EV Charging and Other Top Transportation Stories

IEEE SpectrumThis year’s transportation coverage covered breakthroughs in electric vehicles, batteries, charging, automation, aviation, maritime technology and more. Readers have been following the race to rebuild American magnet manufacturing, rethink electric vehicle charging architecture and reinvent automotive software. They followed China’s sprint toward five-minute charging, the rise of high-power home chargers and the drive to automate airports. Our most-read articles have also explored next-generation shipping, carbon-free maritime fuels, record-sized electric ships, and the first road trials of solid-state batteries. Read on for our roundup of the transportation articles published in 2025 that readers found most compelling.

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The most visited transportation article of the year focused on U.S. efforts to rebuild a domestic supply of neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets, critical components for electric vehicles, wind turbines, HVAC systems and many military systems. MP Materials has begun trial production at its new Texas factory, with plans to increase production to between 1,000 and 3,000 tons per year and supply companies like General Motors. Other American projects Magnetic e-VAC, Novéon, Rare Earth from the United StatesAnd Quadrant also emerge.

But these efforts are dwarfed by China’s rare earth industry: China makes 85 to 90 percent of NdFeB magnets and 97 percent of the underlying rare earth metals, with individual Chinese companies producing tens of thousands of tons, far more than all non-Chinese factories combined. China also has huge spare refining and production capacity, keeping global prices low.

MP Materials’ unique mine-to-magnet strategy could offer supply chain intelligence and resilience, but it will be extremely difficult to compete with China’s subsidies and scale. The U.S. Department of Defense may be paying extra for “friendly nation” magnets, but cost-obsessed automakers like GM could resist higher domestic prices.

Jim West/REA/Redux

A robust public electric vehicle charging network is essential to mass adoption of electric vehicles, especially for drivers who cannot charge reliably at home. Yet today’s fast charging stations are expensive and complex in large part because of one feature: galvanic isolation, the transformer-based safety barrier that protects against electric shock if ground connections fail. This insulation material accounts for about 60 percent of the cost of the charger’s power electronics and about half of the power losses, making fast chargers expensive to build and maintain. The authors of this article – veterans of AC Propulsion, whose early technologies influenced the Tesla Roadster – argue that galvanic isolation is no longer necessary.

The authors propose a new approach they call direct power conversion (DPC): eliminate the isolation link entirely and replace it with: (1) a double-grounded system with ground continuity detection to avoid shock hazards, and (2) a step-down regulator to manage voltage mismatches between the grid and the electric vehicle battery. Removing the isolation would simplify the chargers from four power conversion stages to just one (plus a step-down regulator if necessary). This could cut charger hardware costs by more than half, improve efficiency by 2-3%, enable much cheaper fast charging stations, enable on-board EV chargers to become powerful enough for Level 3 charging, and accelerate the expansion of public charging infrastructure. The authors argue that simplifying chargers – and abandoning old assumptions about galvanic isolation – is the quickest path to an affordable and reliable EV charging network, which is essential for broad adoption of EVs.

BYD

BYD launched megawatt-class electric vehicle charging in China, offering 400 kilometers of autonomy in five minutes– triple the power (and therefore triple the speed) of the best current American configurations. A Han L The sedan briefly reached 1,002 kilowatts on BYD’s new 1,000-volt platform, which uses 1,500-volt silicon carbide chips and redesigned lithium iron phosphate batteries to enable safe, ultra-fast charging. BYD’s vertically integrated approach (building cars, batteries and chargers) allows it to scale quickly and keep prices low. The company has already deployed 500 megachargers and plans to install 4,000 more, putting China far ahead of competitors like Huawei And Zeekr racing to reach speeds of up to 1,500 kW. China makes 85 to 90 percent of NdFeB magnets and 97 percent of the underlying rare earth metals, with individual Chinese companies producing tens of thousands of tons, far more than all non-Chinese factories combined.

Charging point

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