Is is very cool they have the ability to recycle old battery packs, but isn't the goal to have more lithium battery capacity available overall? Many people buy used cars only. If all electric vehicle batteries will be taken off the market after let's say 10 years. This will substantially impact availability of such vehicles for those people.
Let's take an imaginary model 3 that is 15 years old and it has 170k miles on the odometer. If it still works and the battery has somewhere in the region of 30%~50% capacity this is still a very usable vehicle for many people.
Battery prices are still falling @ 10-15% a year. In 10 years you would be able to replace old batteries with new batteries for cheap a $6000-7000 battery in 10 years will be $1500-2000 new only.
It can be extracted from the ocean, there are undeveloped known mineral deposits and you always expect there are unknown deposits to be found. Production will grow as demand grows, when there is lag because new sources take time to develop and proven demand is needed before someone spends a lot of money developing a new source there will be cost growth, when new sources, recycling, etc. develop, prices will drop.
In 20-30 years one of the alternatives (like sodium batteries, we'll never run out of sodium) aren't so unlikely to be found.
Indeed, and we already have research into using concentrated desalination brine to recover lithium from [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of desalination plants are positioned in Arabia [1], so we'd trade dependency on these dictatorships from oil to lithium.
Desalination plants are expensive to run (you either need a lot of energy or a lot of space for a solar evaporation plant) and create a lot of extremely toxic brine, which means you only want them when you don't have an alternative source of drinkable water.
Recovering lithium from the brine is essentially just using the waste these plants generate as part of their operation.
They certainly can be built elsewhere, however it's currently cheaper to import. It is very common to import when it's cheaper than producing domestically despite it having a history of problems like shortages and fluctuating costs. Helium and rare elements(which aren't very rare) are some examples. Rare earth mines were shutdown in countries when China started undercutting prices.
It would have done the world a lot of good, had the WTO, EU and US actually taken massive reaction to Chinese price dumping politics. Instead, all we got was a bit of verbal acrobatics.
For the same reason you "cannot" drill for gas in Germany: it's very hard to do something that someone else can do cheaper. It requires constant work against the market, either by tarifs or subventions. And desalination will always be cheaper if you have to do it anyway, because the (local) value of water is so high
There's a massive difference. You buy lithium once, and from then on it's cheaper to recycle it. If Arabia cuts off our supply, our current EVs are still useful.
OTOH you have to buy gasoline regularly. If supply gets cut off, current vehicles are scrap metal.
"we'll never run out of lithium" is the new "640k ought to be enough for anybody".
As we make lithium battery capacity more affordable, it gets applied more broadly, and the rate of use goes up. There is a very finite amount of any resource here on earth, and while we can get things more and more efficient, there will be a moment where we can no longer extract lithium (or other materials) required for battery production. Treating these as an endless resource is the same error we made with fossil fuels, just hopefully without as much climate change as a direct result...
What an odd claim, I haven't heard anybody say that we will "run out" of lithium, much less at a particular date.
More likely, we will stop more lithium extraction, and get most of it from recycling old batteries. 20 years from now is probably too soon for that, but 30-40 seems like it could be possible where we can circularized the lithium economy.
(Circularization assumes that per capita needs are not every increasing, and that population levels off, which seems likely to me but definitely not certain)
We ran out of easily extractable copper a long time ago. OTOH copper is available in hard to extract, highly diluted quantities pretty much every where. It's just a matter of price.
With how solar and wind electricity prices are still falling at similar rate. I think people don't realise how fast the move to electric is going to be as battery production keeps going up. Think about it just like pc gets cheap each year. Vehicles and fuels are also going to get cheaper as battery and electricity prices get cheaper
It all depends on supply, as well as safety. As long as we have an excess of supply of the materials needed to produce the batteries and the increased production doesn't lead to safety issues with the batteries (remember -- Lithium ion battery packs are essentially incendiary bombs under the right circumstances) then all will be fine. However current trends do not indicate continuing trends. If the switch to battery stored power occurs very quickly, there is potential for a price shock.
> Lithium ion battery packs are essentially incendiary bombs under the right circumstances
So is petrol for that matter - a Tesla Model 3 extended range battery pack stores 82kWh of energy, whereas a 60L tank full of unleaded is holding 570kWh of energy
Sure. When was the last time you had to store gasoline in your residence though? Do you have to manage fuel storage on your person to power devices? Does Amazon have to send you a box with petrol in it when you order a laptop? There is infrastructure around petrol and designated places to contain it and dispense it. We don't have that yet with battery power. Most people just ignore the X with the trash can on the device and dump batteries in the garbage. I don't know about you, but people where I live have to go out of their way to find a place to drop off their old batteries responsibly, and I think I am the only person I know who does.
The other thing people seem to underestimate is the how strong the used battery market is between repairs to another car, after market conversions of internal combustion cars and conversion back into stationary storage. Even the 24kWh of the Nissan Leaf battery pack, having suffered from say 20% degradation is still 20kwh of battery storage, more than a days worth for most households.
For example one of those original Leaf batteries will still fetch nearly £2000. The 40kWh and above much more because they open the possibility of re-batterying an original Leaf.
I mean you couldn't sell is warranted as a 20kWh pack. That much is true. But for most home stationary storage purposes I'm not sure how important the exact capacity is, things like shifting power use onto the low side of a dual rate tariff and maximizing the potential of roof top solar.
It depends on the use case. For time-shifting loads and playing power arbitrage, maybe not much. But in some cases having a few days of autonomy can be nice during a storm or ~freak~/"new normal" weather events. If you live in the US West, wildfires are increasingly common (and we're just getting started) and much of California is expected to have to learn to deal with rolling brownouts and blackouts for the next few years during the warm season while PG&E is upgrading and burying their sparkly infrastructure. And if you live in Texas, I guess you're just signed up to pay infinite dollars for power whenever the market demands it.
In a functional grid, each home shouldn't need its own battery system. But we've neglected ours for so long, both technically and politically, that there's no real hope in improving it in the short term, so homeowners can either take it into their own hands or just go without electricity a week or two out of the year.
In 2022, the auto jargon is still reminiscent of 20th century accounting and marketing.
With the rapid pace of innovation with battery technologies forecast, the lack of "modular powertrains/batteries" just means many EV's will be antiqued at an unacceptable rate, due to paltry range and archaic charge times. Upgrading battery packs and charging ports with modular design should be standard engineering in the 1st world.
The math to charge a battery with 500 miles of range in under 5 minutes is clear as day, but trickle charging standards just means inadequate infrastructure in a decade or so with their current rollouts.
Multi-cell charging means that in 2022, modern engineering could make multiple charging ports on EV's to lower charge times to 1st world standards. I'm not sure if dually's fill both tanks simultaneously, but aircrafts would not trickle fill their fuel tanks either. 350KW charging times 3 or 4 charge ports gets EV's in the ballpark for 21st century "value for time" without supercooling or anything fancy.
Uninteruptable power supply technology has existed for decades with perfect results. There is nothing stopping EV manufacturers from using different chemistries on the same vehicle either. The switchover is seemless.
And with certain chemistries, the EV industry still refuses to adopt "optimized 0%" and "optimized 100%" capacities to reduce degredation and extend the life of the batteries (2nd life uses for battery storage in other environments, etc). RV battery owners and home battery users already use the 20%/80% or 25%/75% discharge/charge cycles to protect their investments with some battery chemistries. EV manufacturers seem oblivious, with range taking a huge hit with responsible environmental stewardship and 1st world math in the real world. The can charge at constant rates with optimized 0% and optimized 100% too. The legs on many lithium-based technologies is already known.
EV jargon shows the generational divide with clarity. Indoctrinated into donkey cart math already makes EV's behind the curve in 21st century vocabulary and math.
The price increases have been because of supply and demand mismatches and speculation that happened because of Covid as production stabilises so will the prices. This is temporary aberration which should avg out over a decade.
It is difficult to predict markets fast, reliable and precisely enough to reliably beat them. It is certainly possible to predict markets and be good at it, people do it all the time
It's easy to predict the markets, just as it's easy to predict the weather.
