Charge your electric vehicle in 5 minutes

The first question arising with the more common usage of electric vehicles is the charging time. Store-Dot found a solution for this topic; developed a battery that is fully chargeable in 5 minutes. We talked with the company which entered the electric vehicle industry with its very fast-charging lithium-ion batteries, about the future of their production partnerships and the expansion of their manufacturing capacities. We’re publishing the interview we made with Store-Dot CEO, Doron Myesdorf.

Your innovation will transform the automotive industry and also the battery industry. What is the world’s first reaction to this?

As you know, recently it was impossible to take a lithium-ion battery and fully charge it in 5 minutes. So there is a very positive reaction to the fact that it is a true proof of concept coming from a production line in China. So this is not a laboratory prototype. It is an engineering sub-product that we need to produce in high volume. So the reaction is that everybody really understands, realizing that hyper-fast charging is real and is happening. And in the very near future, we will begin to see cars fully charged within 5 or 10 minutes.

Are there any developments with automotive companies on this subject?

Yes of course. Our strategic investor, Daimler. So obviously they are testing the technology. However, we are in contact with a number of OEMs including the USA, Germany. Therefore, there are many companies that are interested in it because of the excessively fast charging. Everyone says fast charging but extremely fast charging; that holy grail, everyone wants to learn more.

Production is based in China. Well, do you consider the diversification of production bases in the near future?

Yes, definitely. You know, China is leading in terms of cost, effectiveness, in its ability to quickly adopt new technologies. But at Wolrd, we are looking for more production capacity. We are the man with a captive capacity, the capacity to guarantee our technology. And we’re looking for locations in the UK, locations in the US, and some other locations in Europe. We have joint ventures or our own facilities to create enough capacity where we will be an important player. I believe the market will be in extreme demand for batteries in the next 2 years. While we have amazing technology but we do not have a manufacturing partnership, it will be difficult to supply these batteries in large quantities. My son, in line with technology, we are on the way to improving production capabilities.

So, in the context of this innovation, do you intend to expand the product range not limited to the automotive industry but to other areas?

So, actually, we demonstrate the technology in various industries like smartphones, drones, and scooters. We did live demonstrations of 5-minute full charge. But this was only to show the proof of concept and get the market excited about the technology because people kept saying that this is not possible while I knew that we have this working. So we decided that even though there’s an opportunity in all these modern markets, being smartphones, drones, scooters, the potential in the electric vehicle because of the transformation in the entire automotive industry that it makes sense to leave everything aside and focus only on the solutions for electric vehicles. This is what we took the decision. We are shipping all countries samples because they learn from it and we can engage our manufacturing partner to produce for them but our focus is electric vehicle.

Ford will have a battery factory in Turkey. What is your opinion on the future of battery production in Turkey?

As I mentioned, maybe you need a hundred Giga factories to get used. You need factories all over the world. So I think we will see a rapid transition to electric vehicles and more factories that we will build in 3 to 5 years to start meeting demand. Each automobile corresponds to 5 thousand phones in terms of the number of batteries. When the adoption acceleration began, there were not enough factories left. Therefore, I think we will see many factories built in the coming years.

Thank you very much for the nice interview and for your time.