What Geely has said — and what it hasn't
The teaser posted over the weekend is short: "Charge in Four Minutes, Drive with Peace of Mind — Global Launch of Geely's Next-Generation AI Smart Charging Technology," dated 23 September at the same Ningbo site where the company opened what it calls the world's largest testing centre. Electrek reported the 2.2 MW figure and the claim of about 50% more power than BYD's system.
What the teaser does not say: the state-of-charge window (10–70%? 10–80%? 20–80%?), the pack size, whether 2.2 MW is per vehicle or the total output of one charging pool, which connector is used, and how long the peak holds. The word "AI" also appears, which in 2026 tells us almost nothing — every thermal-management strategy is a control algorithm with a marketing department.
2.2 MW for four minutes: our calculation
Peak power makes the headline; energy is what actually fills a battery. Run the multiplication:
- 2,200 kW × (4 ÷ 60) h = 146.7 kWh delivered, if the peak were sustained for the full four minutes.
- BYD's 1.5 MW × (5 ÷ 60) h = 125 kWh under the same assumption.
That first number is the tell. 146.7 kWh is more than the usable capacity of almost every passenger EV we track in our 67-model EV catalog, so it cannot be an average — it is a peak, held for a short slice of the charge. Take a realistic 100 kWh pack charging 10–80%: that is 70 kWh, and delivering it in four minutes needs an average of 1,050 kW, or roughly 10.5C. The peak is double the average.
Put another way, 70 kWh is about 400–440 km at a 16–17 kWh/100 km highway consumption, delivered in four minutes — roughly 105 km of range per minute. It is also the kind of claim Chinese makers have been quoting since BYD's Denza Z9GT arrived in Thailand at $89,870 with flash charging and 1,036 km CLTC: range added, not percent charged.
The cable problem: 2,200 amps is not a rounding error
Power is voltage times current, and current is where physics stops being polite. At a 1,000 V architecture, 2.2 MW means 2,200 A; even at 1,500 V it is roughly 1,470 A. Liquid-cooled CCS2 cables deliver around 500–600 A in the field. The Megawatt Charging System standard developed for trucks reaches about 3,000 A at up to 1,250 V, and Tesla's Megacharger puts 1.2 MW into the Semi. Geely is talking about exceeding that, into a passenger car.
Two possibilities follow. Either Geely has a new connector generation to show — which would matter more than the power figure itself — or 2.2 MW is station-level output shared across several points, which is precisely how the EU's AFIR regulation counts capacity on TEN-T corridors. Watch that distinction on Wednesday.
The battery, not the charger, is the bottleneck
A 2.2 MW peak into a 100 kWh pack is about 22C. At a 10.5C average with realistic losses you are shedding well over 100 kW of heat from a pack the size of a mattress. Geely also claims help from "smart charging" and a cycle life of 3,500 charge/discharge cycles with limited degradation — treat that as a laboratory figure until somebody publishes a DC-fast-charged fleet study. If you want to see how much of an official number survives contact with reality, our real-world range calculator built on Bjørn Nyland's tests is the place to start.
Who is actually ahead
- Geely (teased, 23 September): 2.2 MW, "four minutes"
- BYD Flash Charging 2.0: 1.5 MW, announced this year
- Tesla Megacharger: 1.2 MW — but for Semi trucks, not cars
- Best public DC in Europe: typically 350–400 kW per car; AFIR asks for charging pools of at least 400 kW total on core network corridors
Europe, meanwhile, keeps shipping quieter things: Porsche is putting 11 kW wireless charging into production, about 90% efficient, with roughly €83 a year in losses. Different continent, different problem statement. And the arms race is not only about charging — Toyota plans China-made extended-range EVs from April 2027, targeting 400,000 a year by 2028, which is the cheaper way to answer the same range anxiety.
Four minutes won't change your bill
Speed buys time, not energy. Our supercharger database tracks 483 European locations and their per-kWh prices — the cheapest of them here. At a rough European DC price of €0.50/kWh, those 70 kWh cost about €35 whether they arrive in four minutes or forty. Run your own figures through the charging cost calculator before getting excited about minutes saved.
What to look for on 23 September
- The SoC window — and whether "four minutes" means percent or kilometres.
- Peak versus average power, and how long the peak lasts.
- Per-car or per-station output. This one changes the entire story.
- Connector and voltage architecture, and whether it works with existing GB/T and Chaoji sites.
- Cell chemistry, its rated C-rate, and whether 3,500 cycles is cell-level or pack-level data.
- Deployment: how many stations, where, by when. BYD has spoken about building thousands of its own flash-charging sites.
Geely's group already sells in Europe through Volvo, Polestar, Zeekr, Lynk & Co and smart, so the technology has a route into EU showrooms if it ever leaves Ningbo. The obstacle is not the car: a 2.2 MW point needs a grid connection most European motorway services cannot supply today, and the regulatory floor here is an order of magnitude lower. A four-minute charge is a Chinese infrastructure story first, a European one second, and possibly a distant third. We will update the numbers once the specification is public.
Source: https://electrek.co/2026/09/21/geely-one-ups-byd-with-2-2mw-charger-allowing-4-minute-ev-charges/
