If anything, Nio battery swap stations would allow car users to swap to newer types of battery as they become available. I say this knowing Nio is one of CATL's most important partners[1].
In a well designed urban environment where cars have space for 2-3 modular batteries with swapping capabilities, I see no reason why taxis etc. need to carry battery payload > 150 km of range needed for local use, which would mean better fuel efficiency as well. Battery swapping done right is integral to this
If anything - my opinion at this point is that cars were a mistake in vehicle sizing caused by internal combustion engines.
For the vast, vast majority of ubran transit, something akin to a bike in size seems to make more sense.
We see this already in urban regions in India/Asia where scooters are the predominate transportation method, and I think even traditional scooters are heavy enough to be problematic.
But a class 2 ebike (so throttle with no need to pedal) can weigh as little as 40lbs (20kg), and go 30 miles at 20mph.
It's insane that we're not designing urban transit for bikes at this point. Much better density, much safer, much easier to store and park, much cheaper to operate and license.
That'd be an interesting situation. They'd probably replace their fleet of batteries gradually, so with each swap sometimes you'd get upgraded, sometimes downgraded. Your range and home charging curves would change with the batteries, and Nio would have to update the battery management software when it puts in a different battery type.
But over time, you'd get upgraded on average without having to pay for a new battery, as long as Nio kept updating to keep its batteries competitive.
This is in fact the main argument to me why swaps would never work at all, economically: the "state" of the battery is a significant part of the value of the car. Being swapped to a worse one makes you several thousand dollars worse off.
It only works in a leasing scenario, and everyone hates those.
I think you'd need a contract where you buy (or lease) the car without a battery and lease/rent the battery separately. With some guaranteed offer for a battery with minimum spec X at maximum price Y when you exit the battery program. Preferably, not a mandatory offer, because one hopes specs go up and prices go down over time.
Then have you pay something per month for having a battery (maybe depends on the specific battery installed), something per kWh for charge used, plus a rebate per kWh for charge added. Or roll it into usage tiers, whatever.
There's lots of people that love leasing cars. I don't understand it, but it makes a lot of people happy?
Nio already has a service to swap to higher capacity battery if you want to go on a long road trip etc. It prices its cars according to battery capacity so even people that chose lower capacity car on purchase still have the option to swap to a higher capacity battery.
Though I think the main use for battery swap technology will be for commercial trucking and if I recall correctly Chinese government and OEM are working on standardisation for that so all those truck batteries are swappable no matter which company builds the battery.
Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable to do instead of charging once every three to five years or so. I guess it depends on the quality and retained capacity on the batteries being swapped in.
The vast majority of charging is done at home, though. Five-minute-charging/swapping is basically a gimmick to show off to your friends, and only really sees (questionable) use during that once-a-year road trip.
The main value in these technologies is to shut up the "But sometimes I want to drive for 20 hours without being forced to take even a single 30-minute break!" pseudo-argument as to why an EV is "impossible" for their lifestyle. Same with the Lucid Air and its 1000km range: basically zero people truly need it, but it needs to exists in order to drag the last few holdouts into the future.
When my road trip is in negative temperatures, I appreciate not having to be in the cold for too long. I think the bigger adoption issue is thoughts of scaling the charging stations. If there’s a line of cars at a liquid fuel pump, one can still get fuel in twenty or thirty minutes. If there’s a line of four cars at every charger and every car takes 15 minutes to charge on average, that’s an hour before you can start.
That was assuming, based on their recharge count, daily 10% to 98% rapid charging. You’d only see that in a vehicle of this range if it’s being used as like a courier vehicle or moving billboard. Pretty much the actual worst cases.
> Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable
eh? are you saying that something that is done once every 5 years has to be done inside 5 minutes? I strongly disagree.
We should always take marketing number with a huge grain of salt, so the 10 to 98% in 7 minutes remain to be seen. Also, there is the question of if it lowers the battery lifespan faster than charging at lower power. It is does, there might still be a point in battery swap, especially for public transport systems (for bus). A public transit operator might want to have more battery than vehicle, so that they can rotate the battery regularly and charge them at lower power, to diminish and distribute the wear on battery. But that's obviously a big if and a more niche usage.
> there might still be a point in battery swap, especially for public transport systems
There isn't. Buses aren't really size- or weight-constricted and don't drive at highway speeds, so building one with enough battery capacity to last most of the day isn't a big deal. Plenty of cities have already transitioned to a 100% electric bus fleet, after all.
A big thing to remember is that people don't travel at the same volume at every moment of the day, so you don't need to run buses at the same frequency the entire day either. You can run buses at 10-minute intervals during commute hours, 15-minute intervals in the middle of the day, and 30-minute intervals in the early mornings and late evenings. This means that there is plenty of time between the morning rush and the evening rush for some buses to go off-duty and charge for a few hour. They are going to sit idle anyways, so why not make use of it?
There are many cases where the EV busses have been abandoned. Busses typically do not do their route and stop, so getting a significant amount of charging for any busses requires extra busses that can be rotated on/off duty. If you design the system to depend on that charging then you need extra busses and you're effectively stuck with a sparse schedule. That is not a constraint to consider with petrol-powered busses. They can run nonstop as much as needed.
There is another thing cities should consider in all this: EV busses are totally unsuitable in emergencies. They cannot be charged fast enough, especially in extreme weather. You should consider this before buying an EV as well. At least, have a plan to arrange alternate transport with a reliable petrol vehicle.
the life span stat with the current battery tech is mostly useless for a normal car. 300 mile range most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years. The battery degradation is not that bad in the first place.
> most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years.
When it comes to as-fast-as-possible charging, I think you can divide that number by at least 10. Slow charging while parked overnight or during the day should still be the most common case by far for most users. Very fast charging is important for road trips, but it is not the usual case.
First, with range decreasing, number of charge cycles per mile, and therefore rate of wear, will increase.
Second, average age of car on the road is above 10 years in most countries; and those that drive old cars definitely do not have €26,500* spare to swap their EV's battery for a new one.
*That's what Audi charges here for e-tron 50 battery replacement, which are already starting to fail for many owners
That's a theoretical / marketing number. In real life I am yet to see meet an EV owner who reports >80% of range after 5 years / 100 000 km of mostly-at-home charging. I see those on internet forums, but on internet forums, anyone can write anything, so I do not take those reports too seriously.
