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Comment by dkoston | Hacker News Reader

476mi/h of charging isn’t gorundbreaking. Aston Martin, Tesla and Porsche already charge at those speeds or faster.

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1118575_gm-working-on-u...

I believe their “secret sauce” is allowing existing packs which charge slower to get “up to speed”. If so, that’s a pretty limited market as it’s likely that within a few years, all EVs sold will charge faster than the listed speeds. They’ll likely have a maximum tota addressable market of a few hundred thousand cars with only a few thousand real consumers. Most people buying electric cars with slower chargers are doing so because those vehicles fit their lifestyle and wouldn’t have a massive incentive to buy a new charger.

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Hi! I'm one of the founders at GBatteries - I’ve partially answered this in another comment, so will copy paste portions.

We've demonstrated 5 min to 50% charge, 10 min to 100% charge - below is a demo that we’ve done at CES 2019, and that we’re now exhibiting at the Detroit Auto show demonstrating this.

[Video here: https://youtu.be/kSLrqR4TfnU Note: Charging times can vary by ~1 minute here and there, because the algorithm is adaptive and characteristics of batteries change from moment to moment.]

The problem with batteries today is not charging speed; it’s possible to charge any battery quickly, but the faster you charge a battery the faster it will degrade. Our technology is able to decrease the irreversible chemical reactions that happen during charging, so that the same batteries can be charged fast without compromising cycle life.

We’re working on enabling existing packs to charge as fast as possible. We’re not able to fast charge at these levels without approval from the OEM as they have limits built-in. We need to either be integrated inside of the vehicle, or on the charger but have the vehicles "approval" for charging at these higher rates, as at Level 3 and up it's DC to the pack.

Thanks for the added clarity. Being able to charge from below 50% without damaging cycle life is huge. Would be great to see some cycle life charts showing GBatteries vs traditional chargers.

One of the other challenges you may face is the lack of consumer knowledge about how charging affects cycle life. Since consumers tend to charge batteries in ways that dramatically reduce cycles, this is potentially huge.

Figuring out how to create demand from consumers will be very important as OEMs don’t really have any motivation here. Cycle life isn’t published nor really considered by consumers when they buy devices with rechargeable batteries.

Should have a current clamp on the cable to show that you're not cheating when doing the demo.

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