Chinese automakers have been making waves of late, and Zeekr is prime among them. The company may now hold an auspicious title, that of having the fastest charging EV currently on the market.
Meet the Zeekr 7X. From the outside, it looks like so many other electric SUVs, with bulbous curves and fancy LED lighting elements. Ultimately, though, it’s what’s inside that makes the difference. We’re talking about the Golden Brick battery, which is key to the fast-charging capability that makes the 7X so special.
Zeekr has been developing the battery for some time, touting the battery’s ability to resist heat and cold without undue degradation. Most of all, though, it’s prized for its fast-charging ability—with the company claiming it can go from 10% to 80% in just 10.5 minutes. Now, recent testing seems to show it lives up to the hype.
Out of Spec Reviews recently took to YouTube to show off the Zeekr 7X and its prime party trick. Testing the vehicle in China, the team found the 7X was able fill its battery from 10 to 80% in nine minutes and 45 seconds. Going further, the vehicle was also available to achieve a 0 to 100% charge in approximately 22 minutes. It’s particularly impressive when you consider that a full charge in the 7X will net you 382 miles of range.
The team also provided a second video covering the charging process in detail. The team recorded a full charging curve during a 0 to 100% charge, noting a peak at 467 kW and sustained charging at over 400 kW. It’s full of grainy detail for the EV nerds out there, but the simpler figures come straight from the 7X’s itself—the display noted the vehicle was adding range at about 1,270 miles per hour. That’s not how we normally use “miles per hour”, but you get the idea.
Specifically, the Zeekr 7X boasts a very high charge rate—the company claims the Golden Brick battery can charge at 5.5C. C is short for capacity—basically, it refers to charging at a rate of 5.5 times the capacity of the battery. Multiply the Golden Brick’s capacity of 75 kWh by 5.5, and you get the peak power level it charges at—nominally, 412.5 kW. Obviously, as per the testing above, it’s able to peak a little higher than that, though this rate is not sustained for the full charge. Most notably, lithium batteries charge slower as they near 100%, which is why charge rates are so commonly compared from 10% to 80% instead.
While the 7X can charge very quickly, it’s worth noting that this isn’t always practical in the real world. For the testing above, Out of Spec Reviews had access to a mighty 840 kW charger owned by Zeekr—something you won’t easily find out in the wild. Most charging stations are lucky to top out at 350 kW or less. With that said, Zeekr has been doing the work to roll out more powerful chargers in China, with the company planning to have over 10,000 ultra-fast chargers up and running by 2026.
Zeekr is very proud of its battery, even throwing it in a fire to show off how robust it really is.
The Golden Brick relies on lithium iron phosphate cells, regarded as safer and more robust than other lithium-ion chemistries. They’re more stable and less likely to undergo dangerous thermal runaway, making it safer to push them to higher charge rates.
It also uses rectangular prismatic cells, rather than the cylindrical cells that have become more popular in the last decade of EV development. Notably, this allows the battery to achieve a strong volume utilization of 83.7%, according to CarNewsChina. In simpler terms, the rectangular cells pack together really nicely to make it remarkably space-efficient.
The Zeekr 7X and its Golden Brick battery are quite the engineering feat. The vehicle is set to hit the market in the summer of 2025, and should quickly find fans in China and beyond. Owners won’t necessarily be charging at 400-plus kilowatts on the regular, given commonly available infrastructure. Regardless, it’s yet another forward step for EV technology—one that will have rival automakers rushing to catch up.
Image credits: Zeekr, Out of Spec Reviews via YouTube screenshot
Nyobolt has been claiming 10%-80% in 5 minutes. But, they aren’t exactly a production vehicle yet. They aren’t much of anything yet.
https://nyobolt.com/electric-vehicles/
Is there a reason why the rest of the car industry has fallen so far behind China in terms of battery development? I would say it’s either that the Chinese government are dumping money into it or that the demand is much greater there,but I don’t see any reason why Europe or the US couldn’t match them if they bothered to try?
Who’s going to invest billions in an American battery R&D/manufacturing plant when every 2-4 years the regulatory/incentive/tax system is thrown into a wood chipper?
Also I wouldn’t be surprised if the orange fascist army will stop all government grants for green energy research at universities as well.
Europe is struggling with high energy prices due to helping America fight Russia with sanctions (and buying expensive American LNG instead). While China is very happy to get Russian energy at a discount.
So basically there’s no “free market” incentive to develop the technology right now as it’s more expensive than just building cheap (or cheap but profitable) ICE cars. And in many ways free market capitalism holds back development and adoption. No one wants to invest and everyone wants profits growing every quarter.
China is putting in the money and resources to develop it. Once they get the technology to the point it is more profitable and more practical than ICE then the western markets will just be forced to buy Chinese
America is falling behind in education, we will buy our tech from advanced countries. If we can afford it. We no longer have first world problems. You should worry about working until you die broke.
“Bother to try” is your answer for the US. Why try when you can make a metric assload of money building comparatively primitive and inefficient body-on-frame pickup trucks?
