Two-minute EV charging coming to Israel

In the next few months, Chinese car manufacturers will raise the competitive threshold a further notch in the electric vehicle segment in Israel, through supercharger technology that makes it possible to charge a battery fully within a few minutes. Leading the charge is BYD, which has announced a global rollout of the technology under the brand name “Flash”.

The venture has two sides to it. The first is the construction of public chargers with a charging rate of 1.5 megawatts, almost ten times the average rate of existing fast charging stations in Israel and three times faster than the current maximum rate of Tesla’s new fast chargers set up in Israel.

The second component is a series of new and rehashed electric and plug-in hybrid car models equipped with second generation batteries. These models are designed to support Flash charging, without overheating or other side-effects, over a long lifetime.

As fast as filling up

According to the company’s data, a battery of this kind can be charged from 10% to 97% in less than ten minutes, or a range of hundreds of kilometers can be added within two minutes, which is comparable with the time it takes to fill the tank of a gasoline-fueled car.

BYD has announced that it plans to deploy some 3,000 of these chargers in Europe in the final quarter of 2026, and sources in China said last week that Israel would be included in the first wave of the European launch.

The charging stations themselves do not require anything unusual by way of power network in comparison with normal public chargers, since they use storage installations that are gradually charged from any existing network. The stations can also rapidly charge regular electric vehicles, and can charge several vehicles at once.

The models that will support Flash technology and will arrive in Israel in the coming months include a crossover slightly larger than the Seal U, and models of the firm’s premium brand Denza, which are expected to be launched in Israel in early 2027. BYD says that the new generation batteries will not raise the prices of the cars in which they are installed significantly, if at all.

Rival Chinese manufacturer Geely plans to launch a similar venture this year. Its rapid charging technology was unveiled in China last week. The technology will initially serve the firm’s premium brands Lynk & Co. and Zeekr. It consists of new chargers with an output of up to 1.1 megawatts and new generation batteries that will be installed in key models.

For several months, Tesla has also been operating a pilot scheme in Israel of its new superchargers, called V4, that are designed to support a theoretical charging rate of up to 1.2 megawatts. In the initial stage, Tesla’s charging stations distribute the charge among several vehicles at a maximum rate of up to 250 kilowatts each.