Electric vehicles are quieter, easier to repair and maintain, and far better for the environment than traditional internal combustion cars. Still, numbers of EVs on the road are trailing behind the cars they’re supposed to replace, in part due to charging times.
While refueling a gas tank only takes a few minutes, charging an EV takes a lot longer. Right now, the fastest chargers available to consumers, sometimes called Level 3 chargers, can charge a vehicle battery to 80 percent in as quickly as 20 minutes. But the most available (and affordable) chargers are far slower. Level 2 chargers take several hours to charge a vehicle, and Level 1 chargers—which plug into a typical home outlet—can take more than two days.
These slow charging speeds have only exacerbated “range anxiety”—the concern that batteries could run out of charge on the road. More than 50 percent of 500 EV owners who participated in a 2022 OnePoll survey commissioned by Forbes Wheels said they frequently or always have this concern. While Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has pushed back on the idea that drivers should be so worried about range, it remains a major hurdle for prospective EV buyers. That, and the fact that demand for EVs outpaces the ability of car manufacturers to make them, threatens to slow down the road to electrification.
Scientists, including those at universities, at major electric vehicle manufacturers and at the Department of Energy, think that EVs could power up more quickly if we push the science of charging to its limits. They argue that tweaking the internal chemistry of EV batteries and the design of charging cables can help eliminate this major barrier to adoption. The challenge is speeding up charging without compromising on safety or the long-term life of the battery. The goal is to get as close as possible to the time it takes to refuel an internal combustion vehicle.
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