​ New technology will make charging electric cars as fast as filling petrol

 

Electric vehicles rely on batteries as the storage medium for their energy, and batteries have a far lower energy density than those offered by the fossil burning cars, which resulted in very low ranges of early electric vehicles. There has been a gradual improvement in battery technologies and this has increased the driving ranges of electric cars to approach acceptable levels. However, despite the vast improvements in battery technology, today consumers of electric vehicles face another difficulty – slow battery charging speed. Currently, electric cars take about 10 hours to fully recharge at home and even using the fastest superchargers at the charging stations the batteries require up to 20-40 minutes to fully recharge the vehicles. Scientists from the Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems have worked out that using quantum charging would lead to a 200 times speedup over classical batteries, which means that at home charging time would be cut from 10 hours to about 3 minutes. At high-speed charging stations, the charge time would be cut from 30 minutes to mere seconds.





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