how fast would it cause the battery to degrade, though?
Chinese EV maker BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank
Submitted 5 weeks ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/18/byd-ev-fast-charging-system-petrol-fuel-speed
Comments
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
That’s the beauty of it. Just get a new one every two years like every other electronic device and you won’t need to worry about that. Subscription plans will be available.
Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I wish the batteries were modular/interchangeable. You could just pull into a station, remove the spent battery and replace it with a full one, the spent one can then just get recharged and stored at the station for the next user to change out. You could even bring some extra ones in the trunk for a long trip!
umbrella@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
ugh, i fear cars will turn into smartphones. its gonna suuuuuuuuuuuuuck
werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I have a Chinese flashlight and the battery trademark is so unfortunate (soonfire) like WTF. Lol.
glitch1985@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
That dying batteries last goal is to provide you with light. How inspiring.
Mihies@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
Not necessarily as they are using LFP chemistry which has much more cycles than the standard one.
Blaster_M@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Stuff I’ve heard on naysays:
“The battery will blow up!!!”
No, it won’t if it’s a solid state battery - solid state batteries barely even notice such a charging rate, their temperature might change by half a degree from this monster charging rate.
“You can’t supply the power because lines”
Modern large commercial buildings already suck down this amount and more.
“The grid overall can’t take 1MW”
So, the 1,000 MW nuclear reactor can’t provide 1MW? How about a reactor station with 4 units cranking 4000 MW? How about we add another 1000 in renewables? How about another 800MW with a single gas turbine? How about adding roof solar and a battery bank below ground for the charging station to supplement the power? We haven’t even touched hydro or geo yet. Making power is not a problem, and we’ll build out the power as we need it.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
So, the 1,000 MW nuclear reactor can’t provide 1MW?
There’s some parts inbetween. You would need an extra line just for the charging stations.
Though, a capacitor bank (maybe where the fuel tank was) would be viable.
x00z@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
What about defects in the machine or car? Could that lead to people being struck by lightning coming from the box next to their automobil?
Blaster_M@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Gas powered cars catch fire all the time
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Fairly unlikely, we engineer things to fail safe.
Even if so we have ways to calculate the power going in and coming out, and if there’s an imbalance kill everything, that’s how gfci and arc fault breakers work.
lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 5 weeks ago
If the insulation doesn’t insulate, that is a risk indeed. There would probably have to be some detection mechanism for damaged insulation on top of regular maintenance checks. I don’t know if some wiring in the insulation could measure the integrity. Maybe if the voltage would oscillate regularly, picking up on the induction of those changes might allow detecting if the shielding is inconsistent before it actually becomes threat? I only have half-remembered bits of an intro course on electrical engineering years ago, so maybe I’m way off.
riodoro1@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Modern large commercial buildings already suck down this amount and more.
And how mamy cars in said building? How many will be allowed to charge at the same time? Should we expect same grid for large commercial buildings and rural charging stations?
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
If there’s literally one place in America we need to throw money at, it’s the electrical grid.
We have a decades out of date power infrastructure, Europe especially has us beat.
Just like electrification originally, and later the internet, increasing power delivery will have benefits for everyone that pay off for centuries .
Mostly we need to make the grid far smarter.
Evs should be allowed to load coordinate with the grid, so they switch on at the optimum times for grid stability in exchange for major discounts on power.
A superload like this one should have to request clearance, then the grid compensates by reducing ‘cheap ev power’ in the area, while also requesting evs configured for v2g to be ready to possibly supply.
The supercharger has a slightly higher cost per kwh to make up for this, but that is the cost of convenience.
deadkennedy@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
this would be a massive leap for EVs
Enelop@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
I’m sure it’s similar to how they trained DeepSeek for $5M when it was really over a $1B…
They make all kinds of false claims.
LixWindoz@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I wasn’t aware! Thanks for sharing. Here goes my dream of bootstrapping an LLM model in my parents’ garage.
expatriado@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
one quick charge for a car, one giant leap for ev king
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
The hurdle to this kind of fast charging isn’t the tech in the car nor is it the tech in the charger. It’s powering the fucking things.
A charging station the size of a small gas station that can handle a dozen cars at once, basically 6 islands with a pump / charger on each side, would require a nuclear reactor sitting out back to supply the required 1.2 Megawatts of power!
So we’re either going to have to get comfy with having an SMR sitting next to every charging station or we’re going to have to get over this idea of charging an EV pack in 5 minutes.
Shark03@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
People just have the wrong idea about EV charging. They think of it like a gas car, wait until you’re low, then go somewhere to fill up. But really, it’s more like charging your phone. You plug it in at home, go to bed, wake up, and it’s ready. You’re not constantly thinking about it.