From my personal family anecdotes: my mothers' 4 year old Hyundai Ioniq 5 had complete battery failure. Thankfully under warranty. And my fathers' 5 year old Audi e-tron 50 already has <80% range remaining, with very rare fast charging.
Western car manufactures scamming their customer should not be what you look at for costs. Batteries pack costs have gone from $130-150/kwh in 2023 $80-90/kwh in 2026. Price for a pack will likely be under $50/kwh in another 3-4 years. Ie battery packs are becoming competitive with engines already and will be cheaper by 30-40% ie replacing a battery will be cheaper than replacing an engine/
> Also, there is the question of if it lowers the battery lifespan faster than charging at lower power.
This kind of fast-as-possible charging rather than overnight or "while parked at the mall for hours" slow charging should be the exception rather than the rule, i.e. it is useful when road-tripping long-distance, but is not not the daily case. Battery lifespan should not be based on assuming that it's the only thing that you ever do.
Swapping does help reduce the high peak power demands that fast charging has. There's limited places where you can get the infrastructure to install a bank of chargers capable of this kind of speed (though, one potential approach is having a local block of batteries near the charger, but you are then paying the efficiency cost of another battery round-trip, and the cost of the batteries which will get a lot of wear and tear themselves)
The charging station's batteries don't have to use the same chemistry though, as they aren't space- and weight-constrained like EV batteries are. You can optimize for durability and cost instead.
Having station-based storage also allows the station to participate on the energy market and purchase only when electricity is cheap. It could even do double duty by selling back electricity from storage during periods of high grid demand! Heck, pair it with a local grid storage battery which is going to be built anyways and you basically get it for free.
Station batteries are an additional toxic inextinguishable fire hazard and expense to consider. I wonder what is the efficiency loss in charging one battery to turn around and charge another too. But you are generally right: stationary batteries do not need to be lightweight like the ones in cars.
Feels quite clear Donut doesn't have much - no meaningful new tests released for many weeks already and some executive of Nordic Nano sued Donut Lab and said their claims were misleading.
I haven't really followed that closely myself, but I've noticed the people who I saw defending Donut before have gone really quiet about it lately.
I find the talk around Donut so weird. At CES we were told they had nothing because they hadn’t shared third party test. They then shared third party tests remarkably fast. From the dating of VTT reports it’s clear they shared it as soon as VTT finalised their reports. Now they have nothing because they haven’t released enough tests fast enough?
It’s clear they have something very interesting.
We’re mainly missing low temp and energy density test. If they have something real, obviously they’re saving density for last (near the time real customers get their hand on the bike), since it will give them huge amount of attention. Can’t fault them for milking what they’ve got (if they got it) for all the marketing hype it’s worth.
We’re also missing cycle life test but the claims can’t really be fully tested in a reasonable time. So even if their tests show projections that indicate high cycle life, people will doubt it, or shift the focus to ageing effects. So personally I don’t care much, we just have to see how it works out in real life.
The lawsuit incidentally reveal their connection to partners which does reveal that there’s something real there. Another criticism was that the couldn’t have developed all the tech from scratch themselves in such a short time, and now it’s clear they didn’t, they’re using tech licensed by other companies with real competence in the field.
If it’s as good as they say with zero caveats and can be manufactured at scale is another matter
I think by this point they demonstrated basically all the characteristics of their battery well enough, except for the density, but then that was a pretty damn important and big claim. I'm not sure they can afford to delay that much longer. Or the actual shipment of products.
They didn't share third party tests. They shared tests done by a party they contracted, and whose test reports don't back up the claims to the extent that they claimed.
Do they have something interesting? Maybe! But it could also be yet another Theranos. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and they haven't exactly been forthcoming with it.
Donut's website claims that they will release the next test result in 7 days, so you can check next week whether those people will have something new to talk about: https://idonutbelieve.com
I sincerely hope Donut really has an ace up their sleeve, we could really use some domestic competition against China here in the EU. I sincerely hope that the next update from them is something solid (pun intended), and not 'what color is the battery'.
Feels weird to pollute a thread about the progress of the largest battery manufacturer in the world that does real science and engineering and massive industrial installations... with a comment about an almost certainly fraudulent fly-by-night company making tiny batteries for motorbikes and not providing real science or published papers to back up their extraordinary claims.
Please do exercise the downvote and flag buttons in that case, instead of polluting the thread with a performative tirade like this. Seems weird that you'd use this as an opportunity to rehash blatantly obvious talking points others have already brought up here before you, if it really does merely just bother you that this is what the respective reputations are and that they're being brought into comparison regardless. It comes across as an attempt to discredit and mock rather than as a genuine upset.
See, I can do this too. All it takes is a modicum amount of conspiratorial thinking and some willingness to engage in ill faith, with a dash of flair for the dramatic. For normal people, it was instead just "oh yeah, news cycle thing one vs news cycle thing two".
I didn't see a number for cycle life. That'd be my biggest question here. You can charge in less than 7 minutes but how many times before performance (capacity) degrades?
TFA says "After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said."
I can't really judge whether 1000 charges is a reasonable target for a car, though i think that 1000 fast charges is reasonable. It should probably be able to push to 5000 slow charges and 500 fast charges, which should fit a lot of use-cases.
If you get 400km per charge using 88% of the battery (98% -> 10%), that's 400,000km (258,000 miles) before you're down to 90%, at which point you have likely worn out an awful lot of other things with the car.
Admitting that I have the luxury of an urban, low-driving lifestyle: I'm 50. That battery would literally last the rest of my driving life and have room to spare.
Understanding battery degredation takes a lot of nuance. If you do nothing but charge and discharge quickly at some given temperature, you degrade to 90% in 1,000 cycles.
But the battery also degrades over time, the hotter it is the more, the higher the SOC the more. So you have to add on that calendar degradation, to that 10% loss from just charging.
Total degradation in practice will vary a lot, based on users charging and storage practices. Most of the time in practice it seems some fault will brick a battery before it degrades too much in total capacity.
The battery in my PHEV (Chrysler Pacifica) showed no appreciable degradation in eight years (and >100k miles) before being replaced under recall for a manufacturing fault last year.
