The fundamental problem of high-wattage charges (say 500kW), isn't to deliver power from the charger to the car, but that there needs to be crazy amounts of grid capacity to support them.
A house has like 10kW peak sustained power consumption (an apt even less), which it rarely reaches, so a park of these fast chargers need the same infrastructure as a small town.
These loads are so huge
Cities like Beijing have strong industry and in general have the infrastructure to it, so it's relatively straightforward to install chargers like these. If you go out into the countryside, this infrastructure disappears, and won't see these fast chargers.
Most European cities barely have enough capacity to cover urban expansion, never mind to support this.
These articles suggest, its just a matter of putting down these stations, and that would solve the charger problem, but in truth, there's often a prerequisite of huge grid upgrades somebody has to build and pay for, which come with the unpleasant sight of these high voltage lines intruding into neighborhoods.
I wished articles lambasting the lack of fast chargers also mentioned this as well.
Sorry, but I think you're wrong on your concern: in China they specifically fix this issue with buffer batteries. From grid perspective, charging is no different than with regular, slow charging stations. You can still limit their capacity (as in cars that can be charged per 24h), the difference here is you can charge quickly.
This is a good compromise for the time being while the grid catches up with demand.
Batteries only help with peak loads, they also cost money and wear out. Let's do some math - a 10 car 500kW charger, with a ~30% occupancy, would draw a constant 1500kW from the grid, if we calculate 3kW average for a household(which is high), that would be the equivalent of 500 households.
In the Netherlands the energy network is undergoing a huge upgrade because of wind and solar- technologies nobody predicted in the 1970s.
Things used to be simple: big power station makes energy and lines transport it to every home.
Now you have vast wind farms far out on the North Sea and millions of buildings have solar panels.
And to top it all off electricity replaces gas for heating and cooking.
At least they're upgrading your network, over here in Australia they've realized (about 20 years after we became one of the biggest users of household solar) that too many people having solar makes the grid unstable and the load unreliable, so they want to start charging solar owners for feeding into the grid instead.
Imo one of the biggest wins of renewables + battery is you can skip most of that infrastructure - you can have solar panels on your roof, on the edge of town, and you can skip most of expensive transmission infrastructure.
As an certified electrical engineer, this is certainly a problem. The main issue is of course how much copper is burried underground and how big transformer capacity is.
The first solution is of course to try avoiding farst charging if possible by charging at home or at work over hours if possible. A faster charge will have to be a more expensive charge. Another solution that could ease things a little is to spread the load on the grid over time by drawing it from some local source (e.g. battery)
Imagine a gas station has a beefy energy storage from which it draws the current in short blasts while the battery itself draws it much more spread out over hours.
This is essentially how it is done in much smaller scales (in terms of time, energy and actual physical size) on printed circuit boards using capacitors. If you'd draw the current all the way back from the power supply any bursty load would affect the voltage on the power supply and thus show up in other psrts of the circuit.
But in the end more electrical energy demand by mobility will lead to more electrical demand, period. And as you rightly pointed out that means more infrastructure, more copper in the ground, bigger transformers, more powerplants.
Ah thanks for the expert opinion. I used to be an EE, but I've not been working in the field for a long time
Forgive me, but afaik you can't really run truly high voltage AC lines underground - the main issues are electrical arcing and capacitive ground coupling, which leads to losses. HVDC has its own issues as well, mostly having to do with electrolysis, and it being crazy dangerous.
I mean, you can, but it's going to be very expensive.
By the way, have there been studies of what a 100% EV society's infrastructure look like, especially in countries without access to cheap and abundant renewables? I feel it's going to be quite a challenge, and would only make sense economically as part of a broader reindustrialization effor (which for the record, I support).
As for batteries, I think solar/wind require those anyway, and if a solar farm is backed by a huge battery bank, those can probably supply these ludicrous kWs these chargers would need, but transmission is going to be a challenge.
I would love to read something that would go in depth on how we would support a renewable based grid that also supports powerful fast chargers, as this I feel this needs to be a part of a society-level project, and I'm growing tired of these 'China's building better electric chargers!!!'-style alarmist articles.
Yeah but I am not talking about high voltage AC under the ground, the bigger problem IMO is literally the last few kilometers to peoples houses. Everything before that costs money as well, but is usually better upgradable by design (at least over here in Europe).
I wonder if Gil Tal has ever used an EV as their daily vehicle.
I have had two EVs in the last three years - a Kona and an IONIQ 5. I have greatly enjoyed them both. But one thing was a downside that I just had to accept: poor charging.
Granted, I live in the Canadian Prairies full of small towns a fair distance apart. And it's not exactly progressive - I'm actually being taxed for owning an EV. The charging infrastructure is sparse with 50-100kW charges every 100km. On long distance trips I spend 1 hour charging for every 2 hours driving. To say that faster charging wouldn't make a meaningful difference is simply wrong. Sure, it doesn't have to be 5 minutes - even 10-15 would be enough - but current chargers don't get anywhere close to that, even with 350kW, which rarely if ever reach those charging speeds.
For driving around the city I never bat an eye. I have a level 2 charger in my garage and there's one at work that is decently priced should I ever need it. I never use a fast charger for local travel. But long distance travel is what people are worried about and having much faster charging would most certainly make a difference for me and for them.
> Sure, it doesn't have to be 5 minutes - even 10-15 would be enough - but current chargers don't get anywhere close to that
My car has a 83 kWh battery and charges at 150 kW, which, for 20% to 80% (what you want to generally do on a trip) means 20 minutes. 20 minutes of charge gets me 300 km, and I generally definitely want to stop for 20 minutes every 300 km or so.
I don't see how that's not "anywhere close" to 15.
I don't think RevEng was saying it is impossible to do technically. I believe they were saying the charging infrastructure near their home makes it impossible to do practically as the chargers are often limited to 50-100kW. Aging Wheels did a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouPiwt5hxXQ
I have also had two EVs and what you are saying does not resonate.
I may be in warmer weather but I would say I probably charge 15 minutes to go 250 km or more. Given that the family also wants to stop to eat, go to the bathroom, or just get out for a bit, it mostly feels like we are stopping when we want to and not for much longer. Typically, stretches of driving are longer than 250 km. We can go over 400 km at a time (but rarely do).
To be fair though, we have great charging infrastructure. There is going to be fast charging in the next town pretty reliably.
At home, day to day, we charge at home and the car is basically magic. You drive as much as you like every day and never think about “fuel” at all. The thing just works. Going back to the non-EV SUV is daily “range anxiety” as it always seems like I am late for something and wondering if I have enough fuel to make it without having to stop.
Don’t get me wrong. Faster charging would be great and I am not saying we have never wanted to leave 10 minutes sooner from a charging station. But I have not found it anywhere near as bad as you are saying, even now.
> On long distance trips I spend 1 hour charging for every 2 hours driving
In Spain, I take ~600km trips every once in a while. I just need to charge once in the middle of the trip, in a super-charger that is. And the charge is 25min maximum.
Your experience varies is basically opposite from my experience. Your situation is probably influenced, indeed, by the poor choice of EVs you purchased (range is the most important factor for me to buy) and the lack of superchargers around your area.
If an Ioniq 5 is a poor choice, I would love to know what a good choice is. Its energy usage is comparable to the vast majority of SUVs and it can charge at up to 227kW. The lack of good fast charger is certainly a difference compared to many areas.
Only the Long Range version of the Ioniq5 has decent range IMO. And BTW, the fact that it's an SUV is precisely a downside about it; smaller cars would have obviously more efficiency.
Faster charging improves things in more EV-friendly areas as well.
I live in Southern California, and if I take a trip on the weekend that is more than the 240mi. freeway range my Kona gets, I'm never worried about being stranded, but I have waited in line for an hour to charge; sub-10 minute charging would cut wait times too, and is probably necessary if the US both wants to electrify its transportation and still have people take road-trips on major holidays.
In remote areas, sudden load from fast chargers can cause a bit of trouble with the rest of the local grid. It may be that those rest stops can't yet support a fast charger without upgrading their transformers.
That's not nearly the problem that people think it is. Industrial and farm operations often use that much.
Upgrading is the problem though. Many of these stations were installed when 50kW was normal. With no other competition nearby there is no incentive to replace everything. It would mean new transformers and potentially even new lines.
It sounds like the more accurate framing, then, is "I'm not getting a tax break for having an EV". Which is disappointing sure, but not outrageous either.
That's the framing but it's also misleading. We are being charged more than a typical ICE driver would pay in gasoline tax. It's also listed as being for road maintenance, but in fact it goes into the general revenue, so it has nothing to do with road maintenance.
Alberta is imposing a charge on EV registrations, and they increased it again this year. At some point I'm hoping courts curtail their attempt at imposing gas cars but given how Canadian courts are hamstrung at obvious human rights issues in places like Quebec, I doubt they will do anything about Alberta either.
The issue is not paying our fair share, the issue is paying more than we would if we drove gas vehicles. They assume we drove X miles (I’m in Washington state) and that is not even close to what I actually drive (it’s much less, I could game it if I drove more than the C miles they compute the fee on, but I don’t need to drive that much).
Are you seriously comparing the number of people? That's silly. It's the amount paid per person. You pay so much in gas, I pay so much for my EV. For the same amount of driving, I am paying more than you do. That's the problem.
The issue is not paying our fair share, the issue is paying more than we would if we drove gas vehicles.
Perhaps in Washington State that is your issue, but that is not what we are discussing here.
The poster I was replying to lives in Alberta, and your experience in an entirely different country, in that state, has nothing to do with what they pay. Or whether what they pay is fair. And this point was not raised as a concern by the original poster.
Their only concern was paying any tax at all. Their concern was paying for road maintenance costs, period.
So about 50 cents per litre for both federal and provincial gas tax, which disappears if you charge at home. And yes, the federal tax counts, as the federal government transfers funds to the provinces from that tax, and to municipalities, and also gives additional grants to municipalities from that tax.
All which vanishes without a gas tax.
So that's around 1/3 to 1/2 of the price you pay at the pump.
Municipalities also sometimes add additional tax.
All said?
A good average for gas tank size might be 50 litres. Gas prices are typically over $1.20 / litre. So maybe $70 per fillup, which seems fair. Let's just pick $30 in tax per fillup.
I'm being generous here, as most EVs are as heavy as a truck, and cause more road damage than a gas car. And I'll also be more generous, and just say $20 per fillup in lost tax.
This figure, $20, is way below the actual lost tax. I expect this to be more like $50 lost per fillup, with the above logic (weight of vehicle, use of taxes, local taxes).
So with this extremely generous number of $20 per fillup, a yearly registration of $200, is the same as 10 tanks of gas of travel per year.
Or less than one fillup per month for a gas car.
This is obviously meant to be an average, and there are people which drive 200km per day. Others may almost never drive, but that's how averages work.
I have a very, very hard time seeing this as unfair.
I feel it is very, very low compared to what is collected from the gas tax currently.
The only other option is to have odometers inspected yearly, and a tax levied on actual distance driven. In as the tax is very very very generous, and only 40% of what I suspect the actual loss to be, very very very low at $200, few would be better off with a tax on actual distance driven.
Not to mention, a yearly inspection would have additional costs (re: taxes) for the whole administrative framework to do so.
All in all, Albertans seem to be paying far less than people driving gas cars, in tax.
But of course, you did the math before complaining about Alberta flat gas tax, right?
So if so, what is your complaint with this flat tax?
That some people might be buying at $50k CDN car, and only drive it less than 400km per month, and so unfairly pay? Because that's the equivalent tax being levied here.
I'll be very blunt. I find such complaints to be frivolous.
It will be unfair one way or the other. Washington state has a high gas tax by American standards (60 cents a gallon) but I only drive around 30 miles per week. I would need one tank of gas a month on my previous ICE car, and the gas tank took 13 gallons, so I was paying around $100/year in gas taxes. I pay $250/year surcharge for having an EV, so I’m definitely paying more (my EV is a compact rather than a sub-compact I had before, so I would lose some mileage there, although not enough to make such a huge difference).
I get it though, other people pay less. It really should be by mileage and weight, but privacy advocates blow a gasket when someone proposed to track vehicle mileage either in real-time or through yearly odometer gauge checks.
Reducing carbon emissions most certainly is a human rights issue. I absolutely can not breathe when I go to large cities. I live in a village, drive an electric, and charge it from rooftop solar.
You actually can breath in "large cities", unless you have a pre-existing health condition. Otherwise, all the people in those "large cities" would already be dead, and they'd cease being "large cities". Or at least, populated ones.
"Carbon emissions" is a human rights issue, just as 1000 other things are. Whether "reducing" carbon emissions is determined to be a right is not black and white as of yet.
Regardless, leveling a road tax has nothing to do with that. It is merely a tax to be inline with what everyone else pays. You may as well say you have a right to a free electric car too, or maybe a right to get 50% off.
You do realise the roads have to be maintained, yes? And that's what the tax on gas is for, yes? I assure you, endless environmentalists which don't drive anything at all, and see the construction of roads as an annoyance, would be upset at the idea of cars, any type of car, electric or otherwise, as bad. And are very upset at any sort of car being subsidized to increase adoption.
But of course, because you own an electric car, it's now a human rights issue that you get to pay less. Right?
I may have exaggerated. In large cities the air is significantly less comfortable to breathe.
> because you own an electric car, it's now a human rights issue that you get to pay less. Right?
No, why would you think that? It is only fair that electric car users, myself included, pay for the proportional damage and wear to the roads.
Now tell me why the polluting carbon-burning vehicles don't have a separate tax to repair the damage they do to the environment, e.g. climate change? How much would that tax cost?
Several people have said that they get much more range and charge much faster. I'm quite interested to know what your situation is: what is the efficiency of your vehicle in kWh/100km or Wh/km? At what rate are you able to charge with nearby chargers? How dense is the population of chargers in your area?
I'm aware that my situation is far from ideal, maybe even far from normal - I have no way to know. What I do know is that this is common for all of Canada outside of the major cities, and to the best of my knowledge is common for much of the USA too. This is a huge market to be left out if this is the EV experience for them. It's not sufficient if EVs only work in specific areas that are densely populated and have ample infrastructure. It becomes a chicken-and-egg situation where nobody wants an EV because the infrastructure sucks, but nobody wants to invest in infrastructure because there aren't many EVs to have as customers.
Here are the numbers for my 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5. It has a 77kWh battery, though only nominally - only 68kWh is actually usable. On long trips I will charge up to 90% and drive down to 20%, so that leaves me with 70% of the available capacity for use, or 47.6kWh. On the highway going 100-110km/h I spend about 20kWh/100km during the summer, 25kWh/100km during the winter (it gets down to -30C and you have to heat the cabin). That gives me about 240km range in the summer, 190km range in the winter. Since chargers are few and far between around here I usually have to stop every 100-150km to charge - chargers are typically that far apart on the highway.
At most my vehicle can charge up to 227kW. If I could get that consistently I would charge in 12.6 minutes. In practice I don't get anywhere near that. As I stated before, most chargers are 50-100kW in my area. There are some as high as 175kW, but they are in remote areas where chargers were only installed recently; all of the chargers along the main highways are older infrastructure that has been around for a few years and they are only 50kW. Thankfully, I actually get a consistent 50kW from those regardless of charge and temperature. That takes almost exactly an hour to charge. Going 100km/h with a range of ~200km that puts me at 1 hour of charging every 2 hours of driving.
Since the Tesla Supercharger network has opened up to non-Tesla vehicles, things have gotten a bit better, but only modestly. Despite the Superchargers being rated for 250kW, they run at 400V where my vehicle is on an 800V architecture. As a result I can only pull ~97kW from a Supercharger. This reduces the charging time to 30 minutes, which is manageable, but still a noticeable inconvenience. On an 8 hour drive this adds up to 2 hours of charging time, extending an 8 hour trip to 10 hours. I think you'll agree that's a significant increase.
In a nearby major city they did recently install 350kW chargers so I tried those out. Unfortunately, I happened to be travelling there on a cold winter day. I struggled to get up to 180kW, spending most of the time around 120kW. The battery preconditioning on this vehicle leaves much to be desired and it won't even turn on until you are within 50km of a stop on the nav (no manual override), despite it taking well over 30 minutes to get the battery up to temperature. The charging rate is severely limited below 0C and doesn't come up to full until about 20C. 20C is the high on a typical summer day around here; spring and autumn hover around 10C-15C. This means you only get full charging speeds in ideal conditions; anything else is noticeably worse.
For efficiency, my experienced 20kWh/100km of pure highway driving seems to be around average. EV-database.org lists the average WLTP (a blend of city and highway driving) as 190Wh/km, or 19kWh/100km. The Ioniq 5 AWD is listed at 180Wh/km, which is similar to my experience when combining both city and highway. The best are the Tesla Model 3 RWD at 130-140Wh/km which is quite impressive. Other small coupes have numbers about that around 150-160. The Ford Mach-e AWD is also common around here and comes out to 202Wh/100km, so notably higher. So other than comparing it to the most efficient RWD sedan, comparing it to other AWD SUVs it is quite normal. Around here, most people drive AWD SUVs or trucks because winter can be nasty. (You can drive FWD sedans - I did for 20 years - but most people get AWD SUVs or trucks if they can afford it because it's much better.)
So this is my experience. I hope it explains why I say that charging still needs to improve in many ways. Different vehicles will have different efficiency. Different areas will have different weather and availability of chargers. Both seem to be getting steadily better with time. But outside of ideal conditions, charging is still a serious downside for many people and it is a blocker to adoption to many. Even at my office several people have recently purchased EVs but had to swallow the pill that long trips were going to suck. Until consistently good efficiency and fast charging become widespread, EVs will remain a niche in many areas where the downsides are simply too great.
Gas pumps in the US are artificially capped at 10 gallons per minute, and a gallon of gasoline is about 33kWh, so petrol cars in the US “charge” at 330kWh/min ~= 20MW. But most cars only turn about a third of that into motion, so let’s say 7MW equivalent? While BYD’s 1.5MW is amazing, it seems a stretch to call it “almost as fast as gas pumps.”
Diesel pumps for trucks typically pump much faster too. And diesel is nearer 40kWh/gal. We have a ways to go!
(The energy density of oil is amazing: a fully loaded A380 with 84,500 us gallons of jet fuel at 37.5 kWh per, that’s over 3TWh. Which is about twice the capacity of all the li-ion batteries made in 2025. We have a ways to go!)
99.9% of use cases of EVs can charge at home/work/shop, don't need separate infrastructure, logistics and supply chains for delivery of electricity. There is a very small fraction of EV trips that need charging on the go. The vast majority of trips are under 3 (or 5 miles).
In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's. People that have access to home-charging, worry about range. The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging.
> In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's.
Most streets have street lighting and electricity, easy to add chargers to lamp posts. NYC probably hasn't heard of street lighting yet?
> The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging.
I think it would be an impressive feat of engineering to charge cars while they are on the move. I like how you think, cars are mostly idling in traffic, we can consider them as stationary, and charge cars while they idle!
Parking is not assigned, sometimes you got to drive around for 20 minutes to find a spot to park over-night and its not guaranteed to be next to a street light.
By idling in traffic, I meant that we would love ev's since most of the time we are just wasting gas and fuming up our own neighborhoods.
> This is yet again a very US-centric view where you assume people are living in house with a garage.
It is a US-centric view to think that the rest of the world is hunter gatherer tribes. Most people live in some kind of constructed building which has electricity, indoor plumbing, a place to park a car. Before that building is built, the first infrastructure that is ready is electrical, without which most of the tools required for building a home do not work.
A garage is not a sine qua non for EV charging. A place to park is. If a person is buying a car, they would've already figured out a place to park. That place is right next to a building with electricity unless you are sleeping in the woods.
I don't understand why people think that running a cable (a few feet) from the nearest building to a car is impossible.
Fair but any EV owner knows after a bathroom break, quick stretch and maybe a bite to eat every 1-2hr while charging and you never even notice the stopping to charge time.
As an EV owner, I'm not sure I agree with this. I'd make less stops if not for the car's need. That said, it's a compromise I'm willing to accept since 99% of the time I'm not road tripping but commuting, and the EV is oh so nice for the commute.
I am not EV owner but that’s not how like my car trips. I can drive 4 hrs nonstop and then expect to “charge” my car in 5 minutes at the pump with a bathroom break, and be on the road.
Sometimes we like a more leisurely drive, but it should be up me to decide when that happens not the car.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with liking how EV behave, it’s just it’s not for everyone. And I think a lot of recent pullback from EVs (Ford, Honda) kinda points that way. With as fast a charger as a gas pump situation may change though, so let’s what happens!
I felt the same way as you until I took a few road trips in sn EV.
I drove about 20 hours in two days. The thing that struck me is how refreshed I felt when I arrived. Normally I'd be dead on my feet and the travel day would be lost completely but I was ready for activity on arrival. I was very surprised.
I have heard that the combination of self-driving and mandatory 30-60” breaks every few hours is very relaxing. I look forward to trying it some day. Meanwhile…
I would be very wary of taking my bolt on a long journey. I have no confidence that what few fast chargers are out there would actually work, or be available, and I wouldn’t want to plan my journey around charging stops, with copious backup plans! It would be very stressful!!
Not to mention that my bolt has only 300mi range in summer, and less than 200mi in winter. And fast chargers are rare enough that I’d be scared to get anywhere near the limit.
By contrast, my Elantra hybrid has a ~600mi range. And I can “charge” it anywhere.
The past is still here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.
e-GMP platform (IONIQ 5, etc.) is really good for road trips.
At least in summer temperatures it reliably charges to 80% under 20 minutes. Its range estimate is quite good, and I can depend on it to know when I can skip a charging stop (when I first drove an EV I was freaking out about the 20% state of charge like it was a cellphone. Now I roll to the chargers with 2% left when it saves time).
It depends where you live, but infrastructure in the UK and EU has got good enough to the point I don't need backup plans. Chargers are as common as McDonald's (often quite literally). If a station is slow or busy, I can just go to the next one (and they are in clumps often enough that even with a low battery it's not a big deal).
Ok, so how about: we made about as much in batteries last year as all the A380s in the world can hold fully loaded in jet fuel. (There aren’t many of them!) Not as impressive, but still.
You're right that it seems close enough, but only as long as we're talking about the time it takes a single vehicle to "fill up". Taking 2 minutes vs 8 minutes to fill up your car doesn't matter to you personally, but it is a significant difference to those installing and operating the fill up infrastructure since it takes 4 times as many charging points as it does gas pumps to serve the same volume of customers in a given period of time.
In a lot of cases that probably won't matter since chargers can be installed in more places than gas pumps and for gas stations that serve mainly local customers I'd expect demand for an equivalent charging station to be lower since some people will charge at home at least some of the time. But things like highway rest stops could be more of a challenge since you'd expect customer volume for EV charging to be similar to the demand for fuel so you'll need more charging stations at each stop to handle the increased time it takes each customer.
The North American car market is more subsidized than any other. It is why it is so uncompetitive.
North America imports cars in large quantities from every car making region in the world (that is not banned). What parts of the world sell high volumes of NA vehicles? They are not banned, just unwanted.
There’s controlling competition in your own country and dominating global markets. Nothing wrong with either. It’s not like it’s not happening anywhere else in the world.
It just makes me laugh when people complain about China propping up it's industry to complete globally. The US has overthrown governments to protect its geopolitical priorities.
I've got no love for China, but I'm not gonna shed a tear for a large corporations crying over someone else having an unfair advantage.
Neither article really explains how they are able to charge this fast, aside from “vertical integration” and slightly increased energy density in the battery design. No real details on the charging technology itself.
there needs to be battery chemistry improvements. Otherwise, with existing batteries, charging at these speeds will cause too much heat and shorten battery life span. BYD is offering 1.5MW charging with increased battery lifespan and without increasing the heat dissipation requirements. Another improvement compared to current crop of batteries is charge curve. Charging from 80 to 95%, BYD batteries can handle higher power than current batteries at MAX
BYD did not go to specifics about their blade 2.0 battery that enables this, but there has to be battery chemistry and manufacturing advancements. CATL shared some details on their 12C LFP batteries before, they lowered li-ion mobility resistance, increased how the anode and cathode can accept more li-ions at faster rates. Another improvement for blade 2.0 battery is the charge curve is much better. 80 - 90 % can have much higher charging rates.
With 5 minute charging, suddenly conventional gas stations can be used for EVs just as they are for ICE. Nice thing about 'plugging in' as opposed to 'filling up' is that a charging car can be left completely unattended (while you go to pay, get a coffee, or whatever).
Seems that the technological barriers have been overcome, now we just need to build out the infrastructure - which could be as simple as retooling existing gas stations. No need to electrify every parking space or such like.
Yes, retooling gas stations is the way to go. Already happening in Norway where stations now show the price of kWh in addition to gas and diesel prominently on signs by the road. Charging is just a different kind of pump.
Charging stations don't need all the environmental equipment that gas stations have to catch oil and gas run off. I guess we could convert old gas stations that don’t need extensive environmental cleanup, but building new ones just to charge EVs is huge overkill when you just need some space in a parking lot.
That's a good point. Charging stations benefit from being a service station too though, with amenities and a cafe etc, since people want something to do while they charge. So a gas station is a better candidate than a parking lot when decisions are made for where to place the new charging infrastructure. Lots of other factors too of course.
I prefer grocery stores because I can run in and grab something quickly. The only problem is that charging is often too quick to do any real shopping, so a smaller convenience store makes sense also.
a key difference between a gas station and a parking lot is that people only park at a gas station to get gas (and have a rest, get dinner, bathroom break etc), so, assuming quick charging, you need less chargers as they will spend less time not charging a fully charged car left parked on them. Gas station staff can ensure charging spots are utilized correctly as they do now for the pumps.
Also everyone understands how gas stations work, so it is easier to slip EVs into the social fabric.
We need grid scale batteries anyways to capture excess solar (curtailment) at zero cost, or for a profit. Put these in distributed locations that can also charge cars and we solve 2 problems at once.
>Just taking an existing fast charger with 150- or 350-kW capacity and swapping in the latest and greatest 1,500-kW chargers wouldn’t get anyone faster speeds. The system would need all new “pipes”—grid capacity—to actually move that much current.
The grid doesn't necessarily mean "pipes" or power lines. You don't build a pipeline to every gas station. Mobile charging robots work pretty well in China.
Also I guess they could put a large battery at the charging station so it can take say a steady 200kw from the grid and be able to kick out 1500kw for ten minutes occasionally. That could also charge from cheap off peak electricity.
This is what everyone is already doing, even for relatively small and slow dispensers.
It's simply cheaper to have on-site batteries. It makes installation work with a smaller connection to the grid, and makes it possible to install chargers in more places without upgrading the grid connection.
Energy arbitrage is profitable on its own, so EV charging stations are almost just an excuse to get some land and a grid connection for more batteries.
Supercaps are viable for this sort of short term charge and discharge. The much maligned donut labs is suspected to be a license built Nordic hybrid supercap battery model
Look range is not a huge issue if it is reliably above 200miles. This means that the 60% of that (120miles) covers your typical max commuting radius, and 80% of that the time you typically you would need a toilet break (3-4 hours).
My old gas guzzler had a 180-250 miles of range, and I did not have range anxiety (I did have gas cost anxiety tho)
The issue always was speed of charging and abundance of chargers. Today things are a bit better as you can find 200kW chargers on the big highways. But still they are not abundant, you need to plan.
I have a feeling that half the reason they're doing this is that they don't have a good idea how to increase energy efficiency.
Case in point:
2026 BMW i3 - 900km WLTP from a 108kWh battery.
2026 Denza Z9 GT - 800km WLTP from a 122kWh pack.
The former charges at a maximum of 400kW, while the latter at over twice that which saves... about 10 minutes at the charger after 450km of driving(12 vs 22 minutes approx).
Many such examples with Chinese manufacturers putting 700kg battery packs into the vehicles just to be able to say it's this and that kWh.
I don't know about anyone here but after 400km or so I'm done and want to at least stretch my legs.
I had to do a double take: remembering the i3s as the little almost SmartCar-sized EVs. Great cars, I still see a few around here, but I couldn't imagine them extending the range of those to 900km!
Turns out they just released the i3 sedan, which is like a 3-series. And good to see they're making the design similar between the new 3-series and the new i3. I like the i4, but really need something more 3-series in size.
Yes that new one is not an i3, not even in spirit. The original i3 was super light, quirky, fun, innovative in so many ways. They just didn't sell enough. People wanted more boring cars.
It was also $50k for a car that only got 120-150mi of range. It was a joke car. The reason it didn’t sell well is because it was a compliance car, not because it didn’t innovative. If it had a reasonable range (say, Chevy Bolt 200-250ish) in all electric for the same price, I bet it would have sold much much better.
If you can get a megawatt into the car batteries without setting them on fire, that's game over for petrol cars. And for the other electric vehicles that haven't worked it out yet. Only reason I'm on petrol is unwillingness to wait an hour to recharge the car.
The rest of the infra is fine if that can be done. Array of batteries and/or capacitors at the supply point and draw continuously from the grid.
Most entertainingly run a diesel generator on site if that doesn't work out. Lines up well with basing them at the existing fuel stations, got the diesel supply already sorted out.
Put a bunch of solar near it when you can. Maybe sell back to grid, nice to have the extra capacity available.
All comes down to capital deployment at that point. Do the calculations on how much to charge for slow car charge vs fast charge, fallback to slow with an apology/discount when the infra is struggling etc.
Huge news. Iff the cars don't catch fire when plugged in.
I have as far as I'm aware the cheapest 800v car on sale in the US (Hyundai Ioniq 5) and in the right weather conditions a 20-80% charge is legitimately 10 minutes.
The weather conditions do unfortunately matter. Travelling during the post-Christmas blizzard last year was very much less than ideal. The battery heaters in my car could not keep up with how bitterly cold and windy it was and I had multiple 30-45 minute charging sessions because it wasn't ever warm enough to accept more than ~120kW.
I'm looking forward to traveling with it in the warm season and seeing how things compare.
