Fastest electric car charger adds 190 miles of range in 5 minutes

First it was XPeng's 480kW charging piles, then came the 500kW stations of NIO, the 600kW chargers of Zeekr, and then the 640kW upgrades of NIO yet again.

The Chinese electric car makers are in a cutthroat competition who will build the largest and fastest EV charging networks, but XPeng just one-upped everybody yet again.

The company announced its next 800kW S5 charger generation that can add more than 300km (187 miles) of range in as little as 5 minutes. 

With 800V current output and 1000V voltage, the new liquid-cooled S5 station beats Tesla's Supercharger, or any other commercial EV charger, for that matter. According to XPeng's CEO, the world's fastest electric car charger can add more than 1km of range for every second of charging, a pretty impressive feat.

EV makers in China have been building their cars on the modern 800V or even 900V powertrain platforms for a good while now, but power infrastructure has been the bottleneck when it comes to ultrafast electric vehicle charging.

The battery packs in Chinese electric cars are mostly made by the world's biggest EV cell makers CATL and BYD, with chemistries and controllers that allow extremely fast charging without speeding up degradation. The charging stations that can deliver such blazing speeds have been few and far between, but now their numbers are growing leaps and bounds, at least in China.

The world's fastest EV charger this side of the elusive 1MW piles aimed at long-haul trucks like the Tesla Semi is liquid-cooled, and initiates the charging session in as little as 13 seconds. Even the Tesla Semi Megachargers that Pepsi uses are still a 750kW affair for now, though.

Meanwhile, XPeng's 800 kW charging station network will start being deployed this quarter. By 2026, the automaker expects to have 1,000 of the fastest EV chargers in operation. For comparison, Tesla's Superchargers max out at 350kW output, and that's for the V4 version that is currently only being deployed in slower 250kW V3 cabinets.

For now, Tesla only has one 800V model that can actually take advantage of fast chargers anyway - the Cybertruck - so that might be one of the reasons it is dragging its feet on true V4 deployment.

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