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I’m old, so sometimes it takes me nine minutes and forty-five seconds to get my bladder down to 80% empty. Nice to know my car battery can match that flow rate.
I keep saying China has caught up to the point where they show genuine pride in their craftmanship and products. But we really should keep our focus on fighting culture wars, as that’s obviously more important.
The issue is that for every Chinese company trying their best to do good honest work, there’s five more stealing tech and shilling it out as cheaply and crappily as possible.
Wasn’t there a reason most EV companies stopped using prismatic cells? I thought they had issues with even cooling on the rectangular shape. Making them round largely solves that because coolant is the same distance from the center of the cell all the way around. Which makes me wonder about the longevity of these packs if they’re shoving a ton of current into cells that are difficult to cool effectively. Density is great, but not if you’re having to replace a five figure battery pack every few years.
And honestly, I’m not sure I care. A while ago someone released an EV that would charge 180 miles or something like that in 15 minutes and I realized that was probably fast enough for me. I’m most likely stopping for 15 minutes every 180 miles on a road trip anyway, so it’s not going to be a huge imposition.
The real issue is that you can’t count on getting that charging speed. Even if you find a charger that theoretically supports it, that doesn’t mean you’ll actually get that speed. The cars aren’t the reason I’ve avoided EVs, the infrastructure is.
You stop every 180 miles??
If I’m traveling with my wife I’d be stopping more frequently than that.
Wow, I go until the low fuel warning light comes on, stop at the next exit, fill, and go. In my hybrid, I’ve done 500+ in a shot many times, back and forth to Michigan or Tennesee or North Carolina for a weekend. I just want to get where I’m going and not bother with anything en route that eats time
Listen up everyone, Ranwhenparked can do 500+ miles between stops. I suggest we halt all EV development, until the technology has caught up with Ranwhenparkeds bladder.
Or good for you i guess, or not. Would personally be a little worried if I had to share the road with you after 5+ hours straight.
I don’t believe I’m unusual, this is a normal thing, most people drive as long as possible on trips, if you have a 300 mile tank, you drive 250 miles, that’s how it’s done, at least post-Victorian era when we no longer have horses that need water
I’ve been in traveling sales for 15 years, a normal work day is 200 business miles. Driving 1,000 over the weekend to get to some out of town concert or music festival is barely a stretch
Not unusual, but (region dependent) in the 2% I would guess. Or perhaps categorized as a profesional driver.
I would still recommend stretching your legs every 2 hours or so.
I was on the road doing sales for years, and I’ve done plenty of long stints at the wheel.
My last few road trips have been in my Miata, which goes less than 200 miles on a tank. Longer stints aren’t really an option.
Traveling with family and pets, I’m lucky to make it even 180 miles between stops.
LFP vs Lithium Ion differences. Apples and Oranges if you will.
I’m pretty sure the current Hyundai EVs will go from 10%-80% in about 20 minutes on a good charger.
Yeah, I think they were the ones I was referring to, although I don’t remember for sure.
All I’ve heard about electric cars is how they have so few moving parts, that they can be built cheaply and you don’t need much labor to build them. Yet they are consistently priced much higher than ICE cars. The first company to manufacturer an affordable, reliable EV will sell millions of them. By affordable, I mean $12-$18k out the door…. and it looks like Chinese auto makers will try it!
Thank you for saying this.
I am curious where you heard that EVs are cheap to build? The have fewer parts and require less labor, but no one appears to dispute the fact that batteries are extremely expensive. If batteries were cheap, EVs would be cheap and wouldn’t depreciate so rapidly.
I’ve heard it 100 times. Every news article on EVs tells us how cheap they are to manufacture, mostly due to the fact that the required labor force is much smaller. China will not face the same expenses with batteries. They control most of the raw materials needed. Even GM predicted layoffs if EVs caught on.
Everything except the battery is cheap to build – electric cars do have fewer parts and do require fewer steps in the assembly process, and, ultimately do require fewer workers. However, the batteries still contain very expensive raw materials, and battery factories require very expensive, specialized manufacturing equipment
Imagine how much more expensive ICE cars would be if gas tanks all had to be made out of platinum sheets bent into shape and secured with diamond studded gold rivets? That’s sort of what’s going on
But, you do also have the additional factor of automakers trying to quickly recoup their investments into EVs by inflating the margins on the vehicles themselves, which they do through feature bloat – all those advanced driver aid features, full glass roofs, electric door handles, massive screens on every surface, giant rims, etc, they can mark those up how ever they want and brag about how much you get “standard” for your money
I work with medium voltage (up to 15kV) motor starting equipment. And I can tell you that although there are few moving parts, they are nevertheless extremely complicated and have far MORE parts and components. And these are the sorts of things you can’t work on by yourself, so you’re 100% reliant of the manufacturer or other experts. The battery, the inverter / variable frequency drive, the motor itself, which can be synchronous, permanent magnet, A/C induction, variable reluctance, wound rotor, etc., there are endless ways to configure and design a motor. Thermal management of the battery pack, a ton of sensors, motor cooling, all the electronics associated with charging. Battery electric vehicles are extremely complex, no one should assume otherwise. Oh yeah and millions of lines of code. They only look simple if you don’t understand how they actually work. Like a lot of things…
Thank you for saving me the time of writing exactly this.
