Startup Nyobolt’s new EV-charging tech is commendably quick—but it’s not “twice the speed of the fastest-charging vehicles on the road”
As Motor Mouth — and others — proclaimed, it was an impressive performance from a production vehicle of realistic proportions and utility.
Wow! In fact, double-wow! Two weeks after we’re celebrating one amazing feat of electron transfer comes a seemingly mind-bending claim purporting to represent an even more incredible advanced battery technology. It would be, at least by those headline numbers, capable of charging speeds three times quicker than the P3-topping Lotus.
Except that it’s not. In fact, it’s slower.
Yup, slower. And unfortunately, the reason the reality doesn’t quite match the headline’s implications is the simple obfuscation of a few basic facts.
The first little tidbit missing in that attention-grabbing headline — or the inevitable bullet-pointed highlights that follow it — is how big of a battery was charged in those four minutes and 37 seconds. And it wasn’t ’til way past the headline — some halfway through a press release, a point many readers may never get to — that we found out the battery Nyobolt was recharging had a capacity of just 35 kilowatt-hours of energy.
In other words, Nyobolt’s new batteries are not at all bad—they are, to be sure, to be commended, and hopefully some of the company’s technologies show up on production vehicles forthwith. But the harbinger of “five-minute-recharging” EVs that you and I could soon drive? Not so much.
Still more important, however, than whether the Nyobolt really can charge at “twice the speed of the fastest-charging vehicles on the road” (later in the missive, this is clarified to read “most of the fastest-charging cars”) is the following advice I’d give to anyone looking for a particularly fast-charging EV: if someone claims to have an EV that can charge in a record amount of time but doesn’t mention the size of the battery — or if they wait ’til way down in the body copy to do so — and does not specify the exact average charging rate in kilowatts, I’d suggest skepticism.
Oh, many the BEV advocate will claim those omissions are actually necessary, because most consumers don’t have a sufficient appreciation of what a kilowatt is, or what a kilowatt-hour can do, so a basic 10% to 80% SoC time — or the even more straightforward so-many-kilometres-recharged-in-so-many-minutes — is a simpler way to communicate the metric they’re trying to get across.
Fair dinkum! However, the vast majority of charging claims that I have seen that focus on per-cent-state-of-charge-in-so-many-minutes, or the amount of mileage recouped, but that don’t specify the actual number of kilowatts being delivered are trying to hide something. A few such claims turn out to be legitimately interesting, but many are just spewing jargon they hope isn’t questioned.
For those still not getting these kilowatt things, allow me a somewhat personal analogy that requires but the most basic of maths. Not immediately spelling out how big the battery being charged is, or how fast you’re charging it, would be like me — I am, in fact, currently preparing to run in my first foot-race in nearly 45 years — telling everyone who’d listen that I am hoping to finish an Olympic-class distance in two hours.
“Nice,” I hope you’d say — though, judging by the comments I get on many Motor Mouth columns, perhaps not — but, uhm, how long exactly is the race, Dave?
Because how far I have to run is exactly analogous to how big of a battery needs to be charged. More importantly, the pace I’d have to run to make that boast even remotely impressive — a fantastic four-and-a-half-minutes per mile, if I am running a full marathon on July 14, versus an any-66-year-old-fat-guy-can-do-it 20-minute-mile pace if it’s a 10K — is exactly equivalent to how many kilowatts your battery sucks up over the course of that 10% to 80% SoC. Either way, a race will be finished, but in only one instance will the accomplishment be deserving of any sort of accolade.
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