BYD Confirms Flash Charging is Coming to Canada

A job posting spotted over the summer suggested that BYD, China’s biggest automaker, was preparing to bring its five-minute EV Flash Charging technology to Canada. The company declined to comment at the time, but in a recent interview with AutoTrader, BYD executive vice president Stella Li confirmed that those ultra-fast, Tiffany blue charging stations are officially bound for Canadian shores.

“Flash Charging is a technology that’s super important for Canada,” Li said. “In cold weather, the trouble with electric cars is shorter range, and charging times take too long. Your spec says 20, 25 minutes, but in reality, it will be 40 minutes. They need a 20- to 30-minute warm-up. Flash Charging in -30 degrees Celsius, we can run 12 minutes … you have full 100 per cent charge. So, this is our game changer for the market. It will be a revolution for the auto industry.”

Claimed charge times in regular temperatures are even quicker, with the headline stats being 10 to 70 per cent charge in just five minutes, 10 to 97 per cent in nine minutes, and the 12-minute, -30 degrees Celsius stat Li referred to is how long it’d take to go from 20 to 97 per cent in the dead of winter. BYD even has a snappy slogan for it: “Ready in Five, Full in Nine, Cold Add Three.”

Each Flash station has two connectors, and the maximum charge rate is 1,500 kW if there’s just one car using the station, and 1,000 kW when two cars are sharing. For context, the most capable DC fast chargers that exist in Canada today mostly cap out at 350 kW.

That speed is possible because Flash Charging doesn’t actually charge your car directly from the grid. Two on-site batteries draw power from the grid at more regular speeds, storing a combined 370 kWh that can then be delivered to your EV in about the same amount of time you’d spend filling up at a gas station. In other words, BYD is storing electricity locally in huge power banks specifically designed to charge a car super quickly, rather than directly hooking cars up to the grid.

For now, those quoted best-case speeds are only achievable with BYD cars that use its new Blade Battery 2.0, so for most Canadians, they’ll likely remain optimistic edge cases for the foreseeable future. However, you don’t need a BYD car to use Flash Charging, since it uses CCS ports.

The added presence of EV chargers with a speed ceiling this high is very welcome, especially considering many new, non-Chinese EVs like, say, the Porsche Cayenne Electric, are already outgrowing the 350-kW standard and can recoup energy at up to 390 kW. For Canadians ready to live that Chinese EV life to the fullest, though, BYD has officially announced it will sell cars in Canada, though whether any of the initial models will get the Blade 2.0 battery that takes full advantage of Flash Charging remains to be seen.