EVwire newsletter #163: Flash Charging, but cheap

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BYD first launched its megawatt charging capability with its flagship models. Cool to go 1,500kW peak, but that’s premium and didn’t fully cause rumbles in the industry.

Now, it has put the megawatt-class charging capability in an ~$18,000 car.

BYD launched the third-generation Atto 3 in China (sold there as the Yuan Plus), but the key news here isn’t the next generation of the model. It’s what it can do on the charging side. (link)

First, the key specs:

Of course, the Atto 3 is priced much higher in Europe (starting at ~€37,990), just as with the rest of the EV industry in the China ←→ Europe direction. But this bit is important:

We’ve learned that BYD plans to add Flash Charging technology to all of its lineup, so even the entry-level BEVs would get the “Ready in 5, Full in 9, Cold Add 3” charging experience.

Decoding these words, it means all BYDs in the future, regardless of the battery size, should be able to charge

10-70% in 5 minutes
10-97% in 9 minutes
and if it’s cold, add 3 minutes to these times.

With the Atto 3 capable of this — and Atto 3 is BYD’s global vehicle so no doubt we’ll see this in Europe, Australia, Latin America etc too — BYD is suddenly bringing something significant to the EV world.

Our friend William from Out of Spec Roaming tested the system out in Paris recently at the BYD’s Denza Z9GT unveiling (click to play the video)

Inside the cabinet, the dispenser pushes 1,000V and up to 1,500A to get to a ~1,500 kW charging power. In China, the full 1500 kW comes through a single GB/T connector.

For Europe, BYD took an unusual route.

Rather than buying off-the-shelf CCS2 connectors from third-party suppliers like Phoenix Contact or Amphenol, they engineered their own. Standard CCS2 isn’t rated for the megawatt-class amperage needed.

BYD’s plug is rated 1000A continuous and 1500A in boost mode, with the cooling sized so the system never has to come out of boost. The full unit is rated at 2 MW total output, with grid input scaling between 60 and 560 kVA depending on site capacity. That’s enough to serve two cars at 1 MW each simultaneously, or deliver well over a megawatt to a single vehicle.

Every flash charging location also includes an on-site BESS… for obvious reasons as our grid could not handle these deployments in most cases otherwise. The standard configuration starts with two 190 kWh units (380 kWh total), using BYD’s own Blade 2.0 cells, rated for 10C charging and discharging.

So the charging stop in these cases will really become a 5-minute stop, and BYD is already designing its charging sites for a quicker turnover than your usual site would. And to manage the large pull from the grid, it’s coupling the chargers with battery energy storage systems by default.

But the network behind it is what makes it usable: BYD already runs 5,900+ flash-charging stations across 312 cities in China, with 6,000 more planned overseas. The first station is now also up in Europe and the goal is to deploy 3,000 in just 12 months.

For this, BYD is actually also looking to partner up with local charging networks to have their flash chargers at, say, a Fastned site. They haven’t mentioned any partners yet. You can read more about BYD Flash Charging in my article for Eleport here: (link)

In my opinion (please argue), BYD is currently pulling off a major shift for the industry. This can’t be left as a differentiation factor for just BYD, so should we expect other EV makers to look towards making 5-minute-charging vehicles? Time will tell.

BYD, however, is able to launch this all on its own here thanks to being really vertically integrated (making the battery, EV, and the chargers now), and enough of its own EVs on the roads to have real utilization for these sites.

There are also many second-order implications of this technology entry to the EV industry. We’ll keep tracking and circling back to this topic soon enough.

EVwire’s now puts out 5 new EV articles every day on our website (yes, our EVwire.com site), so if you’re looking to get more from us on a daily basis… make it a habit to drop by! 🙂

And since we cover there what we would cover in my newsletters here, nearly all of the links you click here lead to our own deeper articles on the topics first. So now you can share our articles, concise yet full of context, with your friends, instead of the press releases we used to link to.