Less of the shade tree jackstand builds then. Unless you happen to have most of these equipment and skills, you’ll have to run with what you bought
Right. If they can make $400 RC cars, why is it so hard to just scale them up a bit? It probably explains why every EV company avoids just building a car and is obsessed with ‘adding value’ like autonomy and in car video games. /s
It’s a matter of time before cars are equipped with driving simulators to entertain the drivers while the gets itself stuck in traffic. LOL
We already have one in Europe, called the Dacia Spring.
It’s a tiny little EV that’s super cheap.
Probably too small to be successful in the US market though.
I dont know.. they always tell us that the US market doesn’t want a tiny, affordable car, but history doesn’t agree all of the time. The VW Beetle? Even the lowly Chevy Vega and Ford Pinto sold millions and lasted many years. I sure wish they’d try selling the Dacia Spring here!
The Dacia is of course made in China…
Honestly, the most impressive thing to me is 382 miles of range on a 75 kWh battery. That would be really really impressive if true. I’m doubtful though.
Me too! That’s right at 5 mi/kWh, which Lucid claims the Air is capable of, but I doubt this can quite match the drag coefficient and frontal area of the Air. Still, if a vehicle like this could reliably do 300 highway miles with a 75 kWh battery that would be excellent progress.
I’m guessing that’s on the Chinese cycle, which much like the European one is highly optimistic when it comes to range (even moreso, in fact). Some napkin math suggests that on the EPA cycle this would come in at more like 270 miles.
Ioniq 5 is EPA rated for 318 miles on a 77kwh battery and I can’t imagine it’s very aerodynamic.
I think the Ioniq 5 is decent for aero but not great. The Ioniq 6 is pretty aerodynamic and gets 342 miles on 77kWh.
Make no mistake about it, China is coming for the world auto market, and I predict they’ll succeed in a huge way. I’ll even make a bold prediction- within 10 years, you’ll see as many Chinese cars in the USA as you see Fiats, Tesla, and others. They’re bringing affordable, well built vehicles. I think that’s the same formula Toyota, Honda and VW once used to gain market share!
It’s going to be the 80s all over. We will tariff the shit out of any foreign/better cars so that the big 3 (4 including Tesla) can churn out obsolete cars that only sell here, because they are completely non-competitive elsewhere.
I agree 100% … we’ve seen this before.
I think 1970s Brazil is going to be a closer comparison to where we’re going. The whole world will be one market, dominated by the Chinese, and the US will be its own isolated thing with a couple of tiny (by world standards) automakers supply our domestic market and no one else, and those automakers will immediately collapse completely as soon as we open ourselves back up
I don’t see the current trade policies making it more than a few months. The big three move a lot of components and vehicles over those borders.
Rinse and repeat
I’ve wondered this aloud before, but if a Chinese car is still cheaper to buy than an equivalent Western car even when accounting for a 25% tariff, then why not just start selling them here? That’s what the Japanese did in the 70s.
Also the UK. Jeremy Clarkson has a video called Who Killed The British Motor Industry? Touched on the effect of Japanese cars in the UK
I’m not very familiar with the history of British automobiles, but the Japanese invasion of the early 1970s certainly didn’t help the British makes in the USA. It wasn’t long after that we totally lost MG and several other historic brands l
Hasn’t China been stealing the intellectual property of companies from other nations? I’m curious if this is a home grown invention or if it was “borrowed” from somewhere else.
Incidentally, it would be a damn shame if an American company were to find the designs of this battery and build it here.
Absolutely, but at this point, it certainly seems they are moving forward on their own much more rapidly than anyone else. If they are the only ones with this technology, it probably isn’t stolen.
Interesting how the US basically abandoned LFP years ago (A123 battery systems went bankrupt, too far ahead of when demand actually materialized), and the Chinese picked up the tech and ran with it.
Ampex invented helical scan tape recording but it didn’t take long for Japan to monopolize and perfect the manufacture of VCR’s. Inventing a technology is one thing, optimizing manufacturing and removing as much cost as possible is always done by someone else. This is why we all own so much Chinese stuff – it’s cheaper. I don’t think BEV’s will become 100% of the market ever, ICE is just too practical and has insurmountable advantages over EV’s. But I would expect China to optimize the electric car, not Tesla.
We are so far behind China it’s insane. Is this how the British felt watching the US surpass them?
It’s almost like governments backing innovation sees more innovation. Well shit, who could’ve seen that coming?
That’s not how (American style) Capitalism works
It’s probably more like watching Datsun and Honda show up here, then only realizing a decade later that they really were amazing cars. Even though the world is much more economically and even culturally homogeneous today (ie, harder to play up the racism angle), now we have an actual legislative barrier — tariffs and bans — to prevent this.
I’m pretty appalled. Put aside our pride and maybe just cede some (or all) of the American EV market to Chinese companies for the betterment of consumers and the environment. Put in place very strict rules around connectivity to ensure they can’t be used for cyber attacks, things like that. Start working on licensing and joint ventures with domestic brands.
