Atlis Virtual Battery Day Reveals Strategy

Atlis Motor Vehicles has plans to eventually produce a beautiful and utilitarian pickup truck, the XT, with as much as 500 miles of range. In order to achieve this lofty goal, it's going to need a large and capable battery that can charge pretty fast.

The company knows this, of course, and has put together a battery pack and charging strategy that's bound to raise some eyebrows. Think little range degradation despite cold temperatures and charging from empty to full in 15 minutes. Yes, that's really 100 percent full (typically, companies will give charging times to 80% full because the speed usually slows down significantly after this mark).

More about Atlis

Atlis XT Electric Pickup Truck: Everything We Know - Range, Specs, More

To explain to customers and potential investors how they plan on accomplishing these ground-breaking numbers the company set up an event similar to the Tesla Battery Day that's in the works. However, due to the novel coronavirus situation, the presentation evolved into a livestream on YouTube with company CEO and founder Mark Hanchett laying it all out for us with the help of a whiteboard.

Luckily for everyone interested, they've published the video (above) so you can now watch and get a good idea about their strategy. Here are some of the main points.

The battery packs – as large as 250 kWh and rated for 2,000 cycles (approximately a million miles of use) – will use an NCM (nickel, cobalt, manganese) chemistry inside prismatic-type cells. The anode, separator, and cathode are laid down in a "z-fold" configuration to help deal with mechanical stresses. The cells are immersed in a silicon-based mineral oil solution inside the pack which is, we should note, fully insulated to keep the heat inside.

That heat is important for its fast-charging strategy. According to Hanchett, in order to achieve 15-minute charging the battery needs to be somewhat warm, as the heat helps keep dendrite formation inside the battery cells in check and allows them to pour in huge amounts of energy. The Atlis charger should pump out 1.5 megawatts of power. That's over four times the energy output of the fastest DC chargers (350 kW) in use today.

There's plenty more information about the company, its products and plans in the video, so we suggest getting yourself a bowl of popcorn at smashing that play button.