>I can't really judge whether 1000 charges is a reasonable target for a car
I mean, if "charges" is "full charge" and the battery pack does even 200 miles of range then that'd be 200,000 miles right? And more like 250-300+ miles seems like a spreading target as energy density ticks upwards.
Honestly that's more than I've ever put on any single individual car or truck I've owned, and well into the point where I'd be expecting to put real money into engine and other work for an ICE. Sure more is better but if a battery pack can go 200k-300k miles keeping 90% range that doesn't feel unreasonable at all for non-commercial usage. Taxis and so on with much higher utilization may find value in alternative options of course.
1000 charges 10-80% for a passenger car at 300-400 km per charge is 300 000 - 400 000 km of fast charge driving. I'd say it's perfectly fine for most people?
The point is that most charges do not have to be fast charges. The usual case is to charge slowly when parked at a "Destination Charger" or overnight at home. Electricity supply is almost everywhere.
You have to change the mentality of "I only get gas when I travel out of my way to the gas station, so the gas refill has to be fast". EVs just do not work like that, and overnight charging is far more convenient that having to go get gas.
> have a minute to plug in? Still sufficient to get from 10 to 35 percent state of charge.
Scaling that to something the size of an EV pack will require one massive cable/connector. Call it 5kw/h in 1/60 hours, thats 3000kw, at 700v thats still roughly 4000 amps. (Please correct my head math.) Charging one car could suck up more power than an entire neighbourhood. Say four or five chargers operating at once ... every roadside charging station will need its own electrical substation.
What's nice there, though, is that the total amount of _energy_ needed at a charging station is roughly fixed(), regardless of how fast you charge the cars. So if you're provisioned for the needed total energy inflow, you can to a reasonable degree compensate for having a more bursty high-rate charging load by having some amount of local energy storage as a buffer.
() - Assuming you provision for the highest-traffic-volume day. Ignoring potential induced demand of making it a little easier to drive, which I suspect is pretty bounded - people need pee and stretch breaks anyway.
For numbers, just follow traffic at a busy gas station. Roughly 100 vehicles per hour is typical. So imagine having to charge 100 Teslas per hour, or just over one telsa per minute. That is still an insane amount of power.
As others have noted, urban gas stations are likely to be far less busy in an EV world due to the ease of distributed charging -- home, work, destination, etc.;
But I think you raise a good model for long-haul. I think of the pennsylvania turnpike gas stations as a worst-case situation: They serve a somewhat captive audience, many of whom are traveling so far they need a mid-trip fillup. So something like 80kWh/minute _does_ seem like what you'd have to do for those specific stations, and that's an average rate of 4.8MW, at least during prime time.
You can probably get away with half of that if you use local storage as use is much lower at night. But let's not - let's see what it takes to do 4.8MW.
The answer is: You don't need a substation. You DO need on-site transformers and switchgear from 12kV primary service. But to put it in perspective, 4MW is like a tiny datacenter or really big (new york size) office building. So it's not really too crazy to think about an EV per minute going from 0-80kWh in a dedicated area. Compared to huge underground gas tanks, I think the infrastructure part of it is pretty ok.
That's not the math though. Approximately 0% of those vehicles at the busy gas station ever fuel up at home. Most of those EV fuel up most of the time at home or at a "Destination Charger" at places other than a roadside DC Super-Fast charger.
I see figures given that around 80% of EV charging is done at home (1). That doesn't mean that the other 20% has to be super-fast though, it will be less than that.
Only people with houses get to charge at home. All the non-rich who don't own houses are stuck with commercial chargers. It will be the reality for so so many people.
1) Do you dispute the 80% at home figure, and if so, on what basis?
2) Are you claiming that all "not at home" commercial charging is "busy gas station" style fast charging while waiting, and if so, on what basis?
Applying gas station capacity math to EVS as if they are like for like will give wrong answers. Your point about access to charge at home is valid but unrelated to that.
Fjord ferries in Norway are up around that sort of charge rate, but for 30 mins instead of 5. That kind of battery charging performance is pure marketing until our local LV supply network is uplifted!
Like others have pointed, you have made a mistake in your computation. The currents that are required are only of hundreds of amps and the latest chargers can provide up to 1000 A.
Also like others have said, it does not matter how fast you charge a car, the total energy consumption is the same, so fast chargers do not require changes in the power supply of a charging station.
The fast chargers that enable this full charging in a few minutes have their own internal batteries, to enable them to pull only the average power from the electrical grid, not the peak power.
The new fast chargers that can achieve the times reported in TFA use a somewhat higher voltage than the older chargers, of 1000 V, to reduce the current.
Ya, i missed a 0, but chargers with batteries are irrelevant for charging stations by a highway like a modern gas station. They have a constant flow of vehicles. There will be no time for a buffer battery when the next customer is maybe 45 seconds behind the last.
A buffer battery may have a place for a home charger, but a constant-use commerical charger is a very different thing. Or think of a rental car stand at an airport, or a truck/buss depot. They will have a vehicle arriving every minute and every hour wasted charging is an hour less rental time.
A charging station must be supplied with a power determined by the number of cars it must charge during a given time interval, e.g. a day or an hour.
It does not matter if it charges 30 cars per hour by having 3 chargers that charge in 6 minutes (including connection/disconnection times) or by having 15 chargers that charge in 30 minutes.
So it is not the charging speed that matters, but the amount of electric vehicles that want to use a charging station.
The charging speed matters only for the car owners, as it determines the time they must spend at the charging station.
Normally, a charger that is 10 times faster is not 10 times more expensive, so faster chargers should also benefit the charging station owners, because they would need to invest less for servicing a given amount of traffic, by buying less chargers.
The faster the chargers the more cars can be charged per hour. Commercial vendors for "drive through" (as opposed to parked) will want the fastest chargers.
Neither article mentions what specs - voltage and kW - are used when doing this very fast charging.
Does anyone know? Assuming it's not just the current high-end spec of 800v? It matters because higher current requires heavier equipment to generate it and heavier cables too.
The other company that makes batteries that charge this fast, BYD, also makes appropriate chargers, which use a somewhat higher voltage, of 1000 V. Those chargers can provide up to 1000 A.
