Electric pickup truck startup claims ‘full charge in less than 13 minutes’

Arizona-based electric vehicle startup Atlis Motor Vehicles claims that it achieved “a full charge in 12 minutes, 35 seconds” of a prototype battery pack that it believes is scalable for its upcoming electric pickup truck.

The company describes this as “the test of their first large-scale prototype pack used a public DC fast charge station,” but the prototype was only a 3 kWh pack.

CEO Mark Hanchett commented on what they describe as a milestone:

“We have completed preliminary testing of our prototype battery pack with fast charging capabilities, and we’re proud to announce that we did better than expected. We beat our charge time by 2 minutes and 25 seconds by charging a 3 kWh pack to full in 12 minutes 35 seconds. This was the key to proving our technology – recharge times for batteries is still one of the largest obstacles to wider adoption of electric vehicles.”

They say that they are achieving that with regular li-ion batteries with some novel cooling technology that they developed.

While a 3 kWh pack sounds irrelevant for a large all-electric pickup truck charging test, Atlis Motor Vehicles says that it is fully scalable:

“The battery pack is part of Atlis’ prototype design and is capable of scaling in size to meet their customer’s performance needs. The capacity of the test pack had to be kept low to ensure enough power was available from the Level 3 DC charging station. Next steps for the prototype pack is to integrate this design concept into Atlis Motor Vehicles’ XP platform currently in development.”

XP platform is an all-electric vehicle platform that they are currently developing.

They plan to offer it to other OEMs, but it will first serve as the platform for the Atlis XT electric pickup truck:

Atlis says that they are aiming for a low price of $45,000 with a base range of 300 miles and an optional range of 500 miles.

The ultra-fast less than 15 minute charging would be standard.

But those are all just goals right now as the company is attempting to raise $1 million through crowdfunding in order to build the first prototype of the truck.

Electrek’s Take

I am all for electric pickup trucks and since legacy automakers don’t seem ready to get on board yet, I think startups will have to lead the way on this front.

That said, I don’t think this effort can be considered serious yet.

They seem to have some good engineering talent at the company, which is a good sign, but I don’t like when companies are doing crowdfunding without even having a working prototype. I think that should be the bare minimum.

I would have liked to have seen more from them before they attempt to get money from the public.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.