 trip in a thousand means something that comes up more than annually.
I can travel most of the time on a single charge. My overall range is just below 300 miles in ideal conditions to 180 miles in worst case scenario. In the USA I would like to be able to have that range between 500 miles and 300 miles. If the charge time is 5 minutes I would change my opinion on what is needed for range.
It's surprising how common 1% event is. Local supermarket has parking lot that only sees 1/4th of it's capacity used daily, but events have it filled up to the brim at least a few times a year. A jitter happening "only" 1% of the time in a game can mean several hitches a _second_, on a webserver you can have several hundred bad customer experiences a second
Many people drive places other (further) than work multiple times a year. "75 mile battery" wouldn't even be good enough for a one-way trip of this kind let alone there and back again.
I’m disappointed and confused as to why countries would impose things like 100% tariffs on vehicles, especially Chinese ones. Their labor force is massive and they can iterate and build much better machines than anyone else, so rather than a tariff helping the local economy, it’s going to cripple it in a relatively short amount of time due to lateral advancements in technology that facilitate every-day cars being built. Smaller countries don’t have the manpower to keep up. So what’s the point of this?
Readit News
Tesla rival BYD launches five-minute battery in $30k model (60 points, 2 months ago, 58 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43670271
BYD unveils battery system that charges EVs in five minutes (24 points, 3 months ago, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43390262
BYD and CATL aim to launch new EV batteries with 6C charge rate (38 points, 11 months ago, 47 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40706337
Then, some chemistries/designs have better cycle endurance, some can probably recharge faster at given depletion levels. When charging an almost totally discharged battery, there's lots of "slots" for the incoming charge to fill, but as it fills up, it will inevitably take more time to locate a "slot" to occupy.
Solid state and semi-solid state may be at play here, since a solid state battery is theoretically more durable as well.
Or, to your point, it is a marketing stunt that doesn't care about cycle endurance. How would we tell? Battery reporting is still horrendous at delineating the tradeoffs/limitations per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025930 but hoping that mainstream media don't "gee whiz" science and technology reporting is simply not going to happen, especially in the clickbait era.
> Finally, there’s the BYD Megawatt chargeritself, whose maximum 1,360-kW output whips the 500 kW of Lucid’s new Charging Hub in New York City. The units feature built-in energy storage to reserve juice for when the grid can’t supply it, or for use in China’s rural areas.
Worth mentioning that the peak is pretty short duration. The article talks about power draw dipping to below 500kW. Which makes me think that having a buffer battery, even a small-ish one, could be super useful for load averaging, to knock off this peak load.
That’s not typical currently though and I presume it’s similar elsewhere.
Does anyone actually drive more than 400 km without stopping for at least 15 minutes to stretch their legs, go to the bathroom, and eat a snack?
Supplying this kind of energy at scale is not possible currently. So they could deploy a few of these around but they simply can't be ubiquitous. Not to mention charging curves make a big difference as do real-world conditions. Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
Oh, and finally, 5 minutes is still slower than filling up a car's tank.
This isn't really relevant. The question is if charging speed is sufficient and it's hard to see five minutes being a deal breaker in any scenario.
Meanwhile, gas cars are still a dead end pollution wise, unless you are pro-dead earth I guess. So there is that.
China also has extreme climates.
For most people charging speed only matters on long trips.
For normal day to day driving those who cannot do their charging at home will often use chargers at their destinations. For example 3 of the 4 grocery stores I shop at have chargers in their parking lots (2 have level 2 charges, and the other has 150 kW DC chargers). If I didn't have home charging I could charge while doing my grocery shopping, and so as long as it finishes by the time I've finished shopping the time doesn't matter.
Even if there are no destination chargers they can use, so charging does involve a special trip, at the rate that BYD demoed (262 miles added in 5 minutes) a typical driver in the US would need 5-15 minutes every week or so.
On long trips generally people want breaks every few hours for the restroom, to stretch, or get food and drinks. At the charging speed BYD demonstrated a large fraction of people on long trips could do all their charging during those breaks, with the charging taking place while they are using the restroom, stretching, or buying their food and drink.
Having done a long road trip at the end of April, I can comfortably say that any time we stopped to get gas, the stop was longer than 5 minutes in general anyway.
> They're getting faster speed by pushing a huge amount of power to the battery (1MW!).
Valid concern given that's honestly scary from a battery life and safety perspective, especially when coupled with China's downplaying of the fire issues observed with some of their brands...
> Do you get full speed if it's below freezing? What about over 100 degrees F? Both are common in the US and well-handled by gas stations.
You might not, but I will state that I've had many a gas station in the US where for whatever reason below freezing has definitely slowed down the pumps. Even if it was still less than 5 minutes, I'd rather the workflow of 'plug in the charger and then go back and sit in the car' than 'Wait at the pump because you've seen even attended pump kickbacks go wrong and it's state law anyway'...
