Maybe with a supercapacitor in the station and a chrging cable with the diameter of a fuel hose.
Is charging speed really the biggest issue with EV’s?
Only by perception, but it practicality mattered, we wouldn’t be ligging around two tons of steel per person everywhere we went.
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.
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.
Countdown until Trump stupidly bans it as it “harms” President Musk.
…
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.
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.
The heavy subsidy by the Chinese government is the reason they would dominate though. The tariffs won’t ever be lifted unless they stop manipulating the prices to be lower than domestic competitors…
Government providing money to create innovative new tech and make it available at a lowe cost to their constituents
Manipulating the prices to be lower
I just wanted to point out the pervasiveness of capitalist propaganda here. They’re not manipulating prices, they’re helping their people. It just so happens that our capitalistic systems don’t do well when someone helps their neighbor because then we can’t abuse them.
Now don’t get me wrong though, I’m not gonna sit here and tell you the Chinese government does no wrong. But in just this particular case I think we’re picking the wrong battle
They would dominate because they make a good product that isn’t more expensive than it has to be. US car companies have discontinued most affordable options to try and force people to only buy larger, higher end vehicles that most people have no use for. Now they’re mad that international companies are willing to sell the products they refuse to.
Yes, usa car companies are bitches. But it is laughable that you think the reason it isn’t more expensive has nothing to do with being subsidized
The reason it is vastly less expensive is due to being subsidized. You don’t seem to understand what is being said and can be backed by facts.
Allowing your local industries to be dominate is common sense. As much as china is smart to subsidize theirs so heavily, the united states isn’t wrong to tariff them
And not the 3.2 billion that the government dumped into them…
I’ve heard they are good cars but the price is manipulated.
so… how much did does the us government give its auto industry?
They gave us auto companies 81 billion between 2008 and 2014, and continue to subsidize the industry to this day.
pot meet kettle
BYD recieved 3.7 billion between 2018-2022 2.2 billion in 2022 alone.
Ford recieved under 500 million in 2022 but did recieve 1.7 billion in 2023.
Ford motor apparently has recieved 7.7 billion in subsidies since the year 2000. Usually from states rather than fedrally.
Yet we don’t try to sell into the Chinese market for the express purpose of undercutting their domestic product. It’s common sense to not allow that to happen.
The heavy subsidy by the Chinese government is the reason they would dominate though.
¡Waaaah bad mon China letting people get around with cars and public transit!
/s
They aren’t manipulating, shits just cheaper to make over there. So they can make more profit and still charge less.
That is verifiably false…
https://electrek.co/2024/04/12/china-gave-byd-an-incredible-3-7-billion-to-win-the-ev-race/
Read your own source maybe?
For its part, China has declared the EU subsidy probe a protectionist maneuver by Europe, saying that its automakers are winning because they make better products. Of course, even the study’s author say that the rapid adoption of green tech in Europe in particular is due in large part to cheap goods coming from China.
The source is also a German investigation? So it may not even be entirely factual either dude…
I’d trust Germany over China any day and twice on Sunday…
how fast would it cause the battery to degrade, though?
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.
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!
The problem is the form factor. They’re broad, flat batteries under the floor of the car, because that’s the most available space when you take out the drivetrain. If you wanted to make them swappable, you’d have to sacrifice the space under the hood or the trunk. Or the passenger space. And all that comes with their own safety concerns.
They can drop the battery out from underneath…. You’re not seriously suggesting that this would be done by users and not automatically? The easiest place for this would be exactly where it is now, underneath EVERYTHING.
It’s not like you are gonna man handle the battery yourself in and out of these dude.
The precedence is there, there’s scooters that already utilize this exact exchanging. Hell forklifts figured this out decades ago… and you want to make it sound like it would be an issue in todays age? Semis have used it for years too, why do you think they would go back to manually doing it? Even if the batteries were light enough to move by hand, you would spend more time unplugging and plugging them back in than it would be to charge them….
There is a company that does this in China. You lease the battery, and pay roughly the same amount as a tank of fuel to swap it, so not a cheap process, and it only works on a small number of vehicles. They’re also losing money hand over fist, and aren’t likely to last very long.
Also, a long trip is precisely when I need all my trunk space.
Yeah, I’ve thought about this too, but real use cases would be rare and maybe somewhere along highways for long trips, but you’d need a lot of stations in hard to predict locations to make it something people could use. Most of the time a simple recharge at night at the domicile would suffice. Add trying to get battery form factors standardized when companies can’t even agree on a universal charger and challenges to upgrading vehicle frames and design if such a standard was ever adopted and it just seems unsustainable.
