BYD announced during a 28 August livestream that it has installed its 10,000th ultra-fast “flash charging” station in China, doubling the company’s network in less than five months since opening its 5,000th station on 1 April. The milestone puts BYD halfway to its stated target of 20,000 stations by the end of the year, and it now claims to be the Chinese automaker with the largest self-built charging network and the broadest geographic coverage.

However, hitting that year-end target will require a meaningfully faster build-out than BYD has managed so far. Reaching 10,000 stations in roughly five months averaged 65-70 installations a day, but adding the remaining 10,000 by December would require closer to 80 a day for the rest of the year. This is more than double the pace BYD sustained over its first five months of deployment, but given its success thus far, possibly still doable. 

Of course, the network is heavily concentrated in China. It already reaches well beyond China’s major cities, covering 325 areas including Hulunbuir in the far north, Sanya in the south, Shuangyashan in the east and Kashgar in the west, alongside high-altitude sites near Turpan and even the Mount Everest Base Camp. BYD has delivered a cumulative 210 million kWh of electricity through the network to more than 1.83 million users, with drivers of other electric vehicle brands accounting for nearly a third of that usage.

Each flash charging station can output up to 1,500 kW per connector across two connectors, and when paired with BYD’s second-generation Blade Battery, the system can take a compatible vehicle from 10% to 97% charge in just nine minutes. That speed remains limited to BYD’s newer flagship models built on its Super e-Platform, such as the Han L and Tang L; older and mainstream BYD vehicles still charge at more conventional rates of 88-150 kW.

The automaker has also begun addressing the obvious follow-up question about whether charging this fast damages a battery. To this end it drove a standard Yangwang U7, one of its flash-charging-capable flagships, 30,000 km over nine days with 350 rapid-charging stops, and found the battery retained 98.7% of its original capacity afterward. This is roughly comparable with how well a typical battery degrades during its first weeks of use, when degradation is fastest. How it performs over the battery’s full lifespan, however, remains largely unanswered.  

BYD is also taking the network overseas, having opened its first UK stations in June with a target of 300 nationally by the year’s end. It is also planning 1,000 throughout Europe during this timeframe, focusing on key traffic corridors first. It is separately planning a roughly 15,000 km ultra-fast charging corridor stretching from Vatican City to Hong Kong, spanning 11 countries.

BYD’s approach differs substantially from how Tesla built out its own Supercharger network. Tesla’s roughly 60,000 charging stalls, developed over some 14 years, run on a 400V and 800V architecture capped around 250-500 kW per stall, while BYD’s 1,000V system allows up to three times that peak output per connector. However very few vehicles on the road today, regardless of brand, can actually draw the full 1.5 MW for which a single BYD station is rated.

However, building stations rated for far more power than most current vehicles can draw is deliberate rather than wasteful. Dual-plug charging lets one station to serve two vehicles simultaneously without either losing speed, and onsite battery buffering protects the surrounding power grid from the kind of surge an instantaneous 1.5 MW draw would otherwise cause.

The real constraint on BYD’s charging ambitions is not station count but vehicle compatibility, since the flash charging speeds this network is built around remain available only to a narrow slice of BYD’s own new models. This means that the network’s capabilities will only become broadly useful to ordinary drivers as BYD and other automakers catch up to the infrastructure already being built for it.