The storage is at the high end and better than most other EV chemistries by 50%+. It's unusable because it doesn't survive long enough, but I think the point is if they can solve the cycle issue then this chemistry becomes available.
It might not double the range of a Tesla or Kia, but it won't be too far off. FWIW, the 360 Wh/Kg number is not far off the 400 number where flight apparently becomes interesting.
In line with other batteries with much lower cycle endurance, but their energy storage is much higher than other batteries with similar charge cycle endurance. That's what matters.
For those who are wondering what makes these new batteries so special, here's what it says in the article:
"What is new is the resilience of the battery. Historically, lithium-metal batteries have been plagued by premature death, with previous record holders accomplishing just 200 cycles before seeing significant drops in capacity. The chemistry developed by the PNNL team was able to maintain 76% of its initial capacity after 600 cycles, blowing the old record out of the water. There is still work to be done for sure, as currently used EV batteries typically last for around 1,000 cycles."
To translate that "80% after 1000 cycles" into more practical numbers: with a 300-mile-range battery, that means you'd have a 240-mile-range after driving 300,000 miles.
Degradation is less important as range increase. Average 500 mile range * 600 cycles = 300,000 miles.
At 350 watt-hours per kilogram a 200kWh battery is 570 kg + housing so feasible. Using a different battery chemistry for ultra high mileage models is probably a bad idea, but it is an option.
If there were two identical 300-mile-range cars on the market, one had a 1000-cycle-life and the other a 600-cycle-life, I'd take whichever was cheaper as long as the price difference was more than say $2000.
And if one of them had physical temperature knobs and a small centre screen, id choose it regardless of the price difference.
Another dimension is weight, if price per kwh was identical these batteries would be be more efficient by making the car lighter. As well as efficiency and handling this presumably also affects the degredation per mile driven since you're discharging less energy to move the smaller battery.
A dumb car should at least have Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Backup cameras are mandatory, so you might as well do something useful with the screen.
Why are backup cameras mandatory? I don't want that either.
Make it a standard DIN radio slot and you can put in whatever stereo you want - and upgrade it in 5 years when your car still works great but the Bluetooth standard has changed.
Because mirrors can’t tell if you have a child sitting by your bumper.
There are several safety justifications for electronics in new cars. ABS, airbags, seatbelt pretensioner, auto-braking, and arguably lane keeping. (Not to mention battery management system, traction control, etc.)
Also, vehicle-state-aware and charging-station-state-aware navigation with auto-routing to Fast Charging is a massively beneficial feature for electric cars. Before I got my used Model S (2013, BTW), I had no idea how important this would be in eliminating range anxiety and enabling road trips.
Legally mandatory. Because too many people (often kids!) have been killed or injured by inattentive drivers who back up without looking behind their cars.
Backup cameras are a legal mandate. It is honestly irresponsible to drive a car without a wide-angle backup camera. Might as well toss the mirrors out while you're at it.
Wasn't aware of this. Regardless, it should be a standard that can connect to any din stereo.
> It is honestly irresponsible to drive a car without a wide-angle backup camera.
The only time my car goes into reverse is when I've just performed a full walkaround (backing out of driveway) or I've just ceased driving forwards and have my eyes tuned to the mirrors.
> Might as well toss the mirrors out while you're at it.
IMO your best bet is to take an older car and retrofit it. With mandatory ADAS looming (I believe EU has already passed a requirement that takes effect in 2022, and the US is surely not far behind), you won't be able to find a new "dumb" vehicle of any sort.
My speculation is that this all stems from the enhances crash safety characteristics of new cars. The doors on new cars are pretty much a foot thick, windowsills and dash higher, A-pillars thicker on new vehicles. This steel marshmellow-man of a car does a great job of protecting the occupants from previously bone-rending impacts like the head-on offset collision, with the tradeoff that you can't see for shit out of them.
Enter ADAS. No manufacturer wants to see their incident rates go up due to crashworthiness-vs-drivability tradeoffs. Now that the tech is available, manufacturers are incentivised to put ADAS in everything they sell.