Ya Engineering really is 't my thing but it seams like such a logical way to do things. This would even be great with phones if you could just swap out the battery you’re not currently using.
I have a Chinese flashlight and the battery trademark is so unfortunate (soonfire) like WTF. Lol.
That dying batteries last goal is to provide you with light. How inspiring.
And heat and depression treatment! (Lithium)
Not necessarily as they are using LFP chemistry which has much more cycles than the standard one.
this would be a massive leap for EVs
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.
I wasn’t aware! Thanks for sharing. Here goes my dream of bootstrapping an LLM model in my parents’ garage.
one quick charge for a car, one giant leap for ev king
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.
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.
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. About as much as a grocery store, with all its freezers, refrigerators, lights, HVAC, etc.
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.
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.
Thats a great point as well, if you live in an apartment the best you can hope for is if you have a garage with an outlet and your apartment complex hasn’t cracked down on you plugging in that way, but that’s like 20 miles charge in several hours.
People are taking naps in their car in a bank parking lot while charging.
Missed opportunity, right there, because even the operators still think in terms of “gas station”. Get a plot of land with a nice view, build a cafe, build a couple of charging stations. Make it a destination people want to go to regardless whether they need a fill-up or not.
Heck, whatever happened to car cinemas.
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. Having to drive 15 minutes away just to charge is annoying.
The other annoying thing is when you find a L2 charger at a hotel that is actually just an L1 charger in disguise.
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.
15 MW power needed, while a single reactor gives 500 to 1000 MW. The usual nuclear plant and power lines seem more likely.
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.
That’s actually a great point. The power grid can’t handle that.
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?
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, whether* 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.
Also, just to indicate the orders of magnitude: The German electiricty grid roughly operates at a power of 200 000 MW on average.
Source (the colorful graph in the middle 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) at any given time, one has to multiply the number by 4.)
Great reply, thank you!
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 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 outside the parking lot of a power plant.
Things like that can definitely be accomodated. A famous example is how the UK would keep pumped storage hydro power ready for moments like half time in major football games or breaks in popular TV shows, because the entire country would pretty much simultaneously put their kettles on
Charging a car is a much bigger draw than powering a kettle, obviously, but the point is that these things tend to be reasonably predictable and we are able to ccount for them if we know they are coming
Combined cycle natural gas plant operator in the US here. Bridging the gap between low demand and high demand times is a big part of why it’s so challenging to try to reduce fossil fuel power solutions. The grid is basically a pressurized pipeline, and it’s only reliable if that pressure is maintained no matter how many “faucets” get opened or closed. Green energy solutions aren’t really able to raise that “pressure” unless we build significantly more than we need and keep a bunch of them off most of the time until peak conditions demand them. Nuclear is extremely slow (relatively speaking) to (safely) alter output to meet demand, so its best usecase is for baseloading as much as possible. But with a natural gas plant, I can put my foot on the gas pedal, figuratively speaking. It’s fucking terrible for the environment, but that’s the cost of everybody insisting on consuming so much goddamn electricity all the time. If you don’t like it, stop supporting power hogs like data centers by using AI bullshit and cloud storage and web hosting and media streaming.
This is a complicated problem, and complicated problems almost never have simple solutions. I wish we could minimize the problem of what happens when 100M+ EVs get plugged in at 7pm on a Tuesday by already having put together a strong public transportation infrastructure that people feel comfortable and safe using, but the time to start doing that was probably during the gas shortage in the 70s when we saw how overly reliant we were on cars. It’s probably not too late to start, but it’s gonna be a challenging transition now no matter what we do.
Nice! Glad I asked
Perfect application and apropos name for ‘surge’ pricing
That article is light on details. Trying to push 1000kW into an 800V drive train (current state of the art) is going to generate a LOT of heat. Is BYD going to increase the drivetrain voltage in order to bring required amperage down (and heat gen with it)? A lot of car makers haven’t even made it to 800 yet.
My car could charge in well under 15 minutes if any charger in my area could make it to the advertised 350kW. My high water mark so far (after 3 months) is 185kW. Usually its closer to 80.
All EV batteries are already thermally constrained more or less. The only way this really works and scales is if they integrate cooling into the charging standards so that theres like a coolant hookup on the charge cable. Or if they’ve got some secret superconducting tech.
Those batteries are gonna be (sorry) LIT.
Like, on fire. Like, from the massive charging rate.
