So, my car is a Chevy Bolt EV, and it has a 60kWh battery. If it were capable of charging a 1MW, it would take 3.6 minutes to charge from 0 to 100. My car can unfortunately only charge at a max of about 50kW, but I’ve owned it for 9 months and have only charged on my standard 120v charger (~1.4 kW) at home.
Technically it should be possible to get to 80-90% at full charging power, assuming the car/battery and charger are properly designed (read: cooled) - most are not, so the charging quickly slows down to prevent overheating.
After that lithium charging (should) transition from Constant Current to Constant Voltage charging, which slowly tapers down to zero, and it usually takes forever to finish.
So what kind of charge times will this translate to, once implemented? Obviously depends on battery capacity but do we have a ballpark?
It will be interesting if they can get charge times quicker than gas refueling but obviously that’s a big challenge.
So, my car is a Chevy Bolt EV, and it has a 60kWh battery. If it were capable of charging a 1MW, it would take 3.6 minutes to charge from 0 to 100. My car can unfortunately only charge at a max of about 50kW, but I’ve owned it for 9 months and have only charged on my standard 120v charger (~1.4 kW) at home.
Does it necessarily charge at that rate the whole time though? It slows down as it fills up I believe.
Technically it should be possible to get to 80-90% at full charging power, assuming the car/battery and charger are properly designed (read: cooled) - most are not, so the charging quickly slows down to prevent overheating.
After that lithium charging (should) transition from Constant Current to Constant Voltage charging, which slowly tapers down to zero, and it usually takes forever to finish.
It would not charge at the full speed the whole time, but the specifics depend on the individual model of car.
You can estimate the time with a rule of thumb: it’s the battery capacity divided by the charging power.
So if you have a 100kWh battery:
And so on.
As I said this is an estimation. There are factors playing a role that result in losses or power limitation. So in reality it would take a bit longer.