Electric Cars Could Soon Charge in as Little as Five Minutes

For the entire modern era of electric vehicles, we’ve been working under the assumption that EVs are not the same as gas cars. They have four tires, a steering wheel and pedals, sure, but if you want to buy an electric car, you need to get used to charging at home and at work, or wherever you park, instead of waiting for a low gas light to click on and simply filling up at the nearest Speedway. And changing ingrained human behavior? That’s no easy feat.

But what if you didn’t have to relearn how to fuel your car? What if you could buy an electric car that charges in the same time it takes to fill a tank of gas? According to a report at The Guardian, that technology is finally here.

“Batteries capable of fully charging in five minutes have been produced in a factory for the first time,” the outlet wrote. It added: “The new lithium-ion batteries were developed by the Israeli company StoreDot and manufactured by Eve Energy in China on standard production lines.”

This technology has been in development for years. We originally wrote about it all the way back in 2016, and while the current model is still an “engineering sample” that was tested in electric scooters, StoreDot hopes to have car batteries that can charge 100 miles in five minutes by 2025 using “available charging infrastructure.” In comparison, Tesla’s proprietary Superchargers can power up a Model 3 with 175 miles of charge in 15 minutes in the best conditions.

Professor Chao-Yang Wang thinks these fast-charging batteries will be available even sooner than that, hopefully in three years. He works in the Battery and Energy Storage Technology Center at Pennsylvania State University and is the founder of EC Power, a company on the forefront of rechargeable batteries.

“We have the technology for $25,000 electric cars that race like luxury sport cars, have 10-minute rechargeability and are safer than any currently on the market,” Wang said. The problem now is proving that technology, scaling it up and getting it out to automakers.

That shouldn’t be a problem — as innovation in the electric vehicle segment accelerates, so does investment. As The Guardian noted, investors in StoreDot include Daimler (the auto giant behind Mercedes-Benz), Samsung, TDK and even BP.

“Batteries are the new oil,” StoreDot CEO Doron Myersdorf told the outlet.