Fast charging is for road trips, not everyday driving. You’re not supposed to be scrambling to find a charger every couple of days. Ideally, you start each morning with 80%, go about your day, come home, plug in, and do it all over again. You’re never really “empty” unless you seriously mess up. And the whole “how long does it take to charge?” thing, isn’t really all that relevant. You’re not sitting there watching it, it just happens while you’re doing other things.
People are stuck on the idea of gas stations, but with an EV, your “gas station” is literally your house.
So ideally it wouldn’t be handling 12 cars at once it’d be handling one or two.
dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Unfortunately, the infrastructure for the standard use case you talk about isn’t pervasive enough. Most apartments don’t have chargers at all, let alone one per apartment. You can drive by a Tesla or DC fast charge station at almost any time of day in a big city and see a line of cars waiting to use the small number of chargers. People are taking naps in their car in a bank parking lot while charging. Kudos to them for embracing the inconvenience of not charging at home to help the environment, but I never would have bought my 2 EVs if I didn’t have charging at home.
ifmu@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Yeah this is the idea. Personally I think charging needs more emphasis on at-work and apartment charging because if you don’t live at a house, you essentially rely on public charging which isn’t good for the battery.
Also more hotels should have charging. Have no to drive 15 minutes away just to charge is annoying.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
I wouldn’t buy a car I couldn’t take on a road trip though, even if it’s only a few times a year.
And everyone tends to go on a road trip at a similar time, too.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
The hurdle to this kind of fast charging isn’t the tech in the car nor is it the tech in the charger. It’s powering the fucking things.
Agreed.
would require a nuclear reactor sitting out back to supply the required 1.2 Megawatts of power!
Eh…
At 5 minutes a car, each charger would be able to accommodate 12 cars per hour. The 12-charger station, fed by that nuclear reactor, would be able to handle 144 per hour; 3456 cars a day
A typical gas station that size has an 8500 gallon tank, and refills 2-5 times per week. That amount of fuel will serve somewhere between 1000 to 3000 cars per week, or about 6 to 18 cars per hour.
This doesn’t call for a nuclear reactor at the station. This calls for a sufficiently large battery pack at each station that can “trickle” charge continuously. I say “trickle” - if I did my math right, it would be about as much power as 15 hot tubs or 60 water heaters. This is about as much as a grocery store, with all its freezers, refrigerators, lights, HVAC, etc.
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
15 MW power needed, while a single reactor gives 500 to 1000 MW. The usual nuclear plant and power lines seem more likely.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
A large office building will have an incoming main in the hundreds of amps range, some are over a thousand, meaning 500+ KW.
Getting that much power to a site isn’t ridiculously hard to do.
PeteZa@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
That’s actually a great point. The power grid can’t handle that.
rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
But will it smell as good as filling up a tank of gas?
GreatRam@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
It dispenses a small cup of gasoline to sniff while it charges
LeroyJenkins@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
most BYD cars have a gas generator that can power its electric motor. you can still fill a tank and you can still huff gas.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
Maybe with a supercapacitor in the station and a chrging cable with the diameter of a fuel hose.
Rob1992@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Not really, just make the vehicle 800v and then use the same Amp limits. That’s where everyone is out pacing tesla now. Tesla went for amps, the others went for volts
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
Energy is amp x volt. Same energy faster is more energy in same time, be it amps or volt. Dunno if your grid can bear it multiple times in each city but still better buffer it. And more volts needs more gum.
Revan343@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Assuming this is about the same thing as the other BYD charging article I saw a couple days ago, they’re using a higher voltage, which would let them charge faster without needing a thicker* cable.
(* The copper need not be thicker, but the insulation might need to be)
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
The copper need not be thicker, but the insulation might need to be
That’s my point. More energy means either more copper or more rubber in the cable.
minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I always imagined that portable future wizard (??nuclear??) power would be as simple as unscrewing a 5 gallon cannister from the back of a vehicle and exchanging it at the power/charging station for money. Like the small 20 lb LPG cooking gas tanks. I still think that electric cars are a phase of tech that cannot be sustainable in terms of money and environmental cost and waste for too long and that it is just transitional in our quest. Hydrogen power was always supposed to be the future in my mind.
Slagfart@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Hydrogen has extreme structural problems. Hydrogen tanks need constant maintenance, due to how small the molecule is - it’s very difficult to contain and prevent corrosion. You then have significant conversion loss between the powerplant-native format of electricity, and the hydrogen. So nothing can be as cheap as pure electricity. Fuelling the car with ammonia that then gets converted to Hydrogen inside the car is the solution to the first problem, but further increases the loss on the second.
What you’re describing sounds like a small, high-capacity battery to me! Like a super AA battery. Maybe in 50 years :)
echodot@feddit.uk 5 weeks ago
Hydrogen power is the past not the future it’s just a past that never came to be so we sort of feel like it’s something futuristic.