Now (in China) there are also cars with sodium-ion batteries, instead of lithium-ion batteries.
Sodium-ion batteries have the disadvantage of a worse energy per weight ratio, but they also have an advantage (besides the fact that they will become cheaper when their production will be more mature): they work much better at low temperatures, not losing capacity or charging speed until minus 40 Celsius degrees.
Therefore, they may become preferable in colder climates, where they will not have the problems described by you.
> If you can get a megawatt into the car batteries without setting them on fire, that's game over for petrol cars
Chinese people are complaining about this. In highway service stops, the megawatt charger is too fast, the 20%-95% charging is done before people returns from the toilet. Realistically, the charging speed should take around 10 minutes in average for everyone.
Or there could be some price surges. You are in a really hurry pay some 1.2x price for 3 min megawatt charge, or flat price for a regular 10 min charge.
For me EVs already won when charging got down to 20 minutes.
EVs charge unattended. It takes less of my own time to leave EV plugged in parked next to a place I want to be at, than to go drive to a gas station and stand there holding a smelly nozzle.
Agreed. Right now EVs are almost strictly superior for day to day usage (only real downside is that the higher weight goes through tires faster). But for road trips, combustion vehicles blow them out of the water. If I'm taking a 12 hour road trip, no way am I going to take an EV if that means I will have to spend an extra hour or two charging it.
My wife has an EV and it's genuinely really nice. But until they get the charging experience on par with the speed of filling up a gas tank, we will always have one of our two cars be a combustion car, to give us that extra flexibility for long trips.
Based on the figures here, they’re claiming around 400 miles of range added in 300 seconds (60% of the full 677 mile range); contrast this with around 100 seconds for a typical gas pump (8 gal/min) and typical efficiency (30 mpg). It suggests that you’d need around 5MW chargers to truly get to the speed of a gas pump.
On the other hand, 5 minutes is already a huge improvement over 15-30 minutes, and it’s fast enough to remove much of the friction of recharging an EV.
Really wish this kind of tech would come to North America…
Although the thought of getting an electric car has passed through my mind on a few occasions, I'm not 100% familiar with the intricate technical details. (for some reason, the tax incentives where I live are still in favor of continuing with the small petrol car I have. Taxes are primarily a function of weight in the Netherlands, and anything besides a lightweight Dacia Spring would imply significantly higher monthly expenditure for me).
What I'm wondering w.r.t. this article is: wouldn't such fast charging shorten the battery lifespan?
I have experience with ebike batteries. Bosch in particular, with very decent 29E samsung cells, that after 70k km or so, basically halved their capacity. I imagine this effect is severily reduced with a car battery because there are a lot more than 10p, so all the wear is distributed more evenly, and 29E are very old technology.
Research on the current EVs shows that they degrade by on average 2.3 % of original capacity a year, but there is a strong dependency on how much the vehicle is used and how often it is DC fast charged, i.e. there is time based degradation and usage based degradation.
Low use vehicles have degradation of 1.5 % a year, heavily used vehicles mostly slow charged had degradation of 2.2 % a year and heavily used vehicles mostly fast charged had highest degradation of 3 % a year.
Now before you think that means the capacity will halve in X years (33, 23 and 17), the article also notes that the degradation is not linear and it was faster in new vehicles and then slowed down - with no way to know if it will slow down further or continue in this manner, etc, until we have a sufficient sample of 20 years old modern EVs.
> the article also notes that the degradation is not linear
Battery degradation is affected by multiple processes which respond primarily to different factors, such as heat, cycles or just time.
This[1] paper goes into some detail about that, and also notes that the typical way batteries were evaluated for longevity in the lab significantly overestimates the degradation compared to batteries used with real-world dynamic loads.
Some quotes:
We found that dynamic cycling enhances battery lifetime by up to 38%. Moreover, we determined the window for the tip-over C-rate that balances time-induced ageing and cycling ageing for this commercially relevant chemistry to be approximately between 0.3C and 0.5C, in the range of realistic average C-rates.
Figure 4a,b illustrates that the degradation is initially dominated by the loss of lithium inventory (QLi). [...] However, as the batteries age, additional degradation mechanisms become important. On the one hand, the positive electrode capacity loss dominates and is impacted by the rest fraction at high SOC [...]
On the other hand, the negative electrode capacity loss (which is less than the positive electrode capacity loss) is impacted by the DoD [...]
Figure 4d shows that, in particular at low average C-rates, when the DoD is beyond 85%, the negative electrode capacity degrades more rapidly, while cells avoiding deep discharge have more preserved negative electrode capacities, in agreement with Fig. 3e. In addition, the DoD has no impact on the positive electrode capacity (Fig. 4e).
I picked 20 years arbitrarily, what I meant is that we don't have data on how modern EV batteries will look when 20 years old, because they have not been around that long.
The whole LFP chemistry is pretty new, on automotive timescales, and lot of the older data on degradation comes from the first few generations of Nissan Leaf, which did not have battery heating and cooling.
Rule of thumb for modern EVs is to not care about the battery at all. They are expected to last longer than the car. I would doubt even faster charging significantly changes this, or if it does it’s worth the trade off to those who need it.
I believe you meant to write “10S” instead of 10p. I’m not 100% sure, but you were talking about e-bike batteries, which are often 36V, made out of 10 cells (or banks of cells) in series. The nominal voltage of most lithium chemistries is 3.6-3.7V.
EV batteries have many more cells in series, for example my car is 104S, and 800V cars have (obviously) more than 200 cells in series.
And the longevity of car batteries isn’t about wear being distributed “evenly” (a healthy battery can’t really wear “unevenly”, you always load all cells at once). EVs take care of their batteries, they cool them, heat them, balance them periodically, and they don’t actually pull that much power from them. They also keep the cells within pretty conservative voltage limits.
Indeed, I meant 10S. And what I meant by load being distributed along more cells, is that since you have many more cells, current drawn from each is lower. Which greatly prolongs the lifetime.
And hence the question I had with charging too fast. Since discharging faster clearly wears them more quickly, surely charging faster has a similar effect, since it's mostly the reversed process? A question probably easily answered with a query to a LLM.
“Number of cells” doesn’t really tell you anything about current and how it will affect the battery. The number of cells in series gives you the nominal voltage of the entire battery, and the P number (number of cells in parallel) rarely tells you anything useful — three 2000 mAh cells in parallel are equivalent to one 6000 mah cell, and both approaches are valid and used.
What you care about is actually the mass of the cells, basically the total weight of the active material. More material means higher capacity and can withstand more current.
For example, my car is 104S and that’s it, no parallel connections, but the individual cells are huge (~170 Ah each).
Is this how the US falls behind? Missing technological improvements due to blind disagreements with Chinese/etc, combined with inability to update infrastructure? (Unclear how/why but datacenters being stood up so quickly seems like an exception to US’s bad construction)
I think it's difficult to turn around, unless the mud is cleansed -- but most likely the mud doesn't want to be cleansed so it would rather take the whole pond with it.
I mean if you really think about it china already has or is on the verge of:
- energy independence
- ASML level microchip production
- the SOTA of AI
- citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
- strong local manufacturing
- eastern world support
- yuan recognized as a stable world currency
But they do suffer from issues as well:
- Aging population
- Autocracy (or well, one party system)
- Brain drain (better funding and security in the US and Europe, US has managed to alienate a lot of very promising figures so it's closer to just Europe, but capital markets in Europe are still hit and miss)
It's completely understandable why US is freaking out, china's future still looks a lot more promising than the one US find themselves in.
> citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
It's certainly not to China's extent, but is America really that opposed to surveillance and lack of privacy?
Yes, we tend to raise a huge stink when evidence of such comes to the surface.
But actions speak louder than words, and through our actions we already largely accept surveillance and a lack of privacy.
Everyday consumer apps are some of the worst offenders. Our social media apps listen to us, Amazon Ring doorbells are allegedly accessed by ICE (though Amazon denies it), Flock cameras abound (not to mention the fact they're poorly secured so who knows who else is watching other than the municipalities Flock contracts with), companies own much of our data and sell them to myriad unknown sources on a whim. There are too many examples to list.
No, it's not as severe as China. But we're certainly not trending in the right direction.
The american government pretends to care, but the moment you look deeper (snowden leaks), it's clear that they don't. But the fact still stands, the population is mostly against surveilance while chinese just keep their head down.
They have to keep their head down for fear it will get cut off (figuratively speaking, mostly). I doubt the majority of Chinese civilians are happy to be in a repressed state such as the one they're in.
And unfortunately it's pretty clear the current administration is working hard to enact a similar chilling effect on free speech. It's hard to see how we avoid becoming a similarly surveilled and repressed state if there were a third term.
> They have to keep their head down for fear it will get cut off (figuratively speaking, mostly). I doubt the majority of Chinese civilians are happy to be in a repressed state such as the one they're in.
Around 100 million Chinese people travel abroad every year, and they all return to their country of their own free will. Go to China and see it for yourself. Talk with people, you would be surprised. Go to Shanghai and visit the provinces. This is not North Korea, you can talk with people normally. The majority of them will tell you that they are happy with how much their lives have improved over the last five decades. Every five years during those decades, life got better and better for most of them. And if you read about their history, you will see that this is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (more than 2,000 years since the Qin Dynasty) in which stability and order are prioritized over political pluralism.
I can't say I'm as knowledgeable of Chinese history as you seem to be, so I appreciate the information. And I may have used less than accurate phrasing when I said that I thought Chinese people are likely unhappy to be in a repressed state.
Perhaps my comment should have been more specific about the fact I was referring to not having any freedom of speech when it comes to criticizing the government.
But as a thought experiment, what happens once the government does something unpopular? Or once the economy is no longer thriving?
The masses tend to be pacified when their basic needs are met and the unspoken social contract is upheld. But I'd be curious to see how the people react if the fallout from the ongoing real estate crisis in China continues to persist and affect middle-class people as just one example.
China certainly has a long history of centralized bureaucratic governance. It also has a long history of silencing its critics. They've disappeared countless heads of companies or organizations and prominent individuals as well (#WhereIsPengShuai). It was not that long ago that hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in Tianenmen Square (which is wiped from the record in China of course).
So sure, quality of life has generally gotten better for many people living in China. I don't think that really negates my point about Chinese citizens needing to stay in line for fear they will also be disappeared or worse.
You've shifted the argument. "China restricts freedom of speech, especially criticism of the government" is true. But that is not the same claim as "most Chinese people are unhappy, living with their heads down in fear of being disappeared". China is authoritarian and heavily censors speech but broad support for the system can still exist in an illiberal state, especially when people feel their lives have improved materially. China lifted nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty over the past 40 years. Independent long run survey work from (if I remember correctly it was Harvard's) found extremely high satisfaction with China's central government, including 95.5% in around 2016.
The real question is whether your picture of ordinary Chinese life is accurate. And IMO it mostly isn't. This is not North Korea. Mainland residents made 291 million exit/entry trips in 2024 alone. There was a survey that found many respondents were willing to complain to the government or even protest over concrete issues like pollution, which is not how people behave if society is defined mainly by universal terror. So the better description is that China has hard political red lines, but normal daily life for most people is not "stay silent or vanish".
> They've disappeared countless heads of companies or organizations and prominent individuals as well (#WhereIsPengShuai).
The Peng Shuai case became a major Western media story, yet the controversy lasted only a few weeks before the international attention faded. Meanwhile, the WTA eventually backed down from its boycott threats. This illustrates how these incidents are often weaponized for geopolitical narratives rather than representing systematic policy.
More broadly, every country has mechanisms to deal with corruption, fraud, and abuse. China's anti corruption campaign has prosecuted hundreds of thousands of officials. The difference is that in China, accountability flows through Party mechanisms rather than Western style independent judiciaries.
> It was not that long ago that hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in Tianenmen Square (which is wiped from the record in China of course).
That was over 35 years ago in 1989, so longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Berlin Wall. You're basicallt judging present day Germany by conditions in 1945. China's government, economy, and society have transformed fundamentally since then.
> I don't think that really negates my point about Chinese citizens needing to stay in line for fear they will also be disappeared or worse.
The assumption that 1.4 billion people live in constant terror is simply not consistent with what we observe. If the level of fear you describe were accurate, would we not expect to see mass emigration rather than the world's largest annual outbound tourism? Would we not see economic collapse? The voluntary return of over 100 million Chinese travelers annually many of whom have the means to stay abroad tells you something significant about where people actually want to live.
Predictions that Chinese society is one downturn away from revolt have been made for decades, and they have repeatedly been wrong.
An authoritarian system can be repressive and still enjoy genuine mass support. In China's case, the evidence strongly suggests that both things are true at once.
The CCP's legitimacy rests not merely on performance but on a coherent worldview that China's developmental challenges require a unified national direction rather than gridlocked partisan competition. For a country that experienced a century of humiliation, civil war, and famine, stability is existential.
You wrote that quality of life improvements "don't really negate" your fear based argument. But I'd ask: at what point does aggregate human welfare matter more than ideological purity? If a governance system has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty while maintaining social order and national dignity, on what grounds do outsiders declare it illegitimate?
The Chinese people are not waiting for Western validation. They're building a civilization according to their own traditions and values.
What is that “choice”? Surely you aren’t like those yokels in the south that think a “militia” running in the woods can take on the the US military or even a decent SWAT force
Being willing to fight for what you think is right even though there is no hope of winning is a choice you can make without being a tacticool yokel that doesn't understand the tech gap between the people and their masters.
You're presuming that if they had a choice, they wouldn't accept it.
The reality is that chinese goverment is - overall - delivering results.
People will accept things that bring good outcomes.
There's also upsides from the surveilence and the way things are done in China which makes it way more resilient from outside influence and disruptive bad actors.
Now I don't want the same things in my country, but it suits China to some extent.
How much more surveillance and lack of privacy is there than the US? The US also has
- surveilled cities and less dense places through doorbell cams
- surveilled digital communications
- social credit scores (try getting a bank account if you've opted out of things like lexisnexis etc)
It’s not even “falling behind”, it’s willfully jamming heads in sand and actively blocking innovation so the legacy US OEMs can fall further behind and become less relevant.
The country is doing the same thing on multiple fronts as fast as possible
Data Centre builds are being managed by the tech bro companies aren't they? Don't they follow a much different set of rules than 'public' construction? (for better and worse).
China is what happens when you put scientists and engineers in charge [1][2].
20 years ago China had a single high speed rail link in Shanghai going to the airport. Now they have more than 30,000 miles of high speed rail where they've bootstrapped all the civil engineering, they make their own trains, etc. The system handles over 4 billion trips annually and they built the entire thing for an estimated $900 billion [3], which is now less than the US spends on the military in a single year.
Every $1 you spend on the military is $1 you don't spend on housing, healthcare, education, roads, trains and other infrastructure. Eisenhower warned about this 60+ years ago [4].
On a semi related note, military leaders in the US have been warning about the dangers of the American deficit and have a long history of trying to cut waste by getting rid of weapons programs and military bases they don’t need but are constantly blocked by the civilian leadership in Congress because of the job loss.
