Volvo Wants to Crack EV Range Anxiety With 30% Faster Charging

Volvo wants to solve one of the biggest issues with electric vehicles, but not the same way many other companies are approaching the problem....
Volvo Wants to Crack EV Range Anxiety With 30% Faster Charging
Written by Matt Milano
  • Volvo wants to solve one of the biggest issues with electric vehicles, but not the same way many other companies are approaching the problem.

    Range anxiety is one of the biggest challenges to EV adoption. While many companies are trying to make batteries hold more energy or last longer, Volvo and its partner—Breathe Battery Technologies—are trying to solve the problem through faster charging.

    According to Ars Technica, Volvo and Breathe believe they can deliver EVs that charge 30% faster than current models.

    “The frustration that everyone feels is that cell manufacturers brute force and empirically test batteries until they die,” explained Ian Campbell, CEO of Breathe. “They ship the data sheet alongside those batteries that has some numbers baked in, that says ‘control it according to this A4 piece of paper,’ and that significantly underutilizes the complex electrochemistry and materials in the system that they built and shipped.”

    Breathe’s technology is designed to provide much greater control over the charging process, resulting in 15-30% reduced charging time.

    “It is insanely difficult to take a battery model that is a complicated piece of maths and modeling electrochemistry, to take that to an embedded application processor like the integrated circuit in a Volvo car or any car in the world or any laptop or smartphone,” Campbell told Ars. “That is then fundamentally what enables us to take physics, take equations, algorithms, maths, and electrochemistry, from what’s traditionally been on high-performance computing environments to integrated circuits. By running that real-time, we have the fidelity of control that… enables us to deliver, then, the end-user experience that we really want,” he added.

    If Breathe and Volvo are able to deliver on the premise it could help make range anxiety a thing of the past.

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