Electric Vehicle Charging Breakthrough
![](https://develop.bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/origin-222.jpg?w=382&h=263&crop=1)
What’s the Latest Development?
Electric vehicles may be cleaner than gasoline-powered cars and cheap to charge, but they come with a major downside: how long it takes to juice them up. But what if EVs could be charged up in the time it takes to go to the bathroom and run into a convenience store for a snack? Nissan is said to be working on a charger that can juice up an EV in just 10 minutes.
What’s the Big Idea?
It’s the kind of thing that could move EVs from the fringe squarely into the mainstream. Apparently Nissan and Japan’s Kansai University have figured out how to shave the charging time down to just 10 minutes by using a capacitor electrode made of tungsten oxide and vanadium oxide (instead of carbon, which is used in today’s chargers) to improve power.