Xi is the first President/leader China has had who literally never worked another job outside of politics and doesn’t speak a foreign language. They gave him a degree in chemical engineering when the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution but he never even had to pretend to use it. Hu, Jiang, and Deng actually worked as engineers and spoke languages besides Chinese (Russian and/or English).
Despite all that, Xi has done really well for China. I was totally predicting the opposite given that Xi was clearly a departure from the technocratic leaders that previously ran China (I thought Xi was a Mao throwback).
Xi is a fascinating figure. I had real concerns when he pushed through repealing term limits. I thought this could be another Putin but that hasn't been the case.
First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Second, real estate speculation was rampant in China for years but Xi quietly popped the bubble more than a decade agao. The property market is still in a dire state but he took the long-term view that housing should be for, well, housing, not investment. He did this by basically increasing the margin requirements that ultimately caused the Evergrade default. I think history will show this was the correct decision.
Third, Xi grew up as "Mao royalty". His father was one of Mao's lieutennants and he was a privileged child of that circle. But when he was a teenager, his father was purged in the Cultural Revolution and was ultimately expelled from the CCP. Xi repeatedly tried to join the party and ultimately succeeded then spending years quietly working in backwaters.
Lastly, Xi has quietly purused a policy of not relying on the West. Investments in renewable energy has been truly massive. Watch in the coming years as China catches up to ASML and TSMC with EUV, a technology that US has embargoed from export to China.
>First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Anti-corruption pushes in the government are 100% purges, just under a different name. As for Jack Ma, wasn't he targeted because he said something that the censors really didn't like all while pushing some finance app? My memory is hazy as to why it happened, but it certainly wasn't because he was wealthy.
There were lots of red flags with Xi, and I’m afraid the world will learn the wrong lessons from his success. Maybe Democracy really is overrated, after all it gave us Trump…twice. The world looks at the USA and China as role models, and only the latter don’t look like a complete clown.
He did suffer from the cultural revolution but afterward he was elevated with strong preference. He even lost one of those Chinese “elections” where they take the top 20 out of 21 candidates, and they still let him through.
Jack Ma’s situation wasn’t corruption though. He simply made the mistake of publicly criticizing the government’s economic policy. He was disappeared shortly after. Then he reappeared a few months later and he has been on his best behavior since.
> First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Uh, interesting take… I think many would say he was silenced/disappeared by the CCP for daring to openly speak against it.
Unfortunately, a corrupt autocracy with a strategy seems more likely to win the capitalist arms race than a wealthy but feckless democracy. It’s only slightly ironic that said autocracy calls itself communist.
Functioning democracies are inherently authoritarian. The simplistic, textbook definition of dictatorship, which in the West is generally used to define the foreign other, has no basis in reality.
This vision holds because it presupposes that the only thing people care about is political freedom, when in reality there can only ever be one political class and political freedom is largely about some other political class trying to take control because the current system doesn't favour them in some way.
Western democracies, at their worst, have a largely permanent political class who is elected every year under the pretext of democratic legitimacy. Eastern dictatorshpis, at their best, have a government that is continuously rotated to ensure competent implementation gaining legitimacy from delivery.
Both are contextual and the position along the autocracy axis largely depends on implementation. Whether people can actually vote is irrelevant (Europe is generally one of the worst examples of this, elections constantly, most election produce governments that polls under 20% within months...it is very strange that people call this democracy).
For the majority of Americans, “the US falling behind” is not something they care about. The principal thing they care about is not whether the whole is ruined but whether they have an appropriate portion.
An American would prefer that a field make 1 unit of rice if everyone got 1/n units. This is different from cultures where the preference is that you maximize your wellbeing (older America) so that if someone could figure out how to make the field make 10 units of rice, it’s okay if he makes 8 units and everyone else gets 2/n units.
The modern American cultural optimum aims to minimize |x_i - x_j| while growth cultures attempt to maximize x_i. An ironic reversal of roles.
America is also, fundamentally, a divided country where people disagree over basic things (such as the distribution of rice) and there is a massive industry dedicated to amplifying that division.
On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics.
Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.
Maybe. Agree that zero-sum thinking sucks. You gotta grow the pie. But. You also have to share the big pie.
In your example, the current crisis can be represented as:
A field exists and produces 1 unit.
A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.
No other country in the world has anything like the Republicans in the US, who are the only major political party in the world to oppose the existence of man made climate change.
There may be political parties in the rest of the world that say that the cost of tackling climate change is too high, but they don’t dispute the factual reality of it.
The Republicans were in this position between about 2008 and 2014 when their leaders were McCain and Romney, but Romney’s lack of insanity inspired a massive backlash within the crazy part of American society that then made Donald Trump their primary winner in 2016 as a repudiation to the not completely insane Republican leadership.
I know HN loves to pretend that the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, but this can be shown to be objectively false by comparing to political parties abroad. Democrats are a normal European center left to center right party with all the flaws that brings with them.
Europe is third since the 2000s. The pushed the Euro to try to limit it (and from the mouth of someone who was present when they pushed, it was also caused by the black Wednesday of 92, the attacks on currencies increased, and the cost to rebuff them too).
And yes, basically, no one should include europe in the comparison until US oil fields are depleted, and even then at best it would be a race for the second place. You can't compete without gas and oil or a huge manufacturing lead, and europe don't have any, and only have specific subset of manufacturing (basically sensors, electronics, avionics, optics, and handmade clothing) that isn't workforce-intensive, nor resource-intensive.
you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind
though in 3.5 months they are gonna ban EU consumers from buying cheap things directly from AliExpress and groom July 1st you will have to pay 3EUR for each ordered item, including that 1EUR screen protector, because it's much better when you can feed some useless middleman than saving money, thanks EU!
> you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind
With that logic, every programmer on this site should spend as much time as possible on Facebook. This will make their salary equal to that of a Meta employee!
Consuming something is not the same as being able to produce it.
Data centers are (a) private not public and (b) throwing money at the problem on the assumption of being able to capture a significant chunk of all white collar incomes.
And they're running into the public issues already, such as lack of large power transformer availability and noise complaints from trying to generate their own power.
Many things are private but some of them are more private than others, the details can be quite intriguing.
Plenty of gas pumps to go around, more of them aren't going to provide anybody private with more of what they crave the most which data centers do provide. That's the reason for the push to abandon EVs and reduce their competing demand for scarce electricity.
New electric capacity, paid for by the ratepayers, would benefit those same ratepayers if used for EV charging but big biz isn't in the game for them.
Cool! My only concern is that Wired has a very long and consistent history of advertising technologies that don't work quite as they say. So let's hope this is real.
BYD is shipping both charging stations and cars with blade battery 2.0 first half of 2026. Both economic and premium models can charge from 0 - 97% under 12 minutes. They are also building these charging stations right now and few hundreds are already operational.
Has there ever been a tariff in all of human history where the technical gap between 2 countries' products has been this large? This is nearly a new product class.
How foolish it must feel to buy a new car without this tech in a world that has this tech, only to fund the people spending our tax money to keep it from us and continue pushing fossil fuels.
Agreed. I've been on the market for a new car to replace my aging Prius for for the past three years. All of my top choices are "not sold in the US".
I don't need a giant fricken SUV to go to work. I don't need 400 miles of range (the other car does that when it's needed). But I do need room to fit the kids and their stuff in the car. There's literally nothing sold in the USA that's suitable for this use case.
I may be in the market for a new car soon, which I hope to keep for at least a decade, so this kind of thing bothers me.
I don't want to buy something that's already years behind on efficiency.
Absolute garbage. Just stop and think for one second what kind of power delivery is required to do this and you will quickly realize that’s it’s not feasible anywhere other than as a demo.
With the range as good as a modern EV the charge time already isn't a particularly that bad. I'd much prefer more chargers (so that you can combine charging with something else you were going to do anyway) than faster ones.
I tend to agree but I think the strategy here is to convert people who stubbornly cling to gas vehicles because EVs somehow defy their expectations. I have been approached many times at highway rest stops by people who are curious and slightly skeptical about the EV value proposition. They see me hanging around the vehicle for a half hour and think “ugh, no thanks” as if that’s all I do when I travel. What they’re not seeing is that I rarely use public chargers at all, because 99% of my charging is done either at home or at the charger in the parking lot at work. It’s really just road trips. Not to mention, if you’re an ICE owner hanging around long enough at a rest stops to notice that I’m hanging around, are you really that much faster on a road trip?!!
Back on topic, I am ok with losing a little efficiency in the fast charging process if it means that more people switch away from a horribly inefficient and polluting technology.
I'll bite. They dumped a lot of power in a small amount of time. Sounds like the perfect job for a mega capacitor to streamline deployments. Other than the successful technology, Mrs. Lincoln, what are your gripes?
They simply use a few grid storage batteries. Chargers don't charge at 1.5MW 100% of time. You also have people driving in and out of the station. The math works out really well.
Cool now at your busy "gas" station keep it working as the pile gets exhausted and you don't have the supporting grid to be able to deliver the needed power to keep it stocked with "gas".
At least not in Europe.
From what I read it's 1500 kW at 1000V or Peak use of 1.5 MW at 1000 A. That's a crazy amount of power.
You will exhaust your piles quickly, or they are enormous. So it's like "quick-charge" until we run out?
Chargers don't charge at 1.5MW 100% of time. You have grid storage batteries serving as buffer. It can be charged at steady rate by the grid all the time. People need time to drive in and out of the station. The math works out really well.
> Thousands of FLASH Charging stations have already been installed in China, and BYD has committed to a global rollout that will include an initial wave of FLASH Chargers in Europe. Further details on the plans, and how they will support the Z9GT's arrival, will be revealed in due course.
The fundamental problem of high-wattage charges (say 500kW), isn't to deliver power from the charger to the car, but that there needs to be crazy amounts of grid capacity to support them.
A house has like 10kW peak sustained power consumption (an apt even less), which it rarely reaches, so a park of these fast chargers need the same infrastructure as a small town.
These loads are so huge
Cities like Beijing have strong industry and in general have the infrastructure to it, so it's relatively straightforward to install chargers like these. If you go out into the countryside, this infrastructure disappears, and won't see these fast chargers.
Most European cities barely have enough capacity to cover urban expansion, never mind to support this.
These articles suggest, its just a matter of putting down these stations, and that would solve the charger problem, but in truth, there's often a prerequisite of huge grid upgrades somebody has to build and pay for, which come with the unpleasant sight of these high voltage lines intruding into neighborhoods.
I wished articles lambasting the lack of fast chargers also mentioned this as well.
Sorry, but I think you're wrong on your concern: in China they specifically fix this issue with buffer batteries. From grid perspective, charging is no different than with regular, slow charging stations. You can still limit their capacity (as in cars that can be charged per 24h), the difference here is you can charge quickly.
This is a good compromise for the time being while the grid catches up with demand.
Batteries only help with peak loads, they also cost money and wear out. Let's do some math - a 10 car 500kW charger, with a ~30% occupancy, would draw a constant 1500kW from the grid, if we calculate 3kW average for a household(which is high), that would be the equivalent of 500 households.
I don't think this speculation is needed here, what I described is literally how these super fast BYD/Xiaomi own chargers work in China.
Same thing in the US. Tesla does exactly that at their supercharger sites. Probably not all of them, but definitely some of them.
In the Netherlands the energy network is undergoing a huge upgrade because of wind and solar- technologies nobody predicted in the 1970s.
Things used to be simple: big power station makes energy and lines transport it to every home. Now you have vast wind farms far out on the North Sea and millions of buildings have solar panels. And to top it all off electricity replaces gas for heating and cooking.
We're gonna need bigger cables.
At least they're upgrading your network, over here in Australia they've realized (about 20 years after we became one of the biggest users of household solar) that too many people having solar makes the grid unstable and the load unreliable, so they want to start charging solar owners for feeding into the grid instead.
Imo one of the biggest wins of renewables + battery is you can skip most of that infrastructure - you can have solar panels on your roof, on the edge of town, and you can skip most of expensive transmission infrastructure.
As an certified electrical engineer, this is certainly a problem. The main issue is of course how much copper is burried underground and how big transformer capacity is.
The first solution is of course to try avoiding farst charging if possible by charging at home or at work over hours if possible. A faster charge will have to be a more expensive charge. Another solution that could ease things a little is to spread the load on the grid over time by drawing it from some local source (e.g. battery) Imagine a gas station has a beefy energy storage from which it draws the current in short blasts while the battery itself draws it much more spread out over hours.
This is essentially how it is done in much smaller scales (in terms of time, energy and actual physical size) on printed circuit boards using capacitors. If you'd draw the current all the way back from the power supply any bursty load would affect the voltage on the power supply and thus show up in other psrts of the circuit.
But in the end more electrical energy demand by mobility will lead to more electrical demand, period. And as you rightly pointed out that means more infrastructure, more copper in the ground, bigger transformers, more powerplants.
Ah thanks for the expert opinion. I used to be an EE, but I've not been working in the field for a long time
Forgive me, but afaik you can't really run truly high voltage AC lines underground - the main issues are electrical arcing and capacitive ground coupling, which leads to losses. HVDC has its own issues as well, mostly having to do with electrolysis, and it being crazy dangerous.
I mean, you can, but it's going to be very expensive.
By the way, have there been studies of what a 100% EV society's infrastructure look like, especially in countries without access to cheap and abundant renewables? I feel it's going to be quite a challenge, and would only make sense economically as part of a broader reindustrialization effor (which for the record, I support).
As for batteries, I think solar/wind require those anyway, and if a solar farm is backed by a huge battery bank, those can probably supply these ludicrous kWs these chargers would need, but transmission is going to be a challenge.
I would love to read something that would go in depth on how we would support a renewable based grid that also supports powerful fast chargers, as this I feel this needs to be a part of a society-level project, and I'm growing tired of these 'China's building better electric chargers!!!'-style alarmist articles.
Yeah but I am not talking about high voltage AC under the ground, the bigger problem IMO is literally the last few kilometers to peoples houses. Everything before that costs money as well, but is usually better upgradable by design (at least over here in Europe).
I wonder if Gil Tal has ever used an EV as their daily vehicle.
I have had two EVs in the last three years - a Kona and an IONIQ 5. I have greatly enjoyed them both. But one thing was a downside that I just had to accept: poor charging.
Granted, I live in the Canadian Prairies full of small towns a fair distance apart. And it's not exactly progressive - I'm actually being taxed for owning an EV. The charging infrastructure is sparse with 50-100kW charges every 100km. On long distance trips I spend 1 hour charging for every 2 hours driving. To say that faster charging wouldn't make a meaningful difference is simply wrong. Sure, it doesn't have to be 5 minutes - even 10-15 would be enough - but current chargers don't get anywhere close to that, even with 350kW, which rarely if ever reach those charging speeds.
For driving around the city I never bat an eye. I have a level 2 charger in my garage and there's one at work that is decently priced should I ever need it. I never use a fast charger for local travel. But long distance travel is what people are worried about and having much faster charging would most certainly make a difference for me and for them.
