Charging

Most multicopter drones can only fly for about 30 minutes, after which their battery has to be recharged for one to two hours. According to Israeli company StoreDot, though, its FlashBattery tech delivers a full charge in just five minutes.

Qualcomm has unveiled Quick Charge 5, its latest fast-charging technology for smartphones – and it promises to get your phone's battery up to 50 percent from absolute zero in as little as just five minutes.

One of the world's major EV charging standards has released its 3.0 specification, harmonizing with China's GB/T plug and using liquid-cooling to deliver monster charging rates more than double what Tesla's V3 Supercharger is currently doing.

Renault and partners have announced the launch of the INCIT-EV project, where innovative electric vehicle charging technologies will be installed and evaluated in various locations throughout Europe.

The new Rollogo Escape S carry-on suitcase uses the spinning of its own wheels to charge its power bank.

With iPhones using Lightning ports, Android phones (and iPad Pros) using USB-C, laptops using a mixture of USB-A and USB-C, and chargers covering just about every base, getting your mobile devices juiced up can be a hassle. Enter the 5-in-1 charging cable, High Five.

​In order to make electric cars more appealing to consumers, automakers have been experimenting with robotic chargers that automatically plug themselves into specific cars such as Volkswagens or Teslas. A new system, however, is designed to work with a wide variety of electric vehicles.

Researchers have found that materials known as niobium tungsten oxides form microscopic structures that let lithium ions flow through them at much greater rates than current technology allows. The finding could be the key to building safe lithium-ion cells that charge in minutes rather than hours.

The River Bank is a modular powerbank designed to provide power to a range of devices, including phones, laptops ... or cars. The company also says it's the largest portable charging system that you'll be able to legally fly with.

For those who charge their electric cars at home, off street parking is pretty much essential. But that's changing. Ubitricity has been installing charging points in streetlamps for a few years now, and now London, UK, startup Urban Electric is about to trial a pop-up charge point in Oxford.​

Swiss company ABB has launched its Terra High Power DC fast charger, which can put out an impressive 350 kilowatts, charging at nearly three times the rate of Tesla's Superchargers. It'll enable super fast car charging – but only once cars are ready to handle it.

​At the end of a fun afternoon on fast bikes, we sat down again with motorcycling legend "Electric Terry" Hershner to finish our chat about the first electric Ironbutt, the Vetter Challenge, riding with his manic dog Charger and a future in which two-way EV charging can support the power grid.