Tesla rival BYD launches five-minute battery in $30k model
the-independent.com
the-independent.com
This is very Apple at its peak’esque.
Too many companies, especially in the EV space (Tesla is awful at this) will announce tech years in advance and often not even deliver.
When we first heard about this 5 min charger a few months ago I fully expected it to be available in a car at least years from now if ever.
Isnt it deliberate to generate Osbourne effect? For example Toyota with its "solid state really coming in soon" while company has no EV plans whatsoever.
It's also true that Toyota lags others on it's line-up of EVs, especially considering their early leadership on hybrids such as the Prius. Some would even say that Toyota don't want to push EVs too hard, lest they eat into their business with hybrids.
It's also also true that press releases saying "solid state really coming in soon" are a thing that Toyota does a lot. Actual shipping products with those solid state batteries, not so much. The bZ4X does not have a solid state battery.
Current electric cars work well because you can fill them at home, reserving the need to fast charge to 100% for special occasions. If you have a home charger there's no need to stick to the same refueling regime as a petrol car, so there's limited advantage in being able to "treat the car like a petrol car".
5 minute charging is good, but put it in context until we have "perfect" batteries that have no significant limitations.
1) Concerns about EV Battery durability are overblown. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-life
2) "very fast charging" should not be the default, it should be rare. It's there to answer the other concern: "But what if I want to road trip?".
As you say, the default is overnight at home or during the day at office or a mall, with the software giving you that "topped up as specified, every morning", that's better than what an a ICE vehicle can provide.
You can decide for yourself how valid these concerns really are, and to what extent EV critics like to inflate them beyond what's real. But nevertheless, they are being addressed.
Without long term data or some technological explanation I feel that's marketing gimmick by BYD.
"It’s long been possible to charge so quickly once, twice or perhaps even a handful of times over the 1,000-cycle lifetime of a typical EV battery with the 300-mile driving range most motorists demand, they said. But such a battery would burn up, and possibly catch fire, if subjected to consecutive five-minute charges for many hundreds of cycles, industry hands said."
and then,
"Batteries are all about trade-offs between range, weight and charging time. Building a battery that can handle a huge jolt of electricity at once would limit the EV’s range to 100 or 150 miles. The reason is the balance between the electrodes. To enable lithium ions to move that fast into the negative electrode—the anode—it must be made ultrathin. But if you make the anode thinner, you have to make the positive electrode—the cathode—thinner, too, which reduces its capacity to hold energy. That decreases the driving range.
In addition, producing that huge jolt would require costly upgrades to charging stations and the power grid, which at the moment can’t meet such a demand. The cost to build a small four-charger station would be well over $1 million, according to Quincy Lee, CEO of Electric Era, a charging station company. Part of that cost is the large batteries the stations would require to buttress grid power."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/electric-battery-han...
Battery tech is improving so some of the "catch fire, if subjected to consecutive five-minute charges" is probably fixed.
https://apnews.com/article/biden-china-tariffs-electric-vehi...
BYD and CATL aim to launch new EV batteries with 6C charge rate (38 points, 10 months ago, 46 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40706337
We just rented one with an ICE, because they only have mild-hybrids.
We need a 15-20min rest after every ~2h (~120miles) anyway.
I cannot refuel unattended, thus the 500+ miles of range are nice, but I would be more than happy to reload a BEV at every stop. 120miles of extra range should be doable, even in just 15min. Considering we could start with at least 80% battery charge, we wouldn't need the full 120miles extra at every stop.
I don't see the problem even with small batteries (58kW netto) and the charging rate (e.g. ID3 above 100kWh @ 10-80%). It's only a problem if chargers aren't well maintained, or stupid ICE drivers block a station out of malice (and yes: mainly the same sickheads that are responsible for the current economic debacle).
Never mind "target" shopping, for 2 people to each stetch legs and use the restroom in turn, is already 10 minutes.
Get another bottle of water at the attached convenience store, and you're close to the 20 minute mark.
And if small children were also involved, then well...
If you stop every 2 hours, you don't need the full 20 minutes to fully charge anyway.
20 mins is about where you equal the other, human time constraints. i.e. no longer the bottleneck.
Of course. That's where my other comment is relevant: " "very fast charging" should not be the default, it should be rare. ... the default is overnight at home or during the day at office or a mall, with the software giving you that "topped up as specified, every morning, that's better than what an a ICE vehicle can provide"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43671612
i.e. with an EV and commute, you can slow charge and also never "stop for gas", ever. The vehicle is just ready, every day.
If you "don't live in a place where you can have a car charger" at home or at work, then IMHO an EV is not ideal for you, yet. The infrastructure isn't ready for you, work on that first.
That's very different from needing to charge in 10 minutes on a road trip. For most people even a garage with access to a 110v wall socket is sufficient to cover daily commute driving. If you don't have that or a place to charge at work, yeah going electric is a chore.
I haven't had to visit a gas station since I got it so that's about 10 minutes a week this year saved. So I'm up almost 2 and a half hours so far this year.
Gas stations are ubiquitous simply because they are 100 years worth of infrastructure roll out.
If you're saying that EV infrastructure isn't there yet, then you're stating the obvious.
