BYD Flash: 10 C Charging Speeds

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Hello everyone and welcome to another news coolum video. So another plugside chat I guess if you will. Uh I'm going to try to rush this one out. We have a Coast to Coast EVs live stream coming up and we're going to be talking about some of the new upcoming charging hardware.

[00:00:20]And I wanted to do this first because I I feel like it's also important news.

[00:00:26]Unfortunately, maybe not for the United States just because of the state of affairs and of of course um whether BYD ever really gets a a sort of foothold in the United States. North of America is a little bit different, but in terms of the United States specifically, uh probably not because this is mostly about fast charging. I'll probably just throw in some B-roll, you know, with some of the higher power chargers. But I I wanted to talk about this in the sense that a recent video out of spec uh Kyle and Drew went out to China to to test the BYYD flash charging. I think it was a Denza Z9 GT.

[00:01:08]um which for those of you who haven't seen I'll put a link down below, but for those of you who have or who are familiar with the uh BYD blade battery blade technology uh right now they're pushing this uh 10C charging rate and it I mean in theory right 10C means that it's a 6 minute um charge from empty to full. It doesn't work out that that way exactly because it's peak charging rate of of 10C, right? You're you're looking at closer to about 10 minutes to to charge from empty to full. I mean, still compared to most other batteries and battery technology and EVs and whatnot, that 10C charging rate really does sort of raise the bar and move it to a point where, you know, it starts becoming harder and harder to argue that gas cars, right, have any sort of distinct advantage when it comes to refueling on road trips. And so the premise of this video for me really is the idea that we don't as EV drivers, as EV advocates, we don't really need five minute charging, right? And I get that a lot of EV proponents are pushing this idea that five minute charging is going to eliminate any arguments for uh gas cars over EVs. And then suddenly everybody's going to see the light. And everybody who has been reluctant to buy an electric vehicle will now buy one because they can refuel as quickly as a gas car, right? Um it's still a little bit slower, right? But uh within the close enough ballpark that it's going to win everybody over. And the caution that I would want to present to electric vehicle advocates is the people who are saying that they aren't going to buy an EV until it can recharge as quickly as a gas car can fuel up. These aren't honest actors, right? This is not a an argument made in earnest. And no matter what, even if electric vehicles can achieve that, they're going to move the goalpost in some other way.

[00:03:35]And just one example of that, right, is currently in the United States, there are there are about 10 times as many gas stations as there are electric vehicle charging, fast charging stations. And like that's 10 times as many stations. There's also more than 10 times as many gas pumps as there are DC fast chargers. So, one goalpost immediately that will be moved when you say, "Oh, well, it charges in 10 minutes." is, "Well, where are the chargers?" Right? You can, for the most part, traveling the country, almost every town with, I don't know, a few hundred people or more has a gas station. And every city certainly has a number of gas stations.

[00:04:29]And nearly every exit off of every major highway and major interstate has a gas station. So it doesn't matter that you can charge from empty to full in 5 minutes. If instead of like every exit having a gas station, it's every third or fourth or fifth or sixth exit having a DC fast charging station, right? And especially if it's every eighth, 9th, 10th exit having a DC fast charging station that's actually capable of charging an EV from empty to full in 10 minutes or less. Right? So, there's always that goalpost. And I'll be honest here, too, fast charging does not address, right, some of the major hurdles to electric vehicle adoption. uh where there are still advantages for gasoline powered cars because the energy and energy storage essentially is being sold separately with a gas car. They're always going to be cheaper upfront, right? You're you're asking the customer to pay for their energy over time rather than an EV where you're essentially paying for that energy storage upfront. Um, and then the cost from that point forward is is much much lower. So there's already there's always going to be an up upfront cost difference. Batteries are still heavier than gasoline. We would need another 10fold increase in energy density before the payload capacities for an EV are equivalent to what they could be for a gas car. These are all different goalposts that are going to be moved forward uh by people who are disingenuous when they say, "Oh, if it only charged as fast as a gas car can refuel." Right? So, in that I would say this isn't some, you know, gotcha moment where we can point to and say, "Okay, well, now electric vehicles are as good as gas cars and we can move on."

[00:06:46]Done. It's not it's not going to work that way. And to be brutally honest, this isn't a huge impact for a vast majority of people who do end up buying an EV. So, with the exception of a very small group of individuals, a majority of your charging is always going to be done at home. And there are two reasons for that. One is convenience, right?

[00:07:14]What's what's better than spending 5 to 10 minutes filling your EV battery?