We can keep China at arm’s length in a lot of ways, but this is one area where it’s just a no-brainer.
The environment? I’m not at all convinced that the 300 new EV companies in China are following good environmental practices on the manufacturing side.
And there’s also the issue of worker protections and working conditions. Which are non-existent and generally poor, respectively.
So sure… there’s rapid advancement… but it comes at a cost.
Such is the way of the human race. The world has historically been built on the backs of slave labor or glorified versions of it since the dawn of time.
I’m not saying it’s right but noting it’s how we’ve gotten to where we are now.
Don’t forget about China’s reputation for intellectual property theft. When I see big advances coming from a Chinese company, I’m very skeptical.
I am frustrated with those that are quick to talk about how wonderful the Chinese EV industry is given China’s poor treatment of workers, disregard for the environment, and disregard for intellectual property rights. It is easy to build cheap vehicles when you are playing by a different set of rules than companies in the US, Europe, South Korea, and Japan.
I was out for a a tough hike over lunch (hypoxia is my best thinking time!) and I thought it might be an interesting time for the US to start tearing these cars apart and studying them — either they’ve stolen some tech, or we can steal some back. That’s the rules they play by, anyway.
I don’t see much downside as long as these cars don’t start blowing up. Most of the developed world seems okay with them.
Exactly, but I wonder if opening up their market to the US with some additional stipulations would be a good enticement.
You know, just how America solved all of China’s human rights abuses by purchasing their other products.
Yeahhhhh
Yes and no. On one hand they make advanced EVs. On the other hand if you say mean things about the government you could wind up in jail. They also have the world’s largest property bubble which wiped out literally trillions of dollars in savings since most Chinese folks don’t invest in things like stocks and bonds but instead have traditionally invested in real estate…. which has turned out to be a huge collapsing bubble.
Its still very much a old school communist regime that does all that it can to put on a facade that everything is perfect, people are super happy there and that all of those new skyscrapers and trains somehow makes up for what we don’t see. Like millions of ethnic minorities being put into labor camps, forced to work in factories as slave labor, and having their kids “reeducated” And so on. Its not a country you’d want to live in.
That isn’t to say we did a lot of the same things. We did. We also have a completely corrupt government. But I can still say trump is a fucking moron and get away with it. For now.
So no. I don’t think they have surpassed us. Making shit is one thing. How you treat your people is another and they are very far behind in that rehard.
Right, so it’s fine that everything else we use on a daily basis from furniture to smartphones to power tools to home appliances is made in China, but we draw the line at cars? Really, American capitalism has already milked disadvantaged cheap labor in China for decades and continues to do so with no end in sight. We buy buy buy all this cheap junk off of Shein, Temu, and Amazon and in stores like Dollar Tree, Target, and Walmart that have zero transparency in the supply chain and simply ignore the potential for labor abuses there.
But suddenly we care about slave labor when our domestic auto industry is being called into question after we already off-shored every other manufacturing industry to this so called ‘communist regime’? If anything cars being one of the most expensive and difficult-to-manufacture products ought to mean that the workers building them receive much higher compensation than the ones making cheap junk to fill Walmart shelves.
Meanwhile American companies are coming under fire for child labor in their domestic suppliers. Criticize the labor abuses in Mainland China all you like and rightly so, but it’s the sheer hypocrisy that kills me since apparently it only matters when our beloved cars are under threat.
Also the quality of life of their middle class these days is fairly decent. With cheap groceries, rent, transportation and heavily subsidized healthcare, it’s no wonder most are satisfied with the one party system and willing to overlook their government’s evils. I’m not saying it’s a great system and its abuses shouldn’t be overlooked, but it shouldn’t be painted as some unliveable empire either. Plenty of people I know from China go back and forth and point out that there are good and bad things both here and there. It’s not so one-sided.
If you re-read my comment I didn’t allude to the US being the absolute pinnacle of perfection. Not by a long shot.
If I could avoid buying ANYTHING from China I would. These days if say- an appliance goes bad- I look on eBay for something older. As in, I bought a NOS GE Iron from the 50’s. Better built, made in the US ( long ago) and will last longer. But its IMPOSSIBLE not to buy things from there because of all of those lovely executives whom back in the 90’s-2000’s ( looking at you Walmart ) who sent the work to China.
You can call me a hypocrite till the cows come home. But ever since communism came to China, more people have died as a result of that then from any other regime or war in history. Mao’s “Great leap Forward” cost 50 million lives as the population starved to death. A million more deaths from A “Mini-revolution” in the late 60’s when Mao thought the country was becoming “too western”.
And its still happening. Over 2 million ethnic Uighur Muslims being detained, imprisoned or otherwise used as slaves. The entire country of Tibet has been fighting for its own survival against China for decades. The entire world suffered as a result of the CCP refusing to initially admit that Covid was a problem, refused to allow its scientists to release the sequence to the WHO and the more we find out about it the more its likely the virus came from a lab where sloppy handling resulted in its release- causing death to millions around the world.