Roughly the same total amount of energy is needed within the same period of couple days either way, having the capacity to charge faster when possible should be a good thing.
>Do you get full speed if it's below freezing?
I live somewhere where it's reasonably regularly -30F and no electric car does well neither charging nor distance despite claims of battery pre-heating and such. You have to pick a car for the environment it's going to be used in.
5 minutes is hugely impressive for our current day and we need to remember these moments as the tech continues to get better. This is just the beginning of EV infrastructure!
But it's already independent of the size of the battery. You don't really get any increase on the max charging speed by dividing it up differently, any more than you can create cake by cutting a whole cake into pieces.
The way to improve it is with battery chemistry, and probably with more capable power electronics.
If you've got a 1-megawatt power supply, there are things you can do about that.
The article also mentions that the charger has its own battery reserves, which it can fill in between fill-ips, and then use to help provide those high peaks. Load averaging.
Then there's your list of gotchas. Oh will it work in the cold? Will it work in heat? Ok yeah maybe that will diminish charge rate maybe. But this habit of looking for problems, looking for reasons to discredit and ignore is a horrible perspective, risks ignoring so much possibility because of such a negative minded orientation.
5 minutes is more than good, imo. At. If you think about the steps before and after filling up, there's a couple minutes of pulling off the road, turning off the car, getting out, walking around, setting up payment, opening the fill up, selecting fuel grade, inserting the filler. You can absolutely speed race this down to 2-3 minutes, but but usually a gas station stop is 5-10 minutes of lost time for most people today. It feels like 5 minutes of waiting is really not a big deal. Is it slower? Yes. But is it significantly slower? Not really, not usually.
It's just so sad having such energy poured into negative mental energy, into convincing people against doing better things. The world deserves better than to be beholden to pestilences of the mind.
The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Station in my home state of Maryland outputs 1700MW on a typical day. This is enough to power a third of the homes in the state. According to some estimates I found, there are more than 1450 EV charging stations of all types in the state (not enough even for current EV adoption and many are L2 chargers). I can't find over what timescale each charger uses 1MW (per second?) but let's say it's 1MW of power for the 5 minute charge. Let's say each 1MW charger is used twice per day for a single charge each. If all 1450 chargers are used twice per day (2MW/day), you've now exceeded the output of Calvert Cliffs. This is the scale we're talking about.
It's not negative to point out these absurdities, it's vitally important because many jurisdictions are getting ready to ban the sales of new gas cars in 5 years. People depend on working cars for their livelihoods.
edit: it seems some are confused. I'm saying a PHEV is superior to BEV.
I think it's hard to economically hit that and give a car that folks are OK driving within limitations.
Mazda tried to do a range extender setup on the MX-30, however it didn't sell that well and my understanding is the range extender wasn't good for hills or highway cases.
Non Range Extender setups, actually typically work better if you're stuck in gas mode than a range extender, mostly because you can use the mechanical energy from the ICE more directly than the losses of something feeding energy directly into the drivetrain. However, once you hit that point anything after 2 or 3 KWh of battery is just dead weight on the car. I'm guessing that's why even the Prius prime is only around 40 miles of range.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the US addiction to huge vehicles (which need even bigger batteries...)
Edit:
Seeing the edit of what I'm replying to, I'll add that yes PHEVs are probably a 'better' option than BEVs for many people, but the cost of a PHEV can be as much or more than a BEV. Look at a Chevrolet Equinox EV vs a Rav4 Prime. The Rav4 Prime is 10K more expensive. Happy to consider a different comparison here but overall nobody has figured out how to make a PHEV that is cheaper than a similar EV.
$28,790: MSRP of the 2022 Niro L HEV (hybrid)
$34,390: MSRP of the 2022 Niro EX PHEV (plug-in hybrid with an electric range of 51 kms.
$46,790: starting price of the 2022 Niro EX EV (all battery electric vehicle with a range of 386 kms)
it's just simple math. if you take a 400 mile road trip 4 times a year, and your electricity is totally free for the sake of example, gas is 5 bucks a gallon, how long does it take for the EV to pay itself off, assuming the regular commute is 40km daily otherwise? answer is almost 15 years. doesn't make any sense.
We tend to act with a scarcity and "what if" mindset.
It doesn't matter if you never drive 400 miles, or rarely, you're spending money, significant one in case of a car, thus range becomes an issue.
I think targetting the 99.9th percentile trip is maybe even a bit low. A commuting American has at least two car trips per typical day, probably more like 5. So 1 trip in a thousand means something that comes up more than annually.
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Not talking about US in this case.
Isn't China free to build a car factory here, with their technology?
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