TECHONOLGY

Ford is developing a cable to charge electric cars in 5 minutes

Today, modern electric cars have a range similar to fuel vehicles, and you can recharge most of the battery when you go to the bathroom and have a coffee at the gas station.

Still, many drivers, especially haulers, travelers and professionals who spend their days on the road, need to recharge their car quickly.

 Ford is working on a technology to recharge the electric car in 5 minutes. The most curious thing is that it is not based on the battery itself or the charger, but on the cable.

As Noelia López tells us in Auto Bild, Ford has teamed up with researchers at Purdue University to create a supercharger cable.

Today, chargers have limitations in terms of how fast they can charge an electric vehicle battery due to the danger of overheating ”, explain the technicians of the oval brand.

Indeed, recharging a car battery could be done in 5 minutes, if it weren't for a small problem: the heat.

Fast charging overheats both the charger and the recharging cable itself. If the charge is currently limited, it is because of overheating, not because it cannot be recharged faster.

For Ford, the key is to cool the charger cable, and thus be able to increase the charging speed.

To avoid excess heat, the charging cable developed by Ford uses a liquid with an active cooling agent, which can help extract more heat from the cable by changing its phase, from liquid to vapor; something that current liquid cooling technology does not allow.

With this system, they ensure that recharging an electric car "will take as long as filling the gas tank."

Unfortunately, it is not a short-term technology. The first prototype will be ready in two years, and then the tests and adjustments will come to be able to manufacture it on an industrial scale.