> Sure, it doesn't have to be 5 minutes - even 10-15 would be enough - but current chargers don't get anywhere close to that
My car has a 83 kWh battery and charges at 150 kW, which, for 20% to 80% (what you want to generally do on a trip) means 20 minutes. 20 minutes of charge gets me 300 km, and I generally definitely want to stop for 20 minutes every 300 km or so.
I don't see how that's not "anywhere close" to 15.
I don't think RevEng was saying it is impossible to do technically. I believe they were saying the charging infrastructure near their home makes it impossible to do practically as the chargers are often limited to 50-100kW. Aging Wheels did a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouPiwt5hxXQ
Ahh I see, thanks. Here in Greece chargers are pretty good, though not very many still.
I have also had two EVs and what you are saying does not resonate.
I may be in warmer weather but I would say I probably charge 15 minutes to go 250 km or more. Given that the family also wants to stop to eat, go to the bathroom, or just get out for a bit, it mostly feels like we are stopping when we want to and not for much longer. Typically, stretches of driving are longer than 250 km. We can go over 400 km at a time (but rarely do).
To be fair though, we have great charging infrastructure. There is going to be fast charging in the next town pretty reliably.
At home, day to day, we charge at home and the car is basically magic. You drive as much as you like every day and never think about “fuel” at all. The thing just works. Going back to the non-EV SUV is daily “range anxiety” as it always seems like I am late for something and wondering if I have enough fuel to make it without having to stop.
Don’t get me wrong. Faster charging would be great and I am not saying we have never wanted to leave 10 minutes sooner from a charging station. But I have not found it anywhere near as bad as you are saying, even now.
> On long distance trips I spend 1 hour charging for every 2 hours driving
In Spain, I take ~600km trips every once in a while. I just need to charge once in the middle of the trip, in a super-charger that is. And the charge is 25min maximum.
Your experience varies is basically opposite from my experience. Your situation is probably influenced, indeed, by the poor choice of EVs you purchased (range is the most important factor for me to buy) and the lack of superchargers around your area.
If an Ioniq 5 is a poor choice, I would love to know what a good choice is. Its energy usage is comparable to the vast majority of SUVs and it can charge at up to 227kW. The lack of good fast charger is certainly a difference compared to many areas.
Only the Long Range version of the Ioniq5 has decent range IMO. And BTW, the fact that it's an SUV is precisely a downside about it; smaller cars would have obviously more efficiency.
Faster charging improves things in more EV-friendly areas as well.
I live in Southern California, and if I take a trip on the weekend that is more than the 240mi. freeway range my Kona gets, I'm never worried about being stranded, but I have waited in line for an hour to charge; sub-10 minute charging would cut wait times too, and is probably necessary if the US both wants to electrify its transportation and still have people take road-trips on major holidays.
In remote areas, sudden load from fast chargers can cause a bit of trouble with the rest of the local grid. It may be that those rest stops can't yet support a fast charger without upgrading their transformers.
That's not nearly the problem that people think it is. Industrial and farm operations often use that much.
Upgrading is the problem though. Many of these stations were installed when 50kW was normal. With no other competition nearby there is no incentive to replace everything. It would mean new transformers and potentially even new lines.
Could you please elaborate on:
> I'm actually being taxed for owning an EV.
There's a special excise tax on gasoline for highway and road maintenance.
EVs don't pay that tax because they use normal electricity. So Alberta introduced a $200 EV fee to match the average revenue from the excise tax.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-electric-veh...
It sounds like the more accurate framing, then, is "I'm not getting a tax break for having an EV". Which is disappointing sure, but not outrageous either.
That's the framing but it's also misleading. We are being charged more than a typical ICE driver would pay in gasoline tax. It's also listed as being for road maintenance, but in fact it goes into the general revenue, so it has nothing to do with road maintenance.
https://www.saskatchewan.ca/business/taxes-licensing-and-rep...
Alberta is imposing a charge on EV registrations, and they increased it again this year. At some point I'm hoping courts curtail their attempt at imposing gas cars but given how Canadian courts are hamstrung at obvious human rights issues in places like Quebec, I doubt they will do anything about Alberta either.
Paying the fair share for road maintenance isn't a human rights issue.
The issue is not paying our fair share, the issue is paying more than we would if we drove gas vehicles. They assume we drove X miles (I’m in Washington state) and that is not even close to what I actually drive (it’s much less, I could game it if I drove more than the C miles they compute the fee on, but I don’t need to drive that much).
> paying more than we would if we drove gas vehicles
The 6 people driving EVs in Alberta/Saskatchewan are paying more than $7 trillion in taxes[1]? I find that hard to believe!
[1] Fossil-fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion last year: https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
Are you seriously comparing the number of people? That's silly. It's the amount paid per person. You pay so much in gas, I pay so much for my EV. For the same amount of driving, I am paying more than you do. That's the problem.
> For the same amount of driving, I am paying more than you do. You aren't. See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47475419
The issue is not paying our fair share, the issue is paying more than we would if we drove gas vehicles.
Perhaps in Washington State that is your issue, but that is not what we are discussing here.
The poster I was replying to lives in Alberta, and your experience in an entirely different country, in that state, has nothing to do with what they pay. Or whether what they pay is fair. And this point was not raised as a concern by the original poster.
Their only concern was paying any tax at all. Their concern was paying for road maintenance costs, period.
Most states and provinces I think have already applied a flat yearly registration fee surcharge to make up for lost gas tax revenue.
Most states and provinces I think have already applied a flat yearly registration fee surcharge to make up for lost gas tax revenue
Indeed. No one is contesting that. So what is your point?
In as you are leveling some sort of complaint against a flat tax, are you attempting to claim that any tax is unfair? If so, why?
Let's look at Alberta:
https://www.alberta.ca/electric-vehicle-tax-claims
Here, it states the yearly fee is $200.
Now let's compare to gas taxes in Alberta:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_fuel_taxes_in_Canada
So about 50 cents per litre for both federal and provincial gas tax, which disappears if you charge at home. And yes, the federal tax counts, as the federal government transfers funds to the provinces from that tax, and to municipalities, and also gives additional grants to municipalities from that tax.
All which vanishes without a gas tax.
So that's around 1/3 to 1/2 of the price you pay at the pump.
Municipalities also sometimes add additional tax.
All said?
A good average for gas tank size might be 50 litres. Gas prices are typically over $1.20 / litre. So maybe $70 per fillup, which seems fair. Let's just pick $30 in tax per fillup.
I'm being generous here, as most EVs are as heavy as a truck, and cause more road damage than a gas car. And I'll also be more generous, and just say $20 per fillup in lost tax.
This figure, $20, is way below the actual lost tax. I expect this to be more like $50 lost per fillup, with the above logic (weight of vehicle, use of taxes, local taxes).
So with this extremely generous number of $20 per fillup, a yearly registration of $200, is the same as 10 tanks of gas of travel per year.
Or less than one fillup per month for a gas car.
This is obviously meant to be an average, and there are people which drive 200km per day. Others may almost never drive, but that's how averages work.
I have a very, very hard time seeing this as unfair.
I feel it is very, very low compared to what is collected from the gas tax currently.
The only other option is to have odometers inspected yearly, and a tax levied on actual distance driven. In as the tax is very very very generous, and only 40% of what I suspect the actual loss to be, very very very low at $200, few would be better off with a tax on actual distance driven.
Not to mention, a yearly inspection would have additional costs (re: taxes) for the whole administrative framework to do so.
All in all, Albertans seem to be paying far less than people driving gas cars, in tax.
But of course, you did the math before complaining about Alberta flat gas tax, right?
So if so, what is your complaint with this flat tax?
That some people might be buying at $50k CDN car, and only drive it less than 400km per month, and so unfairly pay? Because that's the equivalent tax being levied here.
I'll be very blunt. I find such complaints to be frivolous.
It will be unfair one way or the other. Washington state has a high gas tax by American standards (60 cents a gallon) but I only drive around 30 miles per week. I would need one tank of gas a month on my previous ICE car, and the gas tank took 13 gallons, so I was paying around $100/year in gas taxes. I pay $250/year surcharge for having an EV, so I’m definitely paying more (my EV is a compact rather than a sub-compact I had before, so I would lose some mileage there, although not enough to make such a huge difference).
I get it though, other people pay less. It really should be by mileage and weight, but privacy advocates blow a gasket when someone proposed to track vehicle mileage either in real-time or through yearly odometer gauge checks.
Reducing carbon emissions most certainly is a human rights issue. I absolutely can not breathe when I go to large cities. I live in a village, drive an electric, and charge it from rooftop solar.
You actually can breath in "large cities", unless you have a pre-existing health condition. Otherwise, all the people in those "large cities" would already be dead, and they'd cease being "large cities". Or at least, populated ones.
"Carbon emissions" is a human rights issue, just as 1000 other things are. Whether "reducing" carbon emissions is determined to be a right is not black and white as of yet.
Regardless, leveling a road tax has nothing to do with that. It is merely a tax to be inline with what everyone else pays. You may as well say you have a right to a free electric car too, or maybe a right to get 50% off.
You do realise the roads have to be maintained, yes? And that's what the tax on gas is for, yes? I assure you, endless environmentalists which don't drive anything at all, and see the construction of roads as an annoyance, would be upset at the idea of cars, any type of car, electric or otherwise, as bad. And are very upset at any sort of car being subsidized to increase adoption.
But of course, because you own an electric car, it's now a human rights issue that you get to pay less. Right?
I may have exaggerated. In large cities the air is significantly less comfortable to breathe.
No, why would you think that? It is only fair that electric car users, myself included, pay for the proportional damage and wear to the roads.Now tell me why the polluting carbon-burning vehicles don't have a separate tax to repair the damage they do to the environment, e.g. climate change? How much would that tax cost?
>You actually can breath in "large cities", unless you have a pre-existing health condition.
Did you know that some people have health conditions?
>Canadian courts are hamstrung at obvious human rights issues
Huh?
Some countries charge a road tax or annual vehicle tax, and ev’s are often except as a green incentive
and some places charge a higher annual fee for EVs due to roads being largely funded by gas taxes.
Seems totally fair to me so long as the averages largely line up for both vehicle types.
Several people have said that they get much more range and charge much faster. I'm quite interested to know what your situation is: what is the efficiency of your vehicle in kWh/100km or Wh/km? At what rate are you able to charge with nearby chargers? How dense is the population of chargers in your area?
I'm aware that my situation is far from ideal, maybe even far from normal - I have no way to know. What I do know is that this is common for all of Canada outside of the major cities, and to the best of my knowledge is common for much of the USA too. This is a huge market to be left out if this is the EV experience for them. It's not sufficient if EVs only work in specific areas that are densely populated and have ample infrastructure. It becomes a chicken-and-egg situation where nobody wants an EV because the infrastructure sucks, but nobody wants to invest in infrastructure because there aren't many EVs to have as customers.
Here are the numbers for my 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5. It has a 77kWh battery, though only nominally - only 68kWh is actually usable. On long trips I will charge up to 90% and drive down to 20%, so that leaves me with 70% of the available capacity for use, or 47.6kWh. On the highway going 100-110km/h I spend about 20kWh/100km during the summer, 25kWh/100km during the winter (it gets down to -30C and you have to heat the cabin). That gives me about 240km range in the summer, 190km range in the winter. Since chargers are few and far between around here I usually have to stop every 100-150km to charge - chargers are typically that far apart on the highway.
At most my vehicle can charge up to 227kW. If I could get that consistently I would charge in 12.6 minutes. In practice I don't get anywhere near that. As I stated before, most chargers are 50-100kW in my area. There are some as high as 175kW, but they are in remote areas where chargers were only installed recently; all of the chargers along the main highways are older infrastructure that has been around for a few years and they are only 50kW. Thankfully, I actually get a consistent 50kW from those regardless of charge and temperature. That takes almost exactly an hour to charge. Going 100km/h with a range of ~200km that puts me at 1 hour of charging every 2 hours of driving.
Since the Tesla Supercharger network has opened up to non-Tesla vehicles, things have gotten a bit better, but only modestly. Despite the Superchargers being rated for 250kW, they run at 400V where my vehicle is on an 800V architecture. As a result I can only pull ~97kW from a Supercharger. This reduces the charging time to 30 minutes, which is manageable, but still a noticeable inconvenience. On an 8 hour drive this adds up to 2 hours of charging time, extending an 8 hour trip to 10 hours. I think you'll agree that's a significant increase.
In a nearby major city they did recently install 350kW chargers so I tried those out. Unfortunately, I happened to be travelling there on a cold winter day. I struggled to get up to 180kW, spending most of the time around 120kW. The battery preconditioning on this vehicle leaves much to be desired and it won't even turn on until you are within 50km of a stop on the nav (no manual override), despite it taking well over 30 minutes to get the battery up to temperature. The charging rate is severely limited below 0C and doesn't come up to full until about 20C. 20C is the high on a typical summer day around here; spring and autumn hover around 10C-15C. This means you only get full charging speeds in ideal conditions; anything else is noticeably worse.
For efficiency, my experienced 20kWh/100km of pure highway driving seems to be around average. EV-database.org lists the average WLTP (a blend of city and highway driving) as 190Wh/km, or 19kWh/100km. The Ioniq 5 AWD is listed at 180Wh/km, which is similar to my experience when combining both city and highway. The best are the Tesla Model 3 RWD at 130-140Wh/km which is quite impressive. Other small coupes have numbers about that around 150-160. The Ford Mach-e AWD is also common around here and comes out to 202Wh/100km, so notably higher. So other than comparing it to the most efficient RWD sedan, comparing it to other AWD SUVs it is quite normal. Around here, most people drive AWD SUVs or trucks because winter can be nasty. (You can drive FWD sedans - I did for 20 years - but most people get AWD SUVs or trucks if they can afford it because it's much better.)
So this is my experience. I hope it explains why I say that charging still needs to improve in many ways. Different vehicles will have different efficiency. Different areas will have different weather and availability of chargers. Both seem to be getting steadily better with time. But outside of ideal conditions, charging is still a serious downside for many people and it is a blocker to adoption to many. Even at my office several people have recently purchased EVs but had to swallow the pill that long trips were going to suck. Until consistently good efficiency and fast charging become widespread, EVs will remain a niche in many areas where the downsides are simply too great.
Not if the charger doesn’t work.
Put diesel generator on trailer, and charge while driving. Best of both worlds!
Kona at least won't drive while charging.
Gas pumps in the US are artificially capped at 10 gallons per minute, and a gallon of gasoline is about 33kWh, so petrol cars in the US “charge” at 330kWh/min ~= 20MW. But most cars only turn about a third of that into motion, so let’s say 7MW equivalent? While BYD’s 1.5MW is amazing, it seems a stretch to call it “almost as fast as gas pumps.”
Diesel pumps for trucks typically pump much faster too. And diesel is nearer 40kWh/gal. We have a ways to go!
(The energy density of oil is amazing: a fully loaded A380 with 84,500 us gallons of jet fuel at 37.5 kWh per, that’s over 3TWh. Which is about twice the capacity of all the li-ion batteries made in 2025. We have a ways to go!)
99.9% of use cases of EVs can charge at home/work/shop, don't need separate infrastructure, logistics and supply chains for delivery of electricity. There is a very small fraction of EV trips that need charging on the go. The vast majority of trips are under 3 (or 5 miles).
