- BYD just launched its 10,000th 1.5-megawatt Flash Charging station.
- This means it managed to double the size of its ultra-fast charging network in just five months.
- The automaker plans to hit 20,000 stations before the end of 2026.
Not too long ago, BYD celebrated the rollout of its 5,000th ultra-fast Flash Charger back in April. Now—just five months later—the EV giant announced that it has doubled its charging network to a whopping 10,000 chargers across more than 300 different cities, according to a report from the Chinese news site IT Home.
BYD said that this milestone makes it the Chinese automaker with the largest self-built charging network and the one with the broadest geographical charging coverage. And BYD isn’t done building. The company’s goal is to install 20,000 Flash Chargers across China by the end of the year.
Photo by: BYD
That’s a pretty big stretch for BYD to hit at this pace, though. Since April, it’s managed to deploy about 34 charging stations per day. If it wants to double its charging network once again in the 125 days remaining in the year, BYD will need to up that number to no fewer than 80 charger deployments each day.
Even if BYD misses that target, it’s hard not to be impressed with this rollout. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill 350-kilowatt DC fast chargers like you see here in America. We’re talking about chargers capable of delivering 1.5 megawatts of power through a single cable—more than triple the rating of your typical high-powered charger for consumer EVs in the U.S. They also include on-site energy storage that acts as a buffer for the grid and allows the chargers to deliver so much power. Their novel T-shaped design uses rails and sliding cables to, BYD says, keep the plugs from hitting the ground and make the chargers easier to maneuver. The Flash Charging stations are able to charge BYD’s newest cars with Blade 2.0 batteries to from 10% to 97% in just nine minutes.
BYD says its Flash Chargers use on-site batteries to relieve stress on the grid.
Photo by: BYD
As BYD announced this week, surging that much electricity into an EV and charging it in minutes may not have the detrimental effect on a battery that you’d expect. Over the course of 9 days, it used its Flash Chargers to refill the battery of a Yangwang U7 350 times, and drove it 30,000 kilometers. You can read all about that test here, but just know that the results were very encouraging for the future of EV batteries.
But it’s not just BYD vehicles charging at these stations. The automaker’s own numbers reveal that it delivered 210 gigawatts of power to 1.83 million drivers during the first six months of its operation. Of those drivers, 33% plugged in vehicles that didn’t wear a BYD badge. That number is likely to increase as more Chinese EVs become capable of megawatt charging and BYD rolls out the chargers to Europe and Canada.