[00:07:20]Spending 15 seconds plugging in, walking away, and not thinking about it, right?

[00:07:25]15 seconds is a lot a lot faster and a lot easier than 5 to 10 minutes. Uh, and then of course there's the economy aspect of it. California, we have some of the highest energy rates in the country. Around 30 cents per kilowatt hour at a home rate. That's not cheap.

[00:07:42]But if you want to charge in public in California, you're now paying usually 30% more, 50% more, sometimes double, right? On average, I would say it's about a 50% increase from charging at home. So that's a massive expense. And when you look at the people who drive the most, right, the EVs who go on long trips the most, use public charging the most, and you go break down where their energy sources come from, even they are only charging maybe 20% of the time using public fast chargers. The rest of the time it's charging at home. So when I say that this 5 minute to 10 minute charging time doesn't matter, it's because it's a corner case of a corner case. A majority of people don't take long trips and when they do, it's sporadic. And even then, I want you to think about it in terms of how this actually p plays out in an EV road trip.

[00:08:44]Because if you're talking about a car that can go 300 m on a full battery at highway speeds, which is not unreasonable, it means that you are going to be driving likely for about 4 hours minimum before you make your first stop.

[00:09:03]Then you're going to stop for 5 minutes, 10 minutes maybe, and then you're going to get back on the road for another 4 hours without stopping. So, what this shorter charging time allows you to do is make a discrete charging stop, but it's still not necessarily as convenient because now you're making two stops. One to fuel your car and one to likely fuel the people, right? At least one meal stop just getting out, stretching your legs, 30 minutes to an hour easily. We see this with gas car drivers all the time is they're stopping at the same locations I'm stopping at in an EV and they're still there when I leave. So, I know that they filled up their gas tank somewhere else in about 5 minutes and now they're spending the same 30 to 45 minutes to an hour that I'm spending at a location that's designed around the driver, not the car. So what you end up is this this dynamic of all you're doing is saying, "Hey, if you want to make a discrete charging stop, you can do that in 5 to 10 minutes." But with an EV, it's already generally going to be more convenient to make a single stop and take care of your car and take care of all of the occupants at the same time.

[00:10:32]Basically, what I'm saying is we're already at the point now where EVs that can charge to 80% in 15 to 20 minutes can outdrive the needs of the driver and the passenger. Right? We have we have hit the biological bottleneck already for convenient easy you know transportation and travel. So reducing that even further almost not necessary, right? It it basically becomes a sales pitch and nothing more. So that's kind of why I say we don't really need 5 to 10 minute charging. It's not going to sell anybody on it and it's not going to really increase the convenience of ownership.

[00:11:19]It's a very small fraction of individuals who are doing things like cannonball runs, races, stress tests.

[00:11:27]That's it, right? It's very it's a very very small percentage of the population who actually is going to benefit from this improvement. Now, maybe I'm uh now maybe I'm getting to a point where I think the the more interesting aspect of that BYD presentation that Kyle did to me is the BYD flash charging system, which is a 1 megawatt plus charging system. Now, I have a lot of thoughts on this, so I'm not going to go too far into the weeds, but essentially, it is a really slick, really cool implementation.

[00:12:12]And in my opinion, it is the more impressive aspect of of the uh presentation, right? The 10C charging, whatever, right? If you were to make a Bolt EV with a 60 70 kWh battery pack and 10C charging, we already have chargers deployed that will more or less max that out. Oh no, you're going to spend 12 minutes, right?

[00:12:45]Instead of 10 minutes charging from empty to full. It's only really when you get to those bigger battery packs with 10C charging that you need this 1 megawatt plus charging system. And you know, there are some conversations back and forth about how this is basically BYD's take kind of on what Tesla's doing with their their superchargers where it's an integration between the automaker and their you know their EVs and the charging system to support them. So, this is really sort of a tailor made system to support BYD's blade batteries 10C charging rates. And I'll say this though, I think BYD is doing something different from what everybody else is doing. And I think it's superior, right?

[00:13:40]So, because when you look at, you know, Charge Point is announcing their new 600 kW charger. Alpronic is announcing their we know their HYC1000 is coming soon.

[00:13:52]Tesla's V4 supercharger obviously ABB made an announcement that they also have their new megawatt charging system coming out. And when you look at those, those are all designed around spreading this power out across multiple charging points. And BYD is like I I this I agree with BYD's philosophy far more is what I'm saying here.

[00:14:21]They're saying if you're charging from empty to full in 5 to 10 minutes, you do not need as many charging posts. So we're going to put in two that can simultaneously charge two cars at 1 megawatt.

