Pushmi-Pullyu
Well-Known Member
With your 10 minute benchmark, you can currently get around 150 miles. Getting a full 300 miles takes more like an hour (it is very non-linear, I assume because of battery heating / management as the batteries near full charge). Note that Tesla tends to quote the 80% charge times because of this long charging 'tail'.
Charging to 80% is pretty much the standard for experienced BEV drivers, for charging when traveling long distance. Beyond that, as your chart shows, you can spend a lot of time at a charger for little benefit. That's why experienced BEV drivers rarely charge past 80% when fast-charging. It's not just Tesla's standard, it's pretty much industry wide.
I keep hoping we'll see a significant improvement in battery tech, by lowering cell charging resistance, which would allow faster charging without overheating. There has been a lot of promise shown in laboratory samples using cell electrodes coated with graphene or CNT (Carbon NanoTubes) to greatly increase surface area, and thus greatly lower electrical resistance. However, despite much effort, industry has failed to produce graphene or defect-free CNT in industrial quantities.

Using current battery cell tech, to go from ~27 minutes for 150 miles of range to ~10 minutes for 300 miles of range, the math says we'd have to increase the size of the battery pack, for a car the size of the Model 3, from 80.5 kWh to 435 kWh. Add another, let's say, 10% for loss of efficiency with a larger pack and larger charging cables losing more power, so I think a more realistic figure would be 478 kWh.
That's not a very practical plan. That large a battery pack would be much too big to fit in the car, so they would have to make the car larger and heavier, which means further increasing the size of the battery pack... a vicious circle. And of course, at ~$100 per kWh, that 478 kWh battery pack would cost approximately $48,000. There's not going to be much of a market at that price!
However, let's not conclude this is an impossible goal, or one which is 50+ years off. It was only a few years ago that the standard was 45 minutes to an 80% charge, and now both the Model 3 and the Taycan can do that in approx. 25-27 minutes.
Competition between BEV makers is bringing down BEV charging times pretty rapidly, even without a radical improvement in battery cell tech!
I hope -- this isn't a prediction, but a hope -- to see ultra-fast-charging cars, and ultra-fast EV chargers able to charge them, charging at least 300 miles of range in 10 minutes or less, within 10 years from today. Now, if we only had a magic crystal ball that would let us peer 10 years into the future...

So maybe a 500 kW 'V4?' Supercharger AND a major battery breakthrough would get you to the holy grail of 300 miles in 10 minutes?
I am a technology optimist, and I'm sure this will happen, but...
my guess would be it will be at least another 5-10 years, and maybe longer before it is commonplace.
Looks like we're in agreement here.

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