The US made a deal with a very smart but also a very brutal regime. Every single person who buys something from there is helping fund it. Myself included. My response was in regard to the comment that somehow China was ahead of us. They are not when it comes to the most important factor: Its people. Now granted maybe we aren’t too far behind when it comes to our own corrupt leadership at the moment.
Yes, I know. My grandparents are of the generation that fled the Revolution because they were the children of a senator and an army general of the former Nationalist Republic. My mom complains daily about the tackiness and superficiality of Mainland China ‘because they killed all the intellectuals, and with it all the taste’. You don’t have to preach to me.
I’m just saying that despite all that, the last decade has seen a major overhaul in the quality of life for a huge majority of their population. My grandmother went back a couple years before COVID for the first time since she had fled as a toddler and said that her village in Guangxi had never looked more tidy and well-kept, and that they had even named her elementary school after one of her (presumably Nationalist) ancestors.
Times are a-changing on the Mainland, and they’re rapidly trying to co-opt and reaffirm their history with regards to ‘the before times’. While my grandmother would of course never go back to live there since she was raised in Taiwan and feels more Taiwanese anyway, she’s glad that the people who stayed are finally able to reap the rewards after the decades of famine and labor. Is that to say that it’s suddenly all over and things are great there? Of course not, but for many citizens of the majority ethnic group things are finally improving, and it’s important to recognize that not everything about the quality of life on the Mainland is ‘propaganda’.
At the end of the day, I don’t think it’s right to say that either the U.S. or China deserves proclaim itself as ‘ahead’. Like you say, they’re both regimes in a race to the bottom, and it’s unfortunate that more civil and equitable Western countries will be caught in the midst of the developing animosity. But just like not everyone in the U.S. is rich and owns their own house as the Chinese citizens assume of us, not everyone in China is an indentured worker who has nothing to their name as we assume of them.
The US was pretty far into it’s industrial revolution before it really started innovating. With the exception of some agricultural innovations and maybe the Franklin stove, they pretty much stole their ideas and scaled them with seemingly limitless resources and slaves (and later cheap immigrant labour).
Slave states weren’t industrialized while slavery still existed
It’s great to see battery tech move forward.
Where I’d love to apply this, once we get to the point of excellent longevity in relation to charge/discharge cycles, is to run my house on the good battery tech.
Where I live, the overnight KWh rate is half the daytime rate. I’d love to charge at night and the run the house all day off stored energy.
Plus, it saves me in power outages. Add a few KWh worth of solar panels (I have a bungalow with 60 horizontal feet of roofline and a decent pitch) and I’d be pretty much energy independent.
It was the price and capability that kept me away from a battery, but I will never look back on my solar panels. My PowCo has ‘net metering’, so I make more than I use and can roll it over.
You probably won’t be energy independent. At least here in FL, you must remain connected to the grid and “sell” your solar energy back to the company. If you use less than you sell, you get a credit in the event that you use more. The batteries only kick on if you lose grid power – think of it as a whole-house generator. But you’d better hope the sun comes out if the outage lasts long enough to deplete your batteries.
Nothing a backup generator can’t fix. Bulk charge and shut it back down.
I have no desire to unhook my current house from the grid as most insurance and even mortgage lenders have stipulations for being connected to the grid.
But being energy independent in that I’m not consuming from the grid, and see no loss in usage of the house, even when the grid goes down.
Your idea works, but you’re correct – the “system” is set up to make it pretty much impossible to disconnect unless your house is paid for and you choose to self-insure.
Ontario just kicked off a whole litany of energy rebates I’m looking to cash in on. The less money I can give to utility companies, the better.
Go get it! Similarly, we had to do some paperwork and deal with inspectors, but we did get a little rebate for putting in hurricane windows. You’d be silly to not go after the money if they’ve put it on the table.
Have you seen the Copper induction stoves? They use a battery to let you operate on only a 120v outlet (a hurdle for people with gas appliances). And because of said battery they can preheat the oven to 375 in like 4 minutes! It’s also programmed to charge the battery overnight when rates are cheaper.
Just looked up these stoves as I’d never heard of them, looks like a pretty great idea. Hopefully there will be more coming out that are more affordable, but still might be cheaper than trying to rewire for 220v.
I find it odd the idea that a 220W rewire is necessary. I can’t think of any existing range or oven installation that is not already 220W. Even ones with gas cook tops are already wired at 220W for the oven. Maybe codes are different where you are?
This feels like a pretty big deal in the real world adoption of EVs to me. Yes I realize that there likely aren’t 840kW chargers in the states yet but the fact that an EV can now realistically go from 10 to 80% in 10 minutes is impressive to me. Sure it only takes 5 to fill my gas tank but on a road trip once you add in a potty break you’re over 10 easily. I’m not saying I’m lining up to buy one quite yet but this is the first time I’ve read about an EV and said to myself, “hey, that might actually work out.”
What people aren’t accounting for with the “fill the gas tank” comparison is how you have to physically be there filling the tank, at least around me. A current EV with Plug and Charge, it’s 30 seconds at most to get out and plug in and another 30 seconds unplugging. On recent road trips on 250 kW chargers, my Tesla was done charging about 50% of the time before I was finished up walking the dogs or getting coffee or whatever. I bet it would be similar with a faster charging EV like the Hyundai/Kia offerings.
