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The big news on EV charging is from BYD in late March when they announced (and it caused TSLA to fall by a few percent) that their new line of superchargers will be able to charge cars to give them a range of 400 km in just a few minutes. This is the state of the art in production

https://www.ttnews.com/articles/byd-5-minute-charging-rivals

Company web site.[1]

The real claim is 10 minute charging of lithium-ion batteries with a process which is a minor mod to existing battery production.

There's no product yet.

Batteries with good low temp behavior have many specialized uses. Things that have a small solar panel, a battery, and no grid connection could benefit from this. Even flashlights could use this.

[1] http://arborbatteries.us/

it seems a little bit dubious to me. You can't beat the Arrhenius Law, not in Electrochemistry, anyhow. The ion mobility would be very very low, you'd have to rely that the temperature in the battery itself is above 0°C

How much more expensive will this solution be than putting a “block heater” into the battery to warm it up to room temperature faster while charging?

If the charge rate is reduced by battery temp and chemistry, shunt the surplus supply into changing the battery temp, no?

Link to the research article: https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(25)00062-5

While the technology may be advantageous, it seems weird to write a whole article about it without mentioning the obvious solution: Just Heat The Battery. It's true that many early EVs (and most non-Teslas even today) don't ship with battery thermal management. But they won't be getting new battery chemistry either.

This is one of those Great New Technology items that smells like a failure simply because it's not competing with the thing the designers think it is. It's not enough for this to beat a cold battery with a performance delta ("5x", per the article) that would justify its additional cost. It has to beat a battery with a garden variety heat pump attached, which is a much (much) lower cost barrier.

now they just have to figure out how to make it charge while people are lighting them on fire

can we do it for the smartphones first? without turning them into a furnace

Nice to see that they require minimal changes at the battery manufacturer. Too often people come up with good ideas like this without accounting for other factors in the supply chain.