Nissan just announced that, in conjunction with Japan’s Kansai University, it has built an electric vehicle charger that is capable of fully recharging a car in just 10 minutes. One of the biggest downsides of current electric vehicles and their accompanying charging stations is that it usually takes about 8 hours to fully recharge a battery. This new charging station, when commercialized, could open up the door to a whole new demographic of people who aren’t willing to wait — the only problem is they’ll have to wait about a decade for Nissan to get this thing into dealerships.
Nissan and Kansai University created the new charger by altering the components of the electrodes inside the battery. Current chargers use carbon electrodes, while the new 10 minute charger switches those out for tungsten oxide and vanadium oxide electrodes, which are much more efficient. If chargers like this were to sweep across the market, the charging components in electric vehicles would have to be altered as well to be compatible with the technology.
According to many recent surveys of consumers, one of the largest complaints about electric cars is the charging time and that charging infrastructure is not sufficient. Though Nissan’s new technology is a long way off from hitting the streets it could really revolutionize the industry. A charger like this would make electricity stations — modeled after gas stations — totally viable. Pull in, plug in, grab a smoothie and be off an running in no time. It is nice to know that solutions to current EV problems are in the works, and though we’d sure like them to come to commercialization a tad bit faster, we’re willing to wait.
Via NY Daily News
If Nissan brought that out now it would definitely be a game changer. I know a couple of very active people who want to make the switch to electric vehicles since they travel a lot, but the main reason they can’t, is the charge time.
Juan Miguel Ruiz (GreenJoyment)
Just make it standard now. What are you waiting for???
I’m very curious as to how they envision to power this charger.
The Nissan Leaf has a 24kWh battery, if you’d want to charge that from empty in 10 minutes, you’d need to be able to get these 24kWh from somewhere in 10 minutes.
That would be 144000 Watts. You’ve got 110V in the US, I believe. You’d need a fuse and cabling able to handle over 1300A. Not to mention the power cables in the streets.
Good luck with that.