I'd be happy to retrofit my good-condition Yaris to be a BEV with ~80km range (similar to first gen leaf). Is there actually a practical way to do this?
Practical? Not really: EV conversions usually don't make economic sense, due to the amount of labor and custom engineering involved.
It could probably be done though if you really wanted to do it and have the time and money. The simplest thing on a front-wheel drive car is probably to tear out the engine and replace it with a motor, keeping the transmission. If you have a manual transmission, it would make that part easier.
Finding room for batteries can be tricky, but if you're only looking for 80km of range that simplifies things considerably. You might be able to put a battery box where the gas tank was, and maybe some more batteries in the engine compartment if there's room. Putting batteries in the trunk might be okay too.
Things you'll probably need: a motor, a motor controller, a motor-transmission adapter plate of some kind, a coupler to attach the motor to the flywheel or transmission shaft, motor mounts, battery boxes, batteries, charger, battery management system, j1772 charge port (if in the U.S.), battery boxes, cabling, some assortment of contactors, fuses, and manual shut-off switches, a vacuum pump for the brakes, and so on.
In modern cars you might also need to figure out how to work around the car's electronics so that all the major systems function as expected.
I understand and sympathize with this sentiment, but…
… vehicle-state-aware and charging-station-state-aware navigation with auto-routing to Fast Charging is a massively beneficial feature for electric cars. Before I got my used Model S (2013, BTW), I had no idea how important this would be in eliminating range anxiety and enabling road trips, and I’ve had both a plug in hybrid Volt and a battery-electric (fast charging) Leaf which I’ve attempted to bring on road trips (a massive headache and cognitive burden is managing charge state and location of fast chargers, hoping it’s not broken at your destination…).
Tesla solved this fantastically well with the Supercharger network integration into in-car navigation. Anyone planning new EV infrastructure in the US should study and experience the Supercharger network (& attempt to do a similar trip in a non-Tesla EV) before making policy recommendations and decisions on EV infrastructure.
4h is the maximum reccomended to drive without a break.
I'd say 300 miles is just about right in terms of distance to force those like me to take a 30 min break.
Edit:
I'd go for cheaper at this stage. Also as low tech as possible.
At 70mph, your 300 mile range car is getting maybe 250-270, if it's 21C out. if it is colder or hotter, range does drop a bit to a lot. Dead of winter can get more like 150-175 miles range.
Then on top of it, for road trips, you often use the battery from 10-60.
Combine those two things, and your dead of winter BEV is needing to stop like every 100 miles.
But, thats like 5% of trips. most of the time this is vast overkill.
If you charge every night, 1000 cycles is about 3 years.
Then they have to be replaced. And there STILL ISN'T any system or process for recycling lithium (lab only, nothing deployed or near to deployment for 5-10 years best case).
Part of why I used lead acid batteries for my solar storage - it's cheap, ubiquitous and environmentally far more green than lithium because of the existent network for lead and lead-acid recycling. Plus if it doesn't move (it doesn't) the much higher weight isn't a problem.
1000 cycles in a 400 miles range electric car (Tesla sells one already, without this fancy battery) is 400,000 miles. Since this battery chemistry will enable longer range, let’s call it 500-600 miles, or 500,000 to 600,000 miles. That’s pretty high.
Also, it’s not true that lithium battery recycling is merely lab scale. Pilot plants, like those operated by Li-Cycle in Toronto, are well beyond lab scale. They’re also in the process of building commercial scale facilities as we speak, not “5-10 years best-case.”
Your argument may have been valid 5-10 years ago but isn’t today.
I'm not sure what counts as a cycle? Does say running it to 70% remaining for 10 days then recharge at night count as 10 cycles?
If so than the actual total lifetime max miles would be way shorter for most city people. Unless IDK if Tesla has a smart setting on their charger or something to maximize cycles at the risk of running out of range.
A full cycle means 0-100% (or roughly that). Charging 30% of your battery capacity counts as just 30% of a cycle in this case. And yeah, electric cars generally do daily cycling up to 80% capacity to extend capacity with 100% capacity being used for long trips.
