China’s new EVs can charge in 5 minutes
Filling an empty gas tank in an SUV might take five or six minutes. A new electric SUV from China’s BYD can charge its battery in roughly the same amount of time, using one of the company’s new EV chargers.
That’s a major step forward. “It is certainly a feat of engineering to design a battery that can handle this kind of charging speed,” says John Helveston, an engineering management professor at George Washington University who studies technological change in China’s EV industry. “Tesla does not have battery technology anywhere near this.” (BYD’s charger has twice the power of Tesla’s latest supercharger.)
The tech inside BYD’s newest cars, which will soon roll out, can handle 1,000 volts of power. The company’s new EV chargers, meanwhile, are designed to match that, so 249 miles of range can be added to a vehicle in five minutes. BYD now plans to build 4,000 of the new chargers across China.
In the U.S., many consumers still say they’re hesitating to buy an electric car because of the time they take to charge. Of course, for daily use, many drivers could charge at home, and the range on current EVs is far greater than the typical commute to work. But until a shift happens in consumer perception of how to use a car—and for longer-distance drives, or anyone who lives in an apartment without easy access to chargers—better charging options could be crucial in helping EVs scale up more quickly.
China is far ahead of the rest of the world on EV battery tech. “It’s the result of a series of different factors, including strong industrial policy support by China’s government to build out the upstream material supply chain for over a decade now,” says Helveston. (Trump’s current anti-EV policy, meanwhile, is likely to push the U.S. farther behind.) Innovative companies like BYD, he says, are also at the forefront of battery science.
The technological development is happening incredibly quickly. “The comparison I hear is that if you have a new charging platform or a new battery chemistry, Volkswagen and BMW will say, ‘We’ll hustle to put this into our systems, and we’ll put it in five years from now.’ Tesla might say, ‘We’ll hustle and get it in a year from now.’ China can say, ‘We’ll put it in three months from now,” Dan Wang, a researcher of China’s technology industry and a fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, recently told Heatmap.
Installing new tech is also faster. “In China, it is much easier to get approvals and install chargers that can handle these kinds of high-power chargers more quickly, mostly because you only have one entity to work with—a state-owned power company,” says Helveston. In the U.S., by contrast, installing high-powered chargers takes more coordination between different players, which means it takes more time and ends up costing more.
Chargers that use so much power could put a strain on the electric grid if they’re not managed correctly. If everyone charges at the same time when they’re headed home from work, that could be a problem. On the other hand, if some people use an ultrapowerful charger in the middle of the day, that could actually help grids with extra solar power that might otherwise go unused.
As with the charging tech itself, what’s happening with grid management in China could also be a model for the U.S. “Certainly, it is in general better and easier to manage if most EV owners slow charge over longer periods of time, but we are moving to a future where fast charging is just going to be part of the ecosystem,” says Helveston. “Given the level of innovation happening in China’s EV sector, I expect the Chinese grid to be able to develop the technology and processes to better handle these kinds of demands on the grid much more quickly than places like the U.S.”