BYD has announced that thanks to 1,000-volt electrical architecture and by way of a 1,000kW charger it’s new ‘Super e-Platform’ for cars is able to receive 249 miles’ worth of charge in just five minutes.
The firm’s forthcoming Han and Tang cars sit on the platform and are available to pre-order in China. The models and will accept ‘Megawatt Flash Charging’, receiving electricity at 10 times the rate many current production EVs are able to. The technological leap has been made possible by liquid-cooled charging and an “automotive-grade silicon carbide” computer chip developed by BYD.
The company’s chief executive, Wang Chuanfu, says “the ultimate solution is to make charging as quick as refuelling a gasoline car”, and while his engineers seem to have achieved this, whether or not so fast a rate of charging is possible in the real world remains to be seen.
That’s because electrical infrastructure, in the UK at least, may be some way off automotive technology. Many public EV chargers are capped at 50kW, while even the fastest 300kW ultra-rapid chargers split that rate to 150kW when two cars are plugged into a single unit; home chargers, meanwhile, typically deliver just 7kW.
Furthermore, the rate of electricity required for an EV to achieve parity with a petrol car when replenishing range is significant: a typical home consumes between 3 and 5kW most of the time, while even peak domestic winter demand sits at around 8kW per dwelling, with high-demand items like tumble driers only requiring 2.5kW of power. One car recharging at 1,000kW is therefore equivalent to adding 20 additional homes to the electrical grid, and may be some way off reality save for exceptional circumstances.