From what I understood, a cycle doesn't equal a charging session. If you charge every night from 36% to 55% for example, it's not 1000 cycles in 3 years.
I charged my 7 years old EV a lot more than 1000 times and it still works fine.
> If you charge every night, 1000 cycles is about 3 years.
If you drain to 0% every day and charge back up to 100% every night it is. Another way you should think about 1000 cycles is that if you have a 300 mile range, it's 300,000 miles.
I'd just like to clarify - a charge cycle is when 100% of charge has been depleted and recharged, be that in ten cycles of 10%, four cycles of 25%, one cycle of 100%, or anywhere in-between. So charging every night won't kill your battery in three years unless you're fully depleting the battery every single day.
But yeah, agreed that we really need to figure out sustainable battery tech, because otherwise EVs are just punting the pollution problem down the road to our kids.
Because it's just noise that never gets anywhere. You get excited at the data/news, go check out the comments for discussion and find out 10 reasons why it's all bunk.
Batteries are better because of all those improvements.
>In fact, gains in the amount of energy [lithium-ion batteries] can store have been on the order of five percent per year. That means that the capacity of your current batteries is over 1.5 times what they would have held a decade ago… A study may identify a way to significantly improve one characteristic, generating an exciting top-line conclusion. But the design may be impractically poor in some other way. While battery researchers learn from what does and doesn’t work, this means that a lot of laboratory batteries you may read about will never hit the market…A recent study noted that “the real price of lithium-ion cells, scaled by their energy capacity, has declined by about 97 percent since their commercial introduction in 1991.” The early lithium-ion cells in the 1990s were around $3,000 per kilowatt-hour. By the early 2000s, that was nearer to $500 per kilowatt-hour.[1]
There are some heavy hitters as authors. Stan Wittingham is the co-inventor of the Li-ion battery and won the Nobel Prize, while Jun Liu is a legendary battery researcher in his own right.
Mark my words - battery range has to increase once more functionality is built into it, e.g. running house in times of power outages or extreme cold/hot or 6 hour trips that don't require a break on the highway. It's inevitable that an option will eventually take place and a subset of buyers with more spending power will pay for it.
There is a Chinese company doing this. Tesla unveiled the concept years ago but decided not to do it.
There are multiple reasons that battery replacement is not as good as it seems.
Charging stations can be built in more locations and more densely than battery swapping locations. This is because you need to store those batteries somewhere and there is more space and machinery involved in swapping. So you trade off queueing time for charging time. Charging stations are most likely cheaper to build and maintain because of the space and machinery requirements.
A battery swapping station is more vulnerable to supply imbalances. Charging stations meet demand at charging rate.
Charging stations can be more easily made universal. Unless you mandate a common battery form factor, that won’t be the case for battery replacement. This means that charging stations can scale with the whole EV industry.
Swapping introduces inefficiencies to the car. You need at least a little additional structure which is weight.
The below article does point to advantages but again not what may first expect: cheaper initial cost for car, off peak charging time. Also note the industry standards.
Today’s EVs are in some ways a hack. The energy contained in the battery is far less than in a tank of gasoline.
To achieve range, most EVs are more aerodynamic than your average ICE car. Towing a battery out back would be horrible for aerodynamics and thus horrible for range.
Furthermore, EVs achieve good EPA ranges by doing better in city driving where they can recover energy via regenerative braking. They do worse at highway speeds since air resistance increases superlinearly with speed. Towing something bad for aerodynamics at highway speeds would be doubly horrible.
Lithium batteries must be kept within a temperature range. Too hot and they combust because the liquid electrolyte is flammable. They generate waste heat when discharging. If you don’t get rid of that heat, your battery will combust. That is why EVs have heating and cooling systems for the battery. Your towed battery, if you are extracting power from it directly, will need that.
Phones deal with too much heat by shutting down or throttling CPU speed. Some EVs have crawl mode but not for excess heat AFAIK.
Just buy an EV with more range. I think the Chinese standards could allow for different amounts of energy contained by the battery. For example, you can use different battery chemistries with the same form factor (nickel vs iron).