I hear your argument but still say 20 minutes is too long for people to willingly accept, particularly for long road trips. Perhaps I’m ignorant to it all though as I admittedly haven’t done much research into EV ownership as I have limited desire to own one at this stage in the game (but I do see the merits and potential).
Maybe I’m slow at stops. With family and dogs, our usual stop is 15-20 minutes every few hours. It was that way with our ICE car prior to getting the EV. Once we found that out, it made the charging stops a bit easier to handle. Same time spent overall, at least for us. We don’t tend to cannonball our road trips either. EV’s aren’t there yet for the cannonballers.
I’d say 15-20 minutes is a pretty quick stop, at least for us. Especially if there’s a park or anything similar nearby, it’s super difficult to get our 4 year old back in the car in under 20 minutes.
Even for single drivers on the way the work, it seems like half of them leave the car at the pump before or after filling up, get a coffee and pick up snacks, then stand in line to pay. The car sits there for 15 minutes total including pumping time.
There are tradeoffs, yes. But there’s also advantages. If most of your driving is back and forth to work or even staying in the same region then most of the time you just drive home and plug it in. We are leasing a Chevy Equinox EV and with 300 miles of range it can be used for commuting, day trips and so on. Not having to go to a gas station is pretty nice.
Agreed. It takes 10 seconds to “fill up” at home. The times I’ve been to a gas station were either for mower gas or when the fast chargers were located at one.
I’d be more concerned with having to wait 20+ minutes for the one working charger to become free before I even started.
That hasn’t been my experience. I had to wait 5 minutes once for a charger. Two days before Christmas, at a mall outside Washington, D.C. close to I-95. Things may be different elsewhere.
I literally wouldn’t even blink. Worst case I’d sit on my phone for ten minutes.
That said, I drove an EV6 across an Australian desert where the only chargers were 11 kW at best… that was a slog.
I go in the store while the pump is running all the time.
Can’t do that around me. The stations took away the little pieces with the detents to hold the nozzle valve open.
wedge the gas cap into the trigger.
Great! But also blah, blah, blah. It 99%does not matter in the US market. China EV bad according to many. We’re getting our asses handed to us in the EV sector. Charging infrastructure is trash. We’re seemingly building to an increasingly outdated standard.
I maintain we are 20+ years from a meaningful switch to EV’s. Electric production capacity isn’t here. Delivery network isn’t here yet. Charging options aren’t even close to critical mass level.
I’m interested in EV’s but not willing to part with my money for one given the current state of things. I also like my gas cars.
I’m with you, and I don’t think it’s being cynical, it’s being realistic. Even if the electricity production capacity increases, it’s likely going to be sucked up by data centers (crypto, AI).
One of the interesting things about the panic caused by the Chinese DeepSeek AI engine is that some power companies like Constellation took a big hit to their stock price too.
There are a couple of reasons floated. One is that DeepSeek is much more energy efficient, although that seems based on a lot of speculation.The other is that AI is significantly overrated, and won’t actually be used nearly as much as people like Zuckerberg are claiming.
Maybe projections are right, but if they’re off due to some combination of efficiency and lower than expected demand, that could result in a lot of surplus capacity.
Oh its gonna’ get used all right. And its probably coming for our jobs. I work as a creative director and also do some design work. All of Adobe tools we use are now AI-enhanced. Even at this early of a stage it does a lot of things that used to take hours to do. |
Every single corporation right now is looking at AI and wondering how many workers it can replace. Obviously because actual people cost money and if what said people did can be replaced with AI then they WILL find a way to do so. Every other company I’ve ever worked at will go on and on about how important you are and whatever. But I’ve been laid off enough to know that’s all bullshit.
A LOT of people will lose their jobs due to AI and I’m probably one of them. Its a good thing I am getting on the older side, paid off the house and have savings and retirement. Because I have no doubt that my line of work will be non-existent in the future and so it will be time to either semi or fully retire.
I remember when AI first came around and scholars and Nobel Laureates were sounding the alarm bells over this stuff and for good reason: Its potential to disrupt society is very real. And beyond helping people write or design things it could just as easily be weaponized.
I have read some of that speculation too. One thing is certain, things are not going to be boring anytime soon.
We just started leasing a 2024 Chevy Equinox EV. It has a 300+ mile range which isn’t insignificant. I spent an afternoon installing a 220 volt line from my breaker box for the car. It charges at 21 miles per hour meaning we just plug it in at the end of the day and its fully charged the next. We can drive for 3-4 days before it even needs to charge. Its pretty much the commuter car and it works great. Just pull into the driveway and plug it in and avoid gas stations. Convenient.
Maybe its because I live in California. But at this point every other car around here is an EV. Usually Teslas but a wide mix of others from different manufactures. There are superchargers at every grocery store and at almost every rest stop. Its no longer considered amazing that people own these and hasn’t in years.
What I’m trying to say is that its working here in California and shows that its totally doable to own an EV and have many different options to charge it. And this will only improve from there.
