Nissan Develops 10-Minute Rapid Charger For Leaf Electric Car

[FreepZ]

This has been out for a few days, but it's still interesting.

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1067182_nissan-develops-10-minute-rapid-charger-for-leaf-electric-car

Curiously, some other reports that I have seen about Nissan's 10 minute charge time (like this one) were about a new charger, which didn't make sense to me, since I thought that the problem was with the batteries not being able to charge fast enough rather than the charging unit not being able to deliver enough power. The article in the link above appears to have been about the charger too, but was subsequentially modified, and now makes references to a new storage technology rather than a new charging device. That makes more sense. The new Nissan power pack works faster because it uses capacitors rather than chemical batteries.

The idea of using capacitors to store energy has been around for a long time (check out this promissing article from 2006). Five years later, and were still not there. Here's a more recent article. Perhaps the folks at Nissan have figured out how to resolve all of the issues. Or perhaps not, which is why the article says that the technology is still 10 years away.  

[protomech]

Pretty terrible reporting.

Not applicable to current Leaf, and 10 years out is basically "we sorta know how this works, have no idea how to productize it" range.

10 minute recharges would be fantastic. They'd also require 100+ kw, which is big numbers.

[WanderLust]

I'll settle for 30 minute charge, and hopefully something to charge!
(right Gavin? am I sounding like you yet ?)