Shares in Chinese electric vehicle (EV) giant BYD Co (比亞迪) surged to a record high yesterday after it unveiled new battery technology that it says can charge a vehicle in the same time it takes to fill up a car with gasoline.
The company said the battery and charging system, called “Super e-Platform,” boasted peak speeds of 1,000 kilowatts, allowing cars to travel up to 470km after being plugged in for just five minutes.
The new technology aims to “fundamentally solve users’ charging anxiety,” BYD founder Wang Chuanfu (王傳福) said.
Photo: Reuters
“Our pursuit is to make the charging time of electric vehicles as short as the refueling time of fuel vehicles,” he said at a launch event on Monday evening.
BYD’s Hong Kong-listed shares jumped more than 6 percent to hit a fresh peak at one point yesterday morning before paring some of the gains.
The announcement positions BYD ahead of archrival Tesla Inc, whose Superchargers currently offer charging speeds of 500 kilowatts.
BYD introduced the Super e-Platform alongside two new EV models that are the first to feature the system — the Han L sedan and the Tang L sports utility vehicle.
The Shenzhen-based company also unveiled plans to build more than 4,000 ultra-fast charging stations nationwide to support the new technology.
BYD’s ambitious expansion comes on the heels of remarkable growth, with sales last month soaring 161 percent to more than 318,000 EVs, while Tesla experienced a steep 49 percent sales decline in the Chinese market during the same period.
Separately yesterday, Chinese EV maker Nio Inc (蔚來) said it had signed a deal with battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Co (CATL, 寧德時代新) involving cooperation on a passenger car battery swap network.
Battery swapping offers an alternative to ultra-fast charging for vehicle owners worried about range, although the vast infrastructure required and standardization issues present major hurdles.
The new cooperation would see CATL invest a maximum of 2.5 billion yuan (US$346 million) in Nio’s battery swap network.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS