You stop to stretch your legs, to eat or have a coffee. These are some of the arguments put forward by the advocates of electric cars to convince those who doubt the convenience of getting one. Waiting time for recharging is still one of the main drawbacks when it comes to charging.
In my experience, fast charging of an electric car on a trip, when it exceeds 100 kW of power is more than satisfactory. On a long trip, this can mean a couple of stops of about 15 to 20 minutes. Just the time it is recommended to rest every two hours of driving and the time it takes to have a coffee.
In fact, to fill up the tank of a combustion car we do not save much more time if we have to tell them to open the tank, return to pay and wait for other drivers to do the same.
Despite this, there is an irrefutable argument. The problem is not so much stopping for 15 or 20 minutes, the problem is that, in that time, the car is always plugged in and, therefore, occupying a charger. Right now, this is not usually a problem due to the volume of electric cars on the market, but it could be in the future.
A recharge in the time it takes to fill up the tank
For this reason, the search for the fastest possible recharging continues to be one of the market’s greatest incentives for further research. In recent years we have seen all kinds of formulas, including a cooled charging cable to dissipate some of the heat generated during charging and improve efficiency.
But with traditional methods (i.e. with a battery that simply supports record power), China has once again achieved a new milestone: a 521 kW recharge.
The announcement was made by the manufacturer Li Auto, which claims that its Li MEGA, a huge all-electric minivan with a 100 kWh battery capacity, can go from 10 to 80% of the battery’s autonomy in just 10 minutes.
The electric car mounts CATL’s famous 800-volt Qilin battery. This new energy accumulator had already been announced a few months ago, with the promise that it will be able to recover up to 400 kilometers of range in just 10 minutes and that its resistance to cold is greater than current batteries, allowing recharges at the same power at 10 degrees below zero.
Li Auto, however, has confirmed that with this battery they have reached peaks of up to 523 kW. To get a better idea, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, one of the cars with the fastest recharges on the market, remains at 350 kW. A Porsche Taycan, another car using 800-volt batteries, recharges at a maximum of 270 kW. In other words, the Li MEGA can fill the same amount of battery in its minivan as the Taycan in half the time.
If the comparisons don’t seem enough, Formula E, the electric single-seater competition, has approved that this year fast recharging with chargers of up to 600 kW of power will have to be carried out.
Details we should not lose sight of
Beyond having achieved a record peak power recharge, we must bear in mind that this type of recharging should only be designed for longer trips. The higher the charging power, the more stress the battery will have to withstand and, therefore, the greater the degradation it will face.
The best for day-to-day use are slow recharges and, as far as possible, not to exceed 80% of the battery capacity, since this is where the wear and tear of the energy accumulator is greater and, surely, we do not travel so many kilometers on a daily basis as to need this extra autonomy.
However, another interesting point is the charging capacity of the vehicle once it has exceeded 80%. In the first tests that were shown with the Hyundai Ioniq 5, it managed to maintain powers of up to 45 kW when the battery was practically full, which is a rarity.
In addition, the infrastructure to provide more than 500 kW of power to charge an electric car must be enormous. Stations with 350 kW charging points are very large, although Europe has a plan to try to fill the main roads of the continent with this type of plugs, with the aim of being able to provide assistance to electric cars that need it on their way.
In this case, Li Auto has used its own charger with which it has managed to reach 711.6 amperes. Until now, the highest figures had been achieved by Huawei, with plugs reaching 600 kW and 600 amps. In fact, it already has half a hundred of these chargers in operation and another 300 of them under construction. They expect to have a total of 3,000 of these chargers available by 2025.
In Europe, for the time being, the vast majority of vehicles on the market are cars with 400-volt batteries that can be recharged at around 150 kW and, at most, 200 kW of power. It remains to be seen whether this type of energy accumulator will finally prevail or whether the problems arising from battery degradation will outweigh the advantage of shorter recharging times.