EV Battery Makers Promise 5-min Charge Times And Better Battery Range

The Financial Times reports that the BEV battery industry is pivoting hard in competition with China to create far better batteries. These batteries would have both greater capacity and faster charging, but consumers would rather just have longer range.

The EV market is still very young compared to ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars, and EVs have had two significant battery-related problems. The first is that they generally use two battery types, lithium-ion for propulsion and lead acid for everything else, and the second is that both battery types create different problems. On this last the 12-volt lead-acid batteries last only three years on average and are often placed in unusually hard-to-reach areas. In addition, the huge traction battery takes a long time to charge and doesn't provide enough range, with some increasing exceptions, with most cars still falling below the 300-mile suggested minimum.

Well, according to the Financial Times, battery makers are setting a goal to create higher capacity, safer batteries, that have nearly 400 miles of range (600 kilometers is the goal) and 5 minute charge times. Though this does raise the problem of battery longevity because charging at this very high speeds could result in far more battery failures over time.

China and Korea are two of the largest world-wide battery producers are approaching this problem differently with China using Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries that are less susceptible to heat damage while LG out of Korea has instead developed a unique temperature-responsive layer to prevent thermal runaway which is generally what causes BEV batteries to catch fire while charging.

Where The Consumers Are

It is interesting to note that consumers don't care that much about fast charging, given that they know it will cost them more. These owners are unwilling to pay the cost of extremely high-speed charging. Most would rather have more chargers available and greater ranges rather than faster charging.

Many EVs in the market today are pushing 400 miles of range and are able to use chargers that result in far faster charging. For instance, cars coming out of China now, according to the Financial Times, have charging times around 10 minutes and have ranges that fall between 400 and 500 miles or more than adequate for most drivers.

This again showcases a significant EV competitive edge with Chinese vehicles.

The Emerging Problem

This move to faster charging and higher capacities, which counters the desire of BEV owners, is problematic because even though battery costs have dropped 90% over the last decade or so, they are still difficult to recycle and very expensive to replace. There is always a problem when an industry thinks it knows what consumers want but isn't listening to those consumers. This mistake could be costly unless, like China, the West moves to a battery formulation and technology that will prevent the premature expiration of the traction battery.

The efforts to create battery swapping stations might address this better if we can develop standard battery sizes and attachment technologies that would allow for the rapid swapping of batteries. But, right now, batteries are generally designed to the car and vary widely in their physical size, capacity, formulation, method of attachment, and even the design of the battery cells. While EV batteries don't catch fire that often, a stack of batteries charging in a battery swap depot represents a serious fire hazard because should one of those battery packs fail, the rest would likely catch fire as well and the result would be a massive fire that would be extremely difficult to put out once it spread to those other battery packs.

Wrapping Up: What EV Owners Are Really Saying

The EV owners' surveys tell us that these owners want to charge at home; their use of public chargers isn't a priority, nor is fast charging at these chargers. They didn't get away from gas stations to just swap to charging stations, they wanted to get away from the gas station experience all-together suggesting the focus on these higher capacity batteries should be enough range so that a BEV owner doesn't have to use a public charger no matter how fast and can instead live with the convenience of charging at home at a far lower cost than what a public charger costs. 

Until we reach a safer and more robust battery formulation, BEV makers should focus more on range than on fast charging to better meet their customers' needs.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torque News who covers automotive technology and battery development. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X, and LinkedIn.