I do not know more than is said in this press release, but I assume that they have coordinated to use identical charger specs, otherwise both would lose. It is said that there already are hundreds of such fast chargers installed, so at this point it would not make sense to try to install other incompatible chargers or to make cars incompatible with the existing fast chargers.
I assume that the chargers are more or less compatible with the older chargers, but they must be able to negotiate a higher charging voltage and higher maximum charging currents.
When either the vehicle or the charger does not support the higher voltages and currents, they should fall back to an older and slower charging mode.
The speed of charging is irrelevant, because the energy consumption is the same. The power requirements for a charging station is determined by the number of cars charged in a day, not by how fast they are charged.
The fast chargers that achieve charging in a few minutes, and which are indeed able to provide up to 1 MW of charging power, have their own internal batteries, so they take from the electrical grid a power averaged over a long time, not the peak power that they provide to the charged vehicle.
but in an hour, these stations have to charge 7 cars now whereas in the past, they only had to charge 1. So power requirements for these stations went up by 7x. Sure, they can fill up at night but they would need a lot more batteries on standby.
> in an hour, these stations have to charge 7 cars now whereas in the past, they only had to charge 1
Why? Where do those extra cars come from? In reality the change you're going to see is from spending 30 minutes to charge 1 car followed by 30 minutes of sitting idle to spending 5 minutes to charge 1 car followed by 55 minutes of sitting idle.
Or, alternatively, go from 6 stations each spending 30 minutes / car to charge 12 cars per hour to 1 station spending 5 minutes / car to charge 12 cars per hour.
The electricity demand only depends on the number of miles driven. Same with ICE cars: the speed through which fuel comes out of the gas station's nozzle doesn't impact how much fuel you consume during your commute, or how often the gas station needs to be resupplied.
The whole fast charge thing is mostly marketing to convert people from "gas car mindset" into getting an EV.
The reality of the situation is that most people who buy an EV will use fast charging only a few times a year. The majority will be charging overnight to recuperate their daily use, which amounts to drawing <1% of a MW. The grid, in it's current form, is totally capable of this.
What would be a strain though is large ultra fast charging stations along major travel corridors. But I'd still wager that those will be overkill for most.
Charging was what stopped me from getting an EV when I was a renter. In a world where I can recharge in 7 to 10 minutes, it becomes a lot more feasible for a renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities. A renter can just pull up to a recharging station. Wait 7 to 10 minutes or (maybe 5 if they don't mind a half charge) and be off.
> renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities.
Assuming that your car is parked for 18 hours of the day or more (and if it is not, you're a courier, taxi driver or similar) the question is not "do I own or rent the place where I live?" it is "How do I get electricity to where the car is normally parked?"
If you solve that with a L2 charger - at night or during the day, you're good. Then recharge time becomes irrelevant as you don't stand there waiting for it, and it happens as part of daily routine. You don't have to regularly pay attention to "When do I have to go get fuel?", it's just done daily.
Electricity is found nearly everywhere, you do not have to treat it as something found only at a special fuelling station. EVS are unlike gas cars in that respect.
For this sort of fast charging you need the charging station itself to have a large pool of batteries to buffer the energy from the grid and to push it at very high power to cars. Probably still requires a good size connection to the grid.
I think this is unavoidable for any sort of decent charging station from now on, anyway but does require significant investment in infrastructure.
Obviously, the engineers at BYD, CATL etc. are not stupid, so these fast chargers, which have been in production for several months and which are already installed in an increasing number of places, do include batteries, so they need only an averaged power from the electrical grid, not the up to 1 MW power that is provided to the charged vehicle.
BYD was the first company demonstrating such batteries and chargers, but CATL followed after a short time. While the times reported by CATL are slightly longer than for BYD at room temperature, these CATL batteries have faster charging at low temperatures.
It is nice to see healthy competition between the major Chinese battery producers. Unfortunately, there is much less competition for them from other countries.
The electrical grid infrastructure that is needed does not depend on the charging speed, but it is determined by the number of cars that are charged per day at a given location (and their average battery capacity).
Battery and solar panel advancements have been the most interesting story in tech for going on a decade in my opinion.
Wish I could fast forward 50 years and see what the world will look like.
I did not expect Nio's 5-minute battery swap technology to become obsolete this soon.
If anything, Nio battery swap stations would allow car users to swap to newer types of battery as they become available. I say this knowing Nio is one of CATL's most important partners[1].
[1] https://eletric-vehicles.com/catl/catl-calls-nio-an-irreplac...
In a well designed urban environment where cars have space for 2-3 modular batteries with swapping capabilities, I see no reason why taxis etc. need to carry battery payload > 150 km of range needed for local use, which would mean better fuel efficiency as well. Battery swapping done right is integral to this
Sorry, but I giggled at this. A well designed urban environment would have no cars.
Frankly - I agree with this take.
If anything - my opinion at this point is that cars were a mistake in vehicle sizing caused by internal combustion engines.
For the vast, vast majority of ubran transit, something akin to a bike in size seems to make more sense.
We see this already in urban regions in India/Asia where scooters are the predominate transportation method, and I think even traditional scooters are heavy enough to be problematic.
But a class 2 ebike (so throttle with no need to pedal) can weigh as little as 40lbs (20kg), and go 30 miles at 20mph.
It's insane that we're not designing urban transit for bikes at this point. Much better density, much safer, much easier to store and park, much cheaper to operate and license.
Cars,those urban monstrosities the vehicles that weigh over 25 times their payload and take up 20 times the space on the roads.
Should I adjust the figures for American sizes?
Should I also add that they are engineered to travel at speeds over 120 mph and usually ply the trade environments where 30 mph is a dangerous speed?
Amazing machines. Can't wait till I can buy something a bit bigger that can also travel to other planets
In an ideal world, yes. But the only way to move forward is somehow modifying the existing world for better, step by step.
but you/stuff still needs to go from a to b. taxis (or individual self driving pods) should however be the future of public transport.
They simply lack the required space density.
That'd be an interesting situation. They'd probably replace their fleet of batteries gradually, so with each swap sometimes you'd get upgraded, sometimes downgraded. Your range and home charging curves would change with the batteries, and Nio would have to update the battery management software when it puts in a different battery type.
