StoreDot says it can charge an electric car in five minutes using existing technology

Electric vehicles are obviously really cool, but we’ve yet to figure out quick-charging. Tesla has its battery-swapping scheme, which tries to exchange your car’s battery as quickly as a fuel-up at the gas pump. There may be existing technology that — when applied to an electric car — would be even better. With a fresh round of financing, Israeli start-up company StoreDot thinks its fast-charging technology can bring nearly instant charging to the automobile. StoreDot’s proprietary FlashBattery technology is designed to get drivers from no energy to a full charge in about five minutes.

When I asked StoreDot CEO Dr. Doron Myersdorf how it worked, he said it was a mostly a matter of scale: The battery is built on the technology developed for the smartphone. It is based on a Li-ion technology but with a new structure of the electrodes. We are using organic compounds that are developed in our lab specifically for fast charging. We combine thousands of small cells in order to achieve the capacity required for the car.