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The Chinese carmaker says it can charge EVs in 5 minutes. Can America ever catch up?
The Chinese automaker BYD might have cracked one of the toughest problems in electric cars.
On Tuesday, BYD unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes. That’s made possible because of a 1,000-volt architecture and what BYD describes as matching charging capability, which could theoretically add nearly one mile of range every second.
It’s still not entirely clear whether the technology actually works, although BYD has a good track record on that front. But it suggests that the highest-end EVs worldwide could soon add range as fast as gasoline-powered cars can now, eliminating one of the biggest obstacles to EV adoption.
The new charging platform won’t work everywhere. BYD says that it will also build 4,000 chargers across China that will be able to take advantage of these maximum speeds. If this pans out, then BYD will be able to charge its newest vehicles twice as fast as Tesla’s next generation of superchargers can.
“This is a good thing,” Jeremy Wallace, a Chinese studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “Yes, it’s a Chinese company. And there are geopolitical implications to that. But the better the technology gets, the easier it is to decarbonize.”
“As someone who has waited in line for chargers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I look forward to the day when charging doesn’t take that long,” he added.
The announcement also suggests that the Chinese EV sector remains as dynamic as ever and continues to set the global standard for EV innovation — and that American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up. The Trump administration is doing little to help the industry catch up: It has proposed repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for EV buyers, which provide demand-side support for the fledgling industry, and the Environmental Protection Agency is working to roll back tailpipe-pollution rules that have furnished early profits to EV makers, including Tesla. Against that background, what — if anything — can U.S. companies do to catch up?
The situation isn’t totally hopeless, but it’s not great.
BYD’s mega-charging capability is made possible by two underlying innovations. First, BYD’s new platform — the wiring, battery, and motors that make up the electronic guts of the car — will be capable of channeling up to 1,000 volts. That is only a small step-change above the best platforms available elsewhere— the forthcoming Gravity SUV from the American carmaker Lucid is built on a 926-volt platform, while the Cybertruck’s platform is 800 volts — but BYD will be able to leverage its technological firepower with mass manufacturing capacity unrivaled by any other brand.
Second, BYD’s forthcoming chargers will be capable of using the platform’s full voltage. These chargers may need to be built close to power grid infrastructure because of the amount of electricity that they will demand.
But sitting underneath these innovations is a sprawling technological ecosystem that keeps all Chinese electronics companies ahead — and that guarantees Chinese advantages well into the future.
“China’s decisive advantage over the U.S. when it comes to innovation is that it has an entrenched workforce that is able to continuously iterate on technological advances,” Dan Wang, a researcher of China’s technology industry and a fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, told me.
The country is able to innovate so relentlessly because of its abundance of process knowledge, Wang said. This community of engineering practice may have been seeded by Apple’s iPhone-manufacturing effort in the aughts and Tesla’s carmaking prowess in the 2010s, but it has now taken on a life of its own.
“Shenzhen is the center of the world’s hardware manufacturing industry because it has workers rubbing shoulders with academics rubbing shoulders with investors rubbing shoulders with engineers,” Wang told me. “And you have a more hustle-type culture because it’s so much harder to maintain technological moats and technological differentiation, because people are so competitive in these sorts of spaces.”
In a way, Shenzhen is the modern-day version of the hardware and software ecosystem that used to exist in northern California — Silicon Valley. But while the California technology industry now largely focuses on software, China has taken over the hardware side.
That allows the country to debut new technological innovations much faster than any other country can, he added. “The comparison I hear is that if you have a new charging platform or a new battery chemistry, Volkswagen and BMW will say, We’ll hustle to put this into our systems, and we’ll put it in five years from now. Tesla might say, we’ll hustle and get it in a year from now.”
“China can say, we’ll put it in three months from now,” he said.“You have a much more focused concentration of talent in China, which collapses coordination time.”
That culture has allowed the same companies and engineers to rapidly advance in manufacturing skill and complexity. It has helped CATL, which originally made batteries for smartphones, to become one of the world’s top EV battery makers. And it has helped BYD — which is close to unseating Tesla as the world’s No. 1 seller of electric vehicles — move from making lackluster gasoline cars to some of the world’s best and cheapest EVs.
It will be a while until America can duplicate that manufacturing capability, partly because of the number of headwinds it faces, Wang said.
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With the federal electric vehicle tax credit now gone, automakers like Ford and Hyundai have to find other ways to make their electric cars affordable.