I looked more closely at the global Q1 EV sales recently, and we created two charts:

First, the global BEV sales ranking per automaker in Q1 2026, based on TrendForce data. (our article here)

Tesla has retaken the BEV crown (12.9%) from BYD (10.9%), and Geely comes in third at 5.5%. Meanwhile, BYD still dominates the PHEV world with 27.3% of all sales.

Notably, we now find Xiaomi in 7th place, having surpassed Volkswagen.

Now — and I haven’t shared this chart with anyone yet, but — I also put together the view for best-selling BEV models globally in Q1 (link):

You can see Tesla has again taken the dual win, even after all these years, the smaller Geely's Geome Xingyuan came close in 3rd, with BYD Dolphin and Xiaomi YU7 are at their heels.

May was a big month for Tesla on the sales charts, too — we recently saw how Tesla topped the charts in:

🇩🇰 Denmark, Model Y #1 of any fuel type.

Denmark is crazy to watch overall, as in May, Denmark’s BEV share hit a record 78.7% overall and even 95.8% among private buyers. (link)

Here is Denmark’s full top 10 best-selling vehicles in May. Just so happens that all of them are fully electric.

🇦🇺 Australia: The Model Y was Australia’s best-selling vehicle of any fuel type in May (5,605), the first time an EV has ever topped the country’s monthly chart.

It beat the Ford Ranger (4,474) and Toyota HiLux (4,005) utes, and EVs took a record 19.9% of the market. A fuel-price spike did some of the lifting, but we’re expecting the momentum to continue. (link)

🇰🇷 South Korea: The Model Y was South Korea’s best-selling car of any fuel type in May (8,762), and the first imported model ever to top the overall chart, outselling homegrown staples like the Kia Sorento and Hyundai Grandeur.
Tesla led all importers with 10,866 registrations (+65.4% YoY), its third straight month above 10,000. (link)

Tesla also went big in:
🇩🇪 Germany, up 322%, with year-to-date volume now triple last year. (link)
🇳🇴 Norway, the Model Y became the first EV ever to pass 100,000 registrations in Norway in under five years. One in every 29 passenger cars on Norwegian roads is now a Model Y. (link)

PS, something was up in my home market with Tesla as well: in
🇪🇪 Estonia, Tesla got the green light to roll out FSD Supervised, the third European country to approve it after the Netherlands and Lithuania. (link)
The news broke just half a day after I sent you the robotaxi newsletter which said that most people don’t know we have one of the most AV-fit legislations in the world for years now.

By the way, if you want to support this Estonian dude that is hopelessly deep in the EV industry and surfaces all these news for you — and get some perks — join us as an EVwire Insider. Every member counts!

A lot of this month’s European-industry news came out of one room, the FT Future of the Car summit in London, where two Chinese automakers said the quiet part out loud: they’re shopping for European factory space.

BYD confirmed it’s in talks with Stellantis and other European carmakers about taking over underused factories across the region, with Italy among the spots it’s eyeing.
EVP Stella Li said BYD wants to soak up that spare capacity, and would rather run any plant itself than through a joint venture. (link)

Xpeng is doing much the same, in discussions with Volkswagen and others about acquiring a European plant as it outgrows its contract line at Magna Steyr in Graz. VW, which already owns about 5% of Xpeng, declined to comment, though CEO Oliver Blume has signaled he’s open to letting Chinese partners use surplus VW capacity. (link)

Rivian opened the public configurator for the R2 ahead of its own timeline. For now, only the R2 Performance with Launch Package is orderable (656 hp, up to 330 miles, 0 to 60 in 3.6s), with two cheaper trims to follow: (link)

On the software side, CSO Wassym Bensaid confirmed that even launch R2s without LiDAR will get Rivian’s point-to-point hands-free driving once the software is ready. Rivian is aiming for a public point-to-point rollout later in 2026, with wider availability in the first half of 2027. (link)

Volkswagen also confirmed the electric Golf won’t arrive until the end of the decade, later than the 2028 the rumor mill had penned in. CEO Thomas Schäfer says VW’s current EV lineup is strong enough that it isn’t needed sooner, and the slip is tied to the delayed rollout of VW’s next-gen SSP platform, which runs software developed with Rivian. (link)

I put this here together with Rivian, because if you remember, I wrote to you right back when Rivian announced R2… and R3X aside from it… that Rivian made the e-Golf that VW never could?

