Wish I could fast forward 50 years and see what the world will look like.
[1] https://eletric-vehicles.com/catl/catl-calls-nio-an-irreplac...
If anything - my opinion at this point is that cars were a mistake in vehicle sizing caused by internal combustion engines.
For the vast, vast majority of ubran transit, something akin to a bike in size seems to make more sense.
We see this already in urban regions in India/Asia where scooters are the predominate transportation method, and I think even traditional scooters are heavy enough to be problematic.
But a class 2 ebike (so throttle with no need to pedal) can weigh as little as 40lbs (20kg), and go 30 miles at 20mph.
It's insane that we're not designing urban transit for bikes at this point. Much better density, much safer, much easier to store and park, much cheaper to operate and license.
Should I adjust the figures for American sizes?
Should I also add that they are engineered to travel at speeds over 120 mph and usually ply the trade environments where 30 mph is a dangerous speed?
But over time, you'd get upgraded on average without having to pay for a new battery, as long as Nio kept updating to keep its batteries competitive.
It only works in a leasing scenario, and everyone hates those.
Then have you pay something per month for having a battery (maybe depends on the specific battery installed), something per kWh for charge used, plus a rebate per kWh for charge added. Or roll it into usage tiers, whatever.
There's lots of people that love leasing cars. I don't understand it, but it makes a lot of people happy?
The main value in these technologies is to shut up the "But sometimes I want to drive for 20 hours without being forced to take even a single 30-minute break!" pseudo-argument as to why an EV is "impossible" for their lifestyle. Same with the Lucid Air and its 1000km range: basically zero people truly need it, but it needs to exists in order to drag the last few holdouts into the future.
That sounds like a phone battery, not an EV battery. Modern EVs should last 15-20 years before seeing significant degredation.
eh? are you saying that something that is done once every 5 years has to be done inside 5 minutes? I strongly disagree.
> charging once every three to five years or so
Um, that's not how charging works at all.
There isn't. Buses aren't really size- or weight-constricted and don't drive at highway speeds, so building one with enough battery capacity to last most of the day isn't a big deal. Plenty of cities have already transitioned to a 100% electric bus fleet, after all.
A big thing to remember is that people don't travel at the same volume at every moment of the day, so you don't need to run buses at the same frequency the entire day either. You can run buses at 10-minute intervals during commute hours, 15-minute intervals in the middle of the day, and 30-minute intervals in the early mornings and late evenings. This means that there is plenty of time between the morning rush and the evening rush for some buses to go off-duty and charge for a few hour. They are going to sit idle anyways, so why not make use of it?
There is another thing cities should consider in all this: EV busses are totally unsuitable in emergencies. They cannot be charged fast enough, especially in extreme weather. You should consider this before buying an EV as well. At least, have a plan to arrange alternate transport with a reliable petrol vehicle.
When it comes to as-fast-as-possible charging, I think you can divide that number by at least 10. Slow charging while parked overnight or during the day should still be the most common case by far for most users. Very fast charging is important for road trips, but it is not the usual case.
Second, average age of car on the road is above 10 years in most countries; and those that drive old cars definitely do not have €26,500* spare to swap their EV's battery for a new one.
*That's what Audi charges here for e-tron 50 battery replacement, which are already starting to fail for many owners
By 10% over 10 years, assuming the worst case of nothing but ultra-fast charging. This seems minor.
Old cheaper cars could be 10% less convenient to use for very long trips. This should not shock anyone.
Rather than an expensive battery swap, sell it on at a lower price to someone who doesn't need 100% range.
From my personal family anecdotes: my mothers' 4 year old Hyundai Ioniq 5 had complete battery failure. Thankfully under warranty. And my fathers' 5 year old Audi e-tron 50 already has <80% range remaining, with very rare fast charging.
This kind of fast-as-possible charging rather than overnight or "while parked at the mall for hours" slow charging should be the exception rather than the rule, i.e. it is useful when road-tripping long-distance, but is not not the daily case. Battery lifespan should not be based on assuming that it's the only thing that you ever do.
Having station-based storage also allows the station to participate on the energy market and purchase only when electricity is cheap. It could even do double duty by selling back electricity from storage during periods of high grid demand! Heck, pair it with a local grid storage battery which is going to be built anyways and you basically get it for free.
Even the gravimetric density is fairly close, CATL's claim is 350 Wh/kg, compared to Donut's 400 Wh/kg.
The safety and durability (plus no lithium) prospects of Donut's V1 battery are still big though (if the thing is actually real).
I haven't really followed that closely myself, but I've noticed the people who I saw defending Donut before have gone really quiet about it lately.
