Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

Addition to the lithium ion battery one, I also have the ultracapacitor based jump starter.
Autowit SuperCap 2

Over the last 3 years, I ended up helping many drivers especially the owners of hybrid cars.

Because of the lockdown and many restrictions, people didn’t drive regularly and these electric and hybrid cars suffered a lot for not being driven regularly.

When they started using their cars again, they couldn’t start the engine at all or the 12V battery got damaged and lost its initial capacity that it couldn’t be charged enough with short distance driving.

With the modern cars, you need to be very careful when jump starting because the surge current could create new issues and even damage some of the electronics components.

Always check the owners manual on how to jump start these modern cars.

Personally, unless you know several tricks, I won’t use another car as the donor power to jump start a car.


While I had great experience with the ultracapacitor, it revealed the characteristic and the potential weakness of ultracapacitor when jump starting the electric/hybrid vehicles.

Unlike the classic cars, it first needs to go through so many electronics diagnosis before it can even enable the starter circuit.

Many of them will spend 5 – 10 sec just for this diagnosis process.

With my ultracapacitor starter pack, it will discharge all its power within 10sec.


So, great for starting the classic combustion engine cars but not for the electric/hybrid ones.

By the time you saw the ‘Ready’ indicator to start the engine, the ltracapacitor already discharged all its power and empty so couldn’t start the car.


Hence, you still need the battery based jump starter or spare big battery.


I was actually looking at the smaller capacity model GT3000 and not the GT4000 but the latter was on special deal and cheaper than other models.

For your reference, there is another model called GT4000S.

It’s different from GT4000 (without the S) as GT4000S doesn’t have the built-in heater circuit for extreme cold environment.


Again, I didn’t need such extra feature and for me, it’s another potential failure factor or waste of energy as I don’t think I’ll be using jump starter in such extreme cold condition.

Still, the cheapest option within GT series was the top of the range GT4000 so that was the only reason why I didn’t get the GT3000 or the GT4000S.


I don’t know it’s discontinued or not as there is already a new GP series on the market.






Anyway, it worked well for helping the neighbours.

I quite liked the very robust clamp construction.

Some of them out on the market are too plasticky and could crack.

It can be charged at PD100W spec and comes with PD100W cigarette plug charger.

Too scared to try such massive current straight out of the box on the car so tried on the bench power supply first.
And yes indeed, it does charge super fast at 100W.

Though, I don’t think I will ever use such thin cable power plug at 100W inside the car…..






It’s huge compared to the previous one but expected.

Almost all these jump starter with safety circuit such as reverse polarity protection, etc would have the mechanical relay, schottky diode, etc either inside the starter pack or on the jump cable dongle.

The controller won’t enable the battery pack until it passes all safety checks and hence, it can safetly separate the battery pack from external world.

Because of the size of the relay or other safety components, it will decide the size of the package or the dongle.