It used to be that one of the downsides to owning an electric car is that it requires the use of a special charger. This is versus regular cars that can be refueled at gas stations that can be found easily. Electric cars also used to take a long time to charge, which once again made it feel like a disadvantage compared to regular cars where refueling only takes minutes.
Thankfully car companies such as Tesla have been working on the technology to help improve charging speeds, but it seems that Porsche and BMW might have Tesla beat. The car companies have recently showed off a prototype of a new electric car charger in Germany that is said to be capable of adding an extra 100 km to the range of an electric car in just 3 minutes.
This is thanks to how the charger, known as FastCharge, has a capacity of 450 kW which is about 3 times that of Tesla’s Superchargers (which is at 145 kW), although to Tesla’s credit they are planning to upgrade it to 250 kW in 2019 which should help improve charging speeds b y quite a bit.
That being said, it should be noted that this is a prototype which means that it isn’t readily available just yet. Also not all cars are capable of supporting 450 kW, which means that until electric cars are upgraded to support it, for the most part existing electric car owners might not be able to fully take advantage of all this power just yet.
Filed in . Read more about Bmw, Electric Cars, Porsche and Tesla.