One of the biggest problems with electric cars at the moment is their long charging time, and of course, this has probably contributed to the fact that the adoption of them hasn’t exactly been high. However, Nissan claims to have created a charging system which will be able to top up your vehicle in just 10 minutes. Nissan are of course remaining pretty tight lipped about the whole situation, they don’t want their competitors stealing their ideas after all. What we do know however is that they worked in conjunction with Kansai University located in Japan.
There seems to have been one snippet that has been reported in the press about how Nissan managed to complete this task. This states “The breakthrough reportedly came by changing the electrode inside of a capacitor from carbon to tungsten oxide and vanadium oxide to improve power”
As you can probably guess, this isn’t the full story. Many people believe that instead of capacitor the statement is meant to read battery, and that something most likely got lost when it was translated from Japanese. However, what we can assume is that Nissan have most likely come up with a new battery technology, one that is more efficient than anything that we have seen in the past.
At the moment, the main problem with charging batteries fast is that they are too fragile to have a lot of power pumped into them at the same time. Therefore new technology like this is needed in order to ensure that the battery can cope with a high amount of power being injected into it.
Estimates at the moment indicate that this technology could take up to 10 years to reach consumers, so don’t expect it to be hitting electric vehicles any time soon. However, if and when it is released, it will certainly do a lot for the electric car market.