I predict it will rain sometime in the next month at my address. I also predict that it will freeze hard in the same time period.
This is a useful prediction, given that I will be winterizing my yard today.
Making a prediction better than an expert's is hard. Useful predictions are often easy.
If my father in law decides to plant 1000 acres in wheat next year, he is making a prediction about the markets. Given the situation in Ukraine and with global climate, wheat prices are one of the most difficult to predict precisely. But he is a low cost producer compared to many, so he knows he is likely to make a profit whether the price is high or low. A precise prediction would be nice, but producers everywhere operate with imprecise but useful predictions all the time.
«Situation» in Ukraine is at mid-WWII level (1942), so plant the wheat. It will be tough to produce and export wheat in Ukraine for next two years at least.
Well, the covid/speculation shockwaves have affected many other goods, but I don't know any other asset that got to x15 in that timeframe. (maybe there are some others, I haven't tracked all of them tbh)
So I wonder if you can really rule out that the increase in demand for EV isn't the main factor in lithium's x15 price increase. And if it's the case, I don't see how battery prices could go down in the next decade, since increasing mining isn't spontaneous and demand is not going to decrease.
I'm definitely pro-EV. As soon as it's practical for us I'll get one. However, I do worry that there are so many dimensions to optimising EV batteries (degradation, fast charge / discharge, stability, temperature tolerance, weight, cubic volume and price) that we might not be able to find anything that really changes the game. By which I mean a doubling of capacity, so 200kwh easily in a car, by my maths that's what we need to keep a light van (3.5t say) busy for a whole shift. Or in my case to tow a caravan 300 miles.
The only thing preventing manufacturers from putting 200KWh in a full size van or truck is cost, and with battery cost reducing 90% per decade, that should not remain a barrier.
The cost drops of the last decade will likely not continue going forward. It is more likely that lithium ion batteries will end up kind of like Nickel-based rechargable batteries: a huge spurt in cost reduction as they become mainstream, then not much after that. Lithium ion chemistries have a few more cost reductions to go, but not another 90%.
Semiconductors spoiled us into thinking we could ride one technology idea down an exponential curve forever, but most technologies don't have that kind of progression. By the way, semiconductors didn't have that kind of progression either - chips from 10 years ago look very different than today's.
It's all about the experience curve. For every doubling in production, cost drops 10-25%. There are very few exceptions to this.
Nickel battery production has decreased as they're being replaced with Lithium batteries so they're no longer riding the experience curve.
Semiconductors have a relatively constant price per chip but a regularly decreasing price per transistor.
We need about 1000TWh for the clean energy transition, half for cars and half for the electrical. There might be better substitutes for the electrical grid, but cars are going to use something that looks a lot like a lithium-ion battery, like sodium ion.
So I figure we've got solid demand from our current 500GWh/year up until at least 32TWh/year or so, 6 doublings, which should lower the price by about 90%.
Look at the other side. Tesla's battery day announcement in 2021 promises 56% cost reductions in 4 years via 6 enhancements: silicon anodes, cobalt-free cathodes, dry electrode process, structural batteries, tabless electrodes, larger cells.
Only the dry electrode process is particularly innovative or risky, but the others still add considerable cost reductions. Not all of Tesla's innovations may pan out, but they're just one of many companies and Universities researching batteries, many of whom are more innovative than Tesla is.
I'm fully on board with you with Wright's law, but that's what we have some idea of demand for, but not what we can supply. Battery supply has a lot of constraints, and they will eventually lift, but not necessarily quickly.
Also, Tesla has a very spotty track record on predicting its own innovations (yes, even on battery design), so I wouldn't take that prediction too seriously.
It wasn’t a 15x price wing, but large commodity price swings aren’t that unusual. Oil briefly went negative due to COVID that’s larger than an infinite price swing.
Lithium is a very small input to batteries, by mass. I forget the exact number, but I think only a few percent by weight, and it's not a major part of the cost. There's also this breakdown:
I would expect battery prices to stall on their drop, or even rise a bit, in the next year or two, before dropping again massively in price. There has been a lot of supply chain disruption, and an absolutely massive increase in demand. But lots more production capacity is being built.
Small input by mass but already 50% of the battery cost, from your link
So if it does x15 in price, then battery goes x7.5 ? That’s still terrible for battery price
How much of the price of the battery is the raw lithium, and how much is the cost of manufacturing? For most technological goods the prices of raw inputs are almost irrelevant; you don't see chip prices going up because of the cost of raw silicon.
(Exception: solar panels, because those have the least processing over raw silicon and are therefore more price sensitive)
With the numbers on that chart, the relative molar masses of lithium and lithium carbonate, and assuming 160g metallic lithium per kWh, at current exchange rates, I got $132 per kWh.
Which is a surprise, but so is a x15 increase in a raw material cost.
Two things are happening here. One, we're bringing on much more Lithium production all around the world. The price increase is coordinating that, but people can also see the writing on the wall. There's plenty of innovation happening in Lithium mining and extraction.
The other thing is we're innovating in battery chemistry. It would not surprise me if Lithium were only one of many options in ten years, depending on the storage capacity and number of cycles needed per kg. Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt. Iron, aluminum, and others are a possibility, for stationary batteries where weight doesn't matter.
I know people here are very skeptical of every battery advance press release, and rightfully so. But nonetheless, some of that is going to pan out, and the world of energy storage is going to fundamentally change the economics for cars, airplanes, and grid storage within the next decade.
Is it likely that current cars would be compatible with batteries that are that different to not even be Lithium in 10 years?
If I look at say my laptop or phone, they definitely aren't compatible with newer batteries even if it's technically feasible so why would we expect cars to be?
It’s a software update to support different chemistries. This is how Tesla supports various pack types (Li, LFP, etc) across vehicles and stationary storage products.
Your car doesn't have to know about the "chemistry" of your battery. It just needs to know specifics about voltages and power draw and temperatures. This is what drivers do.
This is like suggesting that my computer can't go from AMD to nvidia because they would need to know deep specifics about AMD's proprietary chips to support them. But that's what drivers are for!
That’s because your video card sits on a standard well defined port. Where as charging an EV right now comes a bunch of plugs, voltages, charging times, etc. until a unified open standard is reached where you can go from super charging a Tesla to charging a sodium hyndai is reached, this whole ev dance will remain anti consumer.
It's "just" different charge profile; wouldn't need any hardware change.
Most chemistries can be charged using the same "constant current up to this voltage, constant voltage to the max voltage" method, just need to set the right values.
Yes, it is likely. As long as the form factor is well defined or standardized, new battery chemistries are self-contained. Think of, say, how rechargeable AA batteries can fit into standard alkaline AA slots.
The reason it's not true for laptops is that batteries aren't standard form factor sizes in laptops.
> new battery chemistries are self-contained. Think of, say, how rechargeable AA batteries can fit into standard alkaline AA slots.
You might notice that Li-Ion AA batteries CAN'T be charged by Ni-Cd or Ni-MH AA battery chargers. Even a smaller change like Ni-MH to Ni-Zn requires different equipment.
They were shoehorning V8's into miatas, well outside of the warranty period. Locked into obsolete engineering is a crutch/impediment, not innovation.
Seeing the 4G rollout was a good economic course in environmental pollution and abandonded psuedo-innovation. All of the older surplus 2G/3G/4G hardware and abandonded software was sold to developing countries. Now every device on tcp/ip has inferior muck with an out-of-date ecosystem.
Desktop computing had it right when the information superhighway still existed. Just install new hardware thats backwards compatible (the hardware was forward compatible by design).
The tabloid quality fodder and disposible commerce has always been 3rd world, much in the same way that tcp/ip evolved.
Anything for an inferior integer to stay relevant, huh? The environmental impact is someone elses problem :p
I'd bet a decent amount of money that most electric cars in the developed world will still use the Goodenough chemistry in ten years.
The theoretical energy density of sodium is too low for the weight, this isn't a matter of developing the technology.
What we can look forward to is sodium batteries becoming cheap and reliable, replacing every application of lead-acid, and most, perhaps all, stationary lithium. Great choice for house or grid-level storage, where the lower density is basically harmless.
Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around.
150Wh/kg is completely fine. A small vehicle with a 100kg battery can do 95% of what is needed for the average person (or as a second family car), it's just a matter of whether the trend of legislating sane vehicles out of existence continues.
> Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around.
This is absolutely not clear. Active lithium is just ~60g per kWh in a battery, or ~1% of the mass of a state of the art LFP battery. Even though sodium weighs 3.5 times more for the same charge, if it's use would allow just a few percent reduction in total weigh, either by reduction of inactive cathode material or some other source, it could easily beat lithium batteries.
Type of material decides on battery's energy density. It's just impossible for battery of "inferior" chemistry to get to same level of capacity.
There is a reason lead ones are not "just" heavy but also physically much bigger than same capacity lithium one.
What will (probably) happen if we get competitive sodium batteries is that they will phase out lithium from the stationary storage so there won't be that huge demand for lithium for everything. Or possibly they will become "cheap EV's battery"
Stationary storage will more like be taken over by iron batteries which are much cheaper. Sodium batteries will happen in cars because not everyone needs really long range.
Sodium is both heavier and less energetic, enough so that the equation points to a worse car: heavier than a car which goes substantially further.
Sodium cannot improve lithium by replacing it in batteries, for physical chemistry reasons which can't be negotiated.
I don't consider it likely that lithium will become so much more expensive that people will want their second-largest purchase, a car, to be inferior in the way that it must be with sodium batteries.
Rather more likely that cheap and good sodium batteries relieve pressure on lithium supply for the enormous amount of battery storage we need to handle intermittent renewables.
If a significant proportion of a lithium battery was lithium, this would absolutely be true.
By weight, something around 1% of a lithium battery is lithium.
Sodium is seen as an interesting alternative, because there are some indications that it can make that 99% that makes up the rest of the battery lighter. Even though sodium is ~3.5 times worse as a charge carrier, if it's use allows cutting enough weight from that rest, it can be a winner overall.
For example, aluminium is, for complex reasons, not compatible with every part of a li-ion battery, and so they use copper connectors internally, typically containing by weight at least 10 times as much copper as they contain lithium. Sodium batteries can use aluminum everywhere, which saves on not just cost, but also more in weight than the weight difference between equal molar amounts of sodium and lithium.
That all makes sense about the weight, and it will likely matter for airplanes. But it doesn't matter enough for cars.
LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are already used by Tesla and have a gravimetric energy density of 125 Wh/kg, much lower than Lithium-ion.
CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg. Even if that doesn't come to fruition, it's already higher density than what's being used in electric cars!
Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway. You might be able to drop weight in hazard protection systems. Battery cycle times are competitive with Lithium chemistry. Contrary to your prediction that it doesn't pencil out, I expect sodium-ion to completely displace Lithium batteries for use in electric vehicles because it pencils out so much better. It will just be so much cheaper and doesn't bottleneck on any materials as you scale up.
I hope for smaller vehicles as well. It's hard to separate "big" and "heavy" statistically because they are highly correlated, but in general, heavier vehicles means higher likelihood of fatality in a crash 1. I suppose we will be doing a natural experiment to tease out the difference over the years as heavy EVs become more commonplace and pedestrian fatalities continue to increase.
> It’s also about weight. Trucks today averaging around 5200 pounds -- that’s a jump of more than a half ton since 2000. And things get heavier as electric vehicles look to become our new normal.
> On average electric vehicles are 10 percent heavier than gas powered cars. For instance, the new electric Hummer weighs in at a staggering 9,100 pounds or more than 4 and a half tons. All that weight can have deadly consequences. Researchers have found that for every 1,000 pounds a car puts on, a pedestrian is nearly 50 percent more likely to die if they’re hit and the more a truck weighs the longer it will take to stop.
I dunno that "lighter cars" is a realistic thing to hope for at this point. I do hope to see better bumper crush zone designs, more protected bike lanes, blinking crosswalks, better in-vehicle collision detection systems, etc.
Even if a "lighter" car hits you, it's gonna be a bad day. Better to avoid the collision altogether, no? :)
I "hope" for lighter cars in the same way I "hope" we start taking necessary drastic measures to combat climate change, which is by knowing that it won't happen and advocating for change anyway.
On the other hand, I think maybe hoping that vehicles become no heavier than modern EVs is at least somewhat realistic.
>LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are already used by Tesla and have a gravimetric energy density of 125 Wh/kg, much lower than Lithium-ion.
Tesla uses iron phosphate in its cheaper models, but the high end is still reliant on NMC. I'd be interested to know the maximum range available on LFP.
BYD sells a lithium-iron-phosphate battery with an energy density of 150 Wh/kg. CATL's LFP is 125.
Also, a lithium-iron-phosphate battery is a lithium-ion battery, in that the electrolyte works by lithium ionic conduction. The appropriate contrast would be "lithium-nickel".
>CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg.
This is reported as the "single-cell" energy density, and is not directly comparable to the battery pack density.
>Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway.
Surely this isn't because of the stability of sodium, which anyone who watched that chemistry demonstration in high school knows, is significantly more reactive than lithium. I expect the risks to be similar; furthermore, the concept of a dense energy storage that has no risk of sudden release is physically unlikely.
> Tesla uses iron phosphate in its cheaper models, but the high end is still reliant on NMC. I'd be interested to know the maximum range available on LFP.
In theory 490 km, in practice, 380 km. Because they don't degrade as much, after a few years they are closer to what you call the high end models.
> Also, a lithium-iron-phosphate battery is a lithium-ion battery, in that the electrolyte works by lithium ionic conduction. The appropriate contrast would be "lithium-nickel".
Correct, I want to point out that John Goodenough was responsible for the basic research which lead to all lithium-ion batteries.
I explicitly intended LiFePO to be included, and I hope for a variety of reasons that it's much more popular than cobalt-heavy formulas in ten years.
They offer a lithium-nickel chemistry without cobalt. If it can be proven in practice, it would allow comparable density to the best car batteries in a scalable chemistry. The founder is a researcher at the University of Texas who wrote several papers on the chemistry:
Chlorine has lots of industrial uses, so I imagine you sell it. If you produce enough as a by product the cost will go insanely low.
If you had to dump it, you'd probably react it with something cheap to make it inert. This would generate energy, it's akin to combustion with oxygen. You could use that energy to decrease the energy requirements of splitting the NaCl in the first step.
For example, you could use it to turn calcium carbonate AKA limestone into calcium chloride, which is rather harmless. You would get carbon dioxide out of this.
At what concentration though? At what price does lithium extraction from Sea water become economically viable? It feels to me that this is an entropy problem.
AFAICT, Lithium extraction from sea water is economical at current prices. What's preventing its mass adoption is the certainty the prices will stay at current levels.
> Isn't lithium mineral the main cost in building these batteries?
No, and I have no idea why anyone would think that. Raw material costs are generally not that significant, most costs in manufacturing come from labor and capital.
The lithium in a $15000 75kWh battery pack costs around $1600 at current prices. There is a lot of room for the price to fall even with rising raw material costs, as manufacturing gets more efficient and capacity is built out.
And also, rising raw material prices will cause production to expand, which will eventually push prices back down.
That's not what the infograph tells you. It says that 50% of the battery cost comes from cathode materials, which is true for some chemistries, but even in those cases that's not because of lithium, but because of cobalt.
Which is precisely why the industry is moving to chemistries that don't use cobalt, pushing the materials price back down.
Also, lithium isn't the cathode, it's the anode. The cathode is primarily nickel (III) oxide, which is unstable and so stabilized with cobalt, aluminum and/or manganese.
Technically most Li ion batteries are created in the discharged state, with the lithium in the battery provided by the cathode at the time of construction, and then moved over to the LiC6 anode via charging.
Electric car production would have ground to a halt over the last 2 years in the face of a 15x increase in raw material costs if it accounted for 50% right? That doesn't seem to have happened.
