According to some estimates, Chinese manufacturers are ten years ahead of Western competitors in the development of more advanced traction batteries and their high-speed charging technologies. In the coming years, they will be able to offer electric vehicles with a charge replenishment function in five minutes, and not only in the upper price ranges.
Image source: Nyobolt
For many potential buyers of electric vehicles, this will mean that their serious operational drawback has been eliminated – they will not need to spend several tens of minutes or even hours at the charging station, depending on the situation. In August of this year, the Chinese brand Zeekr offered an electric sedan 007, which can increase the charge of its traction battery from 10 to 80% in just over ten minutes. In April, the Chinese company CATL introduced traction batteries of the Shenxing Plus family, which in ten minutes of charging can accumulate energy sufficient to cover 600 km.
Not only the materials from which traction batteries are made are being improved, but also the control software. Faster charging will not necessarily mean that the traction batteries will wear out much faster. For example, in the middle of the past year, the British startup Nyobolt presented a prototype of an electric vehicle with a traction battery capable of restoring up to 80% of its nominal capacity (35 kWh) in less than five minutes, while after 4000 fast charging cycles the remaining battery capacity remains at 80 % of the initial one. In fact, this should be enough for a million kilometers, so there is no need to worry about accelerated wear of the cells in this case.
However, in the case of the Nyobolt prototype, two facts are upsetting. Firstly, a full charge of the car’s battery only lasts for 248 km in the conventional WLTP cycle. Secondly, charging a car with a more capacious battery will require proportionally more time. In any case, progress towards reducing the charging time of electric vehicles is difficult to deny.
The lack of an acceptable charging infrastructure can be a serious problem. Typically, to recharge the traction battery in ten minutes, a connection to a DC charging station with a power of 350 kW or more is required. Not many of these have been built yet. Even in the relatively prosperous United States, there are now no more than 30,000 charging stations of this power. To keep up with the growth in demand for electric vehicles with fast charging, the number of charging stations in this class will need to be increased to 182,000 by 2030. In China, the infrastructure of charging stations is also developing rapidly, but they are usually concentrated in certain areas, and some areas cannot boast of a high density of charging stations.