E-cars are still a deterrent to many people.
Price and battery life are two of the reasons.
With fast-charging batteries, the charging time will soon no longer be a part of it.
Herzliya - just drive to the gas station, hang the tap in the car and after a few minutes be back on the road with a full tank - when it comes to filling up quickly, electric cars simply cannot keep up with combustion engines.
At least until now.
For the first time, electric car batteries have now been developed that can be fully charged within five minutes.
The new lithium-ion batteries were developed by the Israeli company StoreDot and produced in China, as reported by the British daily "Guardian".
It is not the first fast-charging battery from StoreDot.
They are already being used in smartphones, drones and scooters.
The 1,000 batteries that the company had manufactured in China are now to be demonstrated to automakers and other companies.
As the "Guardian" writes, Daimler and Samsung, among others, have already invested in the company, which raised 130 million US dollars.
E-cars: Fear that batteries won't last long distances
Batteries that land quickly could be an important step in making e-cars more attractive to consumers. Many drivers fear that the battery is not suitable for long distances and that they have to wait for hours on the way until the battery is full again. Provided that the infrastructure even provides a charging station. Because in Frankfurt, for example, charging stations for e-cars * are in short supply (
fnp.de reported
). With this in mind, a fully charged battery could help electric cars achieve a major breakthrough within five minutes.
"The biggest obstacle to the introduction of electric vehicles is no longer costs, but range fear," said Doron Myersdorf, CEO of StoreDot, the "Guardian".
“You are either afraid of standing still on the freeway or you have to sit at a charging station for two hours.
But when the driver's experience is exactly like refueling [a gasoline car], all that fear goes away.
"
Fast charging e-car batteries: There are no suitable sockets
The catch: conventional sockets are not designed for this performance, they should be much more powerful. With the sockets currently in use, it should not be possible until 2025 to charge the StoreDot batteries in five minutes for a capacity of around 160 kilometers. "The bottleneck in extra-fast charging is no longer the battery," said Myersdorf. Now the charging stations and networks that supply them need to be upgraded.
The StoreDot battery is also no longer a laboratory prototype, but rather "technical samples from a mass production line," said Myersdorf.
"This shows that it's feasible and commercially viable." Batteries like these will be mass-marketed in three years, Professor Chao-Yang Wang of the Battery and Energy Storage Technology Center at Pennsylvania State University told the newspaper.
"They won't be more expensive, in fact they allow automakers to downsize the on-board battery while eliminating range fears, which drastically reduces vehicle battery costs."
Tesla is also working on fast-charging e-car batteries
StoreDot uses germanium nanoparticles as electrodes instead of graphite for the fast-charging batteries. In the long term, however, silicon should be used. Because in the variant with graphite it happens that the ions clog up and short-circuit the battery when charging quickly. The Israeli company is not the only one working on a solution for e-car batteries. Elon Musk's companies Tesla *, Enevate and Sila Nanotechnologies are already working in the field. (ial)
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