The sports car the Nyobolt battery was fitted into achieve a range of 120 miles over four minutes. The batteries require powerful 350kW DC superfast chargers that are publicly available in the UK but are not widespread.
The company does not plan on manufacturing its own vehicles but intends to partner with existing car brands at a small scale within the year. Nyobolt claims to have minimised degradation noting that its battery still charges to 80% after 4,000 cycles.
A full cycle is a charge from 0%-100%, but doesn't have to be used all at once. So two charges of 50% would count as one cycle.
The demonstration was achieved with a specially-built concept sports car on a test track in Bedford, as part of an industry-wide effort to get EVs charging faster. A live audience of industry professionals was invited to witness the event but challenges, including the UK heatwave, prevented the firm from recreating laboratory results, where they could charge from 0% to 100% in six minutes.
Dr Sai Shivareddy, Co-Founder of Nyobolt, told the BBC that the event was “a big milestone for electrification”, and joked that his own car was still charging, having plugged it in when he arrived earlier that day.
Though more corporations are participating in this race to develop faster-charging batteries, such as Toyota's development of a solid state battery which could charge in ten minutes and last 1,200km last year, barriers around EV infrastructure still remain.
“Electric cars really aren’t limited by the batteries anymore,” said Dr Edward Brightman, Lecturer in chemical engineering at Strathclyde University to the BBC. "We urgently need to upgrade the grid and deploy rapid chargers with the capability to deliver the charge to the battery.”