> 99.9% of use cases of EVs can charge at home/work/shop
This is yet again a very US-centric view where you assume people are living in house with a garage.
In Europe, I live in an apartment with an garage in the basement with EV chargers. Not sure why you you think it's an US-centric view.
because most buildings are too old to have an underground garage, at least in Western Europe.
"home" can be substituted for "place where car resides when owner is at home" without meaningfully changing the point
In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's. People that have access to home-charging, worry about range. The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging.
> In NYC that would be the street. The great conundrum of ev's. Most streets have street lighting and electricity, easy to add chargers to lamp posts. NYC probably hasn't heard of street lighting yet?
> The one's that mostly sit idling in traffic, don't have access to charging. I think it would be an impressive feat of engineering to charge cars while they are on the move. I like how you think, cars are mostly idling in traffic, we can consider them as stationary, and charge cars while they idle!
Parking is not assigned, sometimes you got to drive around for 20 minutes to find a spot to park over-night and its not guaranteed to be next to a street light. By idling in traffic, I meant that we would love ev's since most of the time we are just wasting gas and fuming up our own neighborhoods.
The ‘burbs truly are the worst of all worlds.
Some of the homes in my neighbourhood have 2 cars in the driveway and another two on the street.
They all move regularly. Walkability is terrible. Public transit is iffy. People have to get places on time.
Zoning changes: can't park inside, in front of the house, and on the street. This will address the problems you raised. Unlikely it will be passed.
In London, I saw lampposts with EV chargers built in, as well as tastefully concealed sidewalk ports. This is not an intractable problem.
> This is yet again a very US-centric view where you assume people are living in house with a garage. It is a US-centric view to think that the rest of the world is hunter gatherer tribes. Most people live in some kind of constructed building which has electricity, indoor plumbing, a place to park a car. Before that building is built, the first infrastructure that is ready is electrical, without which most of the tools required for building a home do not work.
A garage is not a sine qua non for EV charging. A place to park is. If a person is buying a car, they would've already figured out a place to park. That place is right next to a building with electricity unless you are sleeping in the woods.
I don't understand why people think that running a cable (a few feet) from the nearest building to a car is impossible.
Even in the US, only 63% of households have a garage or carport.
> The energy density of oil is amazing
Have you heard about nuclear? Over 3 million times more energy dense than coal or gasoline.
Why not anti-matter matter reactions???
Pfff. Infinity stones put these to shame.
At least power orbs are real
https://xkcd.com/2115/
Fair but any EV owner knows after a bathroom break, quick stretch and maybe a bite to eat every 1-2hr while charging and you never even notice the stopping to charge time.
As an EV owner, I'm not sure I agree with this. I'd make less stops if not for the car's need. That said, it's a compromise I'm willing to accept since 99% of the time I'm not road tripping but commuting, and the EV is oh so nice for the commute.
I am not EV owner but that’s not how like my car trips. I can drive 4 hrs nonstop and then expect to “charge” my car in 5 minutes at the pump with a bathroom break, and be on the road.
Sometimes we like a more leisurely drive, but it should be up me to decide when that happens not the car.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with liking how EV behave, it’s just it’s not for everyone. And I think a lot of recent pullback from EVs (Ford, Honda) kinda points that way. With as fast a charger as a gas pump situation may change though, so let’s what happens!
I felt the same way as you until I took a few road trips in sn EV.
I drove about 20 hours in two days. The thing that struck me is how refreshed I felt when I arrived. Normally I'd be dead on my feet and the travel day would be lost completely but I was ready for activity on arrival. I was very surprised.
What kind of EV was it?
I have heard that the combination of self-driving and mandatory 30-60” breaks every few hours is very relaxing. I look forward to trying it some day. Meanwhile…
I would be very wary of taking my bolt on a long journey. I have no confidence that what few fast chargers are out there would actually work, or be available, and I wouldn’t want to plan my journey around charging stops, with copious backup plans! It would be very stressful!!
Not to mention that my bolt has only 300mi range in summer, and less than 200mi in winter. And fast chargers are rare enough that I’d be scared to get anywhere near the limit.
By contrast, my Elantra hybrid has a ~600mi range. And I can “charge” it anywhere.
The past is still here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.
e-GMP platform (IONIQ 5, etc.) is really good for road trips.
At least in summer temperatures it reliably charges to 80% under 20 minutes. Its range estimate is quite good, and I can depend on it to know when I can skip a charging stop (when I first drove an EV I was freaking out about the 20% state of charge like it was a cellphone. Now I roll to the chargers with 2% left when it saves time).
It depends where you live, but infrastructure in the UK and EU has got good enough to the point I don't need backup plans. Chargers are as common as McDonald's (often quite literally). If a station is slow or busy, I can just go to the next one (and they are in clumps often enough that even with a low battery it's not a big deal).
It was a Kona 2019. Not self driving, requires hands on the wheel but it does lane keeping and adaptive cruise control.
If you find a semi going a good speed and set the follow distance to maximum, it's a very easy drive.
I think you are 3 orders of magnitude off in your airplane energy calculation.
3,168,750kWh = 3 GWh
Darn it! You are correct!
Ok, so how about: we made about as much in batteries last year as all the A380s in the world can hold fully loaded in jet fuel. (There aren’t many of them!) Not as impressive, but still.
It’s the same order of magnitude, allowing people to mentally budget zero time for a charge.
You're right that it seems close enough, but only as long as we're talking about the time it takes a single vehicle to "fill up". Taking 2 minutes vs 8 minutes to fill up your car doesn't matter to you personally, but it is a significant difference to those installing and operating the fill up infrastructure since it takes 4 times as many charging points as it does gas pumps to serve the same volume of customers in a given period of time.
In a lot of cases that probably won't matter since chargers can be installed in more places than gas pumps and for gas stations that serve mainly local customers I'd expect demand for an equivalent charging station to be lower since some people will charge at home at least some of the time. But things like highway rest stops could be more of a challenge since you'd expect customer volume for EV charging to be similar to the demand for fuel so you'll need more charging stations at each stop to handle the increased time it takes each customer.
More importantly, the US has banned these cars in America to give protection to american manufacturers.
The Chinese were smart enough to ban US companies only when their own people could match.
That's underselling it, honestly.
They banned import/forced local production which ended in the trained workers then quitting and creating the competitor.
That pattern played out with every large company that tried to get into the Chinese market
The only surprising part about it is how these MBAs kept doing it across industries
During the Cold War would have imported cars from the USSR if they were better
Do we want to strength economically an authoritarian country who is opposed to Western aims across the world?
Of course not. That would be shooting ourselves in the foot.
I just want the better product, period.
Definitely not bc these brands are being propped up by their government in order to flood world markets.
Everyone should be able to make a luxury 30k vehicle sustainably
The North American car market is more subsidized than any other. It is why it is so uncompetitive.
North America imports cars in large quantities from every car making region in the world (that is not banned). What parts of the world sell high volumes of NA vehicles? They are not banned, just unwanted.
It's not like the US hasn't proped up our own industry to push out competition and dominate global markets. Nope, definitely never did that.
There’s controlling competition in your own country and dominating global markets. Nothing wrong with either. It’s not like it’s not happening anywhere else in the world.
It just makes me laugh when people complain about China propping up it's industry to complete globally. The US has overthrown governments to protect its geopolitical priorities.
I've got no love for China, but I'm not gonna shed a tear for a large corporations crying over someone else having an unfair advantage.
This [0] is the actual (good) news, linked from the article.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/vehicle-tech/hybrid-electric-vehic...
Neither article really explains how they are able to charge this fast, aside from “vertical integration” and slightly increased energy density in the battery design. No real details on the charging technology itself.
Sounds like the trick is to use 1.5MW chargers. I guess that'll do it. I suppose the question is how they handel this thermally.
there needs to be battery chemistry improvements. Otherwise, with existing batteries, charging at these speeds will cause too much heat and shorten battery life span. BYD is offering 1.5MW charging with increased battery lifespan and without increasing the heat dissipation requirements. Another improvement compared to current crop of batteries is charge curve. Charging from 80 to 95%, BYD batteries can handle higher power than current batteries at MAX
BYD did not go to specifics about their blade 2.0 battery that enables this, but there has to be battery chemistry and manufacturing advancements. CATL shared some details on their 12C LFP batteries before, they lowered li-ion mobility resistance, increased how the anode and cathode can accept more li-ions at faster rates. Another improvement for blade 2.0 battery is the charge curve is much better. 80 - 90 % can have much higher charging rates.
Is this even as fast as the existing CATL tech? It seems to just be where batteries are heading through a bunch of small improvements over time.
With 5 minute charging, suddenly conventional gas stations can be used for EVs just as they are for ICE. Nice thing about 'plugging in' as opposed to 'filling up' is that a charging car can be left completely unattended (while you go to pay, get a coffee, or whatever).
Seems that the technological barriers have been overcome, now we just need to build out the infrastructure - which could be as simple as retooling existing gas stations. No need to electrify every parking space or such like.
Yes, retooling gas stations is the way to go. Already happening in Norway where stations now show the price of kWh in addition to gas and diesel prominently on signs by the road. Charging is just a different kind of pump.
Charging stations don't need all the environmental equipment that gas stations have to catch oil and gas run off. I guess we could convert old gas stations that don’t need extensive environmental cleanup, but building new ones just to charge EVs is huge overkill when you just need some space in a parking lot.
That's a good point. Charging stations benefit from being a service station too though, with amenities and a cafe etc, since people want something to do while they charge. So a gas station is a better candidate than a parking lot when decisions are made for where to place the new charging infrastructure. Lots of other factors too of course.
I prefer grocery stores because I can run in and grab something quickly. The only problem is that charging is often too quick to do any real shopping, so a smaller convenience store makes sense also.
a key difference between a gas station and a parking lot is that people only park at a gas station to get gas (and have a rest, get dinner, bathroom break etc), so, assuming quick charging, you need less chargers as they will spend less time not charging a fully charged car left parked on them. Gas station staff can ensure charging spots are utilized correctly as they do now for the pumps.
Also everyone understands how gas stations work, so it is easier to slip EVs into the social fabric.
Those fast chargers rely on a buffer, so I’m not sure thy can be used continuously like a gas pump can.
An EV is in digital communication with the charging station. Why would you “go pay”? You don’t “go pay” at a Tesla Supercharger.
Not everyone wants to link their bank account to shady automotive companies or be paying automotive company charging price markup.
We need grid scale batteries anyways to capture excess solar (curtailment) at zero cost, or for a profit. Put these in distributed locations that can also charge cars and we solve 2 problems at once.
>Just taking an existing fast charger with 150- or 350-kW capacity and swapping in the latest and greatest 1,500-kW chargers wouldn’t get anyone faster speeds. The system would need all new “pipes”—grid capacity—to actually move that much current.
The grid doesn't necessarily mean "pipes" or power lines. You don't build a pipeline to every gas station. Mobile charging robots work pretty well in China.
Also I guess they could put a large battery at the charging station so it can take say a steady 200kw from the grid and be able to kick out 1500kw for ten minutes occasionally. That could also charge from cheap off peak electricity.
> guess they could put a large battery at the charging station
BYD's megawatt charging does exactly that.
Tbe best part, the "large battery" uses the same battary on BYD cars. The same electric components, cooling system, etc.
This is what everyone is already doing, even for relatively small and slow dispensers.
It's simply cheaper to have on-site batteries. It makes installation work with a smaller connection to the grid, and makes it possible to install chargers in more places without upgrading the grid connection.
Energy arbitrage is profitable on its own, so EV charging stations are almost just an excuse to get some land and a grid connection for more batteries.
Traffic congestion costs for electricity is going to get wild if we start stacking all sorts of random >= 1.5 MW demands scattered everywhere.
Imagine if we had a parallel information network that could coordinate the charging times of all these things in real-time.
This is what they already are doing, the article is behind a paywall so no clue if they say it there but you can for example see this article about it: https://www.etechvolution.com/p/byd-megawatt-flash-charging-...
Supercaps are viable for this sort of short term charge and discharge. The much maligned donut labs is suspected to be a license built Nordic hybrid supercap battery model
Look range is not a huge issue if it is reliably above 200miles. This means that the 60% of that (120miles) covers your typical max commuting radius, and 80% of that the time you typically you would need a toilet break (3-4 hours).
My old gas guzzler had a 180-250 miles of range, and I did not have range anxiety (I did have gas cost anxiety tho)
The issue always was speed of charging and abundance of chargers. Today things are a bit better as you can find 200kW chargers on the big highways. But still they are not abundant, you need to plan.
I have a feeling that half the reason they're doing this is that they don't have a good idea how to increase energy efficiency.
Case in point:
2026 BMW i3 - 900km WLTP from a 108kWh battery.
2026 Denza Z9 GT - 800km WLTP from a 122kWh pack.
The former charges at a maximum of 400kW, while the latter at over twice that which saves... about 10 minutes at the charger after 450km of driving(12 vs 22 minutes approx).
Many such examples with Chinese manufacturers putting 700kg battery packs into the vehicles just to be able to say it's this and that kWh.
I don't know about anyone here but after 400km or so I'm done and want to at least stretch my legs.
> 2026 BMW i3 - 900km WLTP from a 108kWh battery.
I had to do a double take: remembering the i3s as the little almost SmartCar-sized EVs. Great cars, I still see a few around here, but I couldn't imagine them extending the range of those to 900km!
Turns out they just released the i3 sedan, which is like a 3-series. And good to see they're making the design similar between the new 3-series and the new i3. I like the i4, but really need something more 3-series in size.
Yes that new one is not an i3, not even in spirit. The original i3 was super light, quirky, fun, innovative in so many ways. They just didn't sell enough. People wanted more boring cars.
It was also $50k for a car that only got 120-150mi of range. It was a joke car. The reason it didn’t sell well is because it was a compliance car, not because it didn’t innovative. If it had a reasonable range (say, Chevy Bolt 200-250ish) in all electric for the same price, I bet it would have sold much much better.
I have an i3 though and the range is perfect for my use. Town, school, office etc. I just put it on charge when I get back, or the next day.
On the up side i3 are great second hand bargain at current ~$5K price point.
$20k at least here in South Africa. $5k sounds like insane value.
They also have an iX3 SUV, if reusing i3 isn't confusing enough.
This is an NMC vs LFP battery comparison.
They have different trade-offs but LFP is gradually taking over from the bottom of the market and heading up market in a classic disruptive manner.
They are heavier but cheaper and safer and better longevity.
I think one of the reasons for this is to have very high throughput charging stations in dense urban areas (like central Beijing).
If you can get a megawatt into the car batteries without setting them on fire, that's game over for petrol cars. And for the other electric vehicles that haven't worked it out yet. Only reason I'm on petrol is unwillingness to wait an hour to recharge the car.
The rest of the infra is fine if that can be done. Array of batteries and/or capacitors at the supply point and draw continuously from the grid.
Most entertainingly run a diesel generator on site if that doesn't work out. Lines up well with basing them at the existing fuel stations, got the diesel supply already sorted out.
