Ever since the birth of the popular motorcar – which you can ascribe roughly to the launch of the Ford Model T, the Fiat Topolino, the BMC Mini, the VW Beetle or the Citroen 2CV according to taste and preference – getting from points A to B has been relatively simple, if variously expensive.
When you need to go farther, you simply pull up to a pump dispensing petrol or diesel, spend about five minutes filling your tank, and you go again.
That convenience – however indigestibly priced and environmentally harmful – is why electric cars still struggle to gain sales traction with the wider population of car buyers. In general, average current EVs will charge their batteries from 20-80 per cent capacity in about 20-30 minutes. The very fastest will do so in about 17-18 minutes.
BYD – the giant Chinese car maker that has ambitions to be the world’s biggest motoring brand – can now do it in five minutes.
Well, not quite yet, but the company has shown off a combination of a new ultra-high-powered charger and a pair of new electric cars – the Han-L saloon and Tang-L SUV – fitted with a 1,000kW electric system, which can allow them to take on an extra 400km of range in just five minutes. Such a charging system would allow BYD to meet the promise that Wang Chuanfu, BYD’s chairman and president, stated at the launch event: “The ultimate solution is to make charging as quick as refuelling a gasoline car.”
There are enormous technical hurdles which must be jumped before such incredibly rapid charging becomes commonplace, and we’ll get to those in a moment, but perhaps the more significant project that BYD is now working on is its own-brand network of rapid DC charging points.
So far, only Tesla has invested in a dedicated series of charging locations – the famed Supercharger network. Others have dabbled. The IONITY group, which was established by a conglomeration of car makers including Ford, BMW, Mercedes, VW Group, Hyundai and Kia, has established itself as a rival to Tesla and uses very fast chargers capable of up to 350kW power output – Tesla’s Superchargers run at 250kW.
BYD entering the charging game isn’t merely significant for the potential charging power and speeds being spoken of, but simply because the company has enormous technical and financial resources – backed, to the chagrin of European car makers and legislators, by the Chinese government – and has proven thus far that when it sets its corporate mind to a task, it generally achieves its aims.
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BYD is already vying with Tesla for the title of the world’s biggest maker of electric cars and, given Tesla’s current sales slump, it will probably outpace the increasingly controversial American car maker this year. While its cars are now subject to hefty European import tariffs, BYD will, in the next 18 months, open two new factories in Hungary and Turkey, which will allow it to sidestep those extra taxes.
And the ultra-fast five-minute chargers? Well, they seem to be a reality already. BYD plans to launch the new Han-L and Tang-L in the Chinese market in April, and the company says it has already earmarked 500 sites for these new chargers, with plans to install 4,000 such sites across China. Europe? Nothing official yet, but BYD would be keen to sell such technology to potential European customers, not least given its potential game-changing status.
However, there are still technical hurdles to overcome. BYD says that its new charger, which uses liquid cooling, can pump out more than one megawatt of power – 1,360kW to be exact – and the charging systems and batteries of the Han-L and Tang-L have been upgraded to 1,000kW capacity to make the most of that. In terms of rivals, Audi, Porsche, Hyundai, and Kia all already have cars on sale which can manage up to 800 volts, but their charging speeds top out at a maximum of 350kW for specific models and are more commonly to be found at the 270kW level. BYD’s 400km-in-five-minutes charging equates to adding one kilometre of extra range for every second that the charging current is flowing.
BYD’s new cars aren’t just fast-charging, they’re also fast. Both new models use what’s called the ‘Super-e Platform’, which also includes electric motors capable of up to 1,086hp, giving the cars top speeds of over 300km/h. Both models also come with so-called ‘dual-gun charging’ – two charging sockets on each car, which means that at slower charging points you can double up and speed up your charge times. Good luck explaining that one to an irate Nissan Leaf driver who’s in the charger queue.
Their batteries are based on a new ‘flash-charging battery’ design, which, according to BYD, has built ultra-fast ion channels between the positive and negative terminals, reducing the battery’s internal resistance by 50 per cent. These are not, though, the oft-promised ‘solid state’ batteries, but are instead a development of BYD’s existing lithium-iron phosphate battery designs.
Oddly, the ranges of the Han-L and Tang-L aren’t all that great, topping out at about 700km on the notably lenient CLTC official Chinese range test, which suggests a range of about 550-600km on the tougher European WLTP test. Of course, if they can charge up an extra 400km in five minutes, who cares about range any more?
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Clearly, getting one megawatt of power to each individual charging point is not going to be easy – charging providers are often already complaining that energy providers here in Ireland and across Europe are sluggish at hooking up sufficient power capacity to meet demand – and it’s enough to power an average home for about a month, or slightly more. To get around this problem, BYD says it will install local power supplies for its chargers, which will be in the form of large banks of batteries which can be topped up slowly from the national grid at offpeak times and then used to feed the power-hungry chargers as needed. Such battery banks are large and expensive, but such is BYD’s financial and battery-making might (it’s one of the few EV makers that makes its own batteries, having started as a battery maker long before it made any cars) that this probably won’t unduly trouble it.
How long before Irish EV users can hook up to megawatt power? Don’t hold your breath – the ESB is currently still struggling to meet the existing power connection demands, and anyway no vehicle currently on sale in the Irish market will accept that much charging power. Charging speeds are, in any case, variable – they depend on the car’s charging systems, the potential power of the charging point, the actual amount of power reaching the charger, the condition of the car’s battery, the ambient temperature and a host of other factors.
A five-minute charge is clearly now technically possible, but it will take a great deal of time before both the Irish charging network and the cars we buy will be capable, en masse, of providing it.
