An Israeli company claims to have developed a lithium-ion battery capable of being charged in five minutes and has began producing them in China.

According to a report in The Guardian, StoreDot, has seen their technology successfully charge phones, scooters and drones and is now taking the tech to the automotive industry to demonstrate ‘extreme fast-charging’.

The company has seen huge investment from companies such as Daimler, BP and Samsung and could open the door to the electric vehicle market for all those worried about long charge times hindering a journey.

StoreDot claim that their technology will allow faster charging due to using semiconductor nanoparticles, rather than graphite. The company’s CEO says that the barrier to fast charging is no longer the actual battery, but the power provided by a charger.

“The number one barrier to the adoption of electric vehicles is no longer cost, it is range anxiety,” said Doron Myersdorf, CEO of StoreDot told the Guardian. “You’re either afraid that you’re going to get stuck on the highway or you’re going to need to sit in a charging station for two hours. But if the experience of the driver is exactly like fuelling [a petrol car], this whole anxiety goes away.”

“A five-minute charging lithium-ion battery was considered to be impossible,” he said. “But we are not releasing a lab prototype, we are releasing engineering samples from a mass production line. This demonstrates it is feasible and it’s commercially ready.

“The bottleneck to extra-fast charging is no longer the battery.

“BP has 18,200 forecourts and they understand that, 10 years from now, all these stations will be obsolete, if they don’t repurpose them for charging – batteries are the new oil.”

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