CA here as well. 90% of my charge is 0 mins, I’m not counting the time it takes to charge over night. I hate stopping at gas stations, an EV has been great.
Only time I need to charge is on road trips, if I’m at a hotel, most of them have chargers that I can use over night. If I’m on a 6hr road trip, I need to grab lunch anyways and use the chargers at a rest stop.
I wish there was a Level 2.5 charger, I don’t need a 30mins charge at a restaurant at a rest stop, I need something that takes about an hour. A mix of Level 2.5 and 3 at a rest stop or shopping center would be nice. 30 mins charge if you are at a fast food place, 2.5 if you are at a sit down.
Ours will be mostly used by my wife who will be driving back and forth on her terrible, 55 mile each way commute. In that regard its perfect. She comes home, plugs it in and its full by morning. I did buy an adaptor for it to be used on the Tesla chargers but its useless: The cord is too short to reach the outlet on the fender of the car. But there are other fast chargers in town that don’t require the adaptor.
Level 2.5 would be a 50 kW DC charger. Fast enough to be a reasonable charge in an hour. They better be discounted from the real 150 kW+ DC fast chargers or else I’m not using it. Splitting the difference between L2 and a faster DCFC would do it.
CA seems to be different from other places as well. We’re charge by KWH, so how fast or how long it takes to get delivered doesn’t matter, we’re charged the same.
Catalytic converter thieves running out to buy new grinders.
If tweakers start trying to cut into EV batteries as a new lucrative sideline, we might just win the war on drugs by mistake.
Which do we think will get them first, 1000 amps to the heart, or the violent fire immediately afterwards?
My dad used to be director of transmissions at our regional electric company. Basically he oversaw of all the power lines, substations, etc. on the grid. Once a year or so he’d have to go out to a substation because some idiot tried to steal copper and got electrocuted to death. He said one guy’s entire foot got blown off.
Unrelated, but the helicopter they used to fly over and inspect the lines was the exact same one used in Magnum PI.
“Catalytic converter thieves running out to buy new
grinderschain saws.”FIFY
And how many *840KW*(!) charging stations exist in the US? How many are planned? How much of a toll does doing that take on the battery if you do it more than occasionally?
In the meantime, my car can add 600 miles of range in less than five minutes literally anywhere in the country. And it’s paid for…
I’ve made this point before but it bears repeating.
A gallon of gas has ~34 kWh.
A gas pump flows at 10 GPM or 600 GPH.
That is some 20,000 kW of energy transfer.
400,800, whatever, it’s all basically a rounding error by comparison.
Exactly why I can’t get all that excited about any of this.
If I really cared about efficiency I’d buy a used Prius, not an EV.
You have to factor in that the vast majority of electrical energy used in charging gets used for EV propulsion (charging / discharging efficiency is probably north of 90% these days, and driveline losses are less than most combustion vehicles), whereas when you look at the LHV of gasoline only about 1/3 of that energy is available for vehicle propulsion, while most is just going to be turned into heat (depends on engine thermal efficiency and driveline losses of course). So to be a fair comparison you probably need to cut that gas pump power value in half, if not take 1/3 of it. But still, pumping liquid allows you to flow a lot more “power” than moving electricity and storing it chemically in a battery. It still seems surmountable for the passenger car market especially when most people are able to L1/L2 charge overnight and use DC fast charging sparingly. For fast charging class 8 trucks though the numbers get really crazy, like to the point where truck stop companies may want to invest in some of these nuclear energy startups.
It’s not meant to be a direct comparison because as you say there are big differences in efficiency, but it is a good reference for the scale of energy that can be moved quickly with liquid fuels.
I’m encouraged by this progress in recharge times and hope to see further improvements coming.
Doesn’t need an 840KW, just a 400KW, and they’re coming, Tesla has them, IONNA which is GM/Stellantis/Hyundai-Kia/Honda/BMW/Mercedes is using them in their new stations. Also no oil changes, spark plugs, timing chains, just drive the thing.
Lithium Iron Phosphate is a better chemistry than Nickel Cobalt Maganese, you can charge to 100% without increased degradation, and it can handle fast charging better, and it’s cheaper.
It’s still more expensive and less useful than the car I already have. And the car is inevitably boring. <shrug>
I do agree on the boring, thus my blob comment. EVs were supposed to open up design, instead they’re all looking the same. Crossover hatchback with a lightbar on the front and handles you can’t use unless it wants you to. Oh and the trucks , but trucks probably could’ve stayed normal for a while longer.
Yeah but I like oil changes and routine maintenance. It’s an excuse to hang out with my car for a morning or afternoon.
The people who think EVs will put mechanics out of business are *delusional*. They just break in new and excitingly different, and often more expensive ways.
ICE vehicles are also breaking in more expensive ways now.
All the more reason to not buy a new one no matter the propulsion method. My newest current car is 11 years old, and in hindsight when I bought that one I should have tracked down a minter from two or three generations before that. I would happily drive a w123 or w124 Mercedes wagon for the rest of my driving days. As a bonus, VERY nice examples cost no more than a cheap and crappy modern car. And you don’t need a $50K dealership computer system to repair them.