First that wasn’t a 15x price swing, you read the chart incorrectly click on the 5 year view again. That said, Price shocks happened in both directions from COVID it’s just another supply disruption not any kind of a long term trend.
As to cost, it depends on chemistry but you need ~0.16kg of Lithium metal/kWh or 16kg for 100kWh battery pack. At current prices that’s ~1,300$ worth of lithium meaning the majority of battery pack costs are still from manufacturing and other materials.
November 2020: 40k$
Today: 562k$
Okay, 14x, not 15x
But yeah, on average if you look to previous price, maybe it's more of x8 price increase. 18 month ago was the all time low of the data on tradingview, I give you that.
About the weight details, are you sure your figures are correct? First result on google gives me way higher numbers (minimum 80g/kwh, but likely more than 160g/kwh) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-lithium-li-ion-vehic...
Also, another comment in this thread gives 60g/kwh, and another 160g/kwh
160g/kwh is 0.16kg/kWh… But yes, it varies based on chemistry. 0.16kg/kWh is on the high end but hardly the limit. There are a lot of different electrode options: Lithium Cobalt Oxide, Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminium Oxide, Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide, Lithium Manganese Oxide, etc
In general if you assume high lithium prices then we would expect lower lithium use per kWh given sufficient time for the manufactures to adjust.
NIO has a pretty cool battery swap tech which treats batteries like replenished fuel, over the course of the cars lifetime. The battery gets swapped many times depending on the charge levels and location.
I kinda wish Tesla would merge with them in China.
The car companies should standardize their batteries as well and provide market differentiation on how the car makes efficient use of the power. That would eliminate a lot of waste, kinda like the USB-C standard for mobile devices. EU needs to get on this.
Not sure about reliability of battery swapping. First thing is that one needs now 2 batteries per car while one battery is being charged somewhere. It’s technically hard problem to connect and disconnect 1000s of cycles coolant lines and thick wires to the very bulky and heavy object. While it works nicely in the demos with new cars it brings huge problems in the reality after couple years.
2 batteries per car is assuming everyone is charging at the same time. In reality there are people driving their cars while batteries are being charged and new batteries being built. The batteries charge time efficiency over time also plays a role as infrastructure scales.
I wouldn't be surprised if we will see this tech in the US soon. Especially after we get back to a somewhat normal business environment with China. Next election I hope. Consumers win when they have more choice.
I'd go as far as to say it doesn't make sense except as an exceptional process, a battery upgrade or replacement due to manufacturing fault. Moving 300kg+ batteries around is just not very sensible.
Maybe it might be possible for heavy plant machinery where removing the battery and transporting it to the charger is easier than transporting the machine back to the charge point.
There is a Nio battery swap station next to my nearest Tesla station (Lier South, Norway). No idea how well it works, but it certainly does work. According to Nio they had four million battery swaps in China by the end of 2021. Of course they don't say how many problems occurred.
I guess it depends on how expensive the recycling is. If you can do that fast & cheap then there is little point in making people drive around with 30% cars (plus people just won't want to)
Imho, if 10-15 year old electric cars have that kind of degradation then the switch to electric cars has been a huge failure. We have a huge opportunity to increase the service life of electric cars, among other things, to offset the higher initial environmental cost.
That's what concerns me the most. If cars become like long life computers. 8 to 10 year shelf life and then.. "oh we can't get an official battery replacement for that model anymore. Would you like an untrusted refurb battery we can't guarantee for more than 2 years?" Or even worse, sorry no more software security updates for that model. Best to upgrade.
This is one of those places where we need regulators so step up I think. The Nissan Leaf has been so thoroughly reverse engineered that people can transplant almost all of its components into another Leaf or even an ICE car.
However, there are so many cars coming out (particularly from startups with manufacturing in China) at the moment that it could quickly overwhelm the efforts of the limited number of car hackers to keep up. There should be a reasonable path to detailed specifications if / when manufacturers no longer are willing to supply a replacement battery.
Well that's what the tech can do right now. So while we wait for advances replacing and recycling just the battery is our best bet. At least that keeps the rest of the car (and thus its carbon print) in circulation.
A bit like I've kept my iphone for ~5 years now but did a battery refresh halfway through. Its the best option within constraint given
This is one of those cases where I think it's weird when people are so focused on cost. The environmental cost is extremely high to mine lithium and externalities aren't priced in to the price of lithium. We should be doing everything we can to reuse the lithium we've already mined.
I'm happy for you that cost is not something you need to focus on. For many people, they don't have as much savings or an income that is high enough for them to not focus on cost.
>Let's take an imaginary model 3 that is 15 years old and it has 170k miles on the odometer.
When the vehicle comes up for sale, a regular person could buy it for $x, or a gigafactory will buy it for $x, put a new battery in it and then sell it for $y.
Seems fine to me, and exactly what happens now if you buy a used vehicle as-is, or if an intermediary buy its, rebuilds the engine and trans, puts new tires on, etc. etc. and then sells it for cost+
> If it still works and the battery has somewhere in the region of 30%~50% capacity
Why do you think that the battery degrades that much? Do you change the engine and the transmission on your petrol car every three years when the warranty runs out?
EV battery lifetime has basically surprised everyone. They're lasting way longer than anyone expected. It seems this is mostly because most battery lifetime data was from 0-100% charge cycling, which is rare for most EVs, and cycling over smaller ranges with smaller duty cycles and slower charging (also the norm in EVs but rare in tests) makes a huge difference to lifetime (which was already known to some extent, but was not anticipated when EVs with large battery packs first came onto the market). In fact one of the reasons we don't have large-scale battery recycling at the moment is because there's still relatively few batteries even from this first generation which have reached the end of their life.
30%-50% loses for a well-used 15-year-old lithium battery seems reasonable. Depending on the charge/discharge cycles and depth of them, it can last a lot more or a lot less, see tables and graphs e.g. here:
I think you have a pretty big misunderstanding if you think that electric cars are driven like petrol cars where you always charge to 100% and then don't charge until the battery is at 0%.
Your link has a graph[1] that indicates that while using 75%-25% charging states, which is what most of the electric cars use by default, you would get 10 000 cycles and still retain 80% of the original capacity. On a 500km range electric car, like that hypothetical Tesla Model 3, that would be 80% capacity left after 2 500 000km. You can Google quite easily that there are for example Tesla Model S cars with over a million kilometers driven.
In fairness to the OP and your question, over the last 30 years, several brands of cars developed catastrophic engine and transmission problems in the first 100k miles and definitely 200k miles - and there are many irrational buyers that buy (or lease) new cars every 3-5 years or before 100k miles.
There are also buyers who are overwhelmed by simple maintenance (oil changes, brake maintenance, window regulator failure) that help get their cars into these states.
Luckily, evs require so much less maintenance, even these buyers are likely to be surprised.
>"all electric vehicles will be taken off the market after let's say 10 years"
>"in the region of 30%-50% capacity"
Why are we saying 10 years? Why are we in the region of 30% capacity?
I'm so curious why you'd invent such pessimistic numbers... I am hoping there is a beneficent reason for the choice..
But to inject a frame of reality in your imagining, my 2012 Nissan leaf has worse battery chemistry than modern EVs, has been left for up to 6 months off the charger, charged fully to 100% it's entire life, and still maintains 83% of original capacity a decade later.
Can you share your reference? They only went 73 miles brand new... And they never went 73 miles at highway speed, if that's what you are referring to..
In fact, out of spec motoring channel recently bought the cheapest EV in the country, a $3.5k 2012 leaf with a broken charger, and they were able to get 53 miles out of it at a constant 72mph indicated.
Yes, Nissan went cheap and did not provide any cooling system for their batteries. The first gen batteries ended up being degraded by the heat and lost range. Nissan did change to a different chemistry that was less sensitive to temperature but they never added a cooling system. (Their new Ariya EV does have an active cooling system).
Most other EVs, even of that era, had a cooling system and their batteries have been lasting for many years.
I would go even further and say we need a massive conversion program of existing ICE cars into electrics instead of scrapping a billion perfectly usable cars.
The body, the steering system, suspension, wheels, passenger area, brakes and electronic stability systems etc. they can be used for another 20 years.
