[1] https://eletric-vehicles.com/catl/catl-calls-nio-an-irreplac...
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.
There isn't. Buses aren't really size- or weight-constricted and don't drive at highway speeds, so building one with enough battery capacity to last most of the day isn't a big deal. Plenty of cities have already transitioned to a 100% electric bus fleet, after all.
A big thing to remember is that people don't travel at the same volume at every moment of the day, so you don't need to run buses at the same frequency the entire day either. You can run buses at 10-minute intervals during commute hours, 15-minute intervals in the middle of the day, and 30-minute intervals in the early mornings and late evenings. This means that there is plenty of time between the morning rush and the evening rush for some buses to go off-duty and charge for a few hour. They are going to sit idle anyways, so why not make use of it?
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.
Having station-based storage also allows the station to participate on the energy market and purchase only when electricity is cheap. It could even do double duty by selling back electricity from storage during periods of high grid demand! Heck, pair it with a local grid storage battery which is going to be built anyways and you basically get it for free.
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.
(
) - 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.5 kWh * 60 = 300 kW
at 800V (typical charging voltage) that is 375A
(still huge, but an order of magnitude less)
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.
A buffer battery may have a place for a home charger, but a constant-use commerical charger is a very different thing. Or think of a rental car stand at an airport, or a truck/buss depot. They will have a vehicle arriving every minute and every hour wasted charging is an hour less rental time.
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.
The fast chargers that achieve charging in a few minutes, and which are indeed able to provide up to 1 MW of charging power, have their own internal batteries, so they take from the electrical grid a power averaged over a long time, not the peak power that they provide to the charged vehicle.
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.
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.
I think this is unavoidable for any sort of decent charging station from now on, anyway but does require significant investment in infrastructure.
BYD was the first company demonstrating such batteries and chargers, but CATL followed after a short time. While the times reported by CATL are slightly longer than for BYD at room temperature, these CATL batteries have faster charging at low temperatures.
It is nice to see healthy competition between the major Chinese battery producers. Unfortunately, there is much less competition for them from other countries.
The electrical grid infrastructure that is needed does not depend on the charging speed, but it is determined by the number of cars that are charged per day at a given location (and their average battery capacity).
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).
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.
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
See, I can do this too. All it takes is a modicum amount of conspiratorial thinking and some willingness to engage in ill faith, with a dash of flair for the dramatic. For normal people, it was instead just "oh yeah, news cycle thing one vs news cycle thing two".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which is very much in contrast with this article not mentioning these numbers at all. It's odd.
Are you saying that you know that this CATL charger has the same specs despite this? That was my question, really.
1) "BYD Unveils ... Megawatt Flash Charging " https://www.byd.com/en/news-list/BYD-Unveils-Super-e-Platfor...
"BYD's 1st 1,000-kW ultrafast" https://cnevpost.com/2025/03/26/byd-1st-1000-kw-charging-sta...
2) Subhead: "BYD unveils platform with charging power of 1,000 kW" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/18/byd-ev-fa...
Wish I could fast forward 50 years and see what the world will look like.
