why the new electric Volkswagen car will be able to charge within 15 minutes but phones can still take hours to fully charge
In: Technology
They are probably using different battery chemistries, not all li-ion batteries are the same.
Phones don’t draw much power, which allows a battery chemistry to be chosen for maximum capacity. Typically these high capacity batteries have higher internal resistance and get hot when charged quickly.
A car battery needs to be able to deliver a significant amount of power, so a different chemistry will be chosen with a lower capacity per cell but a lower internal resistance for high power delivery. Generally chemistries designed for high drain can be charged faster too. In addition as someone else mentioned the car can have a cooling system to keep the battery cool while charging.
Finally if you look carefully at the wording it doesn’t say “15 minutes to fully charge”, it says 15 minutes to 300 mile range. These are very different statements, the last 10-20% of battery capacity takes much longer to charge (can often be significantly longer than the charge from 0-80%). With plenty of phones they say things like “a days use from a 15 minute charge” – again this isn’t charging the battery fully.
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