It’s clear they have something very interesting.
We’re mainly missing low temp and energy density test. If they have something real, obviously they’re saving density for last (near the time real customers get their hand on the bike), since it will give them huge amount of attention. Can’t fault them for milking what they’ve got (if they got it) for all the marketing hype it’s worth.
We’re also missing cycle life test but the claims can’t really be fully tested in a reasonable time. So even if their tests show projections that indicate high cycle life, people will doubt it, or shift the focus to ageing effects. So personally I don’t care much, we just have to see how it works out in real life.
The lawsuit incidentally reveal their connection to partners which does reveal that there’s something real there. Another criticism was that the couldn’t have developed all the tech from scratch themselves in such a short time, and now it’s clear they didn’t, they’re using tech licensed by other companies with real competence in the field.
If it’s as good as they say with zero caveats and can be manufactured at scale is another matter
Do they have something interesting? Maybe! But it could also be yet another Theranos. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and they haven't exactly been forthcoming with it.
See, I can do this too. All it takes is a modicum amount of conspiratorial thinking and some willingness to engage in ill faith, with a dash of flair for the dramatic. For normal people, it was instead just "oh yeah, news cycle thing one vs news cycle thing two".
I can't really judge whether 1000 charges is a reasonable target for a car, though i think that 1000 fast charges is reasonable. It should probably be able to push to 5000 slow charges and 500 fast charges, which should fit a lot of use-cases.
Admitting that I have the luxury of an urban, low-driving lifestyle: I'm 50. That battery would literally last the rest of my driving life and have room to spare.
But the battery also degrades over time, the hotter it is the more, the higher the SOC the more. So you have to add on that calendar degradation, to that 10% loss from just charging.
Total degradation in practice will vary a lot, based on users charging and storage practices. Most of the time in practice it seems some fault will brick a battery before it degrades too much in total capacity.
I mean, if "charges" is "full charge" and the battery pack does even 200 miles of range then that'd be 200,000 miles right? And more like 250-300+ miles seems like a spreading target as energy density ticks upwards.
Honestly that's more than I've ever put on any single individual car or truck I've owned, and well into the point where I'd be expecting to put real money into engine and other work for an ICE. Sure more is better but if a battery pack can go 200k-300k miles keeping 90% range that doesn't feel unreasonable at all for non-commercial usage. Taxis and so on with much higher utilization may find value in alternative options of course.
You have to change the mentality of "I only get gas when I travel out of my way to the gas station, so the gas refill has to be fast". EVs just do not work like that, and overnight charging is far more convenient that having to go get gas.
Scaling that to something the size of an EV pack will require one massive cable/connector. Call it 5kw/h in 1/60 hours, thats 3000kw, at 700v thats still roughly 4000 amps. (Please correct my head math.) Charging one car could suck up more power than an entire neighbourhood. Say four or five chargers operating at once ... every roadside charging station will need its own electrical substation.
() - Assuming you provision for the highest-traffic-volume day. Ignoring potential induced demand of making it a little easier to drive, which I suspect is pretty bounded - people need pee and stretch breaks anyway.
But I think you raise a good model for long-haul. I think of the pennsylvania turnpike gas stations as a worst-case situation: They serve a somewhat captive audience, many of whom are traveling so far they need a mid-trip fillup. So something like 80kWh/minute _does_ seem like what you'd have to do for those specific stations, and that's an average rate of 4.8MW, at least during prime time.
You can probably get away with half of that if you use local storage as use is much lower at night. But let's not - let's see what it takes to do 4.8MW.
The answer is: You don't need a substation. You DO need on-site transformers and switchgear from 12kV primary service. But to put it in perspective, 4MW is like a tiny datacenter or really big (new york size) office building. So it's not really too crazy to think about an EV per minute going from 0-80kWh in a dedicated area. Compared to huge underground gas tanks, I think the infrastructure part of it is pretty ok.
I see figures given that around 80% of EV charging is done at home (1). That doesn't mean that the other 20% has to be super-fast though, it will be less than that.
2) Are you claiming that all "not at home" commercial charging is "busy gas station" style fast charging while waiting, and if so, on what basis?
Applying gas station capacity math to EVS as if they are like for like will give wrong answers. Your point about access to charge at home is valid but unrelated to that.
5 kWh * 60 = 300 kW
at 800V (typical charging voltage) that is 375A
(still huge, but an order of magnitude less)
Also like others have said, it does not matter how fast you charge a car, the total energy consumption is the same, so fast chargers do not require changes in the power supply of a charging station.
The fast chargers that enable this full charging in a few minutes have their own internal batteries, to enable them to pull only the average power from the electrical grid, not the peak power.
