Geely develops ultra-fast charging battery and overtakes BYD

Charging time is a key selling point of electric cars. Chinese manufacturers are in a race to see whose battery charges the fastest. The industry leader is now being overtaken.

The Chinese car company Geely, which owns Volvo, says it has developed an ultra-fast charging battery. Charging from 10 to 70 percent battery level takes 4.5 minutes. According to the manufacturer, it takes 8 minutes and 40 seconds to reach a charge level of 97 percent.

Geely is thus competing with the world's largest electric car manufacturer BYD. The Chinese manufacturer also introduced a battery in March that fully charges in nine minutes. According to BYD, it can go from 10 to 70 percent charge in five minutes.

The electric car manufacturers are not only competing in the currently weakening world's largest car market, China, but also want to become more independent from CATL, the world's largest manufacturer of electric car batteries. Geely uses artificial intelligence in its ultra-fast battery to adapt the charging power to the battery temperature so that it doesn't get too hot.

In addition to range and power consumption, charging power is the central parameter for buyers of electric cars. Their share is currently increasing significantly in Europe. Last year, a good 17 percent of all new registrations in the EU were cars with purely electric drives - a record. Ten years ago the proportion was 0.4 percent. Hybrid cars accounted for another 42 percent of new registrations last year. Pure combustion engines are now in the minority.

In Germany last year, 19 percent of all new registrations were purely electric cars. Currently, high fuel prices, better charging infrastructure, cheaper entry-level models and the federal government's funding bonus are causing sales to increase. In August, with 69,000 electric vehicles, a good 75 percent more purely electric cars were registered than in the same month last year.