"Charging is as fast as refueling", what are the strengths of GAC Aion’s new supercharging technology?

Taking advantage of the Chengdu Auto Show, GAC Aion released its own supercharging technology - super-speed battery technology on August 30, and displayed the matching A480 supercharging pile. Whenever a new technology is released, GAC Aion has never been stingy with the numbers. What kind of impact can it bring to people this time?

Super-speed battery technology: more extreme than Taycan

From an electrochemical perspective, GAC Aion believes that the key to increasing the charging rate of power batteries lies in improving the conductivity (or migration/embedding rate) of ions in them. To this end, they have modified the following parts of the battery:

Use highly porous coated ceramic diaphragms and low viscosity/high power electrolytes to increase ion migration rates;

Use new material technology at the negative electrode to increase the ion embedding rate;

Three-dimensional graphene is used as a new type of conductive agent to ensure conductivity and stability.

Ultimately, at a macro level, the super-speed battery achieved the following key indicators: maximum operating voltage 880V, charging current peak 560A, and maximum charging power 480kW.

Test data source: InsideEVs.com

In contrast, the Porsche Taycan, which has a similar battery pack voltage (800V), has an instantaneous charging power of about 260+kW when using DC fast charging (up to 320kW with the assistance of special fast charging equipment). In addition, in terms of maintaining the durability of high-power charging, the Taycan can only reach the maximum charging power when the SOC is below 25%, which makes it take 22.5 minutes to charge from 5% to 80%; while the super-speed battery technology theoretically allows 8 minutes of 0-80% charging time, which means that the SOC upper limit for maintaining higher charging power should be higher, which fully proves that its tolerance to high loads is better.

A480 Supercharger: One is equivalent to two Tesla V3

The A480 supercharging pile launched by GAC Aion in conjunction with the super-speed battery technology has a peak voltage of 1kV, a maximum current of 500A, and a maximum charging power of 480kW. Calculated under the same extreme conditions, the charging capacity of a single A480 supercharging pile is equivalent to 1.92 Tesla V3 supercharging piles. The difference between the two is obvious.

According to data released by GAC Aion, the A480 Supercharger can achieve a DC fast charging rate of up to 6C (corresponding to a power of fully charging 6 battery packs per hour), which is far superior to similar competing products at this stage. In terms of mileage, the A480 Supercharger can achieve an increase of 200km of range in 5 minutes, while Tesla V3 Supercharger takes almost 3 times as long.

The myth of practicality

While releasing new technologies and supercharging piles, GAC Aion also revealed that their practical application process will reach the market as early as September: at that time, Aion V will be launched in two versions, 3C 500km and 6C 500km (the xC here is the charging rate mentioned above); in addition, by 2025, they plan to build 2,000 supercharging stations using A480 supercharging piles, covering 300 cities in China.

Of course, plans are plans, and the cost of popularizing supercharging technology and hardware so quickly has obviously exceeded the hardware requirements of the supercharging station itself. For example, a common supercharging station generally requires at least 6 supercharging piles. Considering the loss when the power is fully turned on, its instantaneous power will not be less than 2.88MW, which will be an extremely heavy burden on the power system around the supercharging station - especially considering that supercharging stations often need to be located near or in convenient locations within urban areas. Such a large instantaneous consumption is enough to give the power supply bureau a headache.

In this regard, GAC Aion's proposal is more "reformist". They plan to use the "1 with many" form as a transition, that is, only one A480 supercharging pile will be installed in a supercharging station, and the rest will be replaced by conventional fast charging piles. This may be the most realistic way, but the only drawback is that it is difficult to deal with: How should the mentality of chargers who are not worried about the lack of charging but the uneven distribution of charging be balanced?