CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes(arstechnica.com)
106 pointsby PotatoNinja5 hours ago7 comments
  • skcan hour ago
    Battery and solar panel advancements have been the most interesting story in tech for going on a decade in my opinion.

    Wish I could fast forward 50 years and see what the world will look like.

    • 23 minutes ago
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  • tristanj4 hours ago
    I did not expect Nio's 5-minute battery swap technology to become obsolete this soon.
    • c9lgPZqHNGdC1V14 hours ago
      If anything, Nio battery swap stations would allow car users to swap to newer types of battery as they become available. I say this knowing Nio is one of CATL's most important partners[1].

      [1] https://eletric-vehicles.com/catl/catl-calls-nio-an-irreplac...

      • newyankee2 hours ago
        In a well designed urban environment where cars have space for 2-3 modular batteries with swapping capabilities, I see no reason why taxis etc. need to carry battery payload > 150 km of range needed for local use, which would mean better fuel efficiency as well. Battery swapping done right is integral to this
        • 0xfaded27 minutes ago
          Sorry, but I giggled at this. A well designed urban environment would have no cars.
          • horsawlarway15 minutes ago
            Frankly - I agree with this take.

            If anything - my opinion at this point is that cars were a mistake in vehicle sizing caused by internal combustion engines.

            For the vast, vast majority of ubran transit, something akin to a bike in size seems to make more sense.

            We see this already in urban regions in India/Asia where scooters are the predominate transportation method, and I think even traditional scooters are heavy enough to be problematic.

            But a class 2 ebike (so throttle with no need to pedal) can weigh as little as 40lbs (20kg), and go 30 miles at 20mph.

            It's insane that we're not designing urban transit for bikes at this point. Much better density, much safer, much easier to store and park, much cheaper to operate and license.

      • DennisP3 hours ago
        That'd be an interesting situation. They'd probably replace their fleet of batteries gradually, so with each swap sometimes you'd get upgraded, sometimes downgraded. Your range and home charging curves would change with the batteries, and Nio would have to update the battery management software when it puts in a different battery type.

        But over time, you'd get upgraded on average without having to pay for a new battery, as long as Nio kept updating to keep its batteries competitive.

        • pjc502 hours ago
          This is in fact the main argument to me why swaps would never work at all, economically: the "state" of the battery is a significant part of the value of the car. Being swapped to a worse one makes you several thousand dollars worse off.

          It only works in a leasing scenario, and everyone hates those.

          • cucumber3732842a few seconds ago
            How's that any different than putting new tires on a shitbox?
          • sowbugan hour ago
            I used to own a truck whose fair market value would double, temporarily, whenever I filled the tank.
        • xbmcuser3 hours ago
          Nio already has a service to swap to higher capacity battery if you want to go on a long road trip etc. It prices its cars according to battery capacity so even people that chose lower capacity car on purchase still have the option to swap to a higher capacity battery. Though I think the main use for battery swap technology will be for commercial trucking and if I recall correctly Chinese government and OEM are working on standardisation for that so all those truck batteries are swappable no matter which company builds the battery.
      • dirck-norman4 hours ago
        5 minute swap is not needed for this.
    • maeln3 hours ago
      We should always take marketing number with a huge grain of salt, so the 10 to 98% in 7 minutes remain to be seen. Also, there is the question of if it lowers the battery lifespan faster than charging at lower power. It is does, there might still be a point in battery swap, especially for public transport systems (for bus). A public transit operator might want to have more battery than vehicle, so that they can rotate the battery regularly and charge them at lower power, to diminish and distribute the wear on battery. But that's obviously a big if and a more niche usage.
      • xbmcuser3 hours ago
        the life span stat with the current battery tech is mostly useless for a normal car. 300 mile range most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years. The battery degradation is not that bad in the first place.
        • antonkochubey16 minutes ago
          First, with range decreasing, number of charge cycles per mile, and therefore rate of wear, will increase.

          Second, average age of car on the road is above 10 years in most countries; and those that drive old cars definitely do not have €26,500* spare to swap their EV's battery for a new one.

          *That's what Audi charges here for e-tron 50 battery replacement, which are already starting to fail for many owners

        • SideburnsOfDoom2 hours ago
          > most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years.

          When it comes to as-fast-as-possible charging, I think you can divide that number by at least 10. Slow charging while parked overnight or during the day should still be the most common case by far for most users. Very fast charging is important for road trips, but it is not the usual case.

          • an hour ago
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      • SideburnsOfDoom2 hours ago
        > Also, there is the question of if it lowers the battery lifespan faster than charging at lower power.

        This kind of fast-as-possible charging rather than overnight or "while parked at the mall for hours" slow charging should be the exception rather than the rule, i.e. it is useful when road-tripping long-distance, but is not not the daily case. Battery lifespan should not be based on assuming that it's the only thing that you ever do.

