With Super Fast Charging, Nyobolt Wants to Be the Belle of the EV Ball

• There are a lot of battery and charger companies out there making claims. Nyobolt is one of them. Its claim is zero to 100% charging of EV batteries in six minutes.

• Is it real? Well, they make a good case. And at the very least they have a nice-looking concept.

• If it’s real, then look for 155 to 200 miles of range from this car’s 35-kWh battery.

The problem with battery chemistry and physics is that not everyone understands them. Once the “experts” start yammering away about anodes and cathodes and ions and electrons, many of us revert to our slack-jawed cave man ancestors so perfectly depicted in Far Side cartoons, staring in awe at what may or may not be the future.

The folks at UK-based battery charging specialists Nyobolt could just as easily be selling time shares and we’d probably buy one. They say Nyobolt’s battery can recharge from zero state of charge to 100% in six minutes just by altering the lattices through which the ions flow, or something like that, and we buy in, hoping that Tampa Beach condo is as nice as it looks in the brochures.

But Nyobolt isn’t the only one making amazing—or possibly absurd—claims about battery charging. Google “Fastest-charging battery” and you get pages of companies claiming they are the fastest. A study discussed in the thoroughly legit IEEE Spectrum says batteries can recharge much of their range in just 10 minutes with the addition of a thin sheet of nickel inside them.

A company called Amprius says it’ll get to 80% in less than six minutes. Enevate’s ZFC-Energy Technology says they’ll do it in five minutes. Prieto Battery Inc. claims three minutes. And we just keep buying time shares in Tampa. “But look at the pool!” we tell the outraged spouse.

Should we believe Nyobolt just because they hired a PR agency that found our email address? I spent about a half-hour talking to two very smart-sounding executives from Nyobolt under their tent in the rain at the UK’s Goodwood Festival of Speed this past weekend.

The company was displaying a Callum-designed Lotus Elise-based electric vehicle with a claimed range of 155 miles in city driving or 200 miles on the highway with the concept’s 35-kWh battery. Nyobolt’s VP of engineering Steve Hutchins said they have charged and discharged their battery at this incredibly fast rate over 2500 times with a total degradation in the battery’s ability to hold electricity of less than 15%.