[00:14:37]That's what our travel chargers need to be. So all of this BS about a V4 cabinet with one megawatt or 1.2 megawws being spread across 16 posts, who cares, right? If you're going to do a city support site, if you're going to do a location where people might be there for 20 to 30 minutes, okay, that is great. That works well because it's one megawatt. It's like chem power, right? It works well. spreading spreading the love so everybody can charge at the same time because you're expecting longer dwell times and very few people to want to take advantage of the faster charging. But if you're talking about travel plazas, if you're talking about convenience stores, if you're talking about highway or interstate stops, right, every post needs to be able to provide maximum power concurrently.

[00:15:34]So HYC, you know, if you're going to do the HYC 1000 for Alpronic, you don't need to split one megawatt across eight posts. Split it across two maybe, right? And then someone can pull in and say, "Oh, this is a,000. This is one megawatt capable." And if I'm sharing power, it means that neither of us is going to get more than 500 to 600 kilowatts. Okay, fine. but you don't need to spread it across eight posts, right? So, I think BYD's design philosophy is far far better. And the fact that it's a 2 megawatt charging site with two stalls, right? Um and you could say, well, just expand a site to have multiple, right? So, maybe it's 2, 4, 6, 8. Who do you appreciate BYD right now? And what ends up happening then is they only need a 500 kVA transformer and power drop for a 2 megawatt charging site. Right? So what you end up with is these big batteries that can also discharge at a 10C rate.

[00:16:45]So you only need a 500 kVA input and those batteries will dispense at 2 megawws, right? And so if you scale this to a larger site, like I said, a well, let's just say it's an eight stall site, so four of those uh dual dual stall posts. Well, now you're you're looking at 8 megawws of output power, but only a 2,000 KVA transformer.

[00:17:19]That's like smaller than a lot of the alpronic sites that we see from Iona, BP Pulse, whatever. So 8 megawws out, but only a 2,000 KVA in. That is huge, right? So that's why I'm way more excited about the BYYD flash charging system than I am about the BYD cars. And I'm going to say this right now. BYD, if you're listening and you've stayed this whole time, you might not be able to sell your cars in North America, but if you can start distributing these flash charging sites in the United States, that might be an endound because what you're going to start to see is people using your chargers and then demanding their representatives is open up the option to buy BYYD cars. So, because as far as I know, I mean, we we could be facing a full-on World War II. I'm not going to mince words with this. The time for being politically correct is over.

[00:18:33]We are in a an age right now where the eagle is attacking the lion and the bear ain't too happy and the dragon is about to start breathing fire. So yeah, we uh we are in a very serious pickle of a dilly of a jam geopolitically speaking. So it's possible that we don't get any Chinese products. But I'll I'll say this. If we get cut off from China in the United States, it means as American consumers, uh you what you're going to have available to you is going to be extremely limited, extremely expensive, and that's going to include electric vehicles themselves from any automaker.

[00:19:19]Um but also access to charging hardware, charging equipment, things like that. So yeah, this is uh we we need to get our politicians um yeah, we need to uh put them in a in a in a in a corner and uh put them on timeout, I think. So anyway, to to end on that sobering note, I just wanted to say that I think that what I saw from that BYD flash charging presentation was way more impressive on the charger side than it is on the EV side. 10C charging, I'm not going to like thumb my nose at it. I just don't think that 10 C charging is really super necessary at this point. Having it as an option, okay, great. And the truth is for a lot of EVs that are already on the road, even if they were capable of 10C charging with their current battery sizes and current range, you don't need a megawatt charger to achieve that, right? Like I said, if you could put a 10C blade battery in my Chevy Bolt EV, I could basically take advantage of that on a 500 to 600 kW charger. I don't even need, right? In theory, a V4 supercharger would charge my my Bolt EV from empty to full in 10 minutes, right?

[00:20:43]If it's a 10-se charging rate, it's only when you get to those 100, 120, 150, 200 kWh battery packs that you need these megawatt chargers. So, anyway, so hopefully I can get this out before the uh um Coast to Coast EVs goes live and we discuss some of this charging hardware. uh it took sort of an endound to get to the hardware. So, I apologize for that, but I'd love to hear what you think. Uh are you excited to see these innovations from BYD? What do you think about their philosophy of distributing power versus what we're seeing from Tesla at all? Right. Where they're wanting to distribute power wider and wider but at lower rates. Um and then uh as always, thank you for watching.