    • rcxdude2 hours ago
      Swapping does help reduce the high peak power demands that fast charging has. There's limited places where you can get the infrastructure to install a bank of chargers capable of this kind of speed (though, one potential approach is having a local block of batteries near the charger, but you are then paying the efficiency cost of another battery round-trip, and the cost of the batteries which will get a lot of wear and tear themselves)
      • NetMageSCWan hour ago
        But if you need batteries that gives you the opportunity to install solar and reduce your costs more than the efficiency hit.
  • viraj_shah3 hours ago
    I didn't see a number for cycle life. That'd be my biggest question here. You can charge in less than 7 minutes but how many times before performance (capacity) degrades?
    • phh3 hours ago
      TFA says "After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said."

      I can't really judge whether 1000 charges is a reasonable target for a car, though i think that 1000 fast charges is reasonable. It should probably be able to push to 5000 slow charges and 500 fast charges, which should fit a lot of use-cases.

      • dgacmu2 hours ago
        If you get 400km per charge using 88% of the battery (98% -> 10%), that's 400,000km (258,000 miles) before you're down to 90%, at which point you have likely worn out an awful lot of other things with the car.

        Admitting that I have the luxury of an urban, low-driving lifestyle: I'm 50. That battery would literally last the rest of my driving life and have room to spare.

        • JMKH422 hours ago
          Understanding battery degredation takes a lot of nuance. If you do nothing but charge and discharge quickly at some given temperature, you degrade to 90% in 1,000 cycles.

          But the battery also degrades over time, the hotter it is the more, the higher the SOC the more. So you have to add on that calendar degradation, to that 10% loss from just charging.

          Total degradation in practice will vary a lot, based on users charging and storage practices. Most of the time in practice it seems some fault will brick a battery before it degrades too much in total capacity.

      • xoa2 hours ago
        >I can't really judge whether 1000 charges is a reasonable target for a car

        I mean, if "charges" is "full charge" and the battery pack does even 200 miles of range then that'd be 200,000 miles right? And more like 250-300+ miles seems like a spreading target as energy density ticks upwards.

        Honestly that's more than I've ever put on any single individual car or truck I've owned, and well into the point where I'd be expecting to put real money into engine and other work for an ICE. Sure more is better but if a battery pack can go 200k-300k miles keeping 90% range that doesn't feel unreasonable at all for non-commercial usage. Taxis and so on with much higher utilization may find value in alternative options of course.

        • NetMageSCWan hour ago
          That’s also a 1,000 fast charges, which shouldn’t be relevant to non-commercial users.
      • baq2 hours ago
        1000 charges 10-80% for a passenger car at 300-400 km per charge is 300 000 - 400 000 km of fast charge driving. I'd say it's perfectly fine for most people?
    • est3 hours ago
      China had many >1M KM electric taxies. Usually they degrade after 200,000 km, and they are like 2 generations behind the latest ones.
    • djcannabiz3 hours ago
      right at the end “After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said.”
  • perching_aix4 hours ago
    Saw this yesterday, did not expect the competition around Donut's batteries to heat up this much and this quickly.

    Even the gravimetric density is fairly close, CATL's claim is 350 Wh/kg, compared to Donut's 400 Wh/kg.

    The safety and durability (plus no lithium) prospects of Donut's V1 battery are still big though (if the thing is actually real).

    • bayesianbot4 hours ago
      Feels quite clear Donut doesn't have much - no meaningful new tests released for many weeks already and some executive of Nordic Nano sued Donut Lab and said their claims were misleading.

      I haven't really followed that closely myself, but I've noticed the people who I saw defending Donut before have gone really quiet about it lately.

      • audunw2 hours ago
        I find the talk around Donut so weird. At CES we were told they had nothing because they hadn’t shared third party test. They then shared third party tests remarkably fast. From the dating of VTT reports it’s clear they shared it as soon as VTT finalised their reports. Now they have nothing because they haven’t released enough tests fast enough?

        It’s clear they have something very interesting.

        We’re mainly missing low temp and energy density test. If they have something real, obviously they’re saving density for last (near the time real customers get their hand on the bike), since it will give them huge amount of attention. Can’t fault them for milking what they’ve got (if they got it) for all the marketing hype it’s worth.

        We’re also missing cycle life test but the claims can’t really be fully tested in a reasonable time. So even if their tests show projections that indicate high cycle life, people will doubt it, or shift the focus to ageing effects. So personally I don’t care much, we just have to see how it works out in real life.

        The lawsuit incidentally reveal their connection to partners which does reveal that there’s something real there. Another criticism was that the couldn’t have developed all the tech from scratch themselves in such a short time, and now it’s clear they didn’t, they’re using tech licensed by other companies with real competence in the field.