A 15kWh conversion kit will turn all these clunkers into perfectly usable daily drivers.
It is almost certain at this point that current EV battery chemistry is going to be obsolete within 10 years, and there is a good chance that all lithium ion batteries today will be considered a safety hazard before then as well. It's not clear when that will happen, nor what the winning chemistry will be, but I think its a pretty safe bet that we will not be scaling today's LiIon batteries 10 years down the road from now.
You are unlikely to need to retire a 10 year old EV. Aside from the early Nissan Leafs, EV batteries are easily lasting more than 10 years. That gives you several years on the used car market. Remember that by 12 years, half of ICEVs are scrapped.
There have been pilot projects that take batteries from EVs where the range has dropped too far to be useful and put those into stationary installations. The batteries are used in buildings to store power from solar panels.
One problem cited by people working on recycling batteries is that the batteries are lasting a lot longer than initial estimates and the number of batteries that have degraded significantly or have failed outright is rather small. It’s hard to setup a reuse or recycling industry if the supplies are so small.
As more cars get to be 10, 15, or more years old, more will degrade to where they are no longer fit for vehicle service or the batteries will fail. That will feed back into the resume/recycle processes.
"Dark Satanic Mills" comes from William Blake's Jerusalem (poem to green and pleasent lands lost). At the time (early 1800s) Manchester was the cotton mill capital of the world - Britain was China, America and Saudi rolled into one, and people were moving from farmlands into the cities and factories.
The abuse was horrific- health and safety was a joke (this was the age pushing for making it illegal for kids to work in factories (cleaning behind moving engines, losing limbs), sexual predation from capitalist owners was rampant (you think Hollywood was bad), and the usual financial exploitation.
Combine with coal soot and Dark Satanic Mills is a good term.
Although Blake was more concerned about people losing their "natural" state because he barely was aware of the abuses in detail and he was middle class and worried about the loss of innocence that educated urban middle classes always worry about - the loss of an idealised non-existent state. People left farms for good reasons.
The external dependency of the petrol car is the production of petrol. Huge amounts of global state focus goes on making sure there is a garage near you selling petrol at a "reasonable" price. I mean wars, repression, pipelines that have their own countries and armies, vast ships across oceans, bending millions of people globally to the needs of us users - "the spice must flow" is a very apt phrase.
Something I do not hear much about but must be hitting military thinkers around the world is ... what happens when EV really takes over.
A tesla powered off my roof can take me to the local supermarket but can you drive a main battle tank on Lithium ? How long does the recharge take from solar cells? How do we fly a helicopter when the only people doing fracking are doing it for military?
Who runs a oil refinary just for the US Navy? And what if the US Navy decides not to sell you their oil from the only working refinary?
The impact on mechanised warfare of the change to EV is something I don't hear much about.
The point is that once everyone is in an EV car, your traditional car hits all those problems. At some point the western world will think "phew we can stop paying Saudi and just drive EVs from our solar cells" - and the whole fucking thing collapses. That's somewhere around 75% of cars being EV.
Surely once energy is practically free due to harnessing solar, wind and ocean energy it’ll be cheaper to create hydrogen. Surely military vehicles can be transformed to run on hydrogen.
At the price a liter of any fuel gets at the end of the supply chain, a lot of things become economically viable: beamed energy from space, for instance. One advantage of this is that, contrary to liquid fuel or solar panels or even portable nuclear reactors, the enemy cannot capture your source of power (unless the war reaces space, of course)
Why? I mean apart from the vast costa of such installations they are really flammable targets.
Imagine a world where oil stops being sold to the Western world - we have enough EV and solar to keep ourselves happy. Say 2040. And then imagine how Saudi and Iranian armed forces will think - those armies have petrol powered tanks and aircraft. And they have oil wells and refineries in their countries borders. If we blow up the refineries then they won't threaten us anymore. Now add in domestic resistance to the regiemes who see the same calculus.
Once the money stops flowing in the oil will be blown up by someone and quickly.
We can imagine anything, but there is no alternative in sight to fossil fuels when weight (aviation) or total energy capacity (freight naval fleet) are decisive factors.
We are yet to see EV trucks adoption, it is too early to talk about other more demanding uses.
This is kind of my point. We can see a future where domestic transport (on domestic roads) and domestic heating and cooling and light industrial power is solar / wind. I mean it's a lot of solar cells on a lot of roofs but it seems to be a snowball right now.
And that accounts for something like 50% of western energy use or more. And yeah there is no replacement for a fuel burning jet engine for an F35. Right now or even decades out.
So what happens to global oil production if half the customers just go away. I don't think the answer is "same as previously just double the price to compensate".
The issue is that the supply chain can / might / will collapse, become more fragile, less reliable etc. States will accept interruptions in oil production if their hospitals can keep running and their citizens keep warm. So that means that the hyper focus on armed support of the global oil industry goes away - and that changes global politics.
Predicting what happens after this 50% ish tipping point is a fools game but something big happens - and that leads to all sorts of effects.
More drones? More missiles and less fighters? I don't know. But there is a new equilibrium and we are probably only guessing what the levers are
>"phew we can stop paying Saudi and just drive EVs from our solar cells"
Umm, there are many other components to solar, wind and EVs that don't magically start getting produced in your backyard. Not having to buy crude from Saudi Arabia is something the US could do tomorrow, if they wanted to. There are tons of reserves in the US and Canada.
The drive train of an electric car will probably last much longer than a complex combustion engine.
Add to that, that you pay much less per kilometer/mile for the electricity than you pay for gasoline/diesel.
The battery might be the weak point currently, but with faster charging (already today you can charge 80% full in 30 minutes) it will be a non-issue. You could then live with lower capacity batteries. And as battery prices go down you could most likely in 10 years replace your battery for much less than today.
We can look at metro trains especially, and see they can run for 20, 30, even 40 years, often for 20 or more hours a day, continually accelerating and decelerating. Some in London travel further in a year than a typical petrol car in its whole lifetime: https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/eye-watering-dist...
Cars have much bumpier roads and less professional maintenance, and batteries, but at least the motors etc aren't something to worry about.
You believe there is a group of "TSLAQ incels" who collectively decided to start posting anti-EV comments on Hacker News in response to Musk purchasing Twitter? Sounds like a pretty crazy conspiracy theory. I like it, please expound on all the data you have collected and all your theories about this hilarious^Wdangerous group. Secret handshake? Connections to the Anti-Pope and zombie Queen Elizabeth II?
I don't think it's so much a conspiracy as the FUD is very effective, so it sticks around in people's head and keeps coming out, especially if they're not very clued up on the subject.
You are underestimating the life time expectancy of EV Batteries and the availability of charging stations. A holiday trip over in the northern countries in Europe (Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway) of around 3500 kilometers is very, very doable. There are charging stations everywhere. Even at remote mountain stations. Granted these countries are at the forefront of the EV car transition. Electrifying transportation is possible. Just as we were able to build a massive oil-infrastructure, we will and are able to build the necessary electric and battery infrastructure. Even in remote areas. You build charging stations with wind and/or solar power and a battery. That's it. It doesn't even need to be connected to the grid. They are already being build in Africa like this (and also provide power to local villages). They cost money to build of course, but the business model is there.
> we will and are able to build the necessary electric and battery infrastructure. Even in remote areas.
It's even better than that. The by far most expensive part –connecting the power source – has already been done. All you need is build a charger. You don't need fuel deliveries so it's in fact a huge logistics simplification.
As an exercise, try the Tesla Go anywhere tool ( https://www.tesla.com/trips ). Note that this is only using Tesla charging stations which are merely a small part of the whole network. But a very convenient part. You plug in for 25 minutes and do a bathroom or lunch break or go shopping or watch a short movie - typically possible since the stops are at convenient locations for that.
Remember that you never need to think about any of this. You tell the car where to go and it will plan all the required stops for you.
If you're traveling with a family, yes, it will likely take 10 minutes or more. And as I said it's not just the bathroom, you just take a break. Get a sandwich.
