BYD announced that it has already installed 10,000 of its 1.5 megawatt “flash charging” stations, despite only starting earlier this year. The number puts it halfway to its lofty goal of 20,000 stations by year’s end – and just about on pace to hit it.
The electric vehicle industry in China is advancing at a rapid pace, and one of the things that China is leading on is fast charging.
Manufacturers outside of China have offered cars that can charge in as fast as 18 minutes, which is still plenty quick, especially if you’re going to grab a bite to eat or go to the bathroom or something while stopped. Mercedes has an upcoming car that can charge in 11 minutes, but it’s going to b expensive.
Meanwhile in China, they’re starting to talk about seconds, not minutes. The fastest-charging consumer brand (Geely) says it can charge from 10-70% in 4 minutes and 22 seconds, and CATL says it has a battery in the works that will be able to charge from 10-80% in 3 minutes and 44 seconds.
BYD is another of the fastest-charging brands in China, with its Blade 2.0 battery quoting a 10-70% time of 5 minutes (or 10-97% in 9 minutes). Those batteries are charged by BYD’s “flash charging” system, which it unveiled this March with 1.5MW (1,500kW) charge capability.
Because that’s the thing – a fast-charging battery is all well and good, but only if you have the juice to charge it.
So BYD has rapidly started building out a charging network that’s capable of charging its fastest-charging cars are their fastest-charging rate. And the scale and speed they’ve done it at has been remarkable.
BYD seems on pace to hit its ambitious goal
In March, the company said it would reach 20,000 installed chargers by the end of the year. It was a bit of a wild claim, given this was a brand new, just-announced technology.
But BYD said it already had 5,000 installed on April 1, less than a month after the initial announcement (and unlike other EV brands, it wasn’t an April Fools’ joke).
Now that number has ballooned to 10,000, as the company will hold an inauguration ceremony for its 10,000th flash charger tomorrow morning (well, in a couple hours really, since it’s already tomorrow in China).
The network currently covers 325 Chinese cities, but the plan is to build out to 18,000 urban chargers and 2,000 highway chargers by the end of this year. Given the progress that’s already been made, it looks like BYD could be on pace to achieve its lofty year-end goal.
BYD is achieving the feat with the cooperation of Sinopec, China’s state-owned oil company. BYD will install chargers alongside select Sinopec stations, like this one in Shanghai which opened this month.
The company plans to install chargers overseas as well, with 3,000 planned in Europe, and 3,000 more elsewhere. The first of those stations opened in June.
Will the US get fast charging like this?
So far, thanks to intentional US policy depriving Americans of the best electric vehicle technology, there is no plan to bring this ultra-fast charging technology to the US.
Instead, in the US, the fast-charging leader Tesla has installed a total of around 38,000 charging ports over the course of the last 14 years since it started building its Supercharger network, with about 2,000 of those added this year.
Tesla’s last big charging announcement was the move to 500kW V4 Superchargers, and it took about three years to go from announcement to the installation of the first “true” V4 station. (This can’t have been helped by boss baby Elon Musk throwing a tantrum and causing chaos with Tesla’s rollout, then bankrolling an anti-EV campaign with $288M of his own money)
The US’ federal effort to install charging stations has also gone slowly. Billions of dollars were allocated for public charging in 2021, but due to regulatory requirements, state-level inaction, and republican meddling to try to slow down the process and make government less efficient, that charger money is not moving fast enough.
So it looks like China – and to a lesser extent, Europe and the rest of the world – get all the cool stuff while America, once again, is last.
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