We finally know what Tesla means by an “affordable” electric vehicle. On Tuesday, the electric automaker revealed the stripped-down, less-fancy “Standard” version of its best-selling Model Y crossover and Model 3 sedan. These EVs will sell for several thousand dollars less than the existing versions, which are now rebranded as “Premium.”
These slightly cheaper Ys and 3s aren’t exactly the $25,000 baby Tesla that many fans and investors have anticipated for years. But the announcement is an indication of where the electric vehicle market in the United States may be headed now that the $7,500 federal tax credit for purchasing an EV is dead and gone. Automakers have spent the past few months rejiggering their lineups and slashing prices as much as they can to make sure sales don’t crater without the federal incentive.
The impending end of the tax credit on September 30 helped propel Tesla to record sales numbers in the third quarter of 2025. It was a stark reversal from months of disappointing sales stemming from factors like increased competition and Elon Musk’s political antics that alienated potential buyers. Money talks, of course; Tesla sent me a blitz of emails to make sure I didn’t forget what a good deal I could get before September’s end. But now, with the deadline passed, Musk’s company needed a new shot in the arm to stop sales from falling off a cliff.
The budget Teslas are, indeed, lesser vehicles. They have simpler headlights, less power, and less range than the now-Premium versions. They even come in fewer colors. But the prices — $40,000 for a Model Y Standard and $37,000 for a Model 3 Standard — effectively mirror what those cars would have cost if the tax credit were still in place. In other words, you can still buy a Tesla in the $35,000 to $40,000 range. It just won’t be as good a Tesla as you used to be able to get for the money.
The tax credit deadline had looked like one that would demarcate two distinct EV eras, with October 1 acting as the beginning of new, less-affordable time. But it turns out things aren’t quite so black and white. Lots of automakers are experimenting with ways to soften the financial blow for those who still want to get into an EV. After all, there’s always a loophole.
For example, as the September tax credit deadline approached, Reuters reported on a scheme orchestrated by Ford and General Motors to allow the American car giants to keep the good times going by buying their own cars. It goes like this: Before the September 30 deadline, the financing arms of these big corporations began the process of purchasing a host of their own vehicles from their dealerships. By making the down payment before the end of September, Ford and GM qualified these vehicles for the federal tax benefit. (They even checked with the IRS to make sure this plot was legitimate, Reuters said.) They plan to pass on the savings by leasing those vehicles back to everyday Americans.
According to Car and Driver, a number of citizens did something similar to what the corporations devised — that is, some buyers made their first payments on EVs that won’t be delivered to them for weeks or months in order to qualify for the tax break. These shenanigans are for the short term, though. Ford and GM could pre-purchase only so many of their own vehicles, and Ford said this deal effectively extends the tax credit only another quarter, through the end of December.
The bigger question is whether the automakers can — or will — simply cut prices on their EVs to make the loss of federal incentives sting a little less.
That’s the plan at Hyundai. The Korean giant has announced an enormous price cut on its successful Ioniq 5, one that more than makes up for the vanishing federal incentive. The most basic version of that car will fall from $42,600 to $35,000, putting it on par with the Chevy Equinox EV that’s been a hit at that price. Fancier versions of the Ioniq 5 will fall by more than $9,000 for the 2026 model year. Hyundai and its partner Kia are offering some of the best October lease deals, too.
Other car companies have begun to follow suit. BMW will simply offer a $7,500 discount on its electric models for those who take delivery by the end of October. Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, and others, will do the same for electric sales through the end of the year. No word yet on what happens after these deals expire.
Incentives like the federal tax credit for EVs aren’t meant to last forever, of course. In theory, their purpose is to lift up a new technology until it can compete at scale with the tech that has been around forever.
Whether electric cars have reached that point is a contentious question. Ford has only just announced a roadmap to overhaul its entire EV production system in order to stop losing billions on electric vehicles. Hyundai’s EVs are profitable — or, at least they were before the Trump administration began monkeying with tax incentives and tariffs. A batch of more affordable EVs are on the way, though the ever-changing map of tariffs makes it unclear exactly how much they’ll cost when they finally arrive.
The short-term picture may well be that electric cars continue to be a loss leader for some automakers still trying to find their footing in the space. Whether their shareholders will tolerate this long enough for the margins to become sustainable — well, that’s the real question.
Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.