Having used an EV for some time now, I don't want to buy one that charges much faster. Once the charging is complete you quickly have to leave the charging spot, because there are fees. So you don't want to be stuck in a queue at the bathroom or shop.
In any case, new chargers have improved to 250 kW and 350 kW is coming, so charging times can be down to 10-15 minutes if the car supports it. And let's remember that most people only need this for long trips, such as going on vacation. I never charge on a public charger day to day. I have not charged anywhere except at home for many months now.
It's easy to imagine from some tech-utopian perspective, but scaling that up isn't straight-forward, and we don't know how the business or subsidization should work, or how much infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. Remember, EVs are far heavier than equivalent ICEs.
> Remember, EVs are far heavier than equivalent ICEs.
So, what's your point? They are heavier, but that weight is recuperated. Unlike ICE cars the distance they travel does, for example, not depend significantly on load.
Dealing with the irrationality of people will certainly be a an issue in EV adoption. People want things they will never use, like 5 seats in a car they know is a second car which will be used 99% of the time with one or two occupants. 400 mile range on a car which rarely travels 40 miles etc.
If we could trim peoples requirements to a reasonable worst case rather than a "what if" we could save a huge amount of energy and environment impact.
And so we make 5 seater EVs with 350 mile range. Even the Chevy bolt has a 260 mile range. Due to federal safety standards, I doubt we'll see mass market cars with 50 mile range for years and years, despite the lower battery requirements leading to a much smaller and lighter vehicle. A two seater a la the smart car as the family's second car for the day-to-day trips.
These ranges are only the case when you get them out of the factory, in ideal conditions. In 5 years, on a cold winter's day, you will not get that range.
> if I need to help a distant relative, go on holiday, or whatever, with petroleum I can achieve my simple objective.
Yeah, maybe not right now, but EVs are at 1% roughly in the US, so obviously the charging network is going to be a lot better. In fact, all you need is a fixed charging station (no fuel deliveries) since everyone is already connected to the grid, so that would not be a problem unless you plan on taking 400+ miles trips in uninhabited regions.
> time to waste charging up
Today you get roughly 200 miles from a 20 min charge with tesla supercharger, seems like a non-issue if stations are ubiquitous. The government should imo force tesla to standardize connectors and high power charging (this is critical infrastructure, stop playing walled garden). Anyway, that's a smaller kink to iron out.
> The loss of battery, the expense of replacement (it costs the same as the car)
New tech, we're already seeing heavy YoY price reductions. Plus lots of the perceptions of price comes from tesla which isn't a cheap-tier car. Not disagreeing fully, time will tell what the lifecycle costs will end up for a Prius-like EV.
> I honestly see electric cars as a non-starter.
Shit, I have my criticisms too, but non-starter? I mean, I get it that today it doesn't make sense for everyone, but clearly there's a lot of progress in the right direction, on all relevant axes.
>Today you get roughly 200 miles from a 20 min charge with tesla supercharger, seems like a non-issue if stations are ubiquitous.
I'm very interested in what this will actually look like. 20 minutes may not seem long every 200 miles for an individual person. But it's far larger than the equivalent gasoline fueling, which might take, what? 10 minutes per 400 miles?
There were National Parks that had to close this year due to too much traffic. Will 20 minutes per person provide the throughput? Will we have massive parking lots filled with chargers? Can the localized infrastructure handle that? What does this look like in practice?
1. It's way easier to install 100 chargers at a service station than it is to install 100 petrol pumps.
2. Lots of people can charge at home and will almost never charge anywhere else, so there will be fewer people wanting to charge there anyway. Maybe not at very sparsely populated American states but they surely have space for huge charging car parks anyway?
Each physical “charger” comes off a truck and the concrete foundation is trivial, of course. No limiting factors there.
The infrastructure to route sufficient power and energy to the site? Massive. Think in terms of a small town or aluminum smelter suddenly popping into being on a random street-corner. Every upstream electrical distribution component must be questioned and possibly upgraded.
Once the low-hanging fruit are gone, possible locations will get harder and harder to find.
Source: a friend who manages the physical installation of car charging stations.
It's pretty clear by now that there will be three types of charging:
1. Medium fast charging at home. Most people will do that. No problems with infrastructure, especially if combined with solar.
2. Slow charging on basically every parking spot at the side of the road in cities. Most people living in apartments will do that. This already exists, it's not a problem. It also means that most trips can now be done with just 50-75% of the range because the car will be able to recharge at the destination.
3. Superchargers for cross-country trips. These will become more expensive and even faster. Most people will use them on holidays.
Yes, the biggest issue is grid support and energy production. In total, if all daily driving was replaces with EVs overnight, it would increase electricity demand by ~25% total (or ~80% in residential use).
Still, expanding the grid is a no-brainer, because everyone who comes off petrochemicals are going to need electrification. So, if you can't expand the grid (slowly over time) you have bigger problems.
> 20 minutes may not seem long every 200 miles for an individual person.
Not only should it not seem long, but biologically all research shows it being meaningfully unhealthy to not get out of a static position for a longer break more often.
These types of trips are also the 5% exception (as opposed to the 95% errands and weekly errands)
> There were National Parks that had to close this year due to too much traffic.
Zion has had too much traffic for almost 50 years. IMO national parks are better enjoyed on ebikes and public transit - to get to the trailheads.
> The loss of battery, the expense of replacement (it costs the same as the car), mean that these are disposable travel options - with a lifespan of around 10 years max.
Then buy a Nio. Nio has designed their packs to be swappable so you can both charge and swap:
You don't need to own a plane so you can fly a couple of times a year. You don't need to own dinosaur juice fueled car so you can drive an uncomfortably long distance in one leg a couple of times a year.
A completely reasonable option is to own an EV that covers the vast majority of your needs and rent the one or two times a year you require more.
>You don't need to own dinosaur juice fueled car so you can drive an uncomfortably long distance in one leg a couple of times a year.
This is so out of touch with mainstream America and will never happen.
The ability to get in my car and drive where I want to, when I want to (perhaps even away from a natural or man-made disaster) is a freedom that me or many others will not allow ourselves to lose. The idea of having to ask permission to travel outside some radius is unfathomable.
The batteries will typically last longer than the car. Especially LFP batteries, such as the Tesla Model 3 has. More than enough range and LFP batteries are expected to last 3000 cycles or more (more than one million kilometers).
The car-shaped form factor exists because we can't fit a working internal combustion engine into anything else, realistically.
But 99 percent of the time, people don't need the whole car. An electric kick scooter is more than enough, if there was somewhere to ride it that wasn't dangerous due to cars.
Economics will eventually fix this problem and infrastructure will match what people actually want.
My understanding is this is completely expected given that lithium is expensive to mine. Regular lead based car batteries are recycled at like 99% rate IIRC. Recycling works best when the waste has a market value, which is clearly the case here. A more interesting question would be whether they're paying market price for the minerals.
I decided to wade through the comments to see if this article was in fact as not-news to me as it was to someone else.
I'm not trying to be drab on the article, nor people who found it to be something new that they just learned.
I will echo your sentiment and add that lead is also listed legally as a "hazardous substance" here in the US which means that incentivizing it to be recycled is the most economical while also being ecological.
It also works best when the valuable thing is collected in nice big amounts like it is for car batteries. I imagine the lithium in coin cell batteries is not recycled at anywhere near the same rate!
If it's as efficient as plastic recycling there's little benefit
Recycling is not a 0 or 1 operation, the rate is not as high as people think, and there are other hidden impacts (energy, resources used by factories, transports, etc)
This is what's nice about standard sizes like 18650 and 21700, There's enough demand to recycle them. With lipo cell pouches (what's in most electronics these days), this is not the case.
Some recycling may involve disassembling and grading cells for usage in lower current draw applications. Lot's of things with great batteries in them get thrown out everyday.
I remember one of the co-founders of Tesla left it to start a battery recycling company. It was clearly the way to go for him, and I reckon Tesla wants to do that as well. Maybe he's working on that problem for them in a way.
