Israeli company StoreDot recently announced it can now mass-produce electric vehicle batteries that can be fully charged in just five minutes. “The bottleneck to extra-fast charging is no longer the battery,” claimed the firm’s chief executive. But is this fast-charging battery really a gamechanger? And if so: exactly how?
Electric vehicle charging speeds are a minefield and can be tough to understand. The latest models claim peak charging rates of over 900 miles in an hour, but the average rate when charging from 10% to 80% of battery capacity is typically about half that. The last bit of the battery is surprisingly hard to “stuff”: beyond 80%, and outside normal operating temperatures, rapid charging slows dramatically.
Even if you understand the capability of your car and its battery, the rate of charging is also constrained by the capacity of the charger itself. The United Kingdom, for instance, only has a handful of what we regard today as “ultrafast”…