CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes • Hacker News Board

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#101

Post by cestith » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #83

cestith wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable to do instead of charging once every three to five years or so. I guess it depends on the quality and retained capacity on the batteries being swapped in.

> Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable eh? are you saying that something that is done once every 5 years has to be done inside 5 minutes? I strongly disagree. > charging once every three to five years or so Um, that's not how charging works at all.

That’s not how sentences or quotations work at all.

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#102

Post by dgacmu » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #81

dgacmu wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's nice there, though, is that the total amount of _energy_ needed at a charging station is roughly fixed( ), regardless of how fast you charge the cars. So if you're provisioned for the needed total energy inflow, you can to a reasonable degree compensate for having a more bursty high-rate charging load by having some amount of local energy storage as a buffer. ( ) - Assuming you provision for the highest-traffi…

For numbers, just follow traffic at a busy gas station. Roughly 100 vehicles per hour is typical. So imagine having to charge 100 Teslas per hour, or just over one telsa per minute. That is still an insane amount of power.

As others have noted, urban gas stations are likely to be far less busy in an EV world due to the ease of distributed charging -- home, work, destination, etc.;

But I think you raise a good model for long-haul. I think of the pennsylvania turnpike gas stations as a worst-case situation: They serve a somewhat captive audience, many of whom are traveling so far they need a mid-trip fillup. So something like 80kWh/minute _does_ seem like what you'd have to do for those specific stations, and that's an average rate of 4.8MW, at least during prime time.

You can probably get away with half of that if you use local storage as use is much lower at night. But let's not - let's see what it takes to do 4.8MW.

The answer is: You don't need a substation. You DO need on-site transformers and switchgear from 12kV primary service. But to put it in perspective, 4MW is like a tiny datacenter or really big (new york size) office building. So it's not really too crazy to think about an EV per minute going from 0-80kWh in a dedicated area. Compared to huge underground gas tanks, I think the infrastructure part of it is pretty ok.

Re: CATL's new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

#103

Post by crote » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

wakawaka28 wrote: post #92

crote wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there might still be a point in battery swap, especially for public transport systems There isn't. Buses aren't really size- or weight-constricted and don't drive at highway speeds, so building one with enough battery capacity to last most of the day isn't a big deal. Plenty of cities have already transitioned to a 100% electric bus fleet, after all. A big thing to remember is that people don't travel at the same v…

There are many cases where the EV busses have been abandoned. Busses typically do not do their route and stop, so getting a significant amount of charging for any busses requires extra busses that can be rotated on/off duty. If you design the system to depend on that charging then you need extra busses and you're effectively stuck with a sparse schedule. That is not a constraint to consider with petrol-powered busses…

> There are many cases where the EV busses have been abandoned

Source?

> Busses typically do not do their route and stop, so getting a significant amount of charging for any busses requires extra busses that can be rotated on/off duty.

Yes. But like I said: this was already the case with diesel buses. Nothing changes here. The duty rotation is demand-driven, not supply-driven.

> EV busses are totally unsuitable in emergencies.

Emergencies are the exception, and there are very few cases where regular city buses (of any kind) are going to be the backbone of a last-minute evacuation plan. And even in that case: usually you only need to drive a dozen miles / kilometers to get out of immediate danger - which should be perfectly doable.

> You should consider this before buying an EV as well.

I completely agree. Leaving a few dozen miles / kilometers of range in the battery not only is a sensible preparation for any kind of (natural or personal) emergency, but it is also better from a charging speed and battery longevity perspective.