Put a bunch of solar near it when you can. Maybe sell back to grid, nice to have the extra capacity available.
All comes down to capital deployment at that point. Do the calculations on how much to charge for slow car charge vs fast charge, fallback to slow with an apology/discount when the infra is struggling etc.
Huge news. Iff the cars don't catch fire when plugged in.
It definitely does not take an hour if you have an 800v car and an 800v EA station.
Can’t speak highly enough about lucid, but their current offerings are definitely not for the budget conscious, but that should change soon.
I have as far as I'm aware the cheapest 800v car on sale in the US (Hyundai Ioniq 5) and in the right weather conditions a 20-80% charge is legitimately 10 minutes.
The weather conditions do unfortunately matter. Travelling during the post-Christmas blizzard last year was very much less than ideal. The battery heaters in my car could not keep up with how bitterly cold and windy it was and I had multiple 30-45 minute charging sessions because it wasn't ever warm enough to accept more than ~120kW.
I'm looking forward to traveling with it in the warm season and seeing how things compare.
Now (in China) there are also cars with sodium-ion batteries, instead of lithium-ion batteries.
Sodium-ion batteries have the disadvantage of a worse energy per weight ratio, but they also have an advantage (besides the fact that they will become cheaper when their production will be more mature): they work much better at low temperatures, not losing capacity or charging speed until minus 40 Celsius degrees.
Therefore, they may become preferable in colder climates, where they will not have the problems described by you.
Same with the EV6. Charged at a Rivian station from 20-80% in 15 minutes.
> If you can get a megawatt into the car batteries without setting them on fire, that's game over for petrol cars
Chinese people are complaining about this. In highway service stops, the megawatt charger is too fast, the 20%-95% charging is done before people returns from the toilet. Realistically, the charging speed should take around 10 minutes in average for everyone.
Or there could be some price surges. You are in a really hurry pay some 1.2x price for 3 min megawatt charge, or flat price for a regular 10 min charge.
For me EVs already won when charging got down to 20 minutes.
EVs charge unattended. It takes less of my own time to leave EV plugged in parked next to a place I want to be at, than to go drive to a gas station and stand there holding a smelly nozzle.
Agreed. Right now EVs are almost strictly superior for day to day usage (only real downside is that the higher weight goes through tires faster). But for road trips, combustion vehicles blow them out of the water. If I'm taking a 12 hour road trip, no way am I going to take an EV if that means I will have to spend an extra hour or two charging it.
My wife has an EV and it's genuinely really nice. But until they get the charging experience on par with the speed of filling up a gas tank, we will always have one of our two cars be a combustion car, to give us that extra flexibility for long trips.
For once or twice a year road trip I’d just rent a combustion car, otherwise it’ll just be sitting in the garage not good as a daily driver.
Based on the figures here, they’re claiming around 400 miles of range added in 300 seconds (60% of the full 677 mile range); contrast this with around 100 seconds for a typical gas pump (8 gal/min) and typical efficiency (30 mpg). It suggests that you’d need around 5MW chargers to truly get to the speed of a gas pump.
On the other hand, 5 minutes is already a huge improvement over 15-30 minutes, and it’s fast enough to remove much of the friction of recharging an EV.
Really wish this kind of tech would come to North America…
5mins is really as good as it has to be. Almost everyone needs a bathroom break or gets a drink/snack after 400miles.
Its also fast enough that I don't have to plan for it. I could be running errands, note a low charge, and unless I'm in a big hurry stop for a charge.
I sometimes spend 3-5 minutes washing all the windows. But I do dream of making F1-style pit stops on my cross-country treks.
And you can do that while charging as there is no need to sit and hold a pump handle.
Although the thought of getting an electric car has passed through my mind on a few occasions, I'm not 100% familiar with the intricate technical details. (for some reason, the tax incentives where I live are still in favor of continuing with the small petrol car I have. Taxes are primarily a function of weight in the Netherlands, and anything besides a lightweight Dacia Spring would imply significantly higher monthly expenditure for me).
What I'm wondering w.r.t. this article is: wouldn't such fast charging shorten the battery lifespan?
I have experience with ebike batteries. Bosch in particular, with very decent 29E samsung cells, that after 70k km or so, basically halved their capacity. I imagine this effect is severily reduced with a car battery because there are a lot more than 10p, so all the wear is distributed more evenly, and 29E are very old technology.
Research on the current EVs shows that they degrade by on average 2.3 % of original capacity a year, but there is a strong dependency on how much the vehicle is used and how often it is DC fast charged, i.e. there is time based degradation and usage based degradation.
Low use vehicles have degradation of 1.5 % a year, heavily used vehicles mostly slow charged had degradation of 2.2 % a year and heavily used vehicles mostly fast charged had highest degradation of 3 % a year.
Now before you think that means the capacity will halve in X years (33, 23 and 17), the article also notes that the degradation is not linear and it was faster in new vehicles and then slowed down - with no way to know if it will slow down further or continue in this manner, etc, until we have a sufficient sample of 20 years old modern EVs.
Link to article https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/
> the article also notes that the degradation is not linear
Battery degradation is affected by multiple processes which respond primarily to different factors, such as heat, cycles or just time.
This[1] paper goes into some detail about that, and also notes that the typical way batteries were evaluated for longevity in the lab significantly overestimates the degradation compared to batteries used with real-world dynamic loads.
Some quotes:
We found that dynamic cycling enhances battery lifetime by up to 38%. Moreover, we determined the window for the tip-over C-rate that balances time-induced ageing and cycling ageing for this commercially relevant chemistry to be approximately between 0.3C and 0.5C, in the range of realistic average C-rates.
Figure 4a,b illustrates that the degradation is initially dominated by the loss of lithium inventory (QLi). [...] However, as the batteries age, additional degradation mechanisms become important. On the one hand, the positive electrode capacity loss dominates and is impacted by the rest fraction at high SOC [...]
On the other hand, the negative electrode capacity loss (which is less than the positive electrode capacity loss) is impacted by the DoD [...]
Figure 4d shows that, in particular at low average C-rates, when the DoD is beyond 85%, the negative electrode capacity degrades more rapidly, while cells avoiding deep discharge have more preserved negative electrode capacities, in agreement with Fig. 3e. In addition, the DoD has no impact on the positive electrode capacity (Fig. 4e).
SOC = State Of Charge
DoD = Depth of Discharge
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01675-8
Where does "20 years" come from? What's wrong with "10 years"?
At the 200,000 mile mark battery life is expected to be ~85%. That's what actual data shows. 200,000 is 13 years of driving 15,000 miles a year.
https://recharged.com/articles/tesla-model-y-battery-degrada...
I picked 20 years arbitrarily, what I meant is that we don't have data on how modern EV batteries will look when 20 years old, because they have not been around that long.
The whole LFP chemistry is pretty new, on automotive timescales, and lot of the older data on degradation comes from the first few generations of Nissan Leaf, which did not have battery heating and cooling.
Rule of thumb for modern EVs is to not care about the battery at all. They are expected to last longer than the car. I would doubt even faster charging significantly changes this, or if it does it’s worth the trade off to those who need it.
“Rule of thumb” is a heuristic, which is necessarily inaccurate.
My only EV was a 1Gen Nissan Leaf, which is a perfect example of the EV that violates your assumptions.
I don’t think the first gen leaf is what parent had in mind when referring to “modern EVs”…
+1000. Who cares. It's good enough.
dont say that or used EV prices are gonna skyrocket :)
I believe you meant to write “10S” instead of 10p. I’m not 100% sure, but you were talking about e-bike batteries, which are often 36V, made out of 10 cells (or banks of cells) in series. The nominal voltage of most lithium chemistries is 3.6-3.7V.
EV batteries have many more cells in series, for example my car is 104S, and 800V cars have (obviously) more than 200 cells in series.
And the longevity of car batteries isn’t about wear being distributed “evenly” (a healthy battery can’t really wear “unevenly”, you always load all cells at once). EVs take care of their batteries, they cool them, heat them, balance them periodically, and they don’t actually pull that much power from them. They also keep the cells within pretty conservative voltage limits.
Indeed, I meant 10S. And what I meant by load being distributed along more cells, is that since you have many more cells, current drawn from each is lower. Which greatly prolongs the lifetime.
And hence the question I had with charging too fast. Since discharging faster clearly wears them more quickly, surely charging faster has a similar effect, since it's mostly the reversed process? A question probably easily answered with a query to a LLM.
“Number of cells” doesn’t really tell you anything about current and how it will affect the battery. The number of cells in series gives you the nominal voltage of the entire battery, and the P number (number of cells in parallel) rarely tells you anything useful — three 2000 mAh cells in parallel are equivalent to one 6000 mah cell, and both approaches are valid and used.
What you care about is actually the mass of the cells, basically the total weight of the active material. More material means higher capacity and can withstand more current.
For example, my car is 104S and that’s it, no parallel connections, but the individual cells are huge (~170 Ah each).
https://archive.is/Xp40l
Is this how the US falls behind? Missing technological improvements due to blind disagreements with Chinese/etc, combined with inability to update infrastructure? (Unclear how/why but datacenters being stood up so quickly seems like an exception to US’s bad construction)
In a word, yes. In a few words, yes that's the entire situation summary. No long term strategy exists for the entire country.
There might be no industrial long term planning, but I think it’s because the US operates in a different mode — financial (late) Capitalism.
That's the problem with late capitalism- we need an economy that makes people want to get up and early.
I think it's difficult to turn around, unless the mud is cleansed -- but most likely the mud doesn't want to be cleansed so it would rather take the whole pond with it.
Not a single country can excel at everything, and China heavily subsidizes their auto industry to undercut competition. It is not a fair game.
China subsidizes Tesla and European EVs as well.
I mean if you really think about it china already has or is on the verge of:
- energy independence
- ASML level microchip production
- the SOTA of AI
- citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
- strong local manufacturing
- eastern world support
- yuan recognized as a stable world currency
But they do suffer from issues as well:
- Aging population
- Autocracy (or well, one party system)
- Brain drain (better funding and security in the US and Europe, US has managed to alienate a lot of very promising figures so it's closer to just Europe, but capital markets in Europe are still hit and miss)
It's completely understandable why US is freaking out, china's future still looks a lot more promising than the one US find themselves in.
> citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
It's certainly not to China's extent, but is America really that opposed to surveillance and lack of privacy?
Yes, we tend to raise a huge stink when evidence of such comes to the surface.
But actions speak louder than words, and through our actions we already largely accept surveillance and a lack of privacy.
Everyday consumer apps are some of the worst offenders. Our social media apps listen to us, Amazon Ring doorbells are allegedly accessed by ICE (though Amazon denies it), Flock cameras abound (not to mention the fact they're poorly secured so who knows who else is watching other than the municipalities Flock contracts with), companies own much of our data and sell them to myriad unknown sources on a whim. There are too many examples to list.
No, it's not as severe as China. But we're certainly not trending in the right direction.
The american government pretends to care, but the moment you look deeper (snowden leaks), it's clear that they don't. But the fact still stands, the population is mostly against surveilance while chinese just keep their head down.
They have to keep their head down for fear it will get cut off (figuratively speaking, mostly). I doubt the majority of Chinese civilians are happy to be in a repressed state such as the one they're in.
And unfortunately it's pretty clear the current administration is working hard to enact a similar chilling effect on free speech. It's hard to see how we avoid becoming a similarly surveilled and repressed state if there were a third term.
I mean I didn't say it was a good thing. It's a benefit (to the government) that it is already widespread and accepted as part of life.
> They have to keep their head down for fear it will get cut off (figuratively speaking, mostly). I doubt the majority of Chinese civilians are happy to be in a repressed state such as the one they're in.
Around 100 million Chinese people travel abroad every year, and they all return to their country of their own free will. Go to China and see it for yourself. Talk with people, you would be surprised. Go to Shanghai and visit the provinces. This is not North Korea, you can talk with people normally. The majority of them will tell you that they are happy with how much their lives have improved over the last five decades. Every five years during those decades, life got better and better for most of them. And if you read about their history, you will see that this is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (more than 2,000 years since the Qin Dynasty) in which stability and order are prioritized over political pluralism.
I can't say I'm as knowledgeable of Chinese history as you seem to be, so I appreciate the information. And I may have used less than accurate phrasing when I said that I thought Chinese people are likely unhappy to be in a repressed state.
Perhaps my comment should have been more specific about the fact I was referring to not having any freedom of speech when it comes to criticizing the government.
But as a thought experiment, what happens once the government does something unpopular? Or once the economy is no longer thriving?
The masses tend to be pacified when their basic needs are met and the unspoken social contract is upheld. But I'd be curious to see how the people react if the fallout from the ongoing real estate crisis in China continues to persist and affect middle-class people as just one example.
China certainly has a long history of centralized bureaucratic governance. It also has a long history of silencing its critics. They've disappeared countless heads of companies or organizations and prominent individuals as well (#WhereIsPengShuai). It was not that long ago that hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in Tianenmen Square (which is wiped from the record in China of course).
So sure, quality of life has generally gotten better for many people living in China. I don't think that really negates my point about Chinese citizens needing to stay in line for fear they will also be disappeared or worse.
You've shifted the argument. "China restricts freedom of speech, especially criticism of the government" is true. But that is not the same claim as "most Chinese people are unhappy, living with their heads down in fear of being disappeared". China is authoritarian and heavily censors speech but broad support for the system can still exist in an illiberal state, especially when people feel their lives have improved materially. China lifted nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty over the past 40 years. Independent long run survey work from (if I remember correctly it was Harvard's) found extremely high satisfaction with China's central government, including 95.5% in around 2016.
The real question is whether your picture of ordinary Chinese life is accurate. And IMO it mostly isn't. This is not North Korea. Mainland residents made 291 million exit/entry trips in 2024 alone. There was a survey that found many respondents were willing to complain to the government or even protest over concrete issues like pollution, which is not how people behave if society is defined mainly by universal terror. So the better description is that China has hard political red lines, but normal daily life for most people is not "stay silent or vanish".
> They've disappeared countless heads of companies or organizations and prominent individuals as well (#WhereIsPengShuai).
The Peng Shuai case became a major Western media story, yet the controversy lasted only a few weeks before the international attention faded. Meanwhile, the WTA eventually backed down from its boycott threats. This illustrates how these incidents are often weaponized for geopolitical narratives rather than representing systematic policy.
More broadly, every country has mechanisms to deal with corruption, fraud, and abuse. China's anti corruption campaign has prosecuted hundreds of thousands of officials. The difference is that in China, accountability flows through Party mechanisms rather than Western style independent judiciaries.
> It was not that long ago that hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in Tianenmen Square (which is wiped from the record in China of course).
That was over 35 years ago in 1989, so longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Berlin Wall. You're basicallt judging present day Germany by conditions in 1945. China's government, economy, and society have transformed fundamentally since then.
> I don't think that really negates my point about Chinese citizens needing to stay in line for fear they will also be disappeared or worse.
The assumption that 1.4 billion people live in constant terror is simply not consistent with what we observe. If the level of fear you describe were accurate, would we not expect to see mass emigration rather than the world's largest annual outbound tourism? Would we not see economic collapse? The voluntary return of over 100 million Chinese travelers annually many of whom have the means to stay abroad tells you something significant about where people actually want to live.
