StoreDot promises electric car that charges in 5 minutes

At last year’s Microsoft ThinkNext event in Tel Aviv, where new technologies by several Israeli start-ups go on display and get their “big break,” Dr. Doron Myersdorf, CEO of Israeli start-up StoreDot, wowed the crowd by promising within a year to develop a technology that could reduce the time needed to recharge cellphones from hours to minutes.

At ThinkNext 2015 Tuesday in Tel Aviv, Myersdorf, fulfilled that promise, displaying before a crowd of some 1,500 a phone as it recharged from zero power to 100% charged in about two minutes.

And while he was doing that, Myersdorf made another promise: “Next year, we will present a technology to recharge an electric car in five minutes.”

“By using an array of 7,000 cells, we’ll take a car that has a zero charge and recharge its batteries to 100% capacity. Then, while ThinkNext is going on, we’ll send it on a trip to Beersheba and have it come back at the end of the event,” Myersdorf said, to the cheers of an enthusiastic crowd.

“StoreDot is looking to expand to the EV (electric vehicle) market and take the lead in the fast-charging battery race. This is part of our larger initiative to commercialize a proprietary game-changing technology of fast-charging batteries which would transform the lives of smartphone users as well as drivers,” said Myersdorf.

Storedot’s technology is nano-based, turning peptides into energy storage nanotubes which can store and emit a large amount of energy at one time, using what the company calls Nanodots. With a few such dots, a cellphone can be fully powered in minutes – and with enough dots, in this case, 7,000 – the system can provide enough power to get an electric car rolling.

Batteries – both the size and the time needed to recharge – have been major issues for electric car manufacturers, and industry experts say that the industry is not going to take off unless solutions are found for both issues, and according to StoreDot, it has the solution to both.

The EV FlashBattery “charges fully in 5 minutes, providing 300 miles (480 km) of driving distance,” said the company. “This fast-charging technology shortens the amount of time drivers will have to wait in line to charge their cars, while also reducing the number of charging posts in each station, and considerably cutting the overall cost of owning an electric car.”

Not only will the system save time, said StoreDot, but it will allow for less frequent battery replacement due to its increased number of cycles, the company claimed, adding that EV FlashBattery results in a 50% cost reduction per mile over the electric vehicle’s lifetime, compared to existing battery technologies.

Currently, the electric vehicle with the longest range is the $80,000 Tesla Model S 85 kWh, which can go 265 miles. Only one other — Toyota’s RAV4 EV – can go more than 100 miles on a single charge.

“We did make a bold statement on charging the phone in one minute,” said Myersdorf at ThinkNext. “As you can see, it’s working. When we commercialize this in 2016, it’s going to change the lives of everyone.”