Cars have well and truly jumped the shark.
“I can feed my horse off the hay from my fields! Ain’t no ‘gas stations’ around here.”
Technology advances, this is a great advancement.
That would be true if an EV was as great an advancement as the car was over a horse. Horses *sucked*. A Model T was a quantum leap over a horse. An EV is a just a more expensive car with different strengths and weaknesses. If you want efficiency, buy a used Prius and drive less.
Put 30 miles of EV range into a PHEV with this tech and I might be interested, if anyone could make such a car these days that doesn’t suck in terms of user interface.
At least you can eat the horse when it craps out.
A tad stringy and tough at that point I would imagine.
Okay, let’s say “At least someone/something can eat the horse”
But you can live in a car. You can’t do THAT with a horse!
Going by the research done by Solo, Skywalker, et al, I believe it is possible to live in a horse at least temporarily.
ROFL – only if you are very small.
It’s not sold in the US, the article doesn’t mention anything about the US, it doesn’t matter how many there are in the US. It’s a Chinese car which will be mainly sold in China, where they are working on the infrastructure as stated in the article.
It’s a technological breakthrough. The fact that you’re not directly affected by it doesn’t make it less relevant. We’re also not likely to see much investment in EV’s or infrastructure before the end of this decade anyway, so let China figure this stuff out and we can iterate upon it in, I don’t know, four years or so?
Yes, I quite realize that this is not sold in the US. Thus there is really no need to get so breathlessly excited about it.
So why mention the lack of charging infrastructure in the US for this technology? You recognize it won’t be sold here, and thus these chargers aren’t necessary. Just needed to get some US defaultism out?
Why breathlessly report on something that is irrelevant to the vast majority of the audience here?
Wake me up when this is available reality.
The world is a big place, Kevin. It’s not just about you.
Except for me, it is! If you don’t like that, feel free to ignore my comments. I will certainly ignore yours.
I suspect most of the things you enjoy in life wouldn’t exist if everyone had your attitude. Good luck with that…
So when can I get breathlessly excited for a cool engineering feat?
When it will actually affect you in some meaningful way. IMHO.
It COULD, if we didn’t choose to stick our collective heads in the sand from technological progress. Just because BEVs don’t work at the moment, things like this are what WILL make them work. But chuckleheads like you just say: “who cares” and we’re stuck with it.
I’m not one to spend my hard earned money on science experiments.
Wake me up when they work properly. Until then, I could not care less. Probably not even then, given most of the things I despise about current cars have nothing to do with the method of propulsion.
It takes decades to make an overnight success.
If the work isn’t done now, when will it be?
If you want to spend tens of thousands on science experiments, you do you. I’ll be interested when they are ready for prime time.
My plan is to buy a cheap used EV with a dead battery. Rip the battery out to save weight. Then put a big cistern on the roof. I can fill it overnight with a garden hose, or ‘fast charge’ from any fire hydrant (except LA – too soon, sorry). Gravity feed the water through a generator to feed the motor. As a bonus, I would get extra range during a rain storm.
I’m also thinking a lot about potato batteries. With all those old diesel wagons driving around on fryer grease, there must be a pretty big waste stream of potatoes to re-purpose.
ROFL! EXCELLENT plan. Especially if one has a very short commute.
It’s really funny how much of a stretch the classic arguments against EVs are getting.
It’s not for everyone, but the tech proved itself to be practical and popular years ago. This is just a particularly cutting edge product.
If I had a “just right” daily commute AND for some reason I needed a new car, I would certainly consider an EV. At this point the idiocy of modern car user interfaces is actually a bigger issue for me than propulsion – I am not buying ANY of them, EV or ICE. Too many creampuff examples of the cars I actually like out there. Amd spending tens of thousands to save hundreds in gas is stupid, and other than my annual migrations between Florida and Maine (where I have no interest at all in dealing with the madness that is charging infrastructure), I put about one tank of gas in a car per *month*, and I have five paid-for cars for one dude. I am the worst case scenario for buying an EV.
Different horses for different courses and all that. if an EV slots into your life easily and you want to spend the money, more power to ya.
8am, month after Christmas; check CarGurus on a lark
I search EVs, both new and used ones
The same old models, I am….numb
Sort by deals, just Fair to High-priced
Interest rates are still too much
My mom and dad refuse to cosign
I check Chinese cars on a hunch
They’ve got Bricks while I’m charging slowly?!
And all these tariffs block their sale!
They got Bricks and we’re charging slowly…
Well done!
Slow clap…
hopefully Geely brings this tech over to Volvo…
So that’s it then, adding 300 miles in 10 minutes, gas vehicle fueling parity achieved, now just need more 400KW stations and we’re done.
On to the next complaint, they all look like amorphous blobs, fix it!
I’m starting to worry we’re at this strange point where 90s retro-blobbiness and objectively good aerodynamics are intersecting. And I’m not liking it. I referred to Tesla yesterday as a “portfolio of suppositories, plus one kidney stone” and I stand by it.