The gas station may be on its way to becoming a relic. First, electric cars had to solve the problem of range. It seemed like an impossible problem, but now, most electric cars have better range than gas ones. Now, the only problem is the charging time. When your “fill-up” isn’t a five-minute stop, but your car takes 30-40 minutes to charge, it can be quite annoying.

This delay is now the single greatest barrier to the electric vehicle revolution. Now, a team of scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and LG Energy Solution believe they have found the key. In a landmark paper, they reveal a counterintuitive strategy that flips decades of battery chemistry on its head. They’ve demonstrated a lithium-metal battery — the holy grail of energy density — that can be charged from 10% to 80% in around 15 minutes.

Trying To Solve the Wrong Problem

The batteries in most of today’s EVs are lithium-ion. They’re reliable and relatively safe, but they are starting to reach their physical limits. The energy is stored in a graphite structure called an anode. Think of it like a hotel where lithium ions check in and out during charging and discharging. The graphite hotel has a limited number of rooms, which caps how much energy the battery can hold.

Lithium-metal batteries (LMBs) are the next generation; they’re a bigger hotel, and they do away with the graphite hotel entirely. Instead, the anode is a simple, wafer-thin sheet of pure lithium metal. This approach dramatically increases a battery’s potential energy density, promising EVs that could travel much farther on a single charge. But this beautiful promise comes with a terrible flaw: charging.

When you try to charge an LMB too quickly, the lithium forms microscopic, needle-like growths called dendrites. These dendrites are the absolute nightmare of the battery world because they can grow so large that they pierce the barrier separating the positive and negative sides of the battery, causing a short circuit, catastrophic failure, or even fire. At the very least, they degrade a battery’s capacity and lifespan.

For years, fast charging and long-lasting lithium-metal batteries seemed mutually exclusive. Scientists tried to go around this by building a better wall and ensuring that the dendrites don’t cause any damage. But the KAIST and LG team thought everyone is trying to solve the wrong problem. It’s not how strong the shield is, it’s how it’s built.

A New Chemistry of Weakness

Led by Professor Hee-Tak Kim, the researchers identified the cause of the dendrite formation. It’s due to something called the non-uniform interfacial cohesion of the lithium metal. Basically, the intense current from fast charging was causing chemical components to clump together, creating an ineffective shield. Using advanced cryogenic transmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM), they could literally see this happening, observing that fast charging produced scattered crystalline regions some 5-8 nanometers in size.

To stop this clumping from happening, they experimented with different formulations of electrolytes. Ultimately, they zoomed in on an a liquid electrolyte that suppressed dendrite formation even during fast charging. Ironically, the best performance came from electrolytes with “weakly Li-associating anions” which are, in a chemical sense, relatively weak. They don’t cling tightly to the lithium ions. This weakness, the team discovered, was the ultimate strength.

The results were spectacular. A high-power battery cell using their best electrolyte achieved a 5% to 70% state of charge in just 12 minutes, and it did so for over 350 repeated cycles. A high-energy version, designed for maximum driving range with a projected energy density of 386 Wh/kg, reached a 10% to 80% charge in a mere 17 minutes, lasting for an impressive 180 cycles. [cite: 13] They had smashed through the fast-charging barrier.

A Paradigm Shift

This research represents a fundamental shift in the quest for the perfect battery. It’s not just the overall performance, it’s that they’ve reached this performance using a different technology than what we use now. For years, the field has been dominated by a search for tougher materials and more aggressive chemical reactions. The KAIST and LG team has shown that, under the extreme conditions of fast charging, a more subtle, delicate approach is needed.

“This research has become a key foundation for overcoming the technical challenges of lithium-metal batteries by understanding the interfacial structure. It has overcome the biggest barrier to the introduction of lithium-metal batteries for electric vehicles,” said Hee Tak Kim, Professor from Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST, in a press release.

Now, with this new technology, the last real hurdle for EVs can finally be overcome.

Journal Reference: Hyeokjin Kwon et al, Covariance of interphasic properties and fast chargeability of energy-dense lithium metal batteries, Nature Energy (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-025-01838-1