| | For subscribers | August 19, 2025 |
|
|
|
|
|
 | | A display of cars from the Chinese automaker BYD at the Auto Shanghai show in April. BYD is now the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. Andrea Verdelli for The New York Times |
Why doesn’t the U.S. have five-minute E.V. charging?
China is dominating the electric vehicle market globally, accounting for more than 70 percent of global manufacturing in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. Its E.V. makers have pulled ahead of U.S. car companies on both price and technology.
Case in point: the five-minute charger.
This past spring, two major Chinese companies announced breakthroughs in battery technology that will enable electric vehicles to drive hundreds of miles on a five-minute charge. After traveling to China to test drive new fast-charging cars sold by BYD, Patrick George, the editor in chief of InsideEVs, said Chinese models were “ pretty much a generation or two ahead of the rest of the world.”
It’s easy to imagine how five-minute charging might transform U.S. drivers’ attitudes toward electric vehicles. Widely available power sources and a charge time roughly the same length as a stop to fill up a gas tank would go a long way to alleviate the range anxiety many cite as a hurdle to going electric.
But car buyers in the U.S. aren’t likely to get access to five-minute charging any time soon, analysts say. Here’s why.
The cars
BYD’s fast-charging system depends on two things: a vehicle capable of charging quickly, and a charger that can deliver power from the grid to match.
BYD, which is now the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles, has developed a battery that has a peak charging capacity of 1,000 kilowatts, also known as a megawatt. This peak rate can add enough charge in five minutes to drive for about 250 miles. Most E.V.s on the market in the U.S. can charge at peak rates of 400 kilowatts or less.
“This was a big leap, almost a tripling of others in the industry,” said Ryan Fisher, head of charging infrastructure at BloombergNEF, a research firm.
Fisher said that the car’s price point in China of around $37,000 was also far lower than those of new fast-charging cars marketed elsewhere. A Tesla Cybertruck sold in the U.S. starts at around $70,000.
While other automakers may eventually figure out how to build megawatt charging systems, it won’t happen overnight, Fisher said.
As we reported last week, Chinese companies have leaped ahead of the rest of the world in high-quality patents for many clean energy technologies, including batteries.
( Read more from our series on how China is beating the U.S. in the race to develop the energy of the future.)
Right now, very few Chinese-branded cars are sold in the U.S. because of prohibitively high tariffs that both President Trump and his predecessor have put on Chinese E.V.s and other products.
 | | A BYD charging station in a parking garage in São Paulo, Brazil. Victor Moriyama for The New York Times |
The chargers
BYD has promised to build 4,000 “megawatt flash charging” stations in China to support its new cars with 1,000-kilowatt charging capacity.
Building these high-powered stations may be a smoother process in China. There, the government treats E.V. charging stations as crucial infrastructure, similar to how the U.S. treats highway maintenance, said Bill Russo, founder and chief executive of Automobility Limited, a Shanghai-based consulting firm.
“That allows them to build a high-power charging hub directly into the grid, sometimes even to high-voltage lines, bypassing a delay that would typically plague a local utility upgrade in the U.S.,” Russo said. “Things just have a straighter-line path to getting done,” he added.
In the U.S., a Biden-era effort to speed the build-out of E.V. chargers was paused this year by the Trump administration, and then reinstated this month. The Transportation Department has said it now plans to make it easier for states to use federal money to build E.V. chargers. Private companies are working to open new charging stations, too.
BYD executives have talked about rolling out megawatt charging stations in Europe, where Chinese companies may be able to gain a toehold despite tariffs, Fisher said. Ionity, a company focused on fast charging, has said it will roll out megawatt-capable charging stations in Europe later this year, though the power will be split among a few parking stalls.
What’s next
t’s unclear how much Trump’s aggressive rollbacks of policies that support the E.V. industry will slow its growth in the U.S. A $7,500 tax rebate for new E.V. purchases will expire next month, and the administration has challenged California’s ability to mandate a transition away from the sales of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035.
Without policies that support a transition away from combustion engines, domestic car companies are not incentivized to invest heavily in E.V.s, Russo said.
In the long run, he said, a major factor in China’s success today has been its upfront investment in its charging network.
“The thing that I don’t think we give them enough credit for,” Russo said, “is they put all this investment in infrastructure before there was even a market for this stuff. Because they knew without the investment in infrastructure, there would never be a market.”
messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com |