It’s a great idea in theory but there’s so many problems with the idea not least of which is where do you get the hydrogen from? The amount of power that you would need to compress hydrogen into liquid on an industrial scale would practically necessitate dysonsphere.
lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 5 weeks ago
Well, you’d need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can’t force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they’ll lose out on precious markups.
That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.
The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you’d let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you’ve already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I’m sure it’s a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.
I’m all for the idea, mind you. This isn’t me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what’s stopping us (and the answer is probably “rich people that don’t like sharing” as usual).
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
Hydrogen has the same problems tho.
slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 5 weeks ago
Is charging speed really the biggest issue with EV’s?
wellheh@lemmy.sdf.org 5 weeks ago
More like charging availability imo. Not everyone has a garage to conveniently charge in after a day’s work. If you make charging speeds fast enough like with gas, you can negate that though.
drmoose@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Definitely availability and range. I thought of getting EV here in Thailand but limited range + limited charing coverage + 30min charing time is a real deal breaker.
All of which are very solvable issues and I’m sure my next car will be an EV tho
dance_ninja@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
If you’re going on a long road trip, yes.
Takumidesh@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
But is it really?
A 2000 mile road trip with 30 minutes charging breaks is gonna add what? 3 and a half hours on top of 30 hours of driving?
Unless you plan on doing a bunch of meth and speeding across the desert, I don’t see a scenario where a regular person does 8+ hours of driving and doesn’t take a 20 minute break.
modality@lemmy.myserv.one 5 weeks ago
Not really. Mostly need greater density of chargers in some areas. Some older EVs charge kinda slow which is a pain because older EVs also tend to have lower range.
Most people charge almost exclusively at home where speed doesn’t really matter much.
asbestos@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I always think about an “imaginary” scenario where we all have ultra fast charging like this and plug our cars in at the same time. Would the grid experience a brownout?
Atom@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I studied this a bit in my MS and the answer is… probably not. “The grid will collapse” has been an anti-technology or pro fossil fuel talking point for a very long time, weather its arguing against renewables or against personal computers or against AC units. The most recent was solar. Grid operators were adamant that solar would crash the grid if it accounted for more than 10%, then 20%, then 30% and so on and it never happened. Now it’s onto EVs being the grid destroyer.
The reality is that production and use is not all that hard to predict. Ultrafast charging will eat some power, but that isn’t going to be the norm for wide EV adoption. Public charging will cost more money and be less convenient than charging at home or work over a longer duration. Home chargers are capping around 30-35 amps, generally overnight when grid demand is low. Couple this with the combined low cost for residential solar to change at even lower rates depending on your state/nation’s hostility to solar.
Now, if every car was replaced with an EV tomorrow, the grid would struggle. But that’s not going to happen. Adoption will be a long slow process and energy producers will increase output on pace as demand forecasts increase. A good parallel to this is Air Conditioning adoption. That’s another high demand appliance that went from rare to common. The grid has its challenges, but now the AC usage is forcastable and rarely challenges the grid.
Is it a challenge, especially with higher renewable mixtures, yes. Can utilities fumble? Of course. Will it be a widespread brownout every day during commute hours? Not likely.
Novocirab@feddit.org 5 weeks ago
Also, just to indicate the orders of magnitude: The German electiricty grid roughly operates at a power of 200 000 MW.
Source (the graph at the bottom of the page). (Be mindful that the absolute numbers in the graph are given in “MWh per 15 minutes” (power*time/time), so to get the Watt number (power), one has to multiply all numbers by 4.)
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
If you truly have an “MS” then it should be trivial for you to do the math and calculate the power requirements of even a dozen of cars being charged at the rate of 1 Megawatt each.
A bare 12 chargers, the equivalent of a single small gas station, would certainly collapse the grid its attached to. These kinds of charging rates aren’t possible except maybe in the parking lot of an actual power plant.
asbestos@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Great reply, thank you!
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Perfect application and apropos name for ‘surge’ pricing
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Those batteries are gonna be (sorry) LIT.
Like, on fire. Like, from the massive charging rate.
fieryhamster@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Countdown until Trump stupidly bans it as it “harms” President Musk.
hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
…
biden basically did that already. ever noticed there are no byds on the road in the us?
i seem to recall it wasn’t an outright ban, but unreasonable tariffs on chinese evs specifically. a soft ban, but enough to be as effective.
Mihies@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
The official reason for tariffs is government subsidy AFAIK, but in reality the moment they lower the tariffs, US and EU automobile industry is done.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Yeah, tariffs.
Otherwise, you’d see the subcompact EVs with a 150mile range for about $9,000 US that BYD sells.
No US manufacturer can remotely compete with the cost of EVs from China. Rather than letting people buy cheap EVs, the government decided to tariff them so that they cost as much as a luxury car.