EVs That Can Charge From 10 to 80 Percent in 10 Minutes Are Coming
Range anxiety could soon be a thing of the past.
Most of us are still used to spending a couple of minutes refueling at a gas station. On the other hand, some EV owners have to wait around 30 minutes to get enough charge to hit the road again. Polestar may have the solution with a prototype EV that can charge from 10 to 80 percent in 10 minutes.
The EV maker designed its Polestar 5 prototype EV along with battery maker StoreDot, which beats out some of the fastest-charging EVs on the market now. Take the Hyundai Ioniq 6 for example, which can charge up 10 to 80 percent in 18 minutes thanks to its 800V architecture. The fast-charging Polestar 5 may just be a prototype for now, but it does represent the first step towards getting rid of range anxiety once and for all.
Fine-Tuning the Battery Design
The prototype EV runs off a 77 kWh battery from StoreDot that uses the company’s Extreme Fast Charging (XFC) design. When charging, you’ll get an initial rate of around 310 kW, but Polestar’s demo showed a consistent charging pattern, even hitting up to 370 kW towards 80 percent charge. That’s much faster than the initially disappointing charging rates we saw with Tesla’s Cybertruck.
To achieve this faster charging rate, StoreDot’s XFC batteries use silicon-dominant cells, instead of the more common options of nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) or lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistries. Polestar says these XFC batteries don’t require any special cooling systems, with the prototype Polestar 5 using just its stock cooling pump and fan.
More precisely, the demo showed that the Polestar 5 got to 82 percent charge in 10 minutes, with plenty of room left for improvement, according to Jen Groot, the company’s chief engineer for battery systems. Groot explained that Polestar can now work on better integration and cooling abilities with the battery pack. This could lead to even better charging rates that inch much closer to the two or three minutes people spend refueling at gas stations.
The fast-charging Polestar 5 could be only a couple of years out.
Sooner Than You Think
We may not have to wait long for Polestar to implement this fast-charging battery technology into a production-ready EV. Groot explained that the demo was done in a fully functioning Polestar 5, adding that the team didn’t change anything in the prototype EV besides including the StoreDot battery pack. Groot also said that Polestar has a development cycle of two to three years, so the EV maker could put this battery into production within that timeframe.
Of course, Polestar isn’t the only company looking into these types of fast-charging EV batteries. Many Chinese companies have been looking into fast-charging technology for EVs, just as they once did for smartphones. Li Auto recently showed off its electric minivan that can charge from 10 to 80 percent in just over 10 minutes, at an even higher peak rate. We’re just hoping the U.S. market doesn’t get left behind when it comes to the latest EV technologies we’re seeing overseas.