But, and hear me out :
a) Will it stay that way? If 50% of vehicles are EV's then 50% of gas stations could be out of business, and that's a re-enforcing spiral of inconvenience. My view is that there some cases where a fossil fuel vehicle is the best choice. But when they're under 10% of all cases, will the infrastructure agree, or nix it by being 10% as common as it is now? Past a certain point the whole distribution system is unprofitable and just folds up. Then gasoline engines go the way of the horse: A few people still ride them, but it's mostly an impractical, expensive hobby with known issues with the smelly stuff that comes of of the back of them.
b) Gas stations of any kind, even bad ones, are rare at a home. Electrical plugs - wall sockets - are EV chargers usable for some purposes, and almost all homes have them. That level of emergency infrastructure is hard to beat.
I didn't say that it was "20 minutes every 2 hours" - in fact the sentence "If you stop every 2 hours, you don't need the full 20 minutes " says that it's less than that.
Your specific case described "10 mins stop every 6-7 hours" is extreme and of questionable safety. How much fluid did you consume during that time?
I'm not going to say "don't do it", but lets not pretend that it's the average use, or even your average use. So you should not optimise for that at the expense of making other cases worse.
You're also saying that the comparable charging time, even for extreme cases like this, is not all that far off.
That was in a 2002. What huge quality of life improvements we’ve made…
It is sad but we may the loss some German / Japanese brands. Just like a lot UK car brand disappeared in the 70 to 90s.
battery packs are often structural components, this idea would make that impossible, reducing durability and safety.
not all batteries are identical. there are many different capacities and wear levels. imagine bringing in your new car for electricity and getting an old battery back. the battery is a huge portion of the cost of the car- now you have an old one!
The rest of your points are things that battery swapping needs to address. But yet here we are - a Chinese EV company has 3000 battery swap stations in operation: https://cnevpost.com/2024/12/31/nio-adds-record-high-swap-st...
This is not true. A battery can be structural and swap-able. The structure is determined by what it has to survive in a crash. While standing still in a battery swap station, your car does not need to clear those requirements.
So as long as it crash safe once the new battery is put into place, your are completely fine.
the batteries could be replaced at the station, or whoever uses your battery, that individual pays you for using it... and the station only gets a cut.
everything is solvable.
And what evidence is there that it is heavily subsidized? This is a company that started really small and has been growing for a while.
Its not any more subsidized then any other Chinese EV company, and less so then many others.
>And what evidence is there that it is heavily subsidized?
40% https://cnevpost.com/2025/03/10/shanghai-to-subsidize-swap-s...
https://cnevpost.com/2025/03/06/hefei-subsidies-battery-swap...
2024 https://www.jato.com/resources/news-and-insights/how-china-i...
from horses mouth 2020 https://www.nio.com/blog/past-present-chinas-ev-subsidies " Electric vehicles that utilize battery-swapping technologies are not limited to the 300,000 yuan price limit and will still qualify for the subsidies."
Just linking a few articles about limited subsidizes doesn't mean the company wouldn't exists or would be bankrupt if not for subsidizes. And some of the articles don't even specifically mention a lot of money.
First article, 40% subsidize on some stations in a single city. The build most of those stations before this new subsidy. So at best this articles shows that they might get some subsidy in the future.
Second articles, a few cities give out subsidizes for cars with battery swapping. Literally a pilot project that has only recently started. Third article just mentions the same pilot program.
Forth article, small change in regulation to existing subsidizes making it slightly more attractive to have a battery swappable car. Since 2020 regulations about what gets how much subsidy have changed many times over in China. And have been in general reduced by a whole lot as China wanted to get its industry of subsidies.
We are talking about a market of millions vehicles with billions of money put into intensives and infrastructure. With government putting in billions as well. Such as the US with the 7500$ tax credit.
To call them specifically 'heavenly' subsidized is just plane inaccurate, they got some subsidy, like every other EV maker. Swapping has got some funding once in a while, but its far from the primary thing that gets subsidies. The company didn't do swapping because it received the most subsidizes.
That's the same wrong argument people made about Tesla for years. Link to any article about the word 'subsidy' and then claim that the whole business only exists because of that.
Its not at all like hydrogen in California. NIO alone makes more cars then global hydrogen sales.
And just to be clear, I don't even like swapping or think that its a good idea but that it has bankrupt every company that tried it or its only viable because of some massive subsidy (that you fail to prove exists) is completely false. Nio has existed since 2014. Unless you can actually point to a subsidy program, specifically for swapping, that funneled multiple billions of $ into Nio pockets, I'm gone call bullshit.
There are significant logistics here. How many batteries should be stocked in any one place.
Batteries are large. So you’re also talking about a lot of space.
At the same time you still need to build out the electric capacity to charge those batteries.
The number of batteries you would need would need to be some multiple of the actual number of cars sold. So if there are 300 cars sold, you probably need something like 1200-1500 batteries in the same city just so a car doesn’t have to travel unreasonable distances to do a swap.
The multiple is probably higher and it gets much worse spread out over the entire country/world. Thats burdening each car sale with multiples costs of the most expensive component in the car.
It’s mechanical, so there are likely to be more breakdowns and other issues.
Battery replacement requires changing the car design and leads to a design that’s almost certainly much less protected from the elements or requires the addition of expensive protection, both in terms of the cost of the additional protection and the weight of the protection.
People tend to treat replaceable batteries poorly.
Battery replacement is just not a good choice relative to the much simpler ability to pump in electricity.
Modern apps could show the current stock of stations.
Batteries could be modularized. So X car might need 4 pieces. Y car needs only 3 etc.
Bring in standards about car battery spacing etc.
If the station runs out of batteries, just use the backup option, meaning, charge the battery in the car.
Anything else needs addressing? :D