That's an awesome profile and article into his Redwood venture. Seems like he really cares about climate change and improving our odds against it through this.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadLet's take an imaginary model 3 that is 15 years old and it has 170k miles on the odometer. If it still works and the battery has somewhere in the region of 30%~50% capacity this is still a very usable vehicle for many people.
The question is "how much will lithium cost?"
It can be extracted from the ocean, there are undeveloped known mineral deposits and you always expect there are unknown deposits to be found. Production will grow as demand grows, when there is lag because new sources take time to develop and proven demand is needed before someone spends a lot of money developing a new source there will be cost growth, when new sources, recycling, etc. develop, prices will drop.
In 20-30 years one of the alternatives (like sodium batteries, we'll never run out of sodium) aren't so unlikely to be found.
Indeed, and we already have research into using concentrated desalination brine to recover lithium from [0]. Unfortunately, a lot of desalination plants are positioned in Arabia [1], so we'd trade dependency on these dictatorships from oil to lithium.
[0] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/em/c8em0...
[1] https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/desalination/worlds-large...
Recovering lithium from the brine is essentially just using the waste these plants generate as part of their operation.
OTOH you have to buy gasoline regularly. If supply gets cut off, current vehicles are scrap metal.
As we make lithium battery capacity more affordable, it gets applied more broadly, and the rate of use goes up. There is a very finite amount of any resource here on earth, and while we can get things more and more efficient, there will be a moment where we can no longer extract lithium (or other materials) required for battery production. Treating these as an endless resource is the same error we made with fossil fuels, just hopefully without as much climate change as a direct result...
Thats… 200 MWh per person worth of lithium.
Or energy storage equal to 200 tons of TNT.
Unlike fossil fuels it is not consumed and will be recycled.
In short, there’s a few orders of magnitude of more lithium around than anyone will ever need. It all comes down to price of extraction.
Taking enough out of the oceans for everybody to have a Tesla won’t even take 0.1% of what’s there.
More likely, we will stop more lithium extraction, and get most of it from recycling old batteries. 20 years from now is probably too soon for that, but 30-40 seems like it could be possible where we can circularized the lithium economy.
(Circularization assumes that per capita needs are not every increasing, and that population levels off, which seems likely to me but definitely not certain)
The safety part seems to be completely ignored. I would not want to have around me a 10 year old battery pack.
So is petrol for that matter - a Tesla Model 3 extended range battery pack stores 82kWh of energy, whereas a 60L tank full of unleaded is holding 570kWh of energy
— it burns for a long time - it resists suppression
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_device
If you want gasoline to meet the definition you have to make napalm out of it.
And disposal of car batteries will never be an issue. Even the smallest and most degraded of Nissan Leaf batteries is worth $2000 or so.
https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/pdf/0722/The-Future-of-Copper_...
For example one of those original Leaf batteries will still fetch nearly £2000. The 40kWh and above much more because they open the possibility of re-batterying an original Leaf.
This is not quite true. The failure rate and capacity decline dramatically incr
In a functional grid, each home shouldn't need its own battery system. But we've neglected ours for so long, both technically and politically, that there's no real hope in improving it in the short term, so homeowners can either take it into their own hands or just go without electricity a week or two out of the year.
With the rapid pace of innovation with battery technologies forecast, the lack of "modular powertrains/batteries" just means many EV's will be antiqued at an unacceptable rate, due to paltry range and archaic charge times. Upgrading battery packs and charging ports with modular design should be standard engineering in the 1st world.
The math to charge a battery with 500 miles of range in under 5 minutes is clear as day, but trickle charging standards just means inadequate infrastructure in a decade or so with their current rollouts.
Multi-cell charging means that in 2022, modern engineering could make multiple charging ports on EV's to lower charge times to 1st world standards. I'm not sure if dually's fill both tanks simultaneously, but aircrafts would not trickle fill their fuel tanks either. 350KW charging times 3 or 4 charge ports gets EV's in the ballpark for 21st century "value for time" without supercooling or anything fancy.
Uninteruptable power supply technology has existed for decades with perfect results. There is nothing stopping EV manufacturers from using different chemistries on the same vehicle either. The switchover is seemless.
And with certain chemistries, the EV industry still refuses to adopt "optimized 0%" and "optimized 100%" capacities to reduce degredation and extend the life of the batteries (2nd life uses for battery storage in other environments, etc). RV battery owners and home battery users already use the 20%/80% or 25%/75% discharge/charge cycles to protect their investments with some battery chemistries. EV manufacturers seem oblivious, with range taking a huge hit with responsible environmental stewardship and 1st world math in the real world. The can charge at constant rates with optimized 0% and optimized 100% too. The legs on many lithium-based technologies is already known.
EV jargon shows the generational divide with clarity. Indoctrinated into donkey cart math already makes EV's behind the curve in 21st century vocabulary and math.
So, what makes you think battery prices are going to continue falling ? Isn't lithium mineral the main cost in building these batteries ?
I predict it will rain sometime in the next month at my address. I also predict that it will freeze hard in the same time period.
This is a useful prediction, given that I will be winterizing my yard today.
Making a prediction better than an expert's is hard. Useful predictions are often easy.
If my father in law decides to plant 1000 acres in wheat next year, he is making a prediction about the markets. Given the situation in Ukraine and with global climate, wheat prices are one of the most difficult to predict precisely. But he is a low cost producer compared to many, so he knows he is likely to make a profit whether the price is high or low. A precise prediction would be nice, but producers everywhere operate with imprecise but useful predictions all the time.
So I wonder if you can really rule out that the increase in demand for EV isn't the main factor in lithium's x15 price increase. And if it's the case, I don't see how battery prices could go down in the next decade, since increasing mining isn't spontaneous and demand is not going to decrease.
There are a lot of reasons that would reduce the cost of batteries even if the mining+processing of Li didn't grow (which it will).
Semiconductors spoiled us into thinking we could ride one technology idea down an exponential curve forever, but most technologies don't have that kind of progression. By the way, semiconductors didn't have that kind of progression either - chips from 10 years ago look very different than today's.
Nickel battery production has decreased as they're being replaced with Lithium batteries so they're no longer riding the experience curve.
Semiconductors have a relatively constant price per chip but a regularly decreasing price per transistor.
We need about 1000TWh for the clean energy transition, half for cars and half for the electrical. There might be better substitutes for the electrical grid, but cars are going to use something that looks a lot like a lithium-ion battery, like sodium ion.
So I figure we've got solid demand from our current 500GWh/year up until at least 32TWh/year or so, 6 doublings, which should lower the price by about 90%.
Look at the other side. Tesla's battery day announcement in 2021 promises 56% cost reductions in 4 years via 6 enhancements: silicon anodes, cobalt-free cathodes, dry electrode process, structural batteries, tabless electrodes, larger cells.
Only the dry electrode process is particularly innovative or risky, but the others still add considerable cost reductions. Not all of Tesla's innovations may pan out, but they're just one of many companies and Universities researching batteries, many of whom are more innovative than Tesla is.
Also, Tesla has a very spotty track record on predicting its own innovations (yes, even on battery design), so I wouldn't take that prediction too seriously.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCOILWTICO/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/20/investing/oil-prices-negative...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...
I would expect battery prices to stall on their drop, or even rise a bit, in the next year or two, before dropping again massively in price. There has been a lot of supply chain disruption, and an absolutely massive increase in demand. But lots more production capacity is being built.
(Exception: solar panels, because those have the least processing over raw silicon and are therefore more price sensitive)
Which is a surprise, but so is a x15 increase in a raw material cost.
The other thing is we're innovating in battery chemistry. It would not surprise me if Lithium were only one of many options in ten years, depending on the storage capacity and number of cycles needed per kg. Sodium is a likely candidate, and it's as cheap and available as salt. Iron, aluminum, and others are a possibility, for stationary batteries where weight doesn't matter.
I know people here are very skeptical of every battery advance press release, and rightfully so. But nonetheless, some of that is going to pan out, and the world of energy storage is going to fundamentally change the economics for cars, airplanes, and grid storage within the next decade.
If I look at say my laptop or phone, they definitely aren't compatible with newer batteries even if it's technically feasible so why would we expect cars to be?
