Mercedes-Benz is deploying its charging network capable of delivering 500kW of power. It’s the fastest in the world among those in service, but there’s only one car that can take advantage of it.
To encourage the growth of electric cars, there are not 36 solutions. Lowering their price is a priority, it is the main obstacle to purchasing for half of drivers. But we must also develop the number of charging stations and make sure we don’t spend too long there. For this last point, engineers are constantly innovating by announcing ultra-fast charging speeds via revolutionary batteries. And let’s not forget that charging stations they themselves must also deliver enough power.
On this point, Mercedes-Benz is ahead of the competition. The firm ChargePointwith whom the automobile manufacturer has a partnership, announces the large-scale deployment of Express Plus Power Link 2000. The charging station is capable of delivering a maximum power of 500 kWeither twice as much as Telsa Superchargers to provide a point of comparison. On paper, it’s impressive. In fact, there are some drawbacks.
Mercedes-Benz charging station is the fastest in the world for a single car model
The power of 500 kW is not constant. Even though ChargePoint claims that the terminal can “provide these maximum speeds for extended periods”, we imagine that this will mainly be a peak which will subsequently drop. And even so, there is currently onlya single electric car capable of supporting such charging power : the Rimac Nevera, a model that regularly breaks speed records, among others. If you want it, it costs around 2 million euros.
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The main interest of the new ChargePoint terminals is ultimately to quickly charge several cars at the same time. Each is in fact equipped with two cables. To keep all this cool, a “proprietary liquid cooling architecture” is at work. Currently, there is only one such station in the United States. There should be 400 of them in the United States by 2030, for 2,500 terminals.
Source: ChargePoint