BYD's new Song Ultra EV racks up over 60,000 orders in one month, starting at $22,000
electrek.co
BYD launched the Song Ultra EV in China, starting at just under $22,000. The new EV is one of the...

The most eye-stealing highlight is the Flash Charging technology, which works in conjunction with the latest Blade Battery 2.0.

– Charging from 10% to 70% takes only 5 minutes. 
– To charge to 97%, it only takes 9 minutes. 
– Even in temperatures as low as -30°C, it can still be fast-charged in 12 minutes.

  • invertedspear@lemmy.zipEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    It’s a 68kWh pack. The 5 min metric is 60% of that. So 41kWh. To do that in 5 min would require 490kW chargers. This is pretty much only available from the latest Tesla super chargers. So while it’s great that the car can support that, articles about it should include the fact that there is very limited support in charging networks for it.

    • sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip
      8·
      1 day ago

      All 3 metrics are important to evaluate together:

      1. Peak power draw, in watts, describes one type of limitation in charging, that exists somewhere in the chain between the grid itself, the charger, the charge controller, and the batteries. Showing off a very high charging capability on this metric is impressive (for a charger/car combination), and usually shows the bottleneck is somewhere else. Sometimes it’s even in the electrical substation where a rack of several chargers can each deliver high power but can’t charge every station at full power simultaneously
      2. Total energy delivered over a particular amount of time (aka average power). High peak power needs to be sustained to be useful.
      3. Percentage charge delivered over a particular amount of time. The nature of modern batteries means that the maximum charging speed has to slow down closer to each cell’s full charge. So charging from 40% to 60% can be much faster than charging from 80% to 100%, even if the total energy transferred and stored is the same.

      All 3 matter. #1 is an engineering flex and helps avoid bottlenecks into #2, which you correctly describe as being an important metric, and affects just how far you can expect to drive off of that charge. And #3 translates into actual user experience, which is also really important. None of the three metrics can be assumed by simple multiplication of the others, because none of it goes at constant rates in all contexts.