CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

PPotatoNinja about 4 hours ago 27 commentsRead Article on arstechnica.com

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Discussion (27 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

perching_aix•about 2 hours ago

Saw this yesterday, did not expect the competition around Donut's batteries to heat up this much and this quickly.

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).

bayesianbot•about 2 hours ago

Feels quite clear Donut doesn't have much - no meaningful new tests released for many weeks already and some executive of Nordic Nano sued Donut Lab and said their claims were misleading.

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.

audunw•12 minutes ago

I find the talk around Donut so weird. At CES we were told they had nothing because they hadn’t shared third party test. They then shared third party tests remarkably fast. From the dating of VTT reports it’s clear they shared it as soon as VTT finalised their reports. Now they have nothing because they haven’t released enough tests fast enough?

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

yorwba•about 1 hour ago

Donut's website claims that they will release the next test result in 7 days, so you can check next week whether those people will have something new to talk about: https://idonutbelieve.com

jonkoops•10 minutes ago

I sincerely hope Donut really has an ace up their sleeve, we could really use some domestic competition against China here in the EU. I sincerely hope that the next update from them is something solid (pun intended), and not 'what color is the battery'.

tristanj•about 3 hours ago

I did not expect Nio's 5-minute battery swap technology to become obsolete this soon.

c9lgPZqHNGdC1V1•about 2 hours ago

If anything, Nio battery swap stations would allow car users to swap to newer types of battery as they become available. I say this knowing Nio is one of CATL's most important partners[1].

[1] https://eletric-vehicles.com/catl/catl-calls-nio-an-irreplac...

DennisP•about 2 hours ago

That'd be an interesting situation. They'd probably replace their fleet of batteries gradually, so with each swap sometimes you'd get upgraded, sometimes downgraded. Your range and home charging curves would change with the batteries, and Nio would have to update the battery management software when it puts in a different battery type.

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.

xbmcuser•about 1 hour ago

Nio already has a service to swap to higher capacity battery if you want to go on a long road trip etc. It prices its cars according to battery capacity so even people that chose lower capacity car on purchase still have the option to swap to a higher capacity battery. Though I think the main use for battery swap technology will be for commercial trucking and if I recall correctly Chinese government and OEM are working on standardisation for that so all those truck batteries are swappable no matter which company builds the battery.

dirck-norman•about 2 hours ago

5 minute swap is not needed for this.

maeln•about 2 hours ago

We should always take marketing number with a huge grain of salt, so the 10 to 98% in 7 minutes remain to be seen. Also, there is the question of if it lowers the battery lifespan faster than charging at lower power. It is does, there might still be a point in battery swap, especially for public transport systems (for bus). A public transit operator might want to have more battery than vehicle, so that they can rotate the battery regularly and charge them at lower power, to diminish and distribute the wear on battery. But that's obviously a big if and a more niche usage.

xbmcuser•about 1 hour ago

the life span stat with the current battery tech is mostly useless for a normal car. 300 mile range most people will need to top up 2 times a week 100 times a year 1000 times in 10 years. The battery degradation is not that bad in the first place.

SideburnsOfDoom•6 minutes ago

[delayed]

SideburnsOfDoom•21 minutes ago

> Also, there is the question of if it lowers the battery lifespan faster than charging at lower power.

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.

viraj_shah•about 1 hour ago

I didn't see a number for cycle life. That'd be my biggest question here. You can charge in less than 7 minutes but how many times before performance (capacity) degrades?

phh•about 1 hour ago

TFA says "After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said."

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.

dgacmu•27 minutes ago

If you get 400km per charge using 88% of the battery (98% -> 10%), that's 400,000km (258,000 miles) before you're down to 90%, at which point you have likely worn out an awful lot of other things with the car.

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.

xoa•23 minutes ago

>I can't really judge whether 1000 charges is a reasonable target for a car

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.

baq•24 minutes ago

1000 charges 10-80% for a passenger car at 300-400 km per charge is 30 000 - 40 000 km of fast charge driving. I'd say it's perfectly fine for most people?

est•about 1 hour ago

China had many >1M KM electric taxies. Usually they degrade after 200,000 km, and they are like 2 generations behind the latest ones.

djcannabiz•about 1 hour ago

right at the end “After 1,000 fast charges, the battery should retain more than 90 percent of its original state of charge, the company said.”

sandworm101•about 2 hours ago

> have a minute to plug in? Still sufficient to get from 10 to 35 percent state of charge.

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.

dgacmu•23 minutes ago

What's nice there, though, is that the total amount of _energy_ needed at a charging station is roughly fixed(), regardless of how fast you charge the cars. So if you're provisioned for the needed total energy inflow, you can to a reasonable degree compensate for having a more bursty high-rate charging load by having some amount of local energy storage as a buffer.

() - 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.

SECProto•about 1 hour ago

> Call it 5kw/h in 1/60 hours, thats 3000kw, at 700v thats still roughly 4000 amps. (Please correct my head math.)

5 kWh * 60 = 300 kW

at 800V (typical charging voltage) that is 375A

(still huge, but an order of magnitude less)

jcsager•about 1 hour ago

Fjord ferries in Norway are up around that sort of charge rate, but for 30 mins instead of 5. That kind of battery charging performance is pure marketing until our local LV supply network is uplifted!

baq•23 minutes ago

substation...? more like an SMR

g4cg54g54•about 1 hour ago

chargers of that size generally have there own internal (sometimes even shared by multiple receptacles) batteries

SideburnsOfDoom•about 2 hours ago

Neither article mentions what specs - voltage and kW - are used when doing this very fast charging.

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.