Chery has announced a 1.44 megawatt charging system, able to deliver 500km (311 miles) in 5 minutes. And it’s not even the fastest system available in China.
It’s become common knowledge at this point that Chinese EVs are the world’s state of the art, but the country isn’t sitting on its laurels, it’s still racing to compete with newer and better technology.
A case in point has been the country’s DC fast chargers, where we’ve seen a slew of announcements of new systems in just the last year.
BYD has a 1.5MW charger which it has already installed 10,000 of, Geely just announced a 2.2MW charger, and CATL has a hyper-fast charging battery.
The competition is so fierce that firms are starting to compete over seconds, not minutes of charging time.
And now, a new challenger appears: Chery.
Chery announced a 1.44MW charger that can add 500km (311miles) of range to a battery in 5 minutes, and can charge from 10-97% in 6 minutes and 50 seconds, as reported by CarNewsChina.
The numbers put it in league with the best of the best in the country. Per CarNewsChina’s accounting, the new Chery “Volt-Dragon” battery is the second-fastest at reaching 97% state of charge, 23 seconds behind CATL’s 6 minute, 27 second record time. FAW, Geely and BYD are all between 8 and 9 minutes for the same full charge metric.
Some other firms released times for charging in very cold or very warm weather, which Chery declined to release during its announcement. Though it did say that it could still deliver 500km of range in 8 minutes in “conservative scenarios.”
In Chery’s announcement, it dropped the same buzzword as Geely did: “AI-Powered.” Chery calls its system CheryMind, and supposedly it adjusts charging power based on temperature changes within the battery, to help maintain optimal charging speeds and battery health.
Meanwhile in the US, the fastest public chargers are around 400kW, with 750kW potentially coming next year. That’s all plenty quick enough for refueling, especially on a roadtrip, but for high-throughput DC charging locations, especially those in urban areas where some people might not have a consistent parking spot to charge in (and yes, we need to fix that), higher speed chargers can relieve a lot of pressure.
Chery has only just started installing chargers, and says it will have 100 chargers open in 10 Chinese cities soon. It plans to install 20,000 stations worldwide by 2029, which is quite a bit slower than BYD’s target to have 20,000 chargers installed by the end of this year.
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