I find this site extremely valuable to fact check hype-driven speculation in all things tech. I work in metal processing, downstream from battery tech, so I thought I might contribute here with a bit of cautious skepticism:<p>"It’s long been possible to charge so quickly once, twice or perhaps even a handful of times over the 1,000-cycle lifetime of a typical EV battery with the 300-mile driving range most motorists demand, they said. But such a battery would burn up, and possibly catch fire, if subjected to consecutive five-minute charges for many hundreds of cycles, industry hands said."<p>and then,<p>"Batteries are all about trade-offs between range, weight and charging time. Building a battery that can handle a huge jolt of electricity at once would limit the EV’s range to 100 or 150 miles. The reason is the balance between the electrodes. To enable lithium ions to move that fast into the negative electrode—the anode—it must be made ultrathin. But if you make the anode thinner, you have to make the positive electrode—the cathode—thinner, too, which reduces its capacity to hold energy. That decreases the driving range.<p>In addition, producing that huge jolt would require costly upgrades to charging stations and the power grid, which at the moment can’t meet such a demand. The cost to build a small four-charger station would be well over $1 million, according to Quincy Lee, CEO of Electric Era, a charging station company. Part of that cost is the large batteries the stations would require to buttress grid power."<p><a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/electric-battery-hands-skeptical-byds-claim-five-minute-charging/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theinformation.com/articles/electric-battery-han...</a>