5 min. charging...could this be a game-changer for EVs?
 

"Piëch doubles down on its outrageous sub-5-minute EV charging claims."

"People will stop complaining about EV range the minute fast charging is a reality, and new startup Piëch reckons it's got the goods to deliver an 80 percent charge on a 311-mile (500 km) range battery in four minutes, 40 seconds, which is vastly quicker than anything else on the market."

https://newatlas.com/piech-4-minute-40-ev-charging/59597/?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1557429532.jpg

It seems doable from some of the things I've read. It seems like they are using a dual battery system vs just one bank, so that cuts charging in half from the beginning. Tesla is able to get 145kW for the 10%-50% charge give or take and taper to about 100kW at 80% and then dwindles from there.

Considering a 5%-80% Supercharger session is about 25 minutes with a warm battery, double that from the start and then double it again (new v3 SCs do 250kW) and you're in the ballpark on current technology just by reconfiguring. Something state of the art cuts a bit more and you're there.

I think anything <10 and it's great but starts to get less relevant, I have done a couple of long distance trips with a couple of SC stops in the Tesla and it's not that big of a deal. One 20min stop for a break 3 hours in, and another 45 minutes at a brewery 3 hours later, followed by some more driving and a 440 mile trip is knocked out with an hour of charging, which is likely about what you'd stop anyhow. Gotta hit the same brewery on the way back though, terrible. :)

Also, I've needed charging that fast exactly twice, so while a big selling point for a heavy road tripper, not super relevant to someone that starts charged fresh every day.

Will add though from what I hear from people tracking their Teslas.. that would be a HUGE game changer if they could get fast chargers at or very near the track.

Think about how much energy you are talking about and how much would have to be transferred in such a short period of time.

The cable would be HUGE and your electric meter would be spinning so fast it would fly on it's own.
Not to mention that the batteries might get a tad warm.

smoke and mirror's, not a chance this will be commercially available technology anytime soon

Yea, I want to see the numbers on how much amperage and voltage that takes. I can't imaging any normal home in this country had the electrical capacity to do it.

Think how much energy is in a gas tank full of gas. About that much has to get shoved into a battery in under 5 minutes? Wow. And andd in tow or three cars stopping all at once. They may have to go to a electrical substation to find the juice necessary.

It takes my car 5 minutes or so to fill up the 18 to 20 gallons I normally pump in. Gasoline is a very high energy density.

Hey Red Beard, can you whip us up some guess please. :D

The issue isn't the charger, it is the battery. IF what they are printing is true, they have made a much more efficient battery which obviates the need for cooling. That will be huge. The charging will just be what ever the batteries can handle.

I see they pick 80%. That is pretty much where you have to back off the maximum current Bulk Charge phase (constant current) and switch to Absorption (constant voltage).

They do not say what the kWh of the system are, but lets assume it is 100kWh battery. 80% = 80kWh. To charge that in 5 minutes will take 80*12 = 960 kW. Call it a Megawatt.

No way it would happen at a house, it'd have to be a dedicated charger.

I charge at 240v/40A at home (10kW) and it gets me about 35-45 miles of range per hour. Multiply that by 5 and use an entire 200A service to a house and you still only get to 175-225 per hour (50kW)

So now, not only are we talking about a dedicated charger, but a dedicated non-home charger, and all of those will need to be built.

Shoving a megawatt around and into a battery is just gonna make some heat. It has to.

Do capacitors charge faster than batteries?

This will not happen without some crazy MAJOR upgrades to every electrical grid out there. I've seen what it takes to plan and install a 1 MW customer, and thats for an expected typical commercial load.

1MW spikes at uncertain intervals? Ya right!

5 minutes, maybe if we're talking a battery bank swap.

I used to take a lot of road trips. One of the only things I loved about my Audi A6 was its range, I could drive it 550 miles on a tank. It would get 33 MPG with an 18 Gallon tank.

Why I loved it was because there was NEVER a 5 minute gas stop, EVER.. Even if I could pump 18 gallons in 5 minutes my family that poured out of the car and scattered had other ideas. I used to get annoyed and once timed it, the shortest we ever got back out of a gas station was 15 minute with 20 minutes being more the average. I always just wanted to get the drive over with.

If I had a Tesla and needed to stop for 25 minutes to get from 20% to 100% on the batteries it would only change my stopped time by 10 minutes and if you just drove 300+ Miles trust me, no one wants to get back in the car.

When I had my vacation home in NC the drive was 730 miles one way, I made that trip so many time I cannot even count how many. I can only remember one trip where I beat the estimated 10.5 hour drive the GPS tells me it should take. On that trip I was in my 911 and I was alone and I was flying.

