Technology

Mainly the issues are about providing ~600 kilowatts for 8 minutes to charge your typical size EV battery.

A row of 5 chargers of that size soaks up 3MW if they're all in use, and that's not something that can be quickly or easily shoehorned into a suburban electricity grid.

It's about 500 houses worth of electricity usage, for comparison. For just 5 fast chargers.

Not to say it's impossible, but infrastructure doesn't come cheap, and so it'll cost quite a bit to cram that 80 percent charge into your car's battery.

I'd be afraid of wearing out a battery super fast. Outside of super long trips that require recharging to arrive, I'd much rather leave a car plugged in overnight rather than need to pay to replace batteries. Also, like @[email protected] said, it's a lot of power at once that could get dangerous if something goes wrong or overload grids if lots of people start fast charging their cars.

Though of course I'm sure it's a great achievement and hopefully the research is useful.

Taking this at face value, I note two things:

1. This shit would overload our current electricity grid fast!
2. This is a terrifying ammount of power going into the car.

As for point 1, the power has to come from somewhere, and our current power grid is already having problems keeping up with current charging currents, and if a battery like this will be able to get charged 80% in 9 min, to use it you have to have a power source to supply that ammount of power in that time.

This could possibly be mitigated somewhat with huge batteries at the charge station that get charged slowly over time and that is then used to boost the charging of the car, but this would need specialized maintenance and commes with big potential risks.

As for point 2, the huge ammounts of power being delivered to the car will require a perfect connection between the power source and the car, it will require heavy insulation in and around the car, I wouldn't want to be within 10 meters of the car while charging due to potential risk of arc flash.

80 % in 9 minutes is only 5 C, not really something that amazing.

As far as I can tell (not as an expert), the pitfalls and unforeseen issues are probably pretty much what they'd be for every new battery chemistry: how safe is it? Does it have really bad self-discharge? Is the supply consistent? How does it do at low charging levels? How long/how many cycles does such a cell last? Does it require an unsustainable amount of exotic minerals?

As well as what they are for any new technology: what is the replacement cost? Can they be installed in existing technology via drop-in or with a simple retrofit, or do you have to replace the entire unit? How long before they come to market? Can they maintain supply to match demand?

Probably a lot of those questions are business-related rather than technology-related (i.e. "will the companies developing this stuff put enough into R&D to solve these problems before releasing them?" not "do the laws of the universe allow this?"). I am not an expert, but before I put all my chips on solid-state batteries (something I'm pretty confident will be the norm eventually), I would want those answered.

Doping is a common term in electronics, it's just that the article is on Top Gear so they didn't explain it well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_(semiconductor)