The Z9GT model EV from China’s BYD “can be 70 percent charged in five minutes and be almost full in 12 minutes, even in temperatures as low as -30° C” and “has a range of up to 800 km” (~500 miles). The US is sooooo far behind here.
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This is such a complicated issue. I'd love for these to be available in the US, or even better, have a US company make something this good at a similar price. It would be the nail in the coffin for fossil fuel cars and light trucks. (We own a VW ID.4 and it's great except for the range in the winter).
However, letting BYD into the US would be the end of the US car manufacturing. And if the Chinese get a foothold in the US car market, the heavy equipment manufacturer would be the next. John Deere, Case IH, Caterpillar, and the lot cannot compete with Chinese manufacturing either.
I don't know what you do policy wise to combat this. The Trump administration just asked us to bury our heads in the sand with policies that promote gas vehicles. This just encourages the US manufactures to continue to fall behind the manufacturing leaders. We are not skating to where the puck is going. In fact we went looking for a puck that was taken out of play.
Agree! In an alternate timeline where we did not have a backwards administration and actually advanced on Biden-era energy policies, it is not out of the question that the US auto industry lead by Rivan, Lucid and (alternate timeline) Tesla couldn't innovate into this ballpark in maybe 5 years.
I think the awful truth is that the US car industry has been on life-support for a long, long time. Per head of population, Germany exports eight times as much value in vehicles as the US, and twice as much value in absolute terms, for instance.
I was in Colombia near the end of 2025 and I couldn't believe the number of BYD cars I saw. I'd never even heard of them, and it seemed like they were a third of the cars I saw.
I spent two weeks in China last year, visiting five cities (and Hong Kong!) and from my experience, I'd say China is way ahead of us in so many areas of technology. And I think a lot of that has to do with how each country is run.
I was just in Mexico City for the first time in three years and the proliferation of Chinese EVs (BYD in particular was really popular) was very noticeable.
Quick tour of a BYD Flash charging station in China. According to this article, the chargers can deliver 1500 kilowatts to a car equipped with BYD's Blade 2.0 battery, going "from 10-to-70% state of charge in just five minutes, while a 10-to-97% charge takes nine minutes".
Here's an entertaining and maybe even startling look at China's embrace of not only EVs but a bunch of other clever and sometimes weird clean-energy transportation ideas.
Such as lunch delivered by drone. But it's more serious stuff than that too.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/17/climate/china-hefei-clean-energy-drones-evs-robots.html
Disclosure, I edited the project that this was a part of. Most interesting to me was the backstory on China's decades-long effort to get to this point, where it dominates so many next-generation technologies such as solar panels, batteries, rare earths, very long-distance transmission lines etc. Beijing played the long game, in contrast to what you might diplomatically call the U.S.'s fits-and-starts approach.
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