In other words, there are additional costs borne by an EV with a towed battery beyond what you would have with an external battery pack for your phone.
Oh, another tidbit of understanding has to do with the size of the battery. Volume grows with the cube but surface area grows with the square. Therefore, a smaller battery would be easier to cool or may not need any cooling. A larger battery would need it. An EV car battery is a magnitudes larger than your cell phone battery.
It is supposedly why elephants have big ears. Cooling.
If everyone were driving new, perfectly maintained vehicles, this might work. But in the real world, an automated system that can move around huge battery packs, remove and install them correctly, and do so consistently and reliably with all the variability of regular people’s cars is an engineering nightmare. That type of system is already introducing a ton mechanical complexity and failure points, which is the opposite of one of the selling points of BEVs, lower maintenance cost and higher reliability.
The system has to work at basically 100% reliability for it to be realistic. If your gas car had a 1% chance of not being able to fill up, and you had to bring it into the shop to find out what part of a complex gas cap system wasn’t functioning properly, that’s probably not a car you would buy.
Then there is standardization. Distributing batteries based on the individual vehicle shape and size is hugely beneficial. Forcing it into a standard removable “pack” brick would reduce capacity, handling, etc. And are you going to regulate all cars use the same pack? Otherwise every car manufacturer would have to build out their own battery pack stations across the country and you would have to find your car brand station.
Also, the whole idea of driving your fuel down, then going and refilling it all at once is a very ICE vehicle thing. 90% of people use their cars for daily commuting between home and work/shopping/activities and back home. If your car refuels every night and you start each day with 300 miles of range, why would you need to stop anywhere to refuel? Obviously this doesn’t cover all scenarios, but the roadtrip is a pretty small use case.
63 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadBut energy storage and weight are in line with other batteries.
It might not double the range of a Tesla or Kia, but it won't be too far off. FWIW, the 360 Wh/Kg number is not far off the 400 number where flight apparently becomes interesting.
"What is new is the resilience of the battery. Historically, lithium-metal batteries have been plagued by premature death, with previous record holders accomplishing just 200 cycles before seeing significant drops in capacity. The chemistry developed by the PNNL team was able to maintain 76% of its initial capacity after 600 cycles, blowing the old record out of the water. There is still work to be done for sure, as currently used EV batteries typically last for around 1,000 cycles."
Interesting graphs here
https://electrek.co/2020/06/12/tesla-data-battery-degradatio...
At 350 watt-hours per kilogram a 200kWh battery is 570 kg + housing so feasible. Using a different battery chemistry for ultra high mileage models is probably a bad idea, but it is an option.
Currently the market is taking any range over low 300 miles and just making the car "cheaper".
And if one of them had physical temperature knobs and a small centre screen, id choose it regardless of the price difference.
Maybe350 miles with 600 cycles vs 300 miles w 1000 cycles...
Make it a standard DIN radio slot and you can put in whatever stereo you want - and upgrade it in 5 years when your car still works great but the Bluetooth standard has changed.
There are several safety justifications for electronics in new cars. ABS, airbags, seatbelt pretensioner, auto-braking, and arguably lane keeping. (Not to mention battery management system, traction control, etc.)
Also, vehicle-state-aware and charging-station-state-aware navigation with auto-routing to Fast Charging is a massively beneficial feature for electric cars. Before I got my used Model S (2013, BTW), I had no idea how important this would be in eliminating range anxiety and enabling road trips.
Wasn't aware of this. Regardless, it should be a standard that can connect to any din stereo.
> It is honestly irresponsible to drive a car without a wide-angle backup camera.
The only time my car goes into reverse is when I've just performed a full walkaround (backing out of driveway) or I've just ceased driving forwards and have my eyes tuned to the mirrors.
> Might as well toss the mirrors out while you're at it.
That's absurd.
