Polestar has revealed that a prototype version of its upcoming Polestar 5 model has managed to achieve a 10 to 80 percent battery charge in just ten minutes, making it one of the fastest charging electric vehicles outside of a laboratory.
Working with battery experts StoreDot, Polestar has created a so-called ultra-fast charging technology – or XFC for abbreviation enthusiasts – that uses silicon-dominant cells to charge at blistering speeds without harming battery health.
Currently, the fastest charging production cars on sale today, such as the Porsche Taycan, can handle a maximum charging speed of 320 kW, but Polestar and StoreDot have managed to prove that their concept can handle peak speeds of up to 370 kW.
In the time it takes to go to the toilet and order an oat milk flat white, Polestar’s shapely and luxurious electric sedan can be topped up to add the equivalent of 200 miles to a journey, making EV technology closer to the internal market. combustion engine in terms of convenience.
While super-fast charging has been available on smartphones and other consumer technology for several years, achieving near-full charging in just minutes instead of hours, automakers are still figuring out how to do it safely with a much larger battery. packs that require a huge amount of thermal management.
Polestar claims one of the biggest achievements of its real-world prototype is that it showed consistent charging speeds of 310 kW, with peaks of 370 kW. This is faster than almost all public charging points currently available in the world, with only ABB’s Terra 360 coming close with its 360 kW capacity.
Thomas Ingenlath, CEO of Polestar, said: “With this new technology, drivers can spend less time charging on longer journeys and get back on the road faster than before. In fact, that stopping time will be longer. similar to what they experience today with a petrol car”.
Great if you can find an electrical outlet
While Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath’s sentiment is true, fast-charging technology is only as good as its infrastructure, which any EV owner will admit is still catching up.
As an EV owner living in the south of England, I can count on one hand the number of fast and reliable charging points I have available to me at any time, and due to their scarcity they are often occupied, broken or inaccessible because the petrol station delivers food (I’m looking at you, BP Pulse).
Polestar’s breakthrough is indeed cause for celebration, as this is the first time these kinds of high charging speeds have been demonstrated on a fully drivable verification prototype, outside laboratory conditions and with the kind of charging consistency and performance that makes it applicable to production vehicles.
But as we mentioned earlier, the number of Electric Super Hubs, as they are called by Gridserve, is still relatively small. For example, Gridserve has twelve Electric Super Hubs in its UK network, each supplying between six and twelve 350 kW High Power chargers at a time.
A quick look at Zap-Map, a great resource for EV owners to locate chargers and get their real-time status, reveals that large parts of continental Europe and entire states in the US (according to the PlugShare app) have no chargers are capable of delivering 350 kW or more.
The Polestar 5 is expected to go on sale in some markets in 2025 and will cost over $100,000 (about £130,000 / AU$190,000), which isn’t exactly affordable for the masses, and it gives those in control of the public EV infrastructure also not many advantages. time to start a mass rollout of 370 kW compatible chargers.
So unless you’re lucky enough to have deep pockets and live near a super-fast charging station, you’ll still have to tolerate hours-long toilet breaks like any other EV owner.