alt Hacker NewsHow BYD got EV chargers to work almost as fast as gas pumps
Comments
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.
More importantly, the US has banned these cars in America to give protection to american manufacturers.
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.
>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.
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.
This [0] is the actual (good) news, linked from the article.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/vehicle-tech/hybrid-electric-vehic...
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.
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…
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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 …
Let's go China!
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"
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.
[dead]
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.
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!)