My speculation is that this all stems from the enhances crash safety characteristics of new cars. The doors on new cars are pretty much a foot thick, windowsills and dash higher, A-pillars thicker on new vehicles. This steel marshmellow-man of a car does a great job of protecting the occupants from previously bone-rending impacts like the head-on offset collision, with the tradeoff that you can't see for shit out of them.
Enter ADAS. No manufacturer wants to see their incident rates go up due to crashworthiness-vs-drivability tradeoffs. Now that the tech is available, manufacturers are incentivised to put ADAS in everything they sell.
It could probably be done though if you really wanted to do it and have the time and money. The simplest thing on a front-wheel drive car is probably to tear out the engine and replace it with a motor, keeping the transmission. If you have a manual transmission, it would make that part easier.
Finding room for batteries can be tricky, but if you're only looking for 80km of range that simplifies things considerably. You might be able to put a battery box where the gas tank was, and maybe some more batteries in the engine compartment if there's room. Putting batteries in the trunk might be okay too.
Things you'll probably need: a motor, a motor controller, a motor-transmission adapter plate of some kind, a coupler to attach the motor to the flywheel or transmission shaft, motor mounts, battery boxes, batteries, charger, battery management system, j1772 charge port (if in the U.S.), battery boxes, cabling, some assortment of contactors, fuses, and manual shut-off switches, a vacuum pump for the brakes, and so on.
In modern cars you might also need to figure out how to work around the car's electronics so that all the major systems function as expected.
… vehicle-state-aware and charging-station-state-aware navigation with auto-routing to Fast Charging is a massively beneficial feature for electric cars. Before I got my used Model S (2013, BTW), I had no idea how important this would be in eliminating range anxiety and enabling road trips, and I’ve had both a plug in hybrid Volt and a battery-electric (fast charging) Leaf which I’ve attempted to bring on road trips (a massive headache and cognitive burden is managing charge state and location of fast chargers, hoping it’s not broken at your destination…).
Tesla solved this fantastically well with the Supercharger network integration into in-car navigation. Anyone planning new EV infrastructure in the US should study and experience the Supercharger network (& attempt to do a similar trip in a non-Tesla EV) before making policy recommendations and decisions on EV infrastructure.
Max speed limit (in UK) is 70mph.
300 miles battery is 4h
4h is the maximum reccomended to drive without a break. I'd say 300 miles is just about right in terms of distance to force those like me to take a 30 min break.
Edit: I'd go for cheaper at this stage. Also as low tech as possible.
At 70mph, your 300 mile range car is getting maybe 250-270, if it's 21C out. if it is colder or hotter, range does drop a bit to a lot. Dead of winter can get more like 150-175 miles range.
Then on top of it, for road trips, you often use the battery from 10-60.
Combine those two things, and your dead of winter BEV is needing to stop like every 100 miles.
But, thats like 5% of trips. most of the time this is vast overkill.
Get a Mach-E. It has physical controls! Oh, wait, its just a volume knob.
I don't know why noone uses physical controls for basic climate in EVs. Its the strangest thing to virtualize, IMO.
Then they have to be replaced. And there STILL ISN'T any system or process for recycling lithium (lab only, nothing deployed or near to deployment for 5-10 years best case).
Part of why I used lead acid batteries for my solar storage - it's cheap, ubiquitous and environmentally far more green than lithium because of the existent network for lead and lead-acid recycling. Plus if it doesn't move (it doesn't) the much higher weight isn't a problem.
Also, it’s not true that lithium battery recycling is merely lab scale. Pilot plants, like those operated by Li-Cycle in Toronto, are well beyond lab scale. They’re also in the process of building commercial scale facilities as we speak, not “5-10 years best-case.”
Your argument may have been valid 5-10 years ago but isn’t today.
If so than the actual total lifetime max miles would be way shorter for most city people. Unless IDK if Tesla has a smart setting on their charger or something to maximize cycles at the risk of running out of range.
I charged my 7 years old EV a lot more than 1000 times and it still works fine.
If you drain to 0% every day and charge back up to 100% every night it is. Another way you should think about 1000 cycles is that if you have a 300 mile range, it's 300,000 miles.