This is like suggesting that my computer can't go from AMD to nvidia because they would need to know deep specifics about AMD's proprietary chips to support them. But that's what drivers are for!
Most chemistries can be charged using the same "constant current up to this voltage, constant voltage to the max voltage" method, just need to set the right values.
The reason it's not true for laptops is that batteries aren't standard form factor sizes in laptops.
You might notice that Li-Ion AA batteries CAN'T be charged by Ni-Cd or Ni-MH AA battery chargers. Even a smaller change like Ni-MH to Ni-Zn requires different equipment.
Seeing the 4G rollout was a good economic course in environmental pollution and abandonded psuedo-innovation. All of the older surplus 2G/3G/4G hardware and abandonded software was sold to developing countries. Now every device on tcp/ip has inferior muck with an out-of-date ecosystem.
Desktop computing had it right when the information superhighway still existed. Just install new hardware thats backwards compatible (the hardware was forward compatible by design).
The tabloid quality fodder and disposible commerce has always been 3rd world, much in the same way that tcp/ip evolved.
Anything for an inferior integer to stay relevant, huh? The environmental impact is someone elses problem :p
The theoretical energy density of sodium is too low for the weight, this isn't a matter of developing the technology.
What we can look forward to is sodium batteries becoming cheap and reliable, replacing every application of lead-acid, and most, perhaps all, stationary lithium. Great choice for house or grid-level storage, where the lower density is basically harmless.
Batteries are such a major component of an electric car that there's a sort of Rocket Equation which applies: a sodium car with the same range as a lithium one would have to carry so much more battery that one would have to add substantially more just to move the extra weight around.
This will never pencil out.
This is absolutely not clear. Active lithium is just ~60g per kWh in a battery, or ~1% of the mass of a state of the art LFP battery. Even though sodium weighs 3.5 times more for the same charge, if it's use would allow just a few percent reduction in total weigh, either by reduction of inactive cathode material or some other source, it could easily beat lithium batteries.
There is a reason lead ones are not "just" heavy but also physically much bigger than same capacity lithium one.
What will (probably) happen if we get competitive sodium batteries is that they will phase out lithium from the stationary storage so there won't be that huge demand for lithium for everything. Or possibly they will become "cheap EV's battery"
Sodium cannot improve lithium by replacing it in batteries, for physical chemistry reasons which can't be negotiated.
I don't consider it likely that lithium will become so much more expensive that people will want their second-largest purchase, a car, to be inferior in the way that it must be with sodium batteries.
Rather more likely that cheap and good sodium batteries relieve pressure on lithium supply for the enormous amount of battery storage we need to handle intermittent renewables.
By weight, something around 1% of a lithium battery is lithium.
Sodium is seen as an interesting alternative, because there are some indications that it can make that 99% that makes up the rest of the battery lighter. Even though sodium is ~3.5 times worse as a charge carrier, if it's use allows cutting enough weight from that rest, it can be a winner overall.
For example, aluminium is, for complex reasons, not compatible with every part of a li-ion battery, and so they use copper connectors internally, typically containing by weight at least 10 times as much copper as they contain lithium. Sodium batteries can use aluminum everywhere, which saves on not just cost, but also more in weight than the weight difference between equal molar amounts of sodium and lithium.
LFP (lithium iron phosphate) batteries are already used by Tesla and have a gravimetric energy density of 125 Wh/kg, much lower than Lithium-ion.
CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg. Even if that doesn't come to fruition, it's already higher density than what's being used in electric cars!
Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway. You might be able to drop weight in hazard protection systems. Battery cycle times are competitive with Lithium chemistry. Contrary to your prediction that it doesn't pencil out, I expect sodium-ion to completely displace Lithium batteries for use in electric vehicles because it pencils out so much better. It will just be so much cheaper and doesn't bottleneck on any materials as you scale up.
> It’s also about weight. Trucks today averaging around 5200 pounds -- that’s a jump of more than a half ton since 2000. And things get heavier as electric vehicles look to become our new normal.
> On average electric vehicles are 10 percent heavier than gas powered cars. For instance, the new electric Hummer weighs in at a staggering 9,100 pounds or more than 4 and a half tons. All that weight can have deadly consequences. Researchers have found that for every 1,000 pounds a car puts on, a pedestrian is nearly 50 percent more likely to die if they’re hit and the more a truck weighs the longer it will take to stop.
1. https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2022/08/08/size-does-mat...
Even if a "lighter" car hits you, it's gonna be a bad day. Better to avoid the collision altogether, no? :)
On the other hand, I think maybe hoping that vehicles become no heavier than modern EVs is at least somewhat realistic.
Tesla uses iron phosphate in its cheaper models, but the high end is still reliant on NMC. I'd be interested to know the maximum range available on LFP.
BYD sells a lithium-iron-phosphate battery with an energy density of 150 Wh/kg. CATL's LFP is 125.
Also, a lithium-iron-phosphate battery is a lithium-ion battery, in that the electrolyte works by lithium ionic conduction. The appropriate contrast would be "lithium-nickel".
>CATL currently produces a sodium-ion battery at 160 Wh/kg, and they expect the next generation to reach 200 Wh/kg.
This is reported as the "single-cell" energy density, and is not directly comparable to the battery pack density.
>Now consider that sodium-ion is less flammable and doesn't have the risk of thermal runaway.
Surely this isn't because of the stability of sodium, which anyone who watched that chemistry demonstration in high school knows, is significantly more reactive than lithium. I expect the risks to be similar; furthermore, the concept of a dense energy storage that has no risk of sudden release is physically unlikely.
In theory 490 km, in practice, 380 km. Because they don't degrade as much, after a few years they are closer to what you call the high end models.
Correct, I want to point out that John Goodenough was responsible for the basic research which lead to all lithium-ion batteries.
I explicitly intended LiFePO to be included, and I hope for a variety of reasons that it's much more popular than cobalt-heavy formulas in ten years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough
https://texpowerev.com/
They offer a lithium-nickel chemistry without cobalt. If it can be proven in practice, it would allow comparable density to the best car batteries in a scalable chemistry. The founder is a researcher at the University of Texas who wrote several papers on the chemistry:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/adma.2020027...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240582972...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/aenm.2...
If you split salt into sodium and chlorine, and use the sodium for batteries, what do you do with the chlorine?
On serious note, Chlorine is widely use chemical, used in cleaning products, bleaching paper and cloth, pesticides , rubber, and some solvents.
If you had to dump it, you'd probably react it with something cheap to make it inert. This would generate energy, it's akin to combustion with oxygen. You could use that energy to decrease the energy requirements of splitting the NaCl in the first step.
Something that might work on a small scale could become an ecological threat on the scale of a billion electric cars.
This would be preferred anyway: HCl is nasty, and carbon dioxide is not.
There’s also a limitless source in the ocean. If prices got high enough we could just filter ocean water.
No, and I have no idea why anyone would think that. Raw material costs are generally not that significant, most costs in manufacturing come from labor and capital.
The lithium in a $15000 75kWh battery pack costs around $1600 at current prices. There is a lot of room for the price to fall even with rising raw material costs, as manufacturing gets more efficient and capacity is built out.
And also, rising raw material prices will cause production to expand, which will eventually push prices back down.
IIUC 50% of the cost of a battery is coming from lithium
Manufacturing is only about bout 25%
Which is precisely why the industry is moving to chemistries that don't use cobalt, pushing the materials price back down.
As to cost, it depends on chemistry but you need ~0.16kg of Lithium metal/kWh or 16kg for 100kWh battery pack. At current prices that’s ~1,300$ worth of lithium meaning the majority of battery pack costs are still from manufacturing and other materials.
https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=li&u=...
But yeah, on average if you look to previous price, maybe it's more of x8 price increase. 18 month ago was the all time low of the data on tradingview, I give you that.
About the weight details, are you sure your figures are correct? First result on google gives me way higher numbers (minimum 80g/kwh, but likely more than 160g/kwh) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-lithium-li-ion-vehic... Also, another comment in this thread gives 60g/kwