In order to demonstrate a 10-minute charge, they intend to take a 350kW feed from the MIT power plant. Presumably 14kV @ 20A, something like that. Their own little substation.

Yes, it's a party trick, but it's a demonstration of the sort of thing that might be possible if you decided to invest in serious charging station infrastructure. (Such a charging station would need major energy storage of some kind, just like your neighborhood gas station has big underground gasoline storage tanks.)

From an engineering economy POV, it's almost certainly better to swap batteries at a battery-swap station than it is to build infrastructure to support 10-minute charge times. But the latter is a lot more fun to play with.

Nope, Package pins are expensive, cable connectors are expensive, board traces are expensive, cabling is expensive. On the other hand, silicon is cheap. :-)

A 6gbps serial link is straightforward to implement, if you know what you're doing, and there are probably a couple dozen design groups around the world that can do it.

Jay

This posting is anti-insightful. I bought a tank of gas from a gas station once. It did not take me the "set distance". It took me 1/2 mile and the engine died. Bad gas (water contaminated). I never bought gas there again. The station went out of business not too long thereafter. Exactly the same for an EV battery-swap business. Load-testing the battery as part of the charging process is straightforward. Any battery-swap business that wants to survive will do that. There are lots of hard problems to solve for this business to succeed. Avoiding giving your customers bad batteries is easy to solve, not hard. -Jay-