00:00 Speaker A
BYD announcing new electric vehicles that it says can charge in about the same amount of time it takes to pump gas for a normal car. The company says its super E platform will allow cars to achieve about 249 miles of range with just 5 minutes of charging. That’s compared to the Tesla superchargers, which can provide up to 200 miles of range in 15 minutes. BYD will start selling cars with the new technology next month. It is impossible to overstate how big of a deal this is because the charging lag time has been a huge headwind for Tesla, and we’re seeing competitors coming in and saying we can do this faster than you can.
00:44 Speaker B
Yeah, there’s a term for it. Charging anxiety, folks, and it’s certainly played out here and how the automakers are trying to deliver more of that speed and efficiency to offer a similar type of experience to if you were just going to Buc-ee’s, for the people who are in Texas, or for the people in Pennsylvania, if you’re going to Wawa to fill up. They’re trying to make sure that it’s a similar amount of time, regardless of whether or not you’re going inside to get one of the hoagies during hoagie fest. All those things aside here. The charging anxiety has been a sticking point here, and we’ve seen it in recent years kind of back off a little bit, um, but as of right now, I think for the super E platform, one of the main competitors, it seems like it’s Mercedes-Benz. But how many people are buying a Mercedes-Benz CLA EV? Um, that one offers 325 kilometers in 10 minutes for its charge. So that is one of the closest competitors as of this juncture, and we’ll see how some of these efforts continue to ramp up to reduce that charging anxiety.
02:05 Speaker A
Yeah.
02:06 Speaker B
Lot of competition. That’s for sure.
02:08 Speaker A
Yeah.
02:09 Speaker B
All right. Shout out to the Wawa and Buc-ee’s folks out there.