Electricians with specialist training are at the forefront of a revolution in green energy, with a lot of households enquiring about installing solar panels, rewiring their homes and exploring potential options for installing EV charging stations on their property.
The latter has become a particularly popular field, in no small part because three of the biggest barriers to buying an electric vehicle for many drivers are range anxiety, charger availability and how long it takes to charge an EV to capacity.
An EV charging station fixes two of those issues since if you own a charger of your own it stands to reason that you will have greater access to it, and charging times are of less importance if your car can be left to charge overnight.
However, there is always that need for a sudden recharge at low battery power, and up until this point, the ability to simply pull into a petrol station for a five-minute refuel has not existed.
This might be about to change, however, as several rapid charging technologies have appeared at roughly the same time.
The Five-Minute Recharge
The one that has piqued the most interest is the Nyobolt Concept Car which has in test track conditions charged from ten per cent to 80 per cent in less than five minutes. It reached 80 per cent charge in four minutes and 37 seconds, to be precise.
There are some caveats to this. The first is that the car that was being charged does not currently exist. The second is that even if it did, its range and capacity are remarkably small for a contemporary EV. The third was that it relied on a 350kW superfast charger likely only to be used at dedicated charging areas rather than installed at home.
However, even with both of these factors in mind, the fact that an EV generated a range of 120 miles after just four minutes is something of an epochal moment, as it demonstrates that EVs are capable of beating petrol cars at their own game.
The rhetorical importance of five-minute charges means that the concern about slow recharges no longer truly applies to EVs, even if it might take a while for this technology to reach the wider charging network.
What is even better than this is that it is not even the fastest-charging car on the market.
It Gets Faster
The German management consultancy P3 released a report that examined the fastest charging cars and found that on an average kilowatt rate, the Lotus Emeya can charge even faster than this.
The relatively rare new EV is able to charge from ten per cent to 80 per cent in 14 minutes, which appears to be three times slower, except for the fact that the Lotus also has three times the capacity, gaining nearly 200 miles of charge in 10 minutes for a car that is heavier and faster.
What this shows instead is a trend towards increasingly rapid chargers that make EVs even more viable.