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Power Transportation China

BYD Unveils New Super-Charging EV Tech With Peak Speeds of 1,000 kW (yahoo.com) 42

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Reuters: BYD on Monday unveiled a new platform for electric vehicles (EVs) that it said could charge EVs as quickly as it takes to pump gas and announced for the first time that it would build a charging network across China. The so-called "super e-platform" will be capable of peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW), enabling cars that use it to travel 400 km (249 miles) on a 5-minute charge, founder Wang Chuanfu said at an event livestreamed from the company's Shenzhen headquarters.

Charging speeds of 1,000 kW would be twice as fast as Tesla's superchargers whose latest version offers up to 500 kw charging speeds. The new charging architecture will be initially available in two new EVs -- Han L sedan and Tang L SUV priced from 270,000 yuan ($37,328.91) and BYD said it would build over 4,000 ultra-fast charging piles, or units, across China to match the new platform.
"In order to completely solve our user's charging anxiety, we have been pursuing a goal to make the charging time of electric vehicles as short as the refuelling time of petrol vehicles," Wang said.

"This is the first time in the industry that the unit of megawatt (charge) has been achieved on charging power," he said.

BYD Unveils New Super-Charging EV Tech With Peak Speeds of 1,000 kW

Comments Filter:
  • 1,000 kW? That's a megawatt. Use the word.
    (that is rather impressive, actually)
    • Zero-point-zero-zero-one jiggawatts!

    • 1,000 kW? That's a megawatt. Use the word. (that is rather impressive, actually)

      It is, but you won't just be plunking those down without the participation of your local electric utility.

    • A thousand amps at a thousand volts? That's a serious conductor. Are they using solid bus bars instead of cables?

      • by short ( 66530 )
        Another opion is there are big heat losses and they just manage to cool the cables down - like the liquid cooling of Tesla Supercharge cables.
      • by tragedy ( 27079 )

        I would not expect so. For high voltage most of the current will move along the skin of your conductor, so you are much better off increasing the total surface area of the skin by using multiple bundled conductors. You might need to liquid cool the cables to keep them at a manageable temperature. Also, the lithium battery pack will charge with something around 95% efficiency. That other 5% will become heat. Some in the cable, but probably a lot in the battery pack. So that's 50 KW of heat or around 170,000

        • by heypete ( 60671 )

          For high voltage most of the current will move along the skin of your conductor, so you are much better off increasing the total surface area of the skin by using multiple bundled conductors

          You're thinking of the skin effect [wikipedia.org] applies to conductors carrying high-frequency (not high-voltage) electricity.

          DC circuits of whatever voltage are unaffected by the skin effect, and EV fast charging is essentially exclusively DC.

        • Wrong.

          For AC, current tends to move along the outside of the conductor. Skin effect is an AC thing, and skin depth is a function of frequency. It doesn't really effect DC.

          Multiple bundles conductors only help with skin effect if they're arranged the right way. The effect is caused by the changing magnetic field generated the changing current flowing in wire. so spreads across adjacent conductors. See Litz wire.

          All of this information is on wikipedia.

      • Let's talk about safety. Some forgotten piece of science fiction described a being falling into futuristic power machinery: "The meter thick bus bars cleared their grisly short."
    • by tragedy ( 27079 )

      It may be impressive, but I thought Kempower already had MegaWatt range vehicle chargers.

  • They make great cars too bad we'll never see them here. Not as long as the world is tribalist.

  • My car is rates to 250kw of charging, but it quickly drops off as the batteries heat. I suppose they could put a lot more effort into heating the batteries before arriving at a charger and then a lot more effort into cooling the batteries while charging. That means extra cost, complication, and weight, lowering efficiency. Or they could just kill battery longevity. Or they could just be making ultra fast chargers that will be underutilized while waiting for battery tech to catch up.

    • by tragedy ( 27079 )

      To me it seems most logical to put the cooling functions into the stationary charging station itself rather than into the car. It makes sense if it is only for the purpose of handling battery heating during charging. This could be from a cooling unit that cools from under the car, or potentially by hooking a coolant cable loop from the charger to the car.

  • Would this needs lots of energy storage connected to the grid?

  • Give me a few minutes.
    I have to redesign my solar installation.

    Hm, gosh, on the first glance it seems I need a bigger house, with a bigger roof, too!

  • Battery lifespan (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sirket ( 60694 ) on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @12:29AM (#65241451)

    You can only push so much current into a battery without destroying it and the higher the current, the faster they degrade.

    Not to mention modern fast chargers are 1000v and at the limit of how much current you can push through their wires and connectors. To hit 1 megawatt you either need even higher voltages, or higher current- both of which require stouter cables and connectors. Not to mention the added safety risks that come with such systems.

    Is it doable? Sure. Do I think current battery designs can handle those rates without rapid degradation? No.

  • The USB Implementer's Forum has announced the ratification of USB-PD 4.0, delivering unprecedented power and rapid charging capability to consumer devices. While remaining backward-compatible with existing USB-C connectors, USB-PD 4.0 will also support SAE-J1772, CCS, and NACS connectors. Said Feldman Mertikopf during the announcement, "We see no reason why people shouldn't be able to charge both their car and their phone using the same foundational infrastructure."
  • If it is a speed, shouldn't there be some unit of time involved?
    • There is. A Watt is 1 Joule per second. Or if you take it all the way to base units, one kilogram-square-metre per second per second per second. That enough time units for you?

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