But over time, you'd get upgraded on average without having to pay for a new battery, as long as Nio kept updating to keep its batteries competitive.
This is in fact the main argument to me why swaps would never work at all, economically: the "state" of the battery is a significant part of the value of the car. Being swapped to a worse one makes you several thousand dollars worse off.
It only works in a leasing scenario, and everyone hates those.
I think you'd need a contract where you buy (or lease) the car without a battery and lease/rent the battery separately. With some guaranteed offer for a battery with minimum spec X at maximum price Y when you exit the battery program. Preferably, not a mandatory offer, because one hopes specs go up and prices go down over time.
Then have you pay something per month for having a battery (maybe depends on the specific battery installed), something per kWh for charge used, plus a rebate per kWh for charge added. Or roll it into usage tiers, whatever.
There's lots of people that love leasing cars. I don't understand it, but it makes a lot of people happy?
I used to own a truck whose fair market value would double, temporarily, whenever I filled the tank.
How's that any different than putting new tires on a shitbox?
Nio already has a service to swap to higher capacity battery if you want to go on a long road trip etc. It prices its cars according to battery capacity so even people that chose lower capacity car on purchase still have the option to swap to a higher capacity battery. Though I think the main use for battery swap technology will be for commercial trucking and if I recall correctly Chinese government and OEM are working on standardisation for that so all those truck batteries are swappable no matter which company builds the battery.
5 minute swap is not needed for this.
Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable to do instead of charging once every three to five years or so. I guess it depends on the quality and retained capacity on the batteries being swapped in.
The vast majority of charging is done at home, though. Five-minute-charging/swapping is basically a gimmick to show off to your friends, and only really sees (questionable) use during that once-a-year road trip.
The main value in these technologies is to shut up the "But sometimes I want to drive for 20 hours without being forced to take even a single 30-minute break!" pseudo-argument as to why an EV is "impossible" for their lifestyle. Same with the Lucid Air and its 1000km range: basically zero people truly need it, but it needs to exists in order to drag the last few holdouts into the future.
When my road trip is in negative temperatures, I appreciate not having to be in the cold for too long. I think the bigger adoption issue is thoughts of scaling the charging stations. If there’s a line of cars at a liquid fuel pump, one can still get fuel in twenty or thirty minutes. If there’s a line of four cars at every charger and every car takes 15 minutes to charge on average, that’s an hour before you can start.
> Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years,
That sounds like a phone battery, not an EV battery. Modern EVs should last 15-20 years before seeing significant degredation.
That was assuming, based on their recharge count, daily 10% to 98% rapid charging. You’d only see that in a vehicle of this range if it’s being used as like a courier vehicle or moving billboard. Pretty much the actual worst cases.
> Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable
eh? are you saying that something that is done once every 5 years has to be done inside 5 minutes? I strongly disagree.
> charging once every three to five years or so
Um, that's not how charging works at all.
That’s not how sentences or quotations work at all.
We should always take marketing number with a huge grain of salt, so the 10 to 98% in 7 minutes remain to be seen. Also, there is the question of if it lowers the battery lifespan faster than charging at lower power. It is does, there might still be a point in battery swap, especially for public transport systems (for bus). A public transit operator might want to have more battery than vehicle, so that they can rotate the battery regularly and charge them at lower power, to diminish and distribute the wear on battery. But that's obviously a big if and a more niche usage.
> there might still be a point in battery swap, especially for public transport systems
There isn't. Buses aren't really size- or weight-constricted and don't drive at highway speeds, so building one with enough battery capacity to last most of the day isn't a big deal. Plenty of cities have already transitioned to a 100% electric bus fleet, after all.
A big thing to remember is that people don't travel at the same volume at every moment of the day, so you don't need to run buses at the same frequency the entire day either. You can run buses at 10-minute intervals during commute hours, 15-minute intervals in the middle of the day, and 30-minute intervals in the early mornings and late evenings. This means that there is plenty of time between the morning rush and the evening rush for some buses to go off-duty and charge for a few hour. They are going to sit idle anyways, so why not make use of it?
There are many cases where the EV busses have been abandoned. Busses typically do not do their route and stop, so getting a significant amount of charging for any busses requires extra busses that can be rotated on/off duty. If you design the system to depend on that charging then you need extra busses and you're effectively stuck with a sparse schedule. That is not a constraint to consider with petrol-powered busses. They can run nonstop as much as needed.
There is another thing cities should consider in all this: EV busses are totally unsuitable in emergencies. They cannot be charged fast enough, especially in extreme weather. You should consider this before buying an EV as well. At least, have a plan to arrange alternate transport with a reliable petrol vehicle.
the life span stat with the current battery tech is mostly useless for a normal car. 300 mile range most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years. The battery degradation is not that bad in the first place.
> most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years.
When it comes to as-fast-as-possible charging, I think you can divide that number by at least 10. Slow charging while parked overnight or during the day should still be the most common case by far for most users. Very fast charging is important for road trips, but it is not the usual case.
First, with range decreasing, number of charge cycles per mile, and therefore rate of wear, will increase.
Second, average age of car on the road is above 10 years in most countries; and those that drive old cars definitely do not have €26,500* spare to swap their EV's battery for a new one.
*That's what Audi charges here for e-tron 50 battery replacement, which are already starting to fail for many owners
> First, with range decreasing, number of charge cycles per mile, and therefore rate of wear, will increase.
By 10% over 10 years, assuming the worst case of nothing but ultra-fast charging. This seems minor.
Old cheaper cars could be 10% less convenient to use for very long trips. This should not shock anyone.
Rather than an expensive battery swap, sell it on at a lower price to someone who doesn't need 100% range.
That's a theoretical / marketing number. In real life I am yet to see meet an EV owner who reports >80% of range after 5 years / 100 000 km of mostly-at-home charging. I see those on internet forums, but on internet forums, anyone can write anything, so I do not take those reports too seriously.
From my personal family anecdotes: my mothers' 4 year old Hyundai Ioniq 5 had complete battery failure. Thankfully under warranty. And my fathers' 5 year old Audi e-tron 50 already has <80% range remaining, with very rare fast charging.
