Why BYD

If you look at the headlines, you might believe that 2025 is the year the electric-vehicle transition crashed out for good.

Just this week, Ford axed its groundbreaking electric F-150 Lightning and announced a retreat from other EV plans. Many other EV models got canceled or postponed this year. The European Union won’t ban the internal combustion engine in 2035 after all. And suddenly, car executives who once promised an eventual all-electric future are now touting the benefits of “consumer choice“—even when consumers, especially in the United States, have had very few truly good electric choices so far. 

But two bigger stories are playing out behind the headlines. The first is that the next crop of EVs coming in 2026 and beyond seems far more promising than what’s come before. Many carmakers are still continuing to invest R&D money into better, cheaper electric vehicles.

The second is that they may have no choice, because even at their best, they’re still playing catch-up to China’s automakers. One in particular, BYD, has developed EV charging that’s so fast it effectively makes pumping gas irrelevant—and it’s rolling out in Europe very soon. 

For these reasons and more, BYD’s Flash Charging has been named our Technology of the Year.

The Breakthrough Awards are InsideEVs’ year-end awards program recognizing the EVs and technologies that are paving the way for our clean energy transition. Read about the awards and the other contenders here.

 
As far as I can tell, I was the first Western journalist to see and experience BYD’s Flash Charging on a trip to Beijing earlier this year. (In fact, I came to Beijing after the Shanghai Auto Show, just to see it.) Months later, it is still something I think about.

The story of BYD is often framed around its explosive growth both in China and in other markets, like Latin America, Europe and Japan. What gets lost in that conversation sometimes is just how advanced this company is as a vertically integrated technology powerhouse—a company that started by making Motorola and Nokia cell phone batteries, then branched into making cars. For nearly every other automaker, the cars came first and next-gen tech came second. 

BYD Han L, Tang L and Megawatt Charging

Photo by: Patrick George

That is reflected in BYD’s approach to making some of the fastest EV charging currently possible. It allows some of BYD’s newest electric vehicles to go from a low battery to more than 50% in under five minutes, at speeds of up to 1,000 kilowatts, or one megawatt. That’s double what even America’s fastest DC chargers will do.

This is made possible thanks to BYD’s new Super e-Platform, which packs a 1,000-volt electrical architecture, an entire ecosystem of redesigned electric motors and motor controllers, a new way of designing and cooling chargers and plugs themselves, and even redesigning the cars’ heating and air conditioning systems. The platform uses a heavily worked lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) battery that’s built to handle such an intense level of charging, while maintaining longevity when megawatt charging is used repeatedly.

You get the idea. This isn’t just fast charging. It’s a top-to-bottom rework of what EV charging is even capable of, all designed in-house by BYD. No heavy reliance on outside suppliers, the way Western and other Asian automakers do things. They built the supply chain for this system independently.

That is what the automakers who slow down on EVs are up against. 

The biggest barriers we see to EV adoption are range and charging anxiety. The cars don’t drive far enough, critics and skeptics say, and when they do need to be charged, they take much longer to do so than a gas car does to fill up at the pump. 

BYD’s cars are already no slouch when it comes to range. But with megawatt charging, they effectively took care of the second concern. That was BYD’s plan from the beginning: “Our goal is to make the charging time of electric vehicles as short as the refueling time for gasoline cars—essentially achieving ‘fuel and electricity at the same speed’ when it comes to charging,” a spokesperson told me at the time. 

For now, in China, only two cars can use the Flash Charging setup to its fullest effect. Both, of course, are BYDs. But more are coming. And Flash Charging itself is expanding in the home turf of Volkswagen and Porsche. It may be from China, but it is not staying there. And when BYD’s Denza luxury brand launches in Europe in 2026, it should be able to take advantage of this charging technology. 

So yes, it requires a great deal of energy, although battery energy storage systems will be used to minimize impact on electric grids. And it is limited to only a few cars for now. But others are catching up to these charging speeds, including Zeekr and possibly even Mercedes-Benz.

Yet it’s BYD that got here first. BYD has proven what is possible and shown the world the immense potential that electric power represents. This is both a true breakthrough for EVs and a warning to any company that’s attempting to slow down and position 20th-century technology as the future of their businesses. 

The gauntlet has been thrown. Who will pick it up?

Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com

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