A new style of battery could let electric cars charge quickly Yang Wang Group Electric vehicle owners may soon be able to fully charge their cars in as little as 10 minutes, thanks to a new design that heats the battery to increase the reaction rate. One major barrier to the uptake of electric cars is the length of time it takes to charge the battery compared with filling a car with petrol. So the key to making electric cars more commercially attractive lies in developing batteries that can reach 80 per cent charge – or a range of roughly 300 kilometres – within 10 minutes, says Chao-Yang Wang at Penn State University. But this requires batteries to rapidly take in 400 kilowatts of power, and those currently on the market can’t do this. When the batteries are charged rapidly – during which lithium ions move from the positive […]