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by ams6110 2666 days ago
> Our breakthrough in manufacturing cost enables battery manufacturers to use the optimal amount, allowing electric cars to safely recharge in 10 minutes or less.

Well that's half the battle. The other half of the problem is delivering that amount of energy in 10 minutes, particularly in areas that are already maxing out their capacity on hot summer days.

2 comments

Agreed. That is definitely a problem that needs some attention. There is a big research effort going on at the Department of Energy "Enabling Extreme Fast Charging" that is providing funding for solutions to fast charging from the battery performance end and from the charging infrastructure ends. Hopefully industry finds some solution sooner rather than later. https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/downloads/enabling-extr...
My math may be a bit off but if you have a 230Ah battery (Telsa Model 3) and you want to charge it in 10 minutes you need something on the order of 1380A charging current even ignoring losses. At 350V, the voltage of the Tesla Model 3 battery pack, this is 483,000 Watts! There are major problems with this type of charging happening at scale at every level of the energy grid.
Most systems like this would be changed to go battery to battery with larger stationary storage on-site being essentially refilled from the net at the average use rate of all cars combined per day. This would delay this problem a little
This is for sure a tough challenge. I think supercharging stations charge at 400V and 250A for the model S. Porsche and others also have 800V chargers coming online.
To be honest I wouldn't mind having just half of that power.

Every quarter I do a 1500km trip, which is split into two legs - the longer being around 1140km.

Assuming I started with enough charge to drive 300km, charging wouldn't affect my time, because I am human and need to go to the bathroom, eat etc.