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Chinese EV maker BYD says new fast-charging system could be as quick as filling up a tank
(www.theguardian.com)
But will it smell as good as filling up a tank of gas?
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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most BYD cars have a gas generator that can power its electric motor. you can still fill a tank and you can still huff gas.
It dispenses a small cup of gasoline to sniff while it charges
Or to splash on your male model friends
No one can predict a freak gasoline accident!
Maybe with a supercapacitor in the station and a chrging cable with the diameter of a fuel hose.
Not really, just make the vehicle 800v and then use the same Amp limits. That's where everyone is out pacing tesla now. Tesla went for amps, the others went for volts
Energy is amp x volt. Same energy faster is more energy in same time, be it amps or volt. Dunno if your grid can bear it multiple times in each city but still better buffer it. And more volts needs more gum or you get the volts.
P=i x v
But also
P=i^2 x r
Power goes up with linearly with voltage but to thw square or I.
That second formula is for how much power gets dissipated in a resistance (hence the R in it) , not how much power travels through a line.
That said the previous poster was indeed incorrect - the required thickness of a cable through which a certain amount of power passes depends only on current, not voltage: make it too thin and it can literally melt with a high enough current and the formula of the power it is dissipating as heat that can cause it to melt is that second formula of yours and the R in that formula is inverselly proportional to the cross-cut area of the cable, which for a round cable is the good old area of a circle formula which depends on the square of the radius - in other words the thicker the cable the less current it can take without heating up too much or, putting it the other way around, the more current you want to safely pass through a cable the thicker it needs to be.
In summary, thinner cables heat up more with higher currents (and if they heat up enough they melt) because even pure copper has some resistance and the thinner the cable the higher the resistance. If you need to move Power, not current specifically (such as to charge something), you can chose more current or to have a higher voltage (because P = V x I), and chosing a higher current means you need thicker cables (because as explained above the cables would overheat and even melt otherwise) but a higher voltage doesn't require a thicker cable.
I always imagined that portable future wizard (??nuclear??) power would be as simple as unscrewing a 5 gallon cannister from the back of a vehicle and exchanging it at the power/charging station for money. Like the small 20 lb LPG cooking gas tanks. I still think that electric cars are a phase of tech that cannot be sustainable in terms of money and environmental cost and waste for too long and that it is just transitional in our quest. Hydrogen power was always supposed to be the future in my mind.
Well, you'd need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can't force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they'll lose out on precious markups.
That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.
The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you'd let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you've already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I'm sure it's a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.
I'm all for the idea, mind you. This isn't me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what's stopping us (and the answer is probably "rich people that don't like sharing" as usual).
Hydrogen power is the past not the future it's just a past that never came to be so we sort of feel like it's something futuristic.
It's a great idea in theory but there's so many problems with the idea not least of which is where do you get the hydrogen from? The amount of power that you would need to compress hydrogen into liquid on an industrial scale would practically necessitate dysonsphere.
I think Toyota and Honda... maybe somebody else was developing a Hydrogen cell car. I remember seeing James May on Top Gear talking about it and driving it. It was in California. It seemed really promising and very exciting at the time that's why the memory imprinted on me a bit.
Toyota at least was getting their hydrogen from natural gas which rather defeats the whole point really.
In order for hydrogen power to be sustainable it has to come from electrolyzing water. But the power requirements are prohibitive since the process is unimaginably inefficient. Something insane like 80% of the power goes to waste when converting water into hydrogen and then you've got to find a way of compressing that hydrogen and transporting that hydrogen.
I'm not saying it's impossible but in a world where you can recharge an electric car in 5 minutes what's the point in even going to the effort of solving those problems.
Hydrogen has extreme structural problems. Hydrogen tanks need constant maintenance, due to how small the molecule is - it's very difficult to contain and prevent corrosion. You then have significant conversion loss between the powerplant-native format of electricity, and the hydrogen. So nothing can be as cheap as pure electricity. Fuelling the car with ammonia that then gets converted to Hydrogen inside the car is the solution to the first problem, but further increases the loss on the second.
What you're describing sounds like a small, high-capacity battery to me! Like a super AA battery. Maybe in 50 years :)
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Assuming this is about the same thing as the other BYD charging article I saw a couple days ago, they're using a higher voltage, which would let them charge faster without needing a thicker* cable.
(* The copper need not be thicker, but the insulation might need to be)
The copper need not be thicker, but the insulation might need to be
Exactly. More energy means either more copper or more rubber in the cable.
Rubber is cheap though, and flexible. If it's the size of a gas pump hose, oh well; gas pump hoses are also rubber. As long as they don't have to make the copper ridiculously thick, it shouldn't matter how thick the cable overall is
Is charging speed really the biggest issue with EV's?
Not really. Mostly need greater density of chargers in some areas. Some older EVs charge kinda slow which is a pain because older EVs also tend to have lower range.
Most people charge almost exclusively at home where speed doesn’t really matter much.
More like charging availability imo. Not everyone has a garage to conveniently charge in after a day's work. If you make charging speeds fast enough like with gas, you can negate that though.
Definitely availability and range. I thought of getting EV here in Thailand but limited range + limited charing coverage + 30min charing time is a real deal breaker.
All of which are very solvable issues and I'm sure my next car will be an EV tho
If you're going on a long road trip, yes.
But is it really?
A 2000 mile road trip with 20 minute charging breaks is gonna add what? 3 and a half hours on top of 30 hours of driving?
Unless you plan on doing a bunch of meth and speeding across the desert, I don't see a scenario where a regular person does 8+ hours of driving and doesn't take a 20 minute break.
I'd like to add that for the once in 20 years that car sees a 2000 mile road trip, I don't think waiting a little bit is actually an issue.
Take an honest reflection, and think, how often are people driving driving more than 300 miles in a single session.
Then think about yourself in the position of the road trip, are you going to sacrifice the lifespan of your battery to go from 20 minutes to 5 minutes charging time?, (especially since it's likely you will spend more than 5 minutes anyway just going to the bathroom, eating some food, etc.)
It depends on how conveniently the chargers are located. If you have a smaller battery and can go 200km you'll need a charging station every 190km and mountainous terrain will change those distances as well. You many end up charging sooner than needed in order to get to the next charging spot. In reality it isn't as bad as it sounds. I travel the BC interior with my short range EV and the savings in fuel make it worthwhile to stop more often. Even when I pay the high speed charging rates, it is about 1/4 the cost of gasoline per km but takes 15% longer time to get to destination vs our gas vehicle.
Only by perception, but it practicality mattered, we wouldn't be ligging around two tons of steel per person everywhere we went.
Stuff I've heard on naysays:
"The battery will blow up!!!!!"
No, it won't if it's a solid state battery - solid state batteries barely even notice such a charging rate, their temperature might change by half a degree from this monster charging rate.
"You can't supply the power because lines"
Modern large commercial buildings already suck down this amount and more.
"The grid overall can't take 1MW"
So, the 1,000 MW nuclear reactor can't provide 1MW? How about a reactor station with 4 units cranking 4000 MW? How about we add another 1000 in renewables? How about another 800MW with a single gas turbine? How about adding roof solar and a battery bank below ground for the charging station to supplement the power? We haven't even touched hydro or geo yet. Making power is not a problem, and we'll build out the power as we need it.
What about defects in the machine or car? Could that lead to people being struck by lightning coming from the box next to their automobil?
Fairly unlikely, we engineer things to fail safe.
Even if so we have ways to calculate the power going in and coming out, and if there's an imbalance kill everything, that's how gfci and arc fault breakers work.
If the insulation doesn't insulate, that is a risk indeed. There would probably have to be some detection mechanism for damaged insulation on top of regular maintenance checks. I don't know if some wiring in the insulation could measure the integrity. Maybe if the voltage would oscillate regularly, picking up on the induction of those changes might allow detecting if the shielding is inconsistent before it actually becomes threat? I only have half-remembered bits of an intro course on electrical engineering years ago, so maybe I'm way off.
Gas powered cars catch fire all the time
So, the 1,000 MW nuclear reactor can't provide 1MW?
There's some parts inbetween. You would need an extra line just for the charging stations.
Though, a capacitor bank (maybe where the fuel tank was) would be viable.
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