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Refueling a gas car takes about five minutes. Geely just charged an electric one from 10 to 80 percent in five minutes and thirty-two seconds — and says its next-generation platform will go faster still. The Chinese auto group, which owns Volvo, Polestar, Lotus, Smart, Zeekr and Lynk & Co, has confirmed it is developing a proprietary 1,000-volt electrical architecture designed to make charging stops feel no different from a gas-station visit.

The demo that turned heads

The showcase vehicle was the Lynk & Co 10, a mid-size electric sedan that starts at roughly ¥215,800 (about $32,200) in China. Plugged into one of Zeekr’s liquid-cooled charging hubs, the car ran from 10 to 80 percent state of charge in 5 minutes 32 seconds, and kept going to 97 percent in 8 minutes 42 seconds. Peak charging power hit 1,100 kW — more than double what most of today’s fastest production EVs can swallow.

The fine print matters, though. That headline speed was achieved on Geely’s own infrastructure, which uses proprietary charging handshakes and station-side battery buffers to squeeze out maximum performance. When the same car was tested on a rival BYD flash-charging station, it peaked at a still-quick-but-far-lower 430 kW. Best-case numbers, in other words, currently require staying inside Geely’s ecosystem — a dynamic familiar to anyone who remembers the early Tesla Supercharger years.

What’s actually inside the car

Today’s Lynk & Co 10 carries a 95 kWh Aegis short-blade lithium-iron-phosphate pack with a nominal voltage around 772.8 volts — technically an 800-volt-class system, despite some reports rounding it up to 900. The cells are engineered to tolerate repeated 10C to 12C charging rates, which is what allows the car to sustain megawatt-adjacent power without cooking the battery. Silicon-carbide power electronics and a 16-in-1 integrated drive unit round out the hardware story.

The forthcoming 1,000-volt architecture is meant to close the gap between what Geely’s vehicles can accept and what its chargers can already deliver. The company has deployed more than 2,100 Zeekr-branded liquid-cooled charging terminals across China, with station hardware rated for peak output as high as 1,500 kW — capacity no current production car can fully use.

Catching up to BYD, leapfrogging everyone else

Geely is not first to the 1,000-volt club. BYD already ships true 1,000-volt systems in production cars like the Han L and Tang L, paired with its own megawatt flash-charging network. But Geely’s demonstration numbers — particularly the sub-nine-minute run to 97 percent — set a new public benchmark, and the company is signaling this is a stepping stone rather than a destination: it plans to begin testing solid-state batteries in 2027, targeting energy density of up to 500 Wh/kg and driving range beyond 1,000 kilometers.

What it means

China’s charging war has quietly become the most consequential technology race in the EV industry. While American and European drivers celebrate 350 kW as fast, Chinese automakers are normalizing peak rates three times higher and treating five-minute charging as a marketing requirement. The catch is fragmentation: these speeds live inside proprietary ecosystems, with each automaker’s cars charging fastest on its own network. If 1,000-volt architectures and 10C-capable LFP packs trickle into Geely’s global brands — Volvo, Polestar, Smart — the technology gap between Chinese-market EVs and everyone else will stop being an abstraction and start showing up in western showrooms. For now, the takeaway is simpler: the five-minute charge is no longer theoretical. It happened, on camera, in a $32,000 sedan.

Sources: ArenaEV, electrive, CarNewsChina