Like I said, it may be a tiny impact. I believe Tesla is on OPECS radar.
Tesla isn’t going anywhere. Even if they did, there’s a serious market and the available technology to make electric cars just as viable as gas cars, even with slightly lower gas prices.
On a somewhat related note this could be kind of a game changer for EV’s if they can scale it up.
The problem has more to do with the physical availability of the power than it does the container to hold it right now.
Charging 85kWh to 70% in 2 minutes means ~2.1MW, even assuming high efficiency along the chain which is really unrealistic at that power. Putting a few of those chargers in a parking lot of a densely populated area is incredibly impractical. On top of that, the grid would have extreme difficult tolerating that kind of a load. Not simply due to the large power demands, but how uncertain the load is. You don’t go flipping electric arc furnaces on and off. That’s essentially whats proposed here.
As a general guide, 2.1MW is roughly 700 somewhat standard 10 SEER 2.5 TON A/C units coming online, at once.
So I guess we should just skip any potential improvements in charge rates and just wait for Mr Fusion? 
I didn’t think they’d be able to charge cars in 2 minutes, just improve the current charge rates.
With current cheap cells readily available from China for RC cars and the such they are relatively happy charging in 10-15 minutes from 0-90% or so. Faster than that is absolutely possible as well, just pushing practicality. The cells are not really the larger issue. Build the pack big enough and the charge and discharge rate of the individual cells is not an issue. The time this is a limit is high power stuff with little packs. But for a pure electric car with any real range, its not a limiting factor. Plus, on a really high capacity pack things like the cell interconnects can be rather weak, which means cheaper and lighter and its not a problem since you can’t discharge the pack in 10 minutes. Building the pack to tolerate a 10 minute charge is extremely impractical unless is a small capacity. Even then, the effort would most likely be better spent on just having larger capacity. It’s technically possible right now with cheap cells that have been available for years. It’s just not very practical to raise the cost of a car quite significantly just so it can tolerate insane charge rates. Something as simple as a connector that can tolerate repeated connections AND insane currents can be literally thousands. When you’re talking about hundreds of kW, things need to be legit. A car with 1000 mile range that charges in 1hr is a better bet than one with 200 mile range that charges in 10 minutes, right? At this stage that should be the focus, since the charge rates are more often than not limited by the charger size and power at the wall.
Charging 85kWh in 15 minutes means averaging 340kW into the pack. This means closer to ~375kW out of the wall. This is over 1,500A at the typical residential 240V. Most homes have 100A, or 200A service, and even then they are typically more or less ‘designed’ to handle a fraction of that, and it better not be from everyone at once. That’s going to be a long while before thats possible at home, a while longer before its close to practical.
Tesla is charging at up to 135kW at the superchargers, which really is serious business given the scale. Sure, it might still take ~20 minutes for only ~50% charge, but thats really cooking for where things are right now. Much more is absolutely possible and has been for some time now, its just not very practical to deploy. Charging at insane power on a large scale is really kinda a problem for the power company since they don’t know when chargers are going to be drawing power until after it happens. It’s not so much about the raw power, it has more to do with how uncertain the load is and of course physically getting it to the parking lot.
Tesla’s battery-swap charging program begins next week"Can swap battery faster than visiting a gas station," says Musk
I just had one of these at my shop and the owner told me to take it for a ride and test it out, very surprised at how fast it accelerates lol, for sure a cool car
they just aren’t moving fast enough with all of these plans of Musk’s. I’m tired of waiting for the future to happen, i want it now.
Just borrowed a friend’s P85D. Man these things are fast.
Sent from my iPhone 5S using Tapatalk
I really hope there’s a high res version of that which actually has the banana represented.
Nice. Without engine noise it’s hard to get an idea from your video, lol.