Car expert Paul Maric has pointed out the glaring Australian issue with BYD's game-changing charger announcement. (Source: Getty/Facebook)
BYD has soared to record heights after announcing its new electric vehicle (EV) system will soon have the ability to charge 400 kilometres of range in just five minutes. But don't expect this ground-breaking EV technology to appear in Australia anytime soon.
BYD is able to achieve this incredible feat through a 1,000kW (1 megawatt) charging system, however, Australia's fastest chargers are only able to hit 350kW at the moment. CarExpert.com.au's Paul Maric told Yahoo Finance that while it's an incredible feat for the Chinese automaker, it's still a pipe dream for Aussie EV drivers.
"A megawatt is a stupendous amount of energy. To put that into context, your air conditioner at home will use maybe 2kWs when it's running trying to cool your home. So could just imagine how many home air conditioners you need to be able to charge one car?"
BYD revealed that tests on its new Han L sedan showed it could gain more than 400 kilometres worth of charge in just five minutes - which is two kilometres per second.
“To completely solve users’ anxiety over charging, our pursuit is to make the charging time for EVs as short as the refuelling time for fuel vehicles,” BYD chairman and founder Wang Chuanfu revealed.
That's a huge step above BYD's rivals for super-fast charging speeds:
A Tesla can be juiced up with 275 kilometres worth of charge within 15 minutes on a supercharger
Mercedes recently announced its all-electric CLA compact sedan can be charged for up to 325 kilometres within 10 minutes
BMW's new battery promises 300 kilometres in range on a 10-minute charge
Contemporary Amperex Technology, the world's current largest manufacturer of EV batteries, unveiled the Shenxing Plus battery last year, which can get 600 kilometres of range in 10 minutes
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Tesla's V4 supercharger operates at 325kW, Li Auto's 5C can get up to 520kW, NIO Power has hit 640kW and Xpeng's S5 can reach 800kW.
The BYD new battery and charging system will be available on the Han L sedan and the Tang L sport utility vehicle.
They'll go on sale in China next month starting from $58,400 (270,000 yuan) and $60,870 (280,000 yuan), respectively.
BYD announced it will build 4,000 superchargers across China to accomodate the new system.
How has BYD achieved this?
When the announcement was made earlier this week, concerns erupted that having a battery that could charge that fast would surely have some downsides.
"I find it hard to believe that they have created technology overnight that solves the issue of the huge amount of heat that's generated during fast charging," Maric told Yahoo Finance.
"We've also been told constantly by battery manufacturers that constant fast charging of your battery degrades its its potential over time, which affects the range of your car.
“BYD claims to have figured out how to how to avoid that. I would be very surprised, pleasantly surprised if they did find that out.”
But Shay Natarajan from private equity fund Mobility Impact Partners revealed the breakthrough is in BYD's cooling system.
“This lets the battery reach peak charging power faster and sustain that peak power longer during the charging cycle, thus increasing the average charging power during the charging cycle and allowing for significantly faster charging,” she said.
The BYD Han will be one of two cars that will be capable of super-fast charging. (Source: Getty)
'Could cause a calamity': Why won't it work in Australia?
Maric said your typical home EV charger works on about 7kW of energy and the fastest chargers you'll find at Aussie stations is up to 350kW.
So it's a fraction of what BYD can achieve with a megawatt charger.
He added that there are some regional towns that only need 1MW to operate as a whole, so to plunge that much electricity into a single car would need a lot of infrastructure.
"It might work well in China, because there they have huge incentives to trump the world at the moment on this technology. But how realistic is it to work in Australia? I think that's going to be the big question," he said.
He also pointed to AMPOL, one of the country’s largest petrol retailers, rolling back its plans last year to triple the number of EV charging bays in Australia from 92 to 300.
Company boss Matt Halliday raised concerns that this plan would place an extraordinary amount of pressure on the power grid that "is not really built for large-scale electrification".
Maric told Yahoo Finance: "If AMPOL can't do it with charging infrastructure that was going to be 50 or 100 kilowatts, so 10 times less per charger than what BYD needs, I think we're going to really struggle to see this technology take off in Australia.
"I just can't stress enough that a megawatt of electricity is is an insane amount of power and if this isn't tested properly in extreme conditions, it could cause a calamity if it all went wrong."
What happened on the stock market?
BYD's revelation this week saw its Shenzhen-listed stock price hit a record high of AUD$87.56.
It has risen nearly 12 per cent over the past five days.
The company now has a market cap of nearly $264.64 billion, which is more than Volkswagen, General Motors and Ford combined.
Conversely, it was a horror story for Tesla.
The Elon Musk-owned carmaker has suffered a 4.44 per cent drop since BYD's announcement was made, but it has been slowly repairing those losses.
“It appears that Tesla is losing its competitive edge on its core competency, as many peers are quickly encroaching on their space,” David Wagner, portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, said.
But this could be the ninth-straight weekly loss for Tesla, and now sits at least 53 per cent below the all-time highs reached in mid-December.
According to Bloomberg, Tesla is the "worst performing" company on the S&P500 Index for the year at the moment.
