If there are two obstacles that are still keeping the general public from embracing electric cars, those would have to be the vehicles’ limited driving range and long charging times. Well, Nissan has achieved a major milestone regarding one of those two problems – last week, Japan’s Nikkei news agency reported that the automaker has developed an experimental system that can fully charge an EV battery in just ten minutes.

The system incorporates a capacitor in which the electrode is made from a combination of tungsten oxide and vanadium oxide, instead of the traditional carbon. This change is said to drastically boost the power of the charger, which is what allows it to work so quickly. On the batteries that were tested, no significant effects were noted regarding their storage capacity or voltage.

The charger is apparently half the size of Nissan’s existing fast charger, and is said to work with batteries from a variety [...]