Western car manufactures scamming their customer should not be what you look at for costs. Batteries pack costs have gone from $130-150/kwh in 2023 $80-90/kwh in 2026. Price for a pack will likely be under $50/kwh in another 3-4 years. Ie battery packs are becoming competitive with engines already and will be cheaper by 30-40% ie replacing a battery will be cheaper than replacing an engine/
No car manufacturer actually sells battery packs for $80-90/kWh or anywhere near that. That's what it costs THEM, not service customers.
> Also, there is the question of if it lowers the battery lifespan faster than charging at lower power.
This kind of fast-as-possible charging rather than overnight or "while parked at the mall for hours" slow charging should be the exception rather than the rule, i.e. it is useful when road-tripping long-distance, but is not not the daily case. Battery lifespan should not be based on assuming that it's the only thing that you ever do.
Swapping does help reduce the high peak power demands that fast charging has. There's limited places where you can get the infrastructure to install a bank of chargers capable of this kind of speed (though, one potential approach is having a local block of batteries near the charger, but you are then paying the efficiency cost of another battery round-trip, and the cost of the batteries which will get a lot of wear and tear themselves)
The charging station's batteries don't have to use the same chemistry though, as they aren't space- and weight-constrained like EV batteries are. You can optimize for durability and cost instead.
Having station-based storage also allows the station to participate on the energy market and purchase only when electricity is cheap. It could even do double duty by selling back electricity from storage during periods of high grid demand! Heck, pair it with a local grid storage battery which is going to be built anyways and you basically get it for free.
Station batteries are an additional toxic inextinguishable fire hazard and expense to consider. I wonder what is the efficiency loss in charging one battery to turn around and charge another too. But you are generally right: stationary batteries do not need to be lightweight like the ones in cars.
But if you need batteries that gives you the opportunity to install solar and reduce your costs more than the efficiency hit.
Saw this yesterday, did not expect the competition around Donut's batteries to heat up this much and this quickly.
Even the gravimetric density is fairly close, CATL's claim is 350 Wh/kg, compared to Donut's 400 Wh/kg.
The safety and durability (plus no lithium) prospects of Donut's V1 battery are still big though (if the thing is actually real).
Feels quite clear Donut doesn't have much - no meaningful new tests released for many weeks already and some executive of Nordic Nano sued Donut Lab and said their claims were misleading.
I haven't really followed that closely myself, but I've noticed the people who I saw defending Donut before have gone really quiet about it lately.
I find the talk around Donut so weird. At CES we were told they had nothing because they hadn’t shared third party test. They then shared third party tests remarkably fast. From the dating of VTT reports it’s clear they shared it as soon as VTT finalised their reports. Now they have nothing because they haven’t released enough tests fast enough?
It’s clear they have something very interesting.
We’re mainly missing low temp and energy density test. If they have something real, obviously they’re saving density for last (near the time real customers get their hand on the bike), since it will give them huge amount of attention. Can’t fault them for milking what they’ve got (if they got it) for all the marketing hype it’s worth.
We’re also missing cycle life test but the claims can’t really be fully tested in a reasonable time. So even if their tests show projections that indicate high cycle life, people will doubt it, or shift the focus to ageing effects. So personally I don’t care much, we just have to see how it works out in real life.
The lawsuit incidentally reveal their connection to partners which does reveal that there’s something real there. Another criticism was that the couldn’t have developed all the tech from scratch themselves in such a short time, and now it’s clear they didn’t, they’re using tech licensed by other companies with real competence in the field.
If it’s as good as they say with zero caveats and can be manufactured at scale is another matter
I think by this point they demonstrated basically all the characteristics of their battery well enough, except for the density, but then that was a pretty damn important and big claim. I'm not sure they can afford to delay that much longer. Or the actual shipment of products.
They didn't share third party tests. They shared tests done by a party they contracted, and whose test reports don't back up the claims to the extent that they claimed.
Do they have something interesting? Maybe! But it could also be yet another Theranos. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and they haven't exactly been forthcoming with it.
It seems clear to me that Donut are a vaporware company with hardly any customers, and CATL are the largest battery company in the world.
Donut's website claims that they will release the next test result in 7 days, so you can check next week whether those people will have something new to talk about: https://idonutbelieve.com
I sincerely hope Donut really has an ace up their sleeve, we could really use some domestic competition against China here in the EU. I sincerely hope that the next update from them is something solid (pun intended), and not 'what color is the battery'.
Feels weird to pollute a thread about the progress of the largest battery manufacturer in the world that does real science and engineering and massive industrial installations... with a comment about an almost certainly fraudulent fly-by-night company making tiny batteries for motorbikes and not providing real science or published papers to back up their extraordinary claims.
Please do exercise the downvote and flag buttons in that case, instead of polluting the thread with a performative tirade like this. Seems weird that you'd use this as an opportunity to rehash blatantly obvious talking points others have already brought up here before you, if it really does merely just bother you that this is what the respective reputations are and that they're being brought into comparison regardless. It comes across as an attempt to discredit and mock rather than as a genuine upset.
See, I can do this too. All it takes is a modicum amount of conspiratorial thinking and some willingness to engage in ill faith, with a dash of flair for the dramatic. For normal people, it was instead just "oh yeah, news cycle thing one vs news cycle thing two".
I didn't see a number for cycle life. That'd be my biggest question here. You can charge in less than 7 minutes but how many times before performance (capacity) degrades?
TFA says "After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said."
I can't really judge whether 1000 charges is a reasonable target for a car, though i think that 1000 fast charges is reasonable. It should probably be able to push to 5000 slow charges and 500 fast charges, which should fit a lot of use-cases.
If you get 400km per charge using 88% of the battery (98% -> 10%), that's 400,000km (258,000 miles) before you're down to 90%, at which point you have likely worn out an awful lot of other things with the car.
Admitting that I have the luxury of an urban, low-driving lifestyle: I'm 50. That battery would literally last the rest of my driving life and have room to spare.
Understanding battery degredation takes a lot of nuance. If you do nothing but charge and discharge quickly at some given temperature, you degrade to 90% in 1,000 cycles.
But the battery also degrades over time, the hotter it is the more, the higher the SOC the more. So you have to add on that calendar degradation, to that 10% loss from just charging.
Total degradation in practice will vary a lot, based on users charging and storage practices. Most of the time in practice it seems some fault will brick a battery before it degrades too much in total capacity.
