It was an honor to join this excellent podcast to discuss how China became dominant in clean energy manufacturing!

What enables that? Three things: (1) a huge market, (2) massive R&D – BYD has 100,000 R&D employees – Ford has 160,000 total employees worldwide – and (3) less effort wasted trying to keep selling gas cars and waiting for when the customer is ready. To compete in China, you cannot just wait and see.

The number and frequency of new technology announcements from the Chinese players, combined with the number of price-competitive and high-quality new models, usually ready for the market instead of just far-away concepts, really emphasizes China’s market lead.

The other thing pointed out by the bloggers: Have you noticed how this technology is not coming from Ford, GM or VW?

Especially if it’s coming from BYD, a low-cost automaker, perhaps this will push more competing carmakers to focus on fast charging and improving the fast charging experience for users, even if they can’t offer 5-minute charging.

After checking the EV podcasts and blogs, I realized that the 5-minute charging headlines have really captured imaginations. Perhaps this type of headline does help bring people to EVs who might not otherwise be interested. Perhaps it does change the narrative.

5. The recent Consumer Reports study makes clear, consumers are fed up with the poor quality of fast charging – broken screens, clunky payment, etc. I would rather have reliable and ubiquitous fast charging than a handful of high-priced 1 MW chargers.

4. Most people charge at home or work. Small breaks on road trips are normal. In my trips, 10-15 minutes to add 50% of range would be fine, provided fast charging is widely available and reliable. Which it’s not!

3. It’s not just the high cost that will limit the numbers. The grid cannot handle multiple 1 MW chargers just anywhere. Sudden spikes in charging load cost the grid more, meaning higher ‘demand charges’ that will also be passed on to consumers.

2. It obviously increases the convenience of road trips, but that depends on how many there are. There are very few 200 and 300 kW chargers now. I expect these ultra-ultra-fast chargers to be even more rare, even in places with lots of EVs.

1. The cost of installing chargers scales with charging power. Users should expect the price to go up as companies seek to recoup those costs. They may need to charge over Euro 1/kWh – a huge premium to gasoline. www.wired.com/story/byd-5-...

Here are 5 reasons I am sceptical about the latest announcements:

In terms of what’s typical today, most DC fast charging offers speeds of 50 kW or 120 kW. There are starting to be more chargers installed that do better. Tesla V3 is 250 kW and Ionity and several other networks offer 300-350 kW.