Fast charging usually shortens overall battery life, I wonder what repeated 5 min charges do to a battery like that? As I understand they are pretty costly to replace.

On Nova last night they went through how we ended up with cars. The episode was interesting.

At the end of the show they mentioned graphene batteries. Thoughts?

Yea, my 5 minute fill up was at my local gas station, and just me getting gas and leaving.

On a road trip for sure finding a open pump, and pumping gas then go in to pee, and maybe get a snack or a drink will take a bit longer if it is just me. If my wife is with me it takes longer for sure.

I was really saying the pumping of a tank of gas is about 5 minutes.

The Tesla website allows you to map out a trip to see where you'd need to charge. Pretty fun to play with if you're considering electric. I can only see needing super quick charging on a road trip or for a commercial local driver, otherwise you'd want to charge at home where the rates are good and not bother with public charging (unless it's free or offers good parking).

If they could ever get capacitors to work, that would be a real game changer. They would charge really quick especially under braking. Imagine a car that would only need brake pads for emergency or track situations.

My wife drives our Hybrid EV 500+ miles a week and buys 2.3 gallons a week. The rest of the time it is on the charger in our garage doing its thing in the middle of the night while we sleep.

The only time I can see using a charging station is on a road trip.


I stand corrected, we use one downtown every Sunday. We go downtown to the green market and then chill under the trees in a park while a free concert takes place from 1-4 every Sunday afternoon. The Charging station we park at is solar powered and free of charge. We typically hook up with our battery at 30% (we run it down on purpose), when we leave it is usually charged to 100%. We get a free fill up every Sunday. :D

Flywheels.

a megawatt is a whole bunch of energy.
1 megawatt = 1,341.02 horsepower

this is the reality of EV that no-one talks about. we do not have the capacity for this. and capacity is expensive as hell.

would it make a difference in sales if you could charge in 10 minutes? hell yes! but I just can't fathom the changes needed to make that a reality for more than a few wealthy people in certain areas and at certain times of the day.

I do not think this is going to be a setup for the typical EV drivers garage. I can see this in commercial areas where one would need to stop and get charged back up real quick.

I have a 220 setup in my garage, it changed my electric bill $40 a month. Ironically, I changed out my Air conditioning a year earlier, we saw a drop of about $50-$60 a month in our summertime bill so our EV is not taxing the grid at all. As a household we have actually lessened our power usage despite adding a EV charger to our house.

I think these high speed chargers like Tesla is using at power stations will mostly be seen in commercial areas where power demands are already very high.

Meh.

https://aa1a5178aef33568e9c4-a77ea51...b733e67ea6.jpg

Quick look on google says a typical manufacturing facility uses 95kwh per sqft per year. By my calculations that means a medium sized 100k sqft factor has an average power draw of around 1MW if they operate continuously day and night. Peak usage would likely be much higher depending on context. of course you could do alot of 5min charges with 1 mW continuous.

I think this is mostly vaporware and designed to get some headlines, but 1 mW in the industrial sense doesnt seem that absurd especially considering the duty cycle would be quite low. the energy density of super caps is about 1/20 lithium ion, so if an EV had a 1000lb battery it would take about 10 tons of supercaps at the charging station to hold the equivalent charge. Then you may be waiting for your charger to charge depending on the utilization rate

OK its a little absurd, but no scifi

Not many, if any, people need to charge that fast at home. You're home, destination reached. It's only on trips where the destination is farther than your battery capacity that fast charging is an issue. You don't have a gas station at home, so why need a gas-up fast charger?

Exactly what I was thinking. It would only be needed rarely until more people go electric and there is time to scale up. It wasn’t that long ago that the whole idea of Tesla was unbelievable.

graphene based (enhanced) batteries are the big woo-woo right now, but I'll be surprised if any manf. has them (outside of a lab)


so... what is the technology here?

Piech is still playing it close to the vest. Here's a statement from the web article ↓

"Due to the ongoing patent process, we cannot comment more detailed information about our lithium ion cells at the moment. This much I can reveal: we were able to construct the inner workings of the cell in such a way that significantly stronger currents can flow, hardly any heat develops during charging and discharging, and the entire recuperation can be made much more efficient."

Talking to a guy I know at the local Porsche dealership he said Porsche has really up'd the game with their tech, so much so they will be licensing it out to other manufacturers. He said they are using capacitors to flash charge the batteries and they are not BS'ing about the capabilities.


I guess it will be coming to light soon enough. He is going down to drive the Taycan in June at the dealer launch.