The battery in my PHEV (Chrysler Pacifica) showed no appreciable degradation in eight years (and >100k miles) before being replaced under recall for a manufacturing fault last year.
>I can't really judge whether 1000 charges is a reasonable target for a car
I mean, if "charges" is "full charge" and the battery pack does even 200 miles of range then that'd be 200,000 miles right? And more like 250-300+ miles seems like a spreading target as energy density ticks upwards.
Honestly that's more than I've ever put on any single individual car or truck I've owned, and well into the point where I'd be expecting to put real money into engine and other work for an ICE. Sure more is better but if a battery pack can go 200k-300k miles keeping 90% range that doesn't feel unreasonable at all for non-commercial usage. Taxis and so on with much higher utilization may find value in alternative options of course.
That’s also a 1,000 fast charges, which shouldn’t be relevant to non-commercial users.
1000 charges 10-80% for a passenger car at 300-400 km per charge is 300 000 - 400 000 km of fast charge driving. I'd say it's perfectly fine for most people?
The point is that most charges do not have to be fast charges. The usual case is to charge slowly when parked at a "Destination Charger" or overnight at home. Electricity supply is almost everywhere.
You have to change the mentality of "I only get gas when I travel out of my way to the gas station, so the gas refill has to be fast". EVs just do not work like that, and overnight charging is far more convenient that having to go get gas.
Did you miss a 0?
I have! Thanks
China had many >1M KM electric taxies. Usually they degrade after 200,000 km, and they are like 2 generations behind the latest ones.
right at the end “After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said.”
> have a minute to plug in? Still sufficient to get from 10 to 35 percent state of charge.
Scaling that to something the size of an EV pack will require one massive cable/connector. Call it 5kw/h in 1/60 hours, thats 3000kw, at 700v thats still roughly 4000 amps. (Please correct my head math.) Charging one car could suck up more power than an entire neighbourhood. Say four or five chargers operating at once ... every roadside charging station will need its own electrical substation.
What's nice there, though, is that the total amount of _energy_ needed at a charging station is roughly fixed(), regardless of how fast you charge the cars. So if you're provisioned for the needed total energy inflow, you can to a reasonable degree compensate for having a more bursty high-rate charging load by having some amount of local energy storage as a buffer.
() - Assuming you provision for the highest-traffic-volume day. Ignoring potential induced demand of making it a little easier to drive, which I suspect is pretty bounded - people need pee and stretch breaks anyway.
For numbers, just follow traffic at a busy gas station. Roughly 100 vehicles per hour is typical. So imagine having to charge 100 Teslas per hour, or just over one telsa per minute. That is still an insane amount of power.
As others have noted, urban gas stations are likely to be far less busy in an EV world due to the ease of distributed charging -- home, work, destination, etc.;
But I think you raise a good model for long-haul. I think of the pennsylvania turnpike gas stations as a worst-case situation: They serve a somewhat captive audience, many of whom are traveling so far they need a mid-trip fillup. So something like 80kWh/minute _does_ seem like what you'd have to do for those specific stations, and that's an average rate of 4.8MW, at least during prime time.
You can probably get away with half of that if you use local storage as use is much lower at night. But let's not - let's see what it takes to do 4.8MW.
The answer is: You don't need a substation. You DO need on-site transformers and switchgear from 12kV primary service. But to put it in perspective, 4MW is like a tiny datacenter or really big (new york size) office building. So it's not really too crazy to think about an EV per minute going from 0-80kWh in a dedicated area. Compared to huge underground gas tanks, I think the infrastructure part of it is pretty ok.
That's not the math though. Approximately 0% of those vehicles at the busy gas station ever fuel up at home. Most of those EV fuel up most of the time at home or at a "Destination Charger" at places other than a roadside DC Super-Fast charger.
I see figures given that around 80% of EV charging is done at home (1). That doesn't mean that the other 20% has to be super-fast though, it will be less than that.
https://www.energy.gov/topics/national-ev-charging-network#
Only people with houses get to charge at home. All the non-rich who don't own houses are stuck with commercial chargers. It will be the reality for so so many people.
1) Do you dispute the 80% at home figure, and if so, on what basis?
2) Are you claiming that all "not at home" commercial charging is "busy gas station" style fast charging while waiting, and if so, on what basis?
Applying gas station capacity math to EVS as if they are like for like will give wrong answers. Your point about access to charge at home is valid but unrelated to that.
Fjord ferries in Norway are up around that sort of charge rate, but for 30 mins instead of 5. That kind of battery charging performance is pure marketing until our local LV supply network is uplifted!
I was so impressed by this when I saw it. Big-ass cable. :) Great ferry trip.
> Call it 5kw/h in 1/60 hours, thats 3000kw, at 700v thats still roughly 4000 amps. (Please correct my head math.)
5 kWh * 60 = 300 kW
at 800V (typical charging voltage) that is 375A
(still huge, but an order of magnitude less)
chargers of that size generally have there own internal (sometimes even shared by multiple receptacles) batteries
Like others have pointed, you have made a mistake in your computation. The currents that are required are only of hundreds of amps and the latest chargers can provide up to 1000 A.
Also like others have said, it does not matter how fast you charge a car, the total energy consumption is the same, so fast chargers do not require changes in the power supply of a charging station.
The fast chargers that enable this full charging in a few minutes have their own internal batteries, to enable them to pull only the average power from the electrical grid, not the peak power.
The new fast chargers that can achieve the times reported in TFA use a somewhat higher voltage than the older chargers, of 1000 V, to reduce the current.
Ya, i missed a 0, but chargers with batteries are irrelevant for charging stations by a highway like a modern gas station. They have a constant flow of vehicles. There will be no time for a buffer battery when the next customer is maybe 45 seconds behind the last.
A buffer battery may have a place for a home charger, but a constant-use commerical charger is a very different thing. Or think of a rental car stand at an airport, or a truck/buss depot. They will have a vehicle arriving every minute and every hour wasted charging is an hour less rental time.
A charging station must be supplied with a power determined by the number of cars it must charge during a given time interval, e.g. a day or an hour.
It does not matter if it charges 30 cars per hour by having 3 chargers that charge in 6 minutes (including connection/disconnection times) or by having 15 chargers that charge in 30 minutes.
