Welcome back to EV News China today. Flash charging versus swapping, Zika-O-9 refresh, and conflict slows down Chinese EVs.

Plus stay tuned later in the show. I'll tell you how a BYD battery did when fire engulfed it, not because of any EV parts, because of a cheap battery bank that exploded inside a car.

Welcome to EV News, China, the podcast all about the world's biggest EV market.

And every day, I bring you headlines, analysis and insights from the heart of China's booming

EV industry and decode it for the global EV audience.

Now, BYD launched its second generation blade battery on the 5th of

March and set out its flash charging China strategy. The pitch pairs blade battery with megawatt

flash charge 2 and backs it with a buildout of high-powered plugs. BYD wants 20,000 megawatt-level charging stations by the end of this year.

They currently have just over 4,200 of the existing flash charge stations, the aim, placed 90% of

urban China within 5 kilometres of a 1,500 kilowatt plug 1.5 megawatts. Wow. They have framed that against battery swapping.

So what's better? Charge your EV quickly or go and change a battery quickly. Well, they've said that it's

not comparable to something like CATL. They are scaling

their battery swap network to just two and a half thousand stations, not 20,000. The hardware

claim rests on speed and cold weather performance, BYD says megawatt 2.0. Pairs a blade battery and a 10 to 70 charge in five minutes. A new

thermal management system delivers 20 to 97% in 12 minutes, even at minus 30 degrees Celsius. BYD also

leans on safety running simultaneous flash charging and nail penetration tests with zero thermal runaway,

and we'll get to that story at the very end. Now, we'll come back to it rather. The bigger story

sits in infrastructure maths. BYD wants a station within a station model to cut the need for grid

upgrades. 18,000 of their planned units will co-locate with existing sites like fuel filling stations

managed by partners.

Each unit uses an internal LFP pack of up to 300 kilowatt hours, drawing a steady 100

kilowatts from the grid until it's full.

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