GAC Aion Officially Reveals 480 kW Ultra Rapid Charger

This charger is almost twice as powerful as the best Superchargers currently available.

GAC Aion

Andrei Nedelea

By: Andrei Nedelea

Aug 30, 2021 at 12:51pm ET

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Aion is a sub-brand of the Chinese automaker GAC (short for Guangzhou Automobile Corporation) and its focus is solely to create electric vehicles. Last month we published a post whose source was an article from the Chinese press that announced the fact that a GAC Aion V electric car was photographed charging at 481 kW with its battery state of charge at 80 percent.

The photo was taken during a charging demonstration organized by GAC Aion and now the company has officially revealed its charger and the official, headline-grabbing features are: 480 kW at 857V and 560A. It is called the A480 and the claim is it can deliver 35.1 kWh in just 4 minutes and 50 seconds, which is a comparable time span to fueling up an ICE vehicle, while the manufacturer says it passed 12 different safety standards, so it can not only deliver the advertised speeds, but also do it safely.

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And if you’re wondering how a smaller and relatively unknown Chinese company is outdoing Tesla, well, GAC Aion says it is using graphene batteries that can not only deliver 1,000 km (621 miles) NEDC on one charge, but they can also be constantly rapid-charged and they will still apparently be good for 1,000,000 km (621,000 miles), although the second point will be harder to demonstrate.

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GAC Aion has also stated in the past that it wants to surpass Tesla as a global EV tech leader and if all these numbers are proven to be real, then it would be a big first step towards achieving that goal. 480 kW is almost twice what the most powerful current Superchargers can muster, although Tesla is expected to introduce 300 kW chargers in the not too distant future.

In September, the company will also debut the 500 km NEDC Aion V electric vehicle (available with two levels o charging) that should be able to use these new chargers and their seemingly unbelievable speed, which should charge the vehicle to 80 percent in just over 10 minutes. Once this model becomes available, we expect that third parties not endorsed by the company will perform tests to verify the claims and we'll be keeping an eye out for when they do.