So it is not the charging speed that matters, but the amount of electric vehicles that want to use a charging station.
The charging speed matters only for the car owners, as it determines the time they must spend at the charging station.
Normally, a charger that is 10 times faster is not 10 times more expensive, so faster chargers should also benefit the charging station owners, because they would need to invest less for servicing a given amount of traffic, by buying less chargers.
The faster the chargers the more cars can be charged per hour. Commercial vendors for "drive through" (as opposed to parked) will want the fastest chargers.
substation...? more like an SMR
Neither article mentions what specs - voltage and kW - are used when doing this very fast charging.
Does anyone know? Assuming it's not just the current high-end spec of 800v? It matters because higher current requires heavier equipment to generate it and heavier cables too.
The other company that makes batteries that charge this fast, BYD, also makes appropriate chargers, which use a somewhat higher voltage, of 1000 V. Those chargers can provide up to 1000 A.
Yes, I am aware that BYD has demonstrated a 1000 kW charging system. In their case it's literally the headline (1) or subheading in other articles (2)
Which is very much in contrast with this article not mentioning these numbers at all. It's odd.
Are you saying that you know that this CATL charger has the same specs despite this? That was my question, really.
1) "BYD Unveils ... Megawatt Flash Charging " https://www.byd.com/en/news-list/BYD-Unveils-Super-e-Platfor...
"BYD's 1st 1,000-kW ultrafast" https://cnevpost.com/2025/03/26/byd-1st-1000-kw-charging-sta...
2) Subhead: "BYD unveils platform with charging power of 1,000 kW" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/18/byd-ev-fa...
I do not know more than is said in this press release, but I assume that they have coordinated to use identical charger specs, otherwise both would lose. It is said that there already are hundreds of such fast chargers installed, so at this point it would not make sense to try to install other incompatible chargers or to make cars incompatible with the existing fast chargers.
I assume that the chargers are more or less compatible with the older chargers, but they must be able to negotiate a higher charging voltage and higher maximum charging currents.
When either the vehicle or the charger does not support the higher voltages and currents, they should fall back to an older and slower charging mode.
> do not know more than is said in this press release, but I assume
ok, thank you for your time.
What's cost? When do they ship?
The poor grid.
The US added basically 0% extra transmission capacity last year.
... Now your local charging station will require a nuclear plant to keep up with ~1MW per car.
The speed of charging is irrelevant, because the energy consumption is the same. The power requirements for a charging station is determined by the number of cars charged in a day, not by how fast they are charged.
The fast chargers that achieve charging in a few minutes, and which are indeed able to provide up to 1 MW of charging power, have their own internal batteries, so they take from the electrical grid a power averaged over a long time, not the peak power that they provide to the charged vehicle.
but in an hour, these stations have to charge 7 cars now whereas in the past, they only had to charge 1. So power requirements for these stations went up by 7x. Sure, they can fill up at night but they would need a lot more batteries on standby.
> in an hour, these stations have to charge 7 cars now whereas in the past, they only had to charge 1
Why? Where do those extra cars come from? In reality the change you're going to see is from spending 30 minutes to charge 1 car followed by 30 minutes of sitting idle to spending 5 minutes to charge 1 car followed by 55 minutes of sitting idle.
Or, alternatively, go from 6 stations each spending 30 minutes / car to charge 12 cars per hour to 1 station spending 5 minutes / car to charge 12 cars per hour.
The electricity demand only depends on the number of miles driven. Same with ICE cars: the speed through which fuel comes out of the gas station's nozzle doesn't impact how much fuel you consume during your commute, or how often the gas station needs to be resupplied.
The whole fast charge thing is mostly marketing to convert people from "gas car mindset" into getting an EV.
The reality of the situation is that most people who buy an EV will use fast charging only a few times a year. The majority will be charging overnight to recuperate their daily use, which amounts to drawing <1% of a MW. The grid, in it's current form, is totally capable of this.
What would be a strain though is large ultra fast charging stations along major travel corridors. But I'd still wager that those will be overkill for most.
Wait. You're missing something.
Charging was what stopped me from getting an EV when I was a renter. In a world where I can recharge in 7 to 10 minutes, it becomes a lot more feasible for a renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities. A renter can just pull up to a recharging station. Wait 7 to 10 minutes or (maybe 5 if they don't mind a half charge) and be off.
Renters shouldn't get EVs if they cannot charge at home.
Which sucks, but the majority of people (2/3) don't rent.
With last year's battery tech sure, but not next year's apparently
> renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities.
Assuming that your car is parked for 18 hours of the day or more (and if it is not, you're a courier, taxi driver or similar) the question is not "do I own or rent the place where I live?" it is "How do I get electricity to where the car is normally parked?"
If you solve that with a L2 charger - at night or during the day, you're good. Then recharge time becomes irrelevant as you don't stand there waiting for it, and it happens as part of daily routine. You don't have to regularly pay attention to "When do I have to go get fuel?", it's just done daily.
Electricity is found nearly everywhere, you do not have to treat it as something found only at a special fuelling station. EVS are unlike gas cars in that respect.
For this sort of fast charging you need the charging station itself to have a large pool of batteries to buffer the energy from the grid and to push it at very high power to cars. Probably still requires a good size connection to the grid.
I think this is unavoidable for any sort of decent charging station from now on, anyway but does require significant investment in infrastructure.
Obviously, the engineers at BYD, CATL etc. are not stupid, so these fast chargers, which have been in production for several months and which are already installed in an increasing number of places, do include batteries, so they need only an averaged power from the electrical grid, not the up to 1 MW power that is provided to the charged vehicle.
BYD was the first company demonstrating such batteries and chargers, but CATL followed after a short time. While the times reported by CATL are slightly longer than for BYD at room temperature, these CATL batteries have faster charging at low temperatures.
It is nice to see healthy competition between the major Chinese battery producers. Unfortunately, there is much less competition for them from other countries.
The electrical grid infrastructure that is needed does not depend on the charging speed, but it is determined by the number of cars that are charged per day at a given location (and their average battery capacity).
To add, the technology for stationary batteries (lithium phosphate) is cheaper, because you're no longer constrained by density/size.