Countdown until Trump stupidly bans it as it “harms” President Musk.
how fast would it cause the battery to degrade, though?
That’s the beauty of it. Just get a new one every two years like every other electronic device and you won’t need to worry about that. Subscription plans will be available.
I wish the batteries were modular/interchangeable. You could just pull into a station, remove the spent battery and replace it with a full one, the spent one can then just get recharged and stored at the station for the next user to change out. You could even bring some extra ones in the trunk for a long trip!
The problem is the form factor. They’re broad, flat batteries under the floor of the car, because that’s the most available space when you take out the drivetrain. If you wanted to make them swappable, you’d have to sacrifice the space under the hood or the trunk. Or the passenger space. And all that comes with their own safety concerns.
They can drop the battery out from underneath…. You’re not seriously suggesting that this would be done by users and not automatically? The easiest place for this would be exactly where it is now, underneath EVERYTHING.
It’s not like you are gonna man handle the battery yourself in and out of these dude.
The precedence is there, there’s scooters that already utilize this exact exchanging. Hell forklifts figured this out decades ago… and you want to make it sound like it would be an issue in todays age? Semis have used it for years too, why do you think they would go back to manually doing it? Even if the batteries were light enough to move by hand, you would spend more time unplugging and plugging them back in than it would be to charge them….
That’s been suggested, the problem is that that requires additional infrastructure, either digging a pit for the battery to be lowered into via elevator, or raising the car in such a way they still have access to the pack.
Former is more likely but digging pits like at oil changes is not cheap either.
Mostly it’s a chicken-egg scenario: nobody will make the facilities until there are cars to use it… And the other way.
… where do you think the battery’s would be stored and charged…? Either on a structure above ground, so drive up on it, or underground and it would already be excavated…
The extra infrastructure would be there for the changing and charging already, adding the lift or hole is moot and a fraction additional cost.
And forklifts figured this out well over 5 decades ago this isn’t some engineering unicorn that they need to figure out from the ground up. The techs all over the place already.
There is a company that does this in China. You lease the battery, and pay roughly the same amount as a tank of fuel to swap it, so not a cheap process, and it only works on a small number of vehicles. They’re also losing money hand over fist, and aren’t likely to last very long.
Also, a long trip is precisely when I need all my trunk space.
Yeah, I’ve thought about this too, but real use cases would be rare and maybe somewhere along highways for long trips, but you’d need a lot of stations in hard to predict locations to make it something people could use. Most of the time a simple recharge at night at the domicile would suffice. Add trying to get battery form factors standardized when companies can’t even agree on a universal charger and challenges to upgrading vehicle frames and design if such a standard was ever adopted and it just seems unsustainable.
Ya Engineering really is 't my thing but it seams like such a logical way to do things. This would even be great with phones if you could just swap out the battery you’re not currently using.
some of them are if you are willing to take it apart and replace the individual cells.
ugh, i fear cars will turn into smartphones. its gonna suuuuuuuuuuuuuck
I have a Chinese flashlight and the battery trademark is so unfortunate (soonfire) like WTF. Lol.
That dying batteries last goal is to provide you with light. How inspiring.
And heat and depression treatment! (Lithium)
Not necessarily as they are using LFP chemistry which has much more cycles than the standard one.
Stuff I’ve heard on naysays:
“The battery will blow up!!!”
No, it won’t if it’s a solid state battery - solid state batteries barely even notice such a charging rate, their temperature might change by half a degree from this monster charging rate.
“You can’t supply the power because lines”
Modern large commercial buildings already suck down this amount and more.
“The grid overall can’t take 1MW”
So, the 1,000 MW nuclear reactor can’t provide 1MW? How about a reactor station with 4 units cranking 4000 MW? How about we add another 1000 in renewables? How about another 800MW with a single gas turbine? How about adding roof solar and a battery bank below ground for the charging station to supplement the power? We haven’t even touched hydro or geo yet. Making power is not a problem, and we’ll build out the power as we need it.
So, the 1,000 MW nuclear reactor can’t provide 1MW?
There’s some parts inbetween. You would need an extra line just for the charging stations.
Though, a capacitor bank (maybe where the fuel tank was) would be viable.
Modern large commercial buildings already suck down this amount and more.
And how mamy cars in said building? How many will be allowed to charge at the same time? Should we expect same grid for large commercial buildings and rural charging stations?
If there’s literally one place in America we need to throw money at, it’s the electrical grid.
