FAW Hongqi Unveils EV Battery That Charges 10-70% in Under Four Minutes

The most persistent myth about electric vehicles is that charging will always be a forced 30-minute ordeal. The public assumes that matching the speed of a gas pump requires a generational leap in solid-state chemistry that remains a decade away. The evidence, however, shows that the chemistry is already here. The actual bottleneck is no longer the battery cell, but the megawatt-scale infrastructure required to feed it.

This week, China’s state-owned FAW Group, through its luxury Hongqi brand, claimed a new milestone that pushes lithium-ion technology to its absolute thermal limits. In collaboration with Lishen Battery, Hongqi announced an ultra-fast charging cell that reached a 10 to 70 percent state of charge in just 3 minutes and 41 seconds.[1][5]

To put that into perspective, the battery absorbed a 60 percent charge faster than most drivers can authorize a credit card and pump a full tank of gasoline. The cell then continued to a 97 percent charge in a total of 8 minutes and 3 seconds.[1][6]

The numbers are staggering, but a skeptical reading of the announcement reveals a crucial distinction: this is a controlled laboratory triumph, not a shipping product. Hongqi achieved these figures at a stable 25 degrees Celsius, using a standalone battery pack rather than a production vehicle. The automaker has not announced a specific model, a battery capacity, or a timeline for when consumers might actually buy it.[1][3][7][8]

The underlying engineering, however, is genuinely impressive. Hongqi claims a peak charging rate of 12C, meaning the battery can theoretically accept power at twelve times its total capacity. For a standard 80-kilowatt-hour pack, that requires a charger capable of delivering nearly a full megawatt of power.[4][7]

To survive that kind of electrical onslaught without degrading or catching fire, Hongqi heavily modified the cell’s internal architecture. The engineering team developed a custom electrolyte with low desolvation energy, which essentially lowers the friction for lithium ions moving through the system.[1][5]

They also applied a composite carbon coating and bulk doping to the anode, reducing internal electrical resistance by 15 percent compared to standard cells. Less resistance means less waste heat, which is the primary enemy of ultra-fast charging.[1][6]

Even with reduced resistance, a 12C charge generates massive thermal loads. Hongqi manages this with an adaptive liquid-cooling system that reportedly keeps the temperature variance across the entire battery pack to within 3 degrees Celsius during the charging session.[6][8]

While Hongqi holds the new laboratory crown, the true state of the market is defined by what is actually rolling off assembly lines. BYD’s second-generation Blade Battery, which was unveiled earlier this year, is already being integrated into production vehicles.[1][2]

BYD’s commercialized system charges from 10 to 70 percent in five minutes, and reaches 97 percent in nine minutes. It is marginally slower than Hongqi’s prototype, but it exists in the real world, supported by BYD’s proprietary 1,500-kilowatt flash-charging stations.[1][2][3][5]

Similarly, Geely’s Lynk & Co has demonstrated its 900-volt Golden Brick battery in a real executive sedan, achieving a 10 to 70 percent charge in 4 minutes and 22 seconds using Zeekr’s megawatt-class V4 chargers.[3][5]

This sets up a fascinating industry divergence. Automakers are currently split between chasing absolute peak charging speeds in controlled environments to claim technical leadership, versus deploying slightly slower, highly reliable architectures that can be scaled across tens of thousands of public charging stations today. A battery that can charge in under four minutes is an engineering marvel, but without a megawatt charger waiting at the highway exit, it remains a laboratory curiosity.[3][5]