The new fast chargers that can achieve the times reported in TFA use a somewhat higher voltage than the older chargers, of 1000 V, to reduce the current.
A buffer battery may have a place for a home charger, but a constant-use commerical charger is a very different thing. Or think of a rental car stand at an airport, or a truck/buss depot. They will have a vehicle arriving every minute and every hour wasted charging is an hour less rental time.
It does not matter if it charges 30 cars per hour by having 3 chargers that charge in 6 minutes (including connection/disconnection times) or by having 15 chargers that charge in 30 minutes.
So it is not the charging speed that matters, but the amount of electric vehicles that want to use a charging station.
The charging speed matters only for the car owners, as it determines the time they must spend at the charging station.
Normally, a charger that is 10 times faster is not 10 times more expensive, so faster chargers should also benefit the charging station owners, because they would need to invest less for servicing a given amount of traffic, by buying less chargers.
Does anyone know? Assuming it's not just the current high-end spec of 800v? It matters because higher current requires heavier equipment to generate it and heavier cables too.
Which is very much in contrast with this article not mentioning these numbers at all. It's odd.
Are you saying that you know that this CATL charger has the same specs despite this? That was my question, really.
1) "BYD Unveils ... Megawatt Flash Charging " https://www.byd.com/en/news-list/BYD-Unveils-Super-e-Platfor...
"BYD's 1st 1,000-kW ultrafast" https://cnevpost.com/2025/03/26/byd-1st-1000-kw-charging-sta...
2) Subhead: "BYD unveils platform with charging power of 1,000 kW" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/18/byd-ev-fa...
I assume that the chargers are more or less compatible with the older chargers, but they must be able to negotiate a higher charging voltage and higher maximum charging currents.
When either the vehicle or the charger does not support the higher voltages and currents, they should fall back to an older and slower charging mode.
ok, thank you for your time.
The US added basically 0% extra transmission capacity last year.
... Now your local charging station will require a nuclear plant to keep up with ~1MW per car.
The fast chargers that achieve charging in a few minutes, and which are indeed able to provide up to 1 MW of charging power, have their own internal batteries, so they take from the electrical grid a power averaged over a long time, not the peak power that they provide to the charged vehicle.
Why? Where do those extra cars come from? In reality the change you're going to see is from spending 30 minutes to charge 1 car followed by 30 minutes of sitting idle to spending 5 minutes to charge 1 car followed by 55 minutes of sitting idle.
Or, alternatively, go from 6 stations each spending 30 minutes / car to charge 12 cars per hour to 1 station spending 5 minutes / car to charge 12 cars per hour.
The electricity demand only depends on the number of miles driven. Same with ICE cars: the speed through which fuel comes out of the gas station's nozzle doesn't impact how much fuel you consume during your commute, or how often the gas station needs to be resupplied.
The reality of the situation is that most people who buy an EV will use fast charging only a few times a year. The majority will be charging overnight to recuperate their daily use, which amounts to drawing <1% of a MW. The grid, in it's current form, is totally capable of this.
What would be a strain though is large ultra fast charging stations along major travel corridors. But I'd still wager that those will be overkill for most.
Charging was what stopped me from getting an EV when I was a renter. In a world where I can recharge in 7 to 10 minutes, it becomes a lot more feasible for a renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities. A renter can just pull up to a recharging station. Wait 7 to 10 minutes or (maybe 5 if they don't mind a half charge) and be off.
Assuming that your car is parked for 18 hours of the day or more (and if it is not, you're a courier, taxi driver or similar) the question is not "do I own or rent the place where I live?" it is "How do I get electricity to where the car is normally parked?"
If you solve that with a L2 charger - at night or during the day, you're good. Then recharge time becomes irrelevant as you don't stand there waiting for it, and it happens as part of daily routine. You don't have to regularly pay attention to "When do I have to go get fuel?", it's just done daily.
Electricity is found nearly everywhere, you do not have to treat it as something found only at a special fuelling station. EVS are unlike gas cars in that respect.
Which sucks, but the majority of people (2/3) don't rent.
I think this is unavoidable for any sort of decent charging station from now on, anyway but does require significant investment in infrastructure.
BYD was the first company demonstrating such batteries and chargers, but CATL followed after a short time. While the times reported by CATL are slightly longer than for BYD at room temperature, these CATL batteries have faster charging at low temperatures.
It is nice to see healthy competition between the major Chinese battery producers. Unfortunately, there is much less competition for them from other countries.
The electrical grid infrastructure that is needed does not depend on the charging speed, but it is determined by the number of cars that are charged per day at a given location (and their average battery capacity).