Predictions that Chinese society is one downturn away from revolt have been made for decades, and they have repeatedly been wrong.
An authoritarian system can be repressive and still enjoy genuine mass support. In China's case, the evidence strongly suggests that both things are true at once.
The CCP's legitimacy rests not merely on performance but on a coherent worldview that China's developmental challenges require a unified national direction rather than gridlocked partisan competition. For a country that experienced a century of humiliation, civil war, and famine, stability is existential.
You wrote that quality of life improvements "don't really negate" your fear based argument. But I'd ask: at what point does aggregate human welfare matter more than ideological purity? If a governance system has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty while maintaining social order and national dignity, on what grounds do outsiders declare it illegitimate?
The Chinese people are not waiting for Western validation. They're building a civilization according to their own traditions and values.
> citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
citizens had no choice.
Neither do US and European citizens. We seem to be accepting the same amount of surveillance and lack of privacy still.
Citizens always have a choice. The cost can be terrible, but there’s always a choice
What is that “choice”? Surely you aren’t like those yokels in the south that think a “militia” running in the woods can take on the the US military or even a decent SWAT force
Being willing to fight for what you think is right even though there is no hope of winning is a choice you can make without being a tacticool yokel that doesn't understand the tech gap between the people and their masters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege
How much good did either do?
Winning remains the important part unless you think you're in a movie, though.
You're presuming that if they had a choice, they wouldn't accept it.
The reality is that chinese goverment is - overall - delivering results. People will accept things that bring good outcomes.
There's also upsides from the surveilence and the way things are done in China which makes it way more resilient from outside influence and disruptive bad actors.
Now I don't want the same things in my country, but it suits China to some extent.
China still has capital controls, so the RMB cannot be a world currency when you can't freely move it in and out of China.
doesn't change the fact that their next 'plan' will likely include expanding yuan influnce across the world.
How much more surveillance and lack of privacy is there than the US? The US also has
- surveilled cities and less dense places through doorbell cams - surveilled digital communications - social credit scores (try getting a bank account if you've opted out of things like lexisnexis etc)
What does lexisnexis do you can opt out of?
It’s not even “falling behind”, it’s willfully jamming heads in sand and actively blocking innovation so the legacy US OEMs can fall further behind and become less relevant.
The country is doing the same thing on multiple fronts as fast as possible
Data Centre builds are being managed by the tech bro companies aren't they? Don't they follow a much different set of rules than 'public' construction? (for better and worse).
China is what happens when you put scientists and engineers in charge [1][2].
20 years ago China had a single high speed rail link in Shanghai going to the airport. Now they have more than 30,000 miles of high speed rail where they've bootstrapped all the civil engineering, they make their own trains, etc. The system handles over 4 billion trips annually and they built the entire thing for an estimated $900 billion [3], which is now less than the US spends on the military in a single year.
Every $1 you spend on the military is $1 you don't spend on housing, healthcare, education, roads, trains and other infrastructure. Eisenhower warned about this 60+ years ago [4].
[1]: https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/All-of-China%27s-preside...
[2]: https://www.economist.com/china/2023/03/09/many-of-chinas-to...
[3]: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2152581/huge-668bn-high...
[4]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
On a semi related note, military leaders in the US have been warning about the dangers of the American deficit and have a long history of trying to cut waste by getting rid of weapons programs and military bases they don’t need but are constantly blocked by the civilian leadership in Congress because of the job loss.
Xi is the first President/leader China has had who literally never worked another job outside of politics and doesn’t speak a foreign language. They gave him a degree in chemical engineering when the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution but he never even had to pretend to use it. Hu, Jiang, and Deng actually worked as engineers and spoke languages besides Chinese (Russian and/or English).
Despite all that, Xi has done really well for China. I was totally predicting the opposite given that Xi was clearly a departure from the technocratic leaders that previously ran China (I thought Xi was a Mao throwback).
Xi is a fascinating figure. I had real concerns when he pushed through repealing term limits. I thought this could be another Putin but that hasn't been the case.
First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Second, real estate speculation was rampant in China for years but Xi quietly popped the bubble more than a decade agao. The property market is still in a dire state but he took the long-term view that housing should be for, well, housing, not investment. He did this by basically increasing the margin requirements that ultimately caused the Evergrade default. I think history will show this was the correct decision.
Third, Xi grew up as "Mao royalty". His father was one of Mao's lieutennants and he was a privileged child of that circle. But when he was a teenager, his father was purged in the Cultural Revolution and was ultimately expelled from the CCP. Xi repeatedly tried to join the party and ultimately succeeded then spending years quietly working in backwaters.
Lastly, Xi has quietly purused a policy of not relying on the West. Investments in renewable energy has been truly massive. Watch in the coming years as China catches up to ASML and TSMC with EUV, a technology that US has embargoed from export to China.
>First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Anti-corruption pushes in the government are 100% purges, just under a different name. As for Jack Ma, wasn't he targeted because he said something that the censors really didn't like all while pushing some finance app? My memory is hazy as to why it happened, but it certainly wasn't because he was wealthy.
Yeah he was encouraging young people to go into debt and then was publicly critical of the pushback against him, two big no nos
There were lots of red flags with Xi, and I’m afraid the world will learn the wrong lessons from his success. Maybe Democracy really is overrated, after all it gave us Trump…twice. The world looks at the USA and China as role models, and only the latter don’t look like a complete clown.
He did suffer from the cultural revolution but afterward he was elevated with strong preference. He even lost one of those Chinese “elections” where they take the top 20 out of 21 candidates, and they still let him through.
Jack Ma’s situation wasn’t corruption though. He simply made the mistake of publicly criticizing the government’s economic policy. He was disappeared shortly after. Then he reappeared a few months later and he has been on his best behavior since.
> First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Uh, interesting take… I think many would say he was silenced/disappeared by the CCP for daring to openly speak against it.
Entire subthread is excellent, great comments and observations by all.
It’s a purposeful hamstringing of EV so the GOP’s oil and gas supporters can make 3-5 more years of money.
China's low level of corruption wins again
Unfortunately, a corrupt autocracy with a strategy seems more likely to win the capitalist arms race than a wealthy but feckless democracy. It’s only slightly ironic that said autocracy calls itself communist.
Functioning democracies are inherently authoritarian. The simplistic, textbook definition of dictatorship, which in the West is generally used to define the foreign other, has no basis in reality.
This vision holds because it presupposes that the only thing people care about is political freedom, when in reality there can only ever be one political class and political freedom is largely about some other political class trying to take control because the current system doesn't favour them in some way.
Western democracies, at their worst, have a largely permanent political class who is elected every year under the pretext of democratic legitimacy. Eastern dictatorshpis, at their best, have a government that is continuously rotated to ensure competent implementation gaining legitimacy from delivery.
Both are contextual and the position along the autocracy axis largely depends on implementation. Whether people can actually vote is irrelevant (Europe is generally one of the worst examples of this, elections constantly, most election produce governments that polls under 20% within months...it is very strange that people call this democracy).
For the majority of Americans, “the US falling behind” is not something they care about. The principal thing they care about is not whether the whole is ruined but whether they have an appropriate portion.
An American would prefer that a field make 1 unit of rice if everyone got 1/n units. This is different from cultures where the preference is that you maximize your wellbeing (older America) so that if someone could figure out how to make the field make 10 units of rice, it’s okay if he makes 8 units and everyone else gets 2/n units.
The modern American cultural optimum aims to minimize |x_i - x_j| while growth cultures attempt to maximize x_i. An ironic reversal of roles.
That’s a rather tall argument given that the US is currently experiencing historic income inequality [1].
[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-u...
America is also, fundamentally, a divided country where people disagree over basic things (such as the distribution of rice) and there is a massive industry dedicated to amplifying that division.
On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics.
Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.
Maybe. Agree that zero-sum thinking sucks. You gotta grow the pie. But. You also have to share the big pie.
In your example, the current crisis can be represented as:
A field exists and produces 1 unit.
A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.
America has a genuinely crazy side.
No other country in the world has anything like the Republicans in the US, who are the only major political party in the world to oppose the existence of man made climate change.
There may be political parties in the rest of the world that say that the cost of tackling climate change is too high, but they don’t dispute the factual reality of it.
The Republicans were in this position between about 2008 and 2014 when their leaders were McCain and Romney, but Romney’s lack of insanity inspired a massive backlash within the crazy part of American society that then made Donald Trump their primary winner in 2016 as a repudiation to the not completely insane Republican leadership.
I know HN loves to pretend that the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, but this can be shown to be objectively false by comparing to political parties abroad. Democrats are a normal European center left to center right party with all the flaws that brings with them.
The Republicans are now a party of insanity.
It's how Europe falls behind, you mean.
Why do they always get left out of the comparisons? Because they're so far behind anything it would be an insult to include them?
Europe is third since the 2000s. The pushed the Euro to try to limit it (and from the mouth of someone who was present when they pushed, it was also caused by the black Wednesday of 92, the attacks on currencies increased, and the cost to rebuff them too).
And yes, basically, no one should include europe in the comparison until US oil fields are depleted, and even then at best it would be a race for the second place. You can't compete without gas and oil or a huge manufacturing lead, and europe don't have any, and only have specific subset of manufacturing (basically sensors, electronics, avionics, optics, and handmade clothing) that isn't workforce-intensive, nor resource-intensive.
Maybe, but BMW are at least trying. https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/electric-cars/electric-3-...
At least the Chinese tech will be available to European consumers, nothing says insecure like pretending a competitor doesn't exist.
At the expense of European companies...good luck.
I think this is probably because Europe is considered part of "the West".
you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind
though in 3.5 months they are gonna ban EU consumers from buying cheap things directly from AliExpress and groom July 1st you will have to pay 3EUR for each ordered item, including that 1EUR screen protector, because it's much better when you can feed some useless middleman than saving money, thanks EU!
> you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind
With that logic, every programmer on this site should spend as much time as possible on Facebook. This will make their salary equal to that of a Meta employee!
Consuming something is not the same as being able to produce it.
DeepSeek is available in the US, so why did anyone imply the US will fall behind in AI tech?
Data centers are (a) private not public and (b) throwing money at the problem on the assumption of being able to capture a significant chunk of all white collar incomes.
And they're running into the public issues already, such as lack of large power transformer availability and noise complaints from trying to generate their own power.
But gas pumps / electric charging stations are also private.
Many things are private but some of them are more private than others, the details can be quite intriguing.
Plenty of gas pumps to go around, more of them aren't going to provide anybody private with more of what they crave the most which data centers do provide. That's the reason for the push to abandon EVs and reduce their competing demand for scarce electricity.
New electric capacity, paid for by the ratepayers, would benefit those same ratepayers if used for EV charging but big biz isn't in the game for them.
Cool! My only concern is that Wired has a very long and consistent history of advertising technologies that don't work quite as they say. So let's hope this is real.
BYD is shipping both charging stations and cars with blade battery 2.0 first half of 2026. Both economic and premium models can charge from 0 - 97% under 12 minutes. They are also building these charging stations right now and few hundreds are already operational.
Big money in US politics is the root of lots bad things happening in the country … some serious change is needed to truly achieve MAGA …
Let's go China!
Headlines right next to each other on my HN feed
"Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance"
"How BYD got EV chargers to work almost as fast as gas pumps"
Has there ever been a tariff in all of human history where the technical gap between 2 countries' products has been this large? This is nearly a new product class.
Rapid charging in the UK is mostly way more expensive than gas (petrol) at around 89p per kWh.
I imagine with Iran etc that could push over £1 soon!
How foolish it must feel to buy a new car without this tech in a world that has this tech, only to fund the people spending our tax money to keep it from us and continue pushing fossil fuels.
Agreed. I've been on the market for a new car to replace my aging Prius for for the past three years. All of my top choices are "not sold in the US".
I don't need a giant fricken SUV to go to work. I don't need 400 miles of range (the other car does that when it's needed). But I do need room to fit the kids and their stuff in the car. There's literally nothing sold in the USA that's suitable for this use case.
I may be in the market for a new car soon, which I hope to keep for at least a decade, so this kind of thing bothers me. I don't want to buy something that's already years behind on efficiency.
Absolute garbage. Just stop and think for one second what kind of power delivery is required to do this and you will quickly realize that’s it’s not feasible anywhere other than as a demo.
looks like they are aiming for 20,000 this year and already have 4,239 "In the first two months of this year alone, BYD has already completed 4,239 charging stations" https://carnewschina.com/2026/03/05/byd-unveils-blade-batter...
They claim to have rolled out 4000 fast chargers so far.
Although it also says the car that supports the max charging speed hasn’t hit the market yet so seems yet to be proven in the wild.
They use a buffer battery, it's quite feasible with that.
Feels like such a waste for marginal gains?
With the range as good as a modern EV the charge time already isn't a particularly that bad. I'd much prefer more chargers (so that you can combine charging with something else you were going to do anyway) than faster ones.
I tend to agree but I think the strategy here is to convert people who stubbornly cling to gas vehicles because EVs somehow defy their expectations. I have been approached many times at highway rest stops by people who are curious and slightly skeptical about the EV value proposition. They see me hanging around the vehicle for a half hour and think “ugh, no thanks” as if that’s all I do when I travel. What they’re not seeing is that I rarely use public chargers at all, because 99% of my charging is done either at home or at the charger in the parking lot at work. It’s really just road trips. Not to mention, if you’re an ICE owner hanging around long enough at a rest stops to notice that I’m hanging around, are you really that much faster on a road trip?!!
Back on topic, I am ok with losing a little efficiency in the fast charging process if it means that more people switch away from a horribly inefficient and polluting technology.
I'll bite. They dumped a lot of power in a small amount of time. Sounds like the perfect job for a mega capacitor to streamline deployments. Other than the successful technology, Mrs. Lincoln, what are your gripes?
They simply use a few grid storage batteries. Chargers don't charge at 1.5MW 100% of time. You also have people driving in and out of the station. The math works out really well.
Cool now at your busy "gas" station keep it working as the pile gets exhausted and you don't have the supporting grid to be able to deliver the needed power to keep it stocked with "gas".
At least not in Europe.
From what I read it's 1500 kW at 1000V or Peak use of 1.5 MW at 1000 A. That's a crazy amount of power.
You will exhaust your piles quickly, or they are enormous. So it's like "quick-charge" until we run out?
Chargers don't charge at 1.5MW 100% of time. You have grid storage batteries serving as buffer. It can be charged at steady rate by the grid all the time. People need time to drive in and out of the station. The math works out really well.
> Thousands of FLASH Charging stations have already been installed in China, and BYD has committed to a global rollout that will include an initial wave of FLASH Chargers in Europe. Further details on the plans, and how they will support the Z9GT's arrival, will be revealed in due course.
https://bydukmedia.com/en/news-articles/denza-z9gt-to-start-...
not feasible yet, keep in mind we regularly transport tons of power in the form of gasoline - an absolutely massive (literally) chain of logistics
moving and storing electricity can vastly simplify the process and work like this will mature