We have a decades out of date power infrastructure, Europe especially has us beat.
Just like electrification originally, and later the internet, increasing power delivery will have benefits for everyone that pay off for centuries .
Mostly we need to make the grid far smarter.
Evs should be allowed to load coordinate with the grid, so they switch on at the optimum times for grid stability in exchange for major discounts on power.
A superload like this one should have to request clearance, then the grid compensates by reducing ‘cheap ev power’ in the area, while also requesting evs configured for v2g to be ready to possibly supply.
The supercharger has a slightly higher cost per kwh to make up for this, but that is the cost of convenience.
What about defects in the machine or car? Could that lead to people being struck by lightning coming from the box next to their automobil?
Gas powered cars catch fire all the time
Fairly unlikely, we engineer things to fail safe.
Even if so we have ways to calculate the power going in and coming out, and if there’s an imbalance kill everything, that’s how gfci and arc fault breakers work.
If the insulation doesn’t insulate, that is a risk indeed. There would probably have to be some detection mechanism for damaged insulation on top of regular maintenance checks. I don’t know if some wiring in the insulation could measure the integrity. Maybe if the voltage would oscillate regularly, picking up on the induction of those changes might allow detecting if the shielding is inconsistent before it actually becomes threat? I only have half-remembered bits of an intro course on electrical engineering years ago, so maybe I’m way off.
this would be a massive leap for EVs
I’m sure it’s similar to how they trained DeepSeek for $5M when it was really over a $1B…
They make all kinds of false claims.
I wasn’t aware! Thanks for sharing. Here goes my dream of bootstrapping an LLM model in my parents’ garage.
one quick charge for a car, one giant leap for ev king
But will it smell as good as filling up a tank of gas?
It dispenses a small cup of gasoline to sniff while it charges
most BYD cars have a gas generator that can power its electric motor. you can still fill a tank and you can still huff gas.
Maybe with a supercapacitor in the station and a chrging cable with the diameter of a fuel hose.
Not really, just make the vehicle 800v and then use the same Amp limits. That’s where everyone is out pacing tesla now. Tesla went for amps, the others went for volts
Energy is amp x volt. Same energy faster is more energy in same time, be it amps or volt. Dunno if your grid can bear it multiple times in each city but still better buffer it. And more volts needs more gum or you get the volts.
P=i x v
But also
P=i^2 x r
Power goes up with linearly with voltage but to thw square or I.
That second formula is for how much power gets dissipated in a resistance (hence the R in it) , not how much power travels through a line.
That said the previous poster was indeed incorrect - the required thickness of a cable through which a certain amount of power passes depends only on current, not voltage: make it too thin and it can literally melt with a high enough current and the formula of the power it is dissipating as heat that can cause it to melt is that second formula of yours and the R in that formula is inverselly proportional to the cross-cut area of the cable, which for a round cable is the good old area of a circle formula which depends on the square of the radius - in other words the thicker the cable the less current it can take without heating up too much or, putting it the other way around, the more current you want to safely pass through a cable the thicker it needs to be.
In summary, thinner cables heat up more with higher currents (and if they heat up enough they melt) because even pure copper has some resistance and the thinner the cable the higher the resistance. If you need to move Power, not current specifically (such as to charge something), you can chose more current or to have a higher voltage (because P = V x I), and chosing a higher current means you need thicker cables (because as explained above the cables would overheat and even melt otherwise) but a higher voltage doesn’t require a thicker cable.
The point was that increasing voltage allows more carrying capacity with a square root of the increase in dissipation as increasing current directly.
Assuming this is about the same thing as the other BYD charging article I saw a couple days ago, they’re using a higher voltage, which would let them charge faster without needing a thicker* cable.
(* The copper need not be thicker, but the insulation might need to be)
The copper need not be thicker, but the insulation might need to be
Exactly. More energy means either more copper or more rubber in the cable.
Rubber is cheap though, and flexible. If it’s the size of a gas pump hose, oh well; gas pump hoses are also rubber. As long as they don’t have to make the copper ridiculously thick, it shouldn’t matter how thick the cable overall is
I always imagined that portable future wizard (??nuclear??) power would be as simple as unscrewing a 5 gallon cannister from the back of a vehicle and exchanging it at the power/charging station for money. Like the small 20 lb LPG cooking gas tanks. I still think that electric cars are a phase of tech that cannot be sustainable in terms of money and environmental cost and waste for too long and that it is just transitional in our quest. Hydrogen power was always supposed to be the future in my mind.
