What's the news?
With just months to go until the unveiling of its all-electric Taycan, Porsche is working hard on developing ultra-rapid EV charging points. The German sports car maker now says that the tech is developing to the point where charging up your batteries could be as fast as filling up with petrol.
Porsche is part of the 'Fast Charge' research project, which has been funded to the tune of €7.8 million by the German Federal Transport Ministry, and which includes the likes of BMW and Siemens as fellow collaborators. The project's research team has constructed an experimental 450kW charging point at Jettingen-Scheppach, located near the A8 motorway in Germany between Ulm and Augsburg. Although new, and hugely powerful, the charging point has been designed to work with any car that uses the CCS (Combined Charging System) plug - that's the double-decker fast-charger plug.
So, Porsche hooked up one of its Taycan test vehicles to the unit, and the numbers it turned out were remarkable. In just three minutes, the Taycan's batteries had inhaled 100km of range, with a charging capacity of 400kW.
Porsche and Fast Charge reckon that these new ultra-powerful 450kW chargers could be as much as nine times faster at topping up your batteries than the current best fast-charging points. That would suggest that you could charge an electric car to 80 per cent capacity in as little as four to five minutes, depending on the energy capacity of its battery.
While you will need a car with the ability to run a 400-volt or 800-volt charging system to make use of these new experimental chargers, the fact that they use an existing, widespread plug design is especially helpful. In fact, if you've got an electric car with the right guts in it, the two charging points on the A8 are currently free to use. Anyone fancy a quick German road trip?
Anything else?
Porsche's Taycan will be one of the first 400-volt compatible cars on the road and is able to deal with such high charging outputs thanks to a clever battery cooling system that evens out the temperature in the cells as they charge.