10 Minutes or Less: Another New Charging System from Nissan

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As long as there are complaints about electric cars, Nissan just isn’t satisfied. Having already resolved the bulky home charger issue with a smaller version, Nissan will next tackle the time it takes to charge an EV.

DC quick chargers can take an EV up to about 80% capacity in just thirty minutes – not bad, when the alternative is charging the car overnight. But thirty minutes is still more time than you might want to spend off the road, or waiting in the morning before heading out to wherever. Nissan’s new technology, if all goes according to projections, will charge an EV battery completely in 10 minutes – less time than it takes to drive to the gas station and fill up.

Kansai University is the hot spot for Nissan – engineers and researchers there have a capacitor electrode made of tungsten oxide and vanadium oxide. Why that works better than the usual carbon is a mystery to me (and many of you, I suspect), but much like the system from the University of Illinois, it can hold more power and charge faster without screwing up the battery capacity.

Nissan isn’t the only Japanese company with super rapid charging technology – last year, JFE Engineering announced it had a 3 minute charging system. Nissan has accepted the challenge and working to get its charging times down as well.

The downside to all of this is that it does none of us any good right now; both systems are a good decade away from commercialization. At least the probable 10-year gap between development and distribution will offer an opportunity to prepare the grid for the new level of power demand. Hey, it could happen.

Source: CNET
 


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