BYD Launches Next-Gen EV Battery System with 5 Minute Charging

BYD has announced that its new battery and charging system can charge almost as fast as it takes a regular car to refuel.

According to a report, it also has a range of around 400 kilometers and can be charged in just five minutes. The company will debut the platform on the models Han L and Tang L next month, starting from 270,000 yuan (USD 37,338) and 280,000 yuan, respectively.

This may also be a much more convincing sell since long wait times for charging are barriers of inconvenience for people, leading them not to choose an EV.

BYD's new architecture operates at an unprecedented 1,000 volts with charging speeds of up to 1,000 kilowatts (1 megawatt), dramatically outpacing current industry leaders. For comparison, Tesla's latest V4 Superchargers max out at 500kW, delivering approximately 171 miles of range in 15 minutes; three times longer than BYD's system for comparable range.

Because of this, BYD can achieve charging rates of 10x the battery capacity per hour. In other words, it can charge a battery in 1/10th of an hour, or 6 minutes. While this may not actually be the case because charging speeds drop significantly once the battery is charged to about 80 percent, it is enough to deliver 70-80 percent charge at close to the peak rate; within 5 minutes, even if achieving the full 100 percent charge takes 15 minutes or more.

This new platform will also be another huge boost for BYD which had already overtaken Tesla as the world's top EV seller. The BYD chargers can comfortably surpass Tesla’s Superchargers, which can add up to 275 kilometers of range in 15 minutes.

On the contrary, in August 2024, Exponent had already partnered with Veera Vahana, a leading player in the bus industry, to introduce rapid charging intercity bus, Veera Mahasamrat EV. To support the new fleet, the company unveiled India's first 1 MW rapid charging technology for electric buses.

Commenting on this achievement, Arun Vinayak, CEO and Co-founder, Exponent Energy, tweeted, “As a nation we need to have self-belief that we can build and own all layers of EV tech. We’ve historically been followers in ICE. We can’t repeat that with EVs. There was a lot of excitement on the BYD 1MW charging. But we’ve already got 1MW charging right here. We’re actually doing this on standard off the shelf cells which makes it 10X accessible. BYD has fantastic cell material science capability. Allowing them to do 10C. Stuff we need to catch up on in India. Optimistic that we will have an Indian cell partner soon.”

Co-founded in 2020 by ex-Ather execs, Arun Vinayak and Sanjay Balyal, the company has worked on their battery pack (e^pack), charging station (e^pump), and charging connector (e^plug) that together unlock a 15-minute rapid charge and give a 3000 cycle life warranty for EVs (a new industry standard)—all done on a range of affordable Li-ion cells.

Since then, Exponent Energy has now come a long way, boasting 1700+ EVs powered by Exponent on the roads of India, completing over 3.5 Lakh rapid charging sessions, covering over 20 Lakh km. Under their leadership, Exponent has cracked the code of scalability in the Indian EV ecosystem and, within just 2 years, has expanded to 5 new cities: Delhi NCR, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, and Hyderabad.