Current owners of electric vehicles can cruise along knowing that they’re not adding any CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. While they can ride guilt-free, these joy rides can still be inconvenienced by the headache of having to wait around half an hour at a high-powered public charger, or even hours and hours with a home charger.

Quantum battery

Well, thanks to quantum technology, these wait times could shrink to about three minutes for future EV owners, according to a new paper from the Institute for Basic Science (IBS). That’s roughly the same time it takes to fill up a conventional car with a tank of gas, which could help propel mass adoption of EVs and reduce range anxiety.

Collective charging

The paper states that quantum batteries could be made to “store and release energy in a fast and efficient manner,” by relying on quantum processes such as entanglement. 

In simpler terms, this would mean that all the cells in an EV battery would be charged simultaneously in a process called “global charging protocol.” 

Right now, EV batteries cannot collectively charge their cells at once and have to charge cells one at a time, but scientists think that EV batteries could be developed to be able to charge all cells simultaneously, which would significantly speed up the charging process.

According to a press release, a traditional EV usually has a battery with 200 cells. Thus, quantum charging could lead to a “200 times speedup over classical batteries,” meaning that what once took hours, would then take mere minutes.

IBS also thinks that quantum charging could expand to other technologies such as consumer electronics.

So, EV owners of today, you may still need to wait anywhere between half an hour to 10 hours to charge your ride right now, but with quantum charging, you just might make up for the lost time in the future.

Source study: Physical Review Letters—Quantum charging advantage cannot be extensive without global operations