“super e-platform” will be capable of peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW), enabling cars that use it to travel 400 km (249 miles) on a 5-minute charge."
Uses a “pile.” Can capacitors accumulate energy for rapid charging? Or will there be arcing, fires, explosions?
Oops.
The title says miles not km
Mike
After reading that I don’t know where you got the idea that super capacitors are involved. Please correct me.
EDIT: I don’t know what a pile is.
Somewhere I read that is uses a “pile.”
I think the pile just refers to a charging station or maybe charging post or pillar. Probably an artifact of some language translator
Mike
A “pile” is a term for a battery. Volta’s “pile” was alternating copper and zinc plates stacked, essentially, a set of cells connected in series. For a capacitor, the individual plates would be connected in parallel, so they act like one huge pair of plates.
In this context, I can see a case where the pile in the charging station is charged by mains current. then the charging station can dump the charge into the car at a far higher rate than would be possible from a typical charger mains connection. A battery stores current chemically, so can only release the power at the speed of the chemical reaction, which also generates a lot of heat. A capacitor is physically holding electrons, so can discharge at a much higher rate.
The trick of course, is, after the charger dumps it’s charge into the car, the charger then would need to recharge from mains power.
Steve…studied electrical stuff, a long, long, time ago
Thanks, Steve. Sounds possible to me. Why did it take all those innovation experts so long to get to this solution to fast charging? Were they asleep at their desks?
Batteries need to be able to take the charge at that rate-and must be able to do so many times. It is all about the battery, not anything else.
If I am right about what they are describing, the hours long charging time is transferred from the car to the charger. When I roll up to the gas station, I gas up in 5 minutes or so, and go on my way. Another person can immediately drive up to the same pump, and refuel at the same rate. Can’t do that if the charger needs to recharge. Maybe they left that bit out of the press release?
And, as jerryab2 said, the battery in the car needs to be able to take the charge that fast too.
Steve
Let’s see. According to the article, part of this high speed charging is in the vehicle. That sounds like a capacitor to me. Capacitors can charge very quickly. But they can also discharge quickly. That sounds kind of dangerous in a car. I wonder if they would rapidly charge the capacitor and then use that to charge batteries after the vehicle leaves the charger. I would think that you could use more typical charging speeds there, transferring the charge from the capacitor to the batteries over half an hour to an hour. That would leave the capacitor discharged most of the time, making it considerably safer.
The other part of the equation is in the charger. They mention a “pile” there, which is a battery. Could the charging station use a giant battery to transfer the charge at high speed to the vehicle’s capacitor? There are limits on how fast batteries can charge/discharge without burning themselves up. It would take a very large battery to deliver that kind of speed - considerably larger than any vehicle it is intended to charge. But with a fast charge to the vehicle, there would hopefully be more time between vehicles to recharge the battery at the station. There might also be better cooling available for these stationary batteries to allow them to deliver (and accept) charges at high rates. Those station batteries might also allow somewhat smaller connections to the grid. Pull a fairly constant load off the grid to charge the station’s batteries, then deliver that charge in random high speed bursts to the cars.
I wonder what the losses would be in this system. We’d be going from grid to battery to car’s capacitor to battery. There are going to be losses at every step along the way. And this system adds two steps - the station battery and the car capacitor (assuming my guesses are right - which is far from certain because they are slightly educated guesses).
Still, it sounds like an interesting concept for sure.
–Peter
In Spanish a battery like an AA battery is called a “pila.”
A multicell battery, like the 12V car batteries are called a “batería.”
“Pile” likely means cell.
The Captain
A capacitor can recharge incredibly quickly, assuming it has enough input coming in. I would guess that there is plenty of juice in those high capacity overhead wires to handle that, my question would be how to transport it to a “service station” unless it happened to be located directly under such high tension wires (or at least reasonably nearby.) You’d also need to step down the power, so that would take some space somewhere.
But there’s no theoretical reason why a large capacitor couldn’t recharge in seconds or minutes.
In fact I would surmise that the “capacitor car” is a combination of large capacity and small battery, like perhaps the size of a plug-in hybrid. The battery pack would be used to smooth out the discharge from the capacitor on its way to the motors, but most of the car storage would be multiple high gain capacitors, synced to recharge the batteries as the need arises.
All capacitors leak charge over time (as do batteries). I don’t know that the leakage problem would be insurmountable, but it’s one of many things the engineers would be looking at when trying to construct such a system. The other is the huge amount of power stored (similar problem with batteries, although those cannot discharge accidentally in the same way as a capacitor can.)
Interesting question … what if it takes an hour to recharge? Kinda changes the picture for deployment.
High-storage capacitors would not be allowed–period. Any type of significant accident would change to a disaster if the car went nova due to the capacitor(s) being damaged, etc. IMO, not allowed in the US or almost anywhere else. Too much public danger.
From another news report:
“The company also said that its flash-charging system relies on silicon carbide power chips with voltage levels of up to 1,500V that it developed on its own.”
Whatever silicon carbide power chips are.
https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2025-03-18/chinas-byd-launches-ev-charging-system-it-says-works-nearly-as-fast-as-a-fill-up
Also:
“BYD said it redesigned the blade batteries to allow faster ion transfer in the electrolyte and less resistance through the diaphragm, resulting in faster charging.”
DB2
I’m sure others have thought about this before. But imagine how this would work…you need a battery inside the charging station that is roughly the size of the battery in the car that you want to charge. So now, everytime a car gets charged you are cycling (and degrading) two batteries instead of one in terms of number of overall battery life cycles. And the battery in the charging station is undergoing a rapid discharge and perhaps a slower recharge. this is the opposite of what a car battery typically does in a fast charger…somewhat rapid charge then discharge over a few hours. Not sure if this is good or bad, just different.
How much extra will consumers be willing to pay to get this extra rapid charge, as compared to a normal fast charge and a slow L2 charge at home?
Mike
Nice thing about capacitors, there is no chemical process involved. Caps have a much higher cycle life. Consider the filter caps in a power supply: they alternately charge and discharge 60 times a second. You won a Radio Shack story: a customer came in one day with a stereo receiver that had a locked up processor. The manufacturer had not provided a means of resetting the thing. I consulted with one of my part timers, who was an EE major in college. We agreed the procedure was to discharge the caps in the power supply. The part timer, also named Steve, tried grounding the first of the two caps. There was nothing in it, completely discharged. Then he grounded the other cap. A big spark jumped with a crack. Ah. He grounded it again to make sure it was completely discharged. We buttoned up the receiver, and it worked perfectly.
Steve
A friend of mine in college had an enormously large capacitor, getting close to a Farad, and he had a power supply. We would charge up the capacitor and then use it to weld pennies together by discharging the cap through the pennies. 
They aren’t mentioned. This thread is speculation.
DB2
Nice…yes. But how do they relate to the “piles” in the original article?
Mike