Ultra‑fast charging hits 1,100 kW
Lynk & Co’s new 900‑volt battery architecture was reported to support charging at roughly 1,100 kW, a technical leap that would radically shorten EV charging times if delivered at scale. That claim sits alongside other headline tech innovations this week — everything from AI model advances to wearable energy storage — and highlights how quickly battery and charging benchmarks are racing forward. (x.com/AI_Techie_Arun)
Electric car charging is a power problem before it is a battery problem: the charger has to push electricity fast, the cable has to stay cool, and the battery has to absorb that energy without damage. A charging rate of 1,100 kilowatts means 1.1 megawatts, which is roughly the scale of a small utility installation, not a typical roadside plug. (newatlas.com) Voltage is the pressure in that system, like water pressure in a pipe. Lynk & Co says its new setup uses a 900-volt architecture, and higher voltage lets a car move the same power with less current, which cuts heat in cables and electronics. (carnewschina.com) Battery charging speed is often described with a “C-rate,” which is a shorthand for how quickly a pack can be filled relative to its own size. BYD said in March 2025 that its Super e-Platform reached up to 10C and 1,000 kilowatts, which was already enough for about 400 kilometers of range in 5 minutes on its first announced models. (byd.com) Now Lynk & Co says it has gone past that mark. At an April 7, 2026 launch, the company said its 95 kilowatt-hour Energee Golden Brick battery could charge from 10 percent to 70 percent in 4 minutes and 22 seconds, with peak power around 1,100 kilowatts. (carscoops.com) That 10-to-70 percent window is not a trick, but it is not the same as charging from empty to full. Carmakers quote that middle band because batteries usually take power fastest there, while the final stretch slows down to protect the cells. (interestingengineering.com) The hardware around the battery is racing too. Zeekr, which sits in the same Geely orbit as Lynk & Co, said in March 2025 that it had developed a fully liquid-cooled charger with 1.2 megawatts of peak power per gun, which shows these battery claims are being paired with equally extreme charging cabinets. (cnevpost.com) This is why China’s charging story looks different from the United States and Europe right now. BYD said it would build more than 4,000 megawatt flash-charging stations for its platform, which means the car, the charger, and the network are being designed together instead of as separate bets. (byd.com) The catch is that peak power is a headline number, not an average. A car that touches 1,100 kilowatts for a brief moment can still charge much slower over the whole session if the curve drops quickly, which is why the 4 minute 22 second claim is more useful than the single peak figure. (carscoops.com) There is also a grid problem hiding underneath the speed race. A station serving several cars at 1 megawatt each needs transformer capacity, cooling equipment, and site economics that look closer to industrial infrastructure than to the 150 kilowatt chargers that spread through the last phase of electric vehicle rollout. (electrek.co) So the real shift is not that one sedan got a very fast top-up in a demo. It is that Chinese brands are now competing above 900 volts, around 1 megawatt, and below 5 minutes for a major charging stop, which is a different benchmark from the 250 to 350 kilowatt era that defined fast charging for most of the past decade. (carnewschina.com)
