If you own an electric car, “range anxiety” is a real thing. At some point in your journey, you begin to worry whether the juice will run out before you reach home or the nearest charger. But this is where DC superchargers come in.
In theory, you find a supercharger, plug the vehicle in for 20 minutes or so while you have a coffee and then you are good to go for another 300 Km or thereabouts. But what if you come back after a five-minute bathroom break and find your car all juiced up?
This is what Build Your Dreams (BYD), the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer promises after revealing new fast-charging technology that can add 400 Km of range from a five minute charge. With the announcement, BYD has also promised to make a major investment in charging infrastructure, building over 4,000 of the new fast chargers across China itself.
The “Super e-Platform” tech is capable of charging at peak speeds of 1,000 KW, double the fastest Tesla V4 superchargers, which will peak at 500 KW when they roll out this year. At the moment there are no vehicles that can accept such a fast charging speed. Fear not, the faster charging tech will initially be available in two new BYD Group vehicles, the Han L Sedan and Tang L SUV, which start at US$ 37,330.
The chargers need to deliver ultra-high voltage and ultra-large current at the same time. But big currents in particular cause problems for batteries because they tend to generate damaging heat. BYD said it had managed to reduce the internal resistance of the new battery, allowing the highest charging speeds for any production vehicle.
To handle the high voltages, BYD also had to produce a new generation of silicon carbide power chips, it said.
“In order to completely solve our users’ charging anxiety, we have been pursuing a goal to make the charging time of electric vehicles as short as the refuelling time of petrol vehicles,” BYD founder Wang Chuanfu said at the Shenzhen launch event. “This is the first time in the industry that the unit of megawatt has been achieved on charging power.”
BYD has also committed to building over 4,000 ultra-fast chargers across China using the new platform, though it did not specify a timeframe for that project. DC fast chargers are generally very expensive at around US$ 150,000 apiece. Faster charging naturally costs more, because more power is needed. That requires expensive connections to power grids, which means that the fastest chargers command a big premium.