        If it’s as good as they say with zero caveats and can be manufactured at scale is another matter

      • pjc502 hours ago
        It seems clear to me that Donut are a vaporware company with hardly any customers, and CATL are the largest battery company in the world.
      • yorwba3 hours ago
        Donut's website claims that they will release the next test result in 7 days, so you can check next week whether those people will have something new to talk about: https://idonutbelieve.com
        • jonkoops2 hours ago
          I sincerely hope Donut really has an ace up their sleeve, we could really use some domestic competition against China here in the EU. I sincerely hope that the next update from them is something solid (pun intended), and not 'what color is the battery'.
    • cmrdporcupine35 minutes ago
      Feels weird to pollute a thread about the progress of the largest battery manufacturer in the world that does real science and engineering and massive industrial installations... with a comment about an almost certainly fraudulent fly-by-night company making tiny batteries for motorbikes and not providing real science or published papers to back up their extraordinary claims.
  • chris_va43 minutes ago
    The poor grid.

    The US added basically 0% extra transmission capacity last year.

    ... Now your local charging station will require a nuclear plant to keep up with ~1MW per car.

    • WarmWash33 minutes ago
      The whole fast charge thing is mostly marketing to convert people from "gas car mindset" into getting an EV.

      The reality of the situation is that most people who buy an EV will use fast charging only a few times a year. The majority will be charging overnight to recuperate their daily use, which amounts to drawing <1% of a MW. The grid, in it's current form, is totally capable of this.

      What would be a strain though is large ultra fast charging stations along major travel corridors. But I'd still wager that those will be overkill for most.

      • hangonhn9 minutes ago
        Wait. You're missing something.

        Charging was what stopped me from getting an EV when I was a renter. In a world where I can recharge in 7 to 10 minutes, it becomes a lot more feasible for a renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities. A renter can just pull up to a recharging station. Wait 7 to 10 minutes or (maybe 5 if they don't mind a half charge) and be off.

    • mytailorisrich24 minutes ago
      For this sort of fast charging you need the charging station itself to have a large pool of batteries to buffer the energy from the grid and to push it at very high power to cars. Probably still requires a good size connection to the grid.

      I think this is unavoidable for any sort of decent charging station from now on, anayway but does require significant investment in infrastructure.

  • sandworm1013 hours ago
    > have a minute to plug in? Still sufficient to get from 10 to 35 percent state of charge.

    Scaling that to something the size of an EV pack will require one massive cable/connector. Call it 5kw/h in 1/60 hours, thats 3000kw, at 700v thats still roughly 4000 amps. (Please correct my head math.) Charging one car could suck up more power than an entire neighbourhood. Say four or five chargers operating at once ... every roadside charging station will need its own electrical substation.

    • adrian_b8 minutes ago
      Like others have pointed, you have made a mistake in your computation. The currents that are required are only of hundreds of amps and the latest chargers can provide up to 1000 A.

      Also like others have said, it does not matter how fast you charge a car, the total energy consumption is the same, so fast chargers do not require changes in the power supply of a charging station.

      The fast chargers that enable this full charging in a few minutes have their own internal batteries, to enable them to pull only the average power from the electrical grid, not the peak power.

      The new fast chargers that can achieve the times reported in TFA use a somewhat higher voltage than the older chargers, of 1000 V, to reduce the current.

    • dgacmu2 hours ago
      What's nice there, though, is that the total amount of _energy_ needed at a charging station is roughly fixed(), regardless of how fast you charge the cars. So if you're provisioned for the needed total energy inflow, you can to a reasonable degree compensate for having a more bursty high-rate charging load by having some amount of local energy storage as a buffer.

      () - Assuming you provision for the highest-traffic-volume day. Ignoring potential induced demand of making it a little easier to drive, which I suspect is pretty bounded - people need pee and stretch breaks anyway.

    • jcsager3 hours ago
      Fjord ferries in Norway are up around that sort of charge rate, but for 30 mins instead of 5. That kind of battery charging performance is pure marketing until our local LV supply network is uplifted!
      • beej712 hours ago
        I was so impressed by this when I saw it. Big-ass cable. :) Great ferry trip.
    • SECProto3 hours ago
      > Call it 5kw/h in 1/60 hours, thats 3000kw, at 700v thats still roughly 4000 amps. (Please correct my head math.)

      5 kWh * 60 = 300 kW

      at 800V (typical charging voltage) that is 375A

      (still huge, but an order of magnitude less)

    • g4cg54g543 hours ago
      chargers of that size generally have there own internal (sometimes even shared by multiple receptacles) batteries
    • baq2 hours ago
      substation...? more like an SMR
  • SideburnsOfDoom4 hours ago
    Neither article mentions what specs - voltage and kW - are used when doing this very fast charging.

    Does anyone know? Assuming it's not just the current high-end spec of 800v? It matters because higher current requires heavier equipment to generate it and heavier cables too.