Well, with this pushed-to-end-of-decade news, it looks like Rivian is actually going to bring the proper electric Golf to market first, too, in the form of R3X:

Ferrari unveiled its first-ever production EV, the Luce, a four-door, five-seat grand tourer with a 1,035 hp quad-motor setup and a cabin co-designed with Jony Ive and Marc Newson.

The internet promptly split over whether it looks like a Ferrari or the Apple Car that never shipped. (link)

The headline specs:

Xiaomi started delivering a cheaper YU7 Standard Edition in China at 233,500 yuan (~$34,410), roughly $4,400 under the base Model Y, with more range (643 km CLTC) and standard LiDAR and Nvidia Thor compute. CEO Lei Jun said it’s there to “once again challenge the Model Y on sales.” (link)

Zoom out a bit and the ramp is hard to ignore: Xiaomi has now delivered over 655,000 EVs in just two years, and it’s heading to Europe, with an EV launch planned for 2027 and a European R&D and design center in the works. Germany is expected to be among the first markets.

Aptera says it has assembled its first five validation vehicles on a new 14-station low-volume line in Carlsbad, California.

The solar-electric three-wheeler is still one of the more unusual things in development, claiming around 400 miles from a 44 kWh pack plus up to 40 miles a day from its integrated solar, with roughly 50,000 reservations on the books. (link)

Off the road and into the field: former Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess is back with a new venture, DIESS E-Agrartechnik AG in Munich, planning a mid-range electric tractor for farmers and municipal fleets in 2027. (link)

What Diess is pitching:

It’s not Herbert’s first rodeo either: Diess ran VW’s GenFarm electric-tractor project, which went into operational use in Rwanda in 2024.

My favorite picture of Herbert Diess, which I used when they had some drama after he left VW, in his pear farm:

…really happy with this section header, by the way.

Rivian’s Adventure Network passed 1,000 DC fast-charging stalls in the US.

They have deployed across 148 locations, up about 40% in a year.

97% of sites are now open to non-Rivian EVs, and Rivian is steadily adding NACS connectors alongside its CCS1 hardware. (link)

I can remember writing to you about when Rivian started this network altogether. Magnificent to see how far the team has come! 👏

Tesla answered a noise complaint with, of all things, a software update. (link)

After residents near a busy 24-hour San Francisco Supercharger complained about late-night noise, Tesla pushed a GPS-triggered pop-up at that exact station:

“Could you turn the volume down? Please be mindful of our neighbors,” with a one-tap button to lower the car’s volume.

Hard to picture a legacy automaker shipping a hyper-local fix that fast.

Tesla has, rather silently, been pushing its Supercharger for Business program further into international markets. We’ve now counted 11 in Europe, 4 in Middle East, Australia, US and Canada. (link)

Their respective websites also pair with the ‘Supercharger calculator’ that Tesla rolled out which makes it easier for businesses to evaluate potential sites.

We linked all the local sites in our article:

What I love about this is that, even leaving the whole program itself aside, their calculator on the Supercharger for Business taps into the Tesla vast database for each country and surfaces it for you. Whether it’s information from their own fleet, or what they’ve gathered over time working with the local utilities, it’s become a massive localized dataset that they have decided to transparently share across markets. Making charging ubiquitous.

To end this section off today (more charging news next time, I promise 🤞 ), I’m a sucker for chargers that are wrapped for celebrations, so here it goes:

Colombia got its first Superchargers, at malls in Medellín and Bogotá, with Tesla wrapping one of the stalls in the Colombian flag, as it tends to do for milestone openings. Supercharger location voting is now live there too. (link)

Why does the new $180,000 all-electric Mercedes AMG GT 4-Door Coupe EV look so… sad?

To compare, here it is on the unveiling promo materials. I guess the car is less sad when it’s powered on and driving: