Article claims that charging requires lithium ions to move. In magnetic field, they move faster. Reducing charging time to 10 min.
No telling if this is practical, but it is the sort of breakthrough that might get people thinking of the possibilities.
Stay tuned for more developments.
Anything that helps those little ions will help with charging. BUT, it is important to remember that “10 minutes” has a different implication. If you are to fully charge a typical EV battery of 82kWh from 0 to 100 in 10 minutes, you need to be charging at an average rate of about 500kW. That’s a MUCH higher average rate than any charger that exists out there today. The fastest chargers (car chargers, not semitrailer chargers) operate at 350kW, but they only operate at 350kW for a short time, and then taper down as SOC (state of charge) goes up, so the best ones might do 350kW from 0% to 35%, then taper down to 250kW from 35% to 50%, and then taper down to 150kW from 50% to 75%, and then taper down to 50kW from 75% to 90%, and then taper down to 25kW from 90% to 100%. If similar thing holds true, then it’s possible that charging would have to start at 1MW (1000kW) and then taper down from there to achieve the “10 minutes”.
The same issue applies to the Toyota 900 mi battery that is coming soon (they say 2027 or 2028 models). 900 miles at 0.25kWh/mi means a battery size of 225kWh. If that one will fully charge in 10 minutes, as they’ve claimed, it will need a charger that averages 1.35MW. That’s a more powerful charger than exists anywhere today.
Are there implications for the electrical capacity needed for locations with multiple chargers?
DB2
That’s always the case. Early Tesla superchargers were “tandem” chargers. They supported 150kW per box. Each box supported 2 vehicles. And if both were plugged in at the same time, each car would only get 75kW. The next generation of Tesla superchargers eliminated that, and each plug can give the max power to the car it is charging.
In the future, if you have 10 charging spots, each of which can supply 1MW+ to enable “10 minutes” charging, then the entire station will have to be able to supply 10MW+.
Of course. But Tesla has many locations that have 50 chargers that can each handle 250kw. That is a total of over 12MW. If batteries actually charged 2 to 4 times faster you could provide the same peak power and just have 1/2 or 1/4 as many chargers to provide the same throughput and use less real estate.
The reality is that everybody doesn’t need this fast charging rate. Reportedly, the Apple HQ has 1000 L2 EV chargers. At 6KW each that is only 6 MW and probably supports 2000 to 3000 cars every day.
Mike