EVwire brief: BYD is building a corridor of ultra-fast Flash Charging stations stretching from Europe toward China.
The corridor will help link 11 countries over 15,000 km (9,320 miles), according to BYD Group EV charging director Diego Pareschi, and it will support the Marco Polo Drive: an all-electric journey retracing Marco Polo's Silk Road route from Rome to Hong Kong.
Pareschi announced the corridor on LinkedIn:
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The full route starts in Vatican City, before heading to Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and China. To commemorate the journey, the first Flash Charging station in Italy was inaugurated.
Pareschi also featured Flash Charging sites in Belgrade, Serbia, Zagreb, Croatia, and Sofia, Bulgaria, in his post. More Flash Charging sites will likely be built along the stops of the Marco Polo Drive, but it won’t be surprising if some of the stops in the long road trip will be supported by non-Flash Charging locations.
Context:
The Marco Polo Drive was launched on Saturday in Rome at the Palazzo Orsini Taverna. The journey is a 43-day, 15,000 km (9,300-mile) drive from Rome to Hong Kong, retracing the Silk Road route Marco Polo traveled more than 750 years ago.
The Marco Polo Drive was conceived by Patrick Zhong, founding managing partner of M31 Capital, and economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Center for Sustainable Development, and the two are driving it themselves.
The official poster of the Marco Polo Drive
The car carrying them is the Denza Z9 GT, the all-electric flagship of BYD's premium sub-brand. The vehicle pairs a 122 kWh Blade Battery 2.0 with three motors that allow the vehicle to sprint from 0 to 62 mph in 2.7 seconds, with up to roughly 600 km (372 miles) of WLTP range on a charge.
The real headline is the charging. BYD's Flash Charging delivers up to 1,500 kW (1.5 MW) through a single connector. The system takes the battery from 10 to 70% in 5 minutes and 10 to 97% in 9 minutes. That is the "Ready in 5, Full in 9, and with Cold add 3" line from Pareschi's post.
The Denza Z9 GT will be put through its paces in the 15,000-km trip
Guiding the drivers between stops is route-planning from Chargetrip, which Pareschi credited with steering travelers from one Flash Charger to the next.
The corridor also doubles as a showcase for BYD's wider European charging push. The company has said it plans 3,000 Flash Charging stations across Europe by 2027, with some of the first units already live in the UK.
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