BYD wants to eliminate charging anxiety, and its plan might actually work
There’s a version of this conversation that’s been happening for years now: electric cars are clever, electric cars are clean, and yes, electric cars take forever to charge. BYD thinks it knows how to eliminate those long charging times.
The Chinese manufacturer, whose Blade Battery already gave us the Seal and Atto 3’s impressively tight packaging, has now unveiled what it calls the Super e-Platform, with the headline figure being a megawatt of charging capacity. That’s 1,000kW of charging power, running at 1,000A with a 1,000V high-voltage architecture. The result is a 400km range in 5 minutes of charging or about the same time as a fill-up at the garage.
The Super e-Platform delivers a single-motor output of 580kW and a claimed top speed of over 300km/h. It will debut on the Han L sedan and Tang L SUV, both now open for pre-order in China and set to go on sale in April.
What of the infrastructure? BYD says it plans to deploy over 15,000 megawatt-level flash-charging stations in China by the end of the decade, while in October 2025, BYD’s Executive Vice President, Ms Stella Li, announced plans to install between 200 and 300 public charging stations across South Africa in 2026. She also announced the brand’s plans to roll out ultra-fast 1MW charging technology infrastructure. At the time, the brand was still in talks with Eskom to facilitate this.
Locally, BYD Auto SA is expanding from 18 to 30 dealerships by the end of Q1 2026, so the charging rollout has a footprint to work with. Whether the Han L and Tang L themselves arrive on our shores in time to use those chargers is another question, since BYD SA has not confirmed local availability of Super e-Platform vehicles.
The truth is that charging anxiety in SA is real, arguably more so than in most markets, given the combination of unreliable grid supply, sparse public charging infrastructure, and long distances between cities. Currently, the fastest widely available public chargers in SA peak at around 150kW, which can add roughly 250-300km of range in about 30 minutes under ideal conditions. A megawatt charging network, on the other hand, backed by solar, is exactly what we need.