Hydrogen has extreme structural problems. Hydrogen tanks need constant maintenance, due to how small the molecule is - it’s very difficult to contain and prevent corrosion. You then have significant conversion loss between the powerplant-native format of electricity, and the hydrogen. So nothing can be as cheap as pure electricity. Fuelling the car with ammonia that then gets converted to Hydrogen inside the car is the solution to the first problem, but further increases the loss on the second.
What you’re describing sounds like a small, high-capacity battery to me! Like a super AA battery. Maybe in 50 years :)
Hydrogen power is the past not the future it’s just a past that never came to be so we sort of feel like it’s something futuristic.
It’s a great idea in theory but there’s so many problems with the idea not least of which is where do you get the hydrogen from? The amount of power that you would need to compress hydrogen into liquid on an industrial scale would practically necessitate dysonsphere.
I think Toyota and Honda… maybe somebody else was developing a Hydrogen cell car. I remember seeing James May on Top Gear talking about it and driving it. It was in California. It seemed really promising and very exciting at the time that’s why the memory imprinted on me a bit.
Toyota at least was getting their hydrogen from natural gas which rather defeats the whole point really.
In order for hydrogen power to be sustainable it has to come from electrolyzing water. But the power requirements are prohibitive since the process is unimaginably inefficient. Something insane like 80% of the power goes to waste when converting water into hydrogen and then you’ve got to find a way of compressing that hydrogen and transporting that hydrogen.
I’m not saying it’s impossible but in a world where you can recharge an electric car in 5 minutes what’s the point in even going to the effort of solving those problems.
Well, you’d need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can’t force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they’ll lose out on precious markups.
That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.
The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you’d let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you’ve already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I’m sure it’s a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.
I’m all for the idea, mind you. This isn’t me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what’s stopping us (and the answer is probably “rich people that don’t like sharing” as usual).
Hydrogen has the same problems tho. Well, except metal/bor hydride, but they have low enery density.
I always think about an “imaginary” scenario where we all have ultra fast charging like this and plug our cars in at the same time. Would the grid experience a brownout?
I studied this a bit in my MS and the answer is… probably not. “The grid will collapse” has been an anti-technology or pro fossil fuel talking point for a very long time, whether* its arguing against renewables or against personal computers or against AC units. The most recent was solar. Grid operators were adamant that solar would crash the grid if it accounted for more than 10%, then 20%, then 30% and so on and it never happened. Now it’s onto EVs being the grid destroyer.
The reality is that production and use is not all that hard to predict. Ultrafast charging will eat some power, but that isn’t going to be the norm for wide EV adoption. Public charging will cost more money and be less convenient than charging at home or work over a longer duration. Home chargers are capping around 30-35 amps, generally overnight when grid demand is low. Couple this with the combined low cost for residential solar to change at even lower rates depending on your state/nation’s hostility to solar.
Now, if every car was replaced with an EV tomorrow, the grid would struggle. But that’s not going to happen. Adoption will be a long slow process and energy producers will increase output on pace as demand forecasts increase. A good parallel to this is Air Conditioning adoption. That’s another high demand appliance that went from rare to common. The grid has its challenges, but now the AC usage is forcastable and rarely challenges the grid.
Is it a challenge, especially with higher renewable mixtures, yes. Can utilities fumble? Of course. Will it be a widespread brownout every day during commute hours? Not likely.
Also, just to indicate the orders of magnitude: The German electiricty grid roughly operates at a power of 200 000 MW on average.
Source (the colorful graph in the middle of the page). (Be mindful that the absolute numbers in the graph are given in “MWh per 15 minutes” (power*time/time), so to get the Watt number (power) at any given time, one has to multiply the number by 4.)
Great reply, thank you!
Perfect application and apropos name for ‘surge’ pricing
That article is light on details. Trying to push 1000kW into an 800V drive train (current state of the art) is going to generate a LOT of heat. Is BYD going to increase the drivetrain voltage in order to bring required amperage down (and heat gen with it)? A lot of car makers haven’t even made it to 800 yet.
My car could charge in well under 15 minutes if any charger in my area could make it to the advertised 350kW. My high water mark so far (after 3 months) is 185kW. Usually its closer to 80.
Those batteries are gonna be (sorry) LIT.
Like, on fire. Like, from the massive charging rate.
