A newly released electric sedan from Lynk & Co — the Geely-owned brand best known in Europe for its subscription-style Lynk & Co 01 — is quietly redefining what "fast charging" means. In verified charging tests, the new Lynk & Co 10+ takes just 4 minutes and 22 seconds to go from 10 percent to 70 percent battery, and 5 minutes and 32 seconds to reach 80 percent.
Those numbers, disclosed in fresh testing this week, are not laboratory theoreticals: they were measured on production-representative vehicles connected to Geely's V4 ultra-fast charging stations. Average charging power during the run hit 492 kilowatts, with peaks even higher. For context, that is roughly ten times the charging speed most Western EV drivers experience today at a public 50 kW station, and about triple the pace of common 150 kW fast chargers.
The technology enabling this is a new battery pack called the Shield Gold Brick, developed inside the Geely Group. It runs on a 900-volt architecture — well above the 400-volt systems still standard in most electric cars, and even above the 800-volt platforms used by Porsche, Hyundai, and Kia in their premium EVs. Higher voltage means the same amount of energy can be delivered with lower current, which reduces heat and lets the battery accept power faster without damage.
Lynk & Co says the Shield Gold Brick also uses a redesigned internal cell structure and a next-generation thermal management system, both of which are needed to keep temperatures safe during the extremely high-power charging window. The battery is engineered around long-cycle stability, meaning it is designed to withstand repeated ultra-fast charges without the significant capacity loss that plagued early fast-charging batteries a decade ago.
Charging that quickly moves the electric vehicle experience into a genuinely new category. Today, most EV drivers plan long trips around 20- to 40-minute charging stops. At Lynk & Co 10+ speeds, a highway pit stop looks a lot more like a gas station visit: pull in, plug in, walk into the shop, buy a coffee, and by the time the barista hands it over, the car is ready to drive another few hundred kilometers.
There are, of course, caveats. Charging at 492 kW requires charging infrastructure that can actually deliver that much power, and Geely's V4 station network is still concentrated in China. Grid connections and station cooling systems capable of sustaining such rates are a real engineering challenge, and rolling them out worldwide will take years. The car itself is initially available primarily in the Chinese market, though Lynk & Co has European ambitions and Geely has hinted at broader global sales.
Still, the milestone matters for the industry as a whole. Every time a Chinese automaker publishes numbers like these — BYD hit 10-97 percent in about 9 minutes earlier this year using a similar approach — global competitors are pulled toward the same targets. The technology cascades: today's frontier spec becomes tomorrow's premium option, and eventually next decade's default. The 900-volt architecture the Lynk & Co 10+ uses is already showing up on the roadmaps of major European and Korean manufacturers.
For consumers, the takeaway is simple: the "long charging times" complaint that has followed electric cars since their revival is on its way to becoming a historical footnote. The Lynk & Co 10+ is not the last word in fast charging — it is a very loud opening statement in what promises to be an increasingly competitive race to make plugging in feel indistinguishable from filling up.
