Swedish electric vehicle manufacturer Polestar, together with StoreDot, one of the pioneers in the fast-charging battery market, have announced the Extreme Fast Charging (XFC) project. As part of the development, a prototype of the Polestar 5 electric car was built, which received a battery and charging electrics, allowing the energy reserve to be replenished from 10 to 80% in just 10 minutes. It is stated that this is the first such experiment on real cars, and not in laboratory conditions.
This is the world’s first 10-minute super-fast charge from 10 to 80 percent using silicon batteries in the vehicle rather than individual batteries in a laboratory environment. A specially designed unit with a capacity of 77 kilowatt-hours, which can be increased to at least 100 kilowatt-hours, can increase the range of a medium-sized electric car by 320 kilometers in 10 minutes.
Polestar is set to become the leader in the premium electric vehicle segment
StoreDot’s revolutionary XFC technology uses silicon-dominant cells with energy densities on par with today’s NMC cells and does not require special cooling systems in the vehicle. In today’s commercial EV batteries, fast charging rates can vary greatly depending on the state of the battery (SOC), sometimes decreasing significantly.
In testing, Polestar noted an increase in charging speed from 310 kilowatts at 10 percent SOC to more than 370 kW at 80 percent SOC, proving the technology’s stable charging speed without any significant changes in charging speed or battery efficiency. Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath promised that innovative batteries should soon appear in production electric cars, but did not outline any time frame.
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