Platform can charge 400km in five minutes and will debut on new Han L and Tang L models.
BYD has shocked the automotive world with the announcement of its Super e-Platform, an all-new electric vehicle platform that can charge nearly twice as fast as anything on sale today.
Set to debut in the newly-released Han L and Tang L models, the Super e-Platform is the world’s first electric car capable of peak charging at Megawatt speeds, or 1000kW, making it capable of adding two kilometres of charge every second, or 400km in five minutes.
The previous record holder was the Li MEGA with a peak charging speed of 520kW, or 5C, although the Zeekr Golden Brick battery can charge at 5.5C but is a smaller pack. By comparison, the Super e-Platform with Flash Charging Battery can charge at 10C, with a charging current of 1000A.
The platform is also the first 1,000V high-voltage architecture in a passenger car, and comes with some pretty impressive motors too.
As revealed in earlier MIIT filings, the Han L and Tang L models that will be the first to use the Super e-Platform, both come equipped with single motors capable of producing 580kW of power and reaching a top speed of 300kph.
This would make them the second most powerful passenger car motors ever produced after the Koenigsegg Dark Matter motors that achieve slightly more.
As the Koenigsegg motors are not mass-produced, this makes BYD’s new creation the world’s first mass-produced 30,000 RPM motor, something BYD’s Senior Vice President, Lou Hongbin, claims “boosts the vehicle’s speed but also greatly reduces the motor’s weight and size, enhancing power density.”
Alongside the new motor, BYD also revealed their next-generation automotive-grade SiC power chips, which have a voltage rating up to 1500V, another world-first for mass-produced chips of this kind.
To support the rollout of these 1000kW-capable charging cars, BYD is finally rolling out its own charging network, something it has been reluctant to do until now.
The new charging stations are the world’s first all-liquid-cooled Megawatt Flash Charging terminals, boasting output capacity up to 1360kW. BYD is planning to build over 4,000 of them in China.
BYD has also touted the abilities of its dual-gun charging technology, whereby a car can be plugged into with two charging guns at once. This, they say, can “turn supercharging piles into flash charging ones and fast charging piles into supercharging ones”, which essentially means getting double the charge out of a normal charging station.
It also suggests we have a new term in our electric vehicle lexicon, ‘flash charging’, which means being capable of charging at one Megawatt speeds. If you get there first, presumably you get the set the rules on naming.
The BYD Han L and Tang L models are now available for pre-sale and will be launched officially in April, likely just ahead of the Shanghai Auto Show at the end of the month, with the Han L priced between RMB 270,000 and RMB 350,000 (£28,800-£37,300 / $37,200-48,300), and the Tang L between RMB 280,000 and RMB 360,000 (£29,900-£38,400 / $38,600-$49,600).
Editor’s Note
It’s hard to shock those of us deeply embedded in the Chinese automotive space anymore, such is the ferocity of development in this area, but BYD’s announcement has done just that.
We were expecting something special from the Blade 2.0 battery, and we’re not even sure this is that since they’ve named it differently, that may be saved for ‘ordinary’ models in BYD’s line-up, but nearly doubling the class-leading Li MEGA’s peak charging speed is frankly outrageous.
BYD’s claims that you can now charge an EV as fast as you can refuel a car are misleading in that 400km of charge in five minutes doesn’t equal the range you’d get from a petrol car in the same period, but that’s not the point.
The point is that with the Super e-Platform, it’s the size of your bladder or how hungry you get that’ll determine when you need to stop rather than the amount of range you have left in your battery, and that could well be the tipping point we’ve all been waiting for.
Of course the massive caveat is that this technology is only on BYD’s flagship models, and their new class-leading chargers will only be in China (to begin with) and there will only be 4,000 of them, but it’s a huge leap forward nonetheless.
That superpowered motor is mighty impressive too.
If anybody had any doubts as to whether BYD is just a massive car-making machine or a genuine tech leader in EVs, they’ve surely been silenced now. They’ve gone and smashed it out the park and beyond the car park around the stadium with this one.
The good news is, with this tech as the flagship battery, you can expect that the next generations of BYD cars for the masses will at least double, if not quadruple their lousy charging speeds of 100 or 200kW, bringing very fast charging to a wider audience, which is good news for everyone.
