Polestar will begin testing StoreDot’s 5-minute charge battery

Enlarge (credit: StoreDot)

There’s a lot to like about electric vehicles. They’re quiet, reliable, and about twice as efficient as the most frugal hybrid, not to mention that whole “instant torque” thing. But there’s no denying that vehicles with internal combustion engines have a big advantage when driving distances requiring more energy than you set off with. A battery company called StoreDot may have a solution, though—an extremely fast charging cell that could add 100 miles (160 km) of range in just five minutes. And its pack will be tested in a Polestar 5.

More than a century has conditioned us to think that refueling a car should take just a few minutes, so the 30–60 minutes that most EVs require to fast-charge seems offensive to many motorists. And that’s assuming the chargers work flawlessly—far from a safe assumption in 21st century America, unfortunately.

Right now, most automakers’ solution to this problem is to throw lithium-ion at it, building EVs with such big battery storage capacities that an unaerodynamic pickup truck could go more than 400 miles between plug-ins. There are, of course, problems with this approach.