But yeah, agreed that we really need to figure out sustainable battery tech, because otherwise EVs are just punting the pollution problem down the road to our kids.
As the old adage goes -- fool me once..
>In fact, gains in the amount of energy [lithium-ion batteries] can store have been on the order of five percent per year. That means that the capacity of your current batteries is over 1.5 times what they would have held a decade ago… A study may identify a way to significantly improve one characteristic, generating an exciting top-line conclusion. But the design may be impractically poor in some other way. While battery researchers learn from what does and doesn’t work, this means that a lot of laboratory batteries you may read about will never hit the market…A recent study noted that “the real price of lithium-ion cells, scaled by their energy capacity, has declined by about 97 percent since their commercial introduction in 1991.” The early lithium-ion cells in the 1990s were around $3,000 per kilowatt-hour. By the early 2000s, that was nearer to $500 per kilowatt-hour.[1]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
Full paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00852-3
There are some heavy hitters as authors. Stan Wittingham is the co-inventor of the Li-ion battery and won the Nobel Prize, while Jun Liu is a legendary battery researcher in his own right.
You drive into a "battery station", a robot switches batteries underneath the car, done.
There are multiple reasons that battery replacement is not as good as it seems.
Charging stations can be built in more locations and more densely than battery swapping locations. This is because you need to store those batteries somewhere and there is more space and machinery involved in swapping. So you trade off queueing time for charging time. Charging stations are most likely cheaper to build and maintain because of the space and machinery requirements.
A battery swapping station is more vulnerable to supply imbalances. Charging stations meet demand at charging rate.
Charging stations can be more easily made universal. Unless you mandate a common battery form factor, that won’t be the case for battery replacement. This means that charging stations can scale with the whole EV industry.
Swapping introduces inefficiencies to the car. You need at least a little additional structure which is weight.
The below article does point to advantages but again not what may first expect: cheaper initial cost for car, off peak charging time. Also note the industry standards.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/china-ev-swappable-batter...
To achieve range, most EVs are more aerodynamic than your average ICE car. Towing a battery out back would be horrible for aerodynamics and thus horrible for range.
Furthermore, EVs achieve good EPA ranges by doing better in city driving where they can recover energy via regenerative braking. They do worse at highway speeds since air resistance increases superlinearly with speed. Towing something bad for aerodynamics at highway speeds would be doubly horrible.
Lithium batteries must be kept within a temperature range. Too hot and they combust because the liquid electrolyte is flammable. They generate waste heat when discharging. If you don’t get rid of that heat, your battery will combust. That is why EVs have heating and cooling systems for the battery. Your towed battery, if you are extracting power from it directly, will need that.
Phones deal with too much heat by shutting down or throttling CPU speed. Some EVs have crawl mode but not for excess heat AFAIK.
Just buy an EV with more range. I think the Chinese standards could allow for different amounts of energy contained by the battery. For example, you can use different battery chemistries with the same form factor (nickel vs iron).
In other words, there are additional costs borne by an EV with a towed battery beyond what you would have with an external battery pack for your phone.
It is supposedly why elephants have big ears. Cooling.
I guess in the long term an induction lane on the highway would make most sense then.
The system has to work at basically 100% reliability for it to be realistic. If your gas car had a 1% chance of not being able to fill up, and you had to bring it into the shop to find out what part of a complex gas cap system wasn’t functioning properly, that’s probably not a car you would buy.
Then there is standardization. Distributing batteries based on the individual vehicle shape and size is hugely beneficial. Forcing it into a standard removable “pack” brick would reduce capacity, handling, etc. And are you going to regulate all cars use the same pack? Otherwise every car manufacturer would have to build out their own battery pack stations across the country and you would have to find your car brand station.
Also, the whole idea of driving your fuel down, then going and refilling it all at once is a very ICE vehicle thing. 90% of people use their cars for daily commuting between home and work/shopping/activities and back home. If your car refuels every night and you start each day with 300 miles of range, why would you need to stop anywhere to refuel? Obviously this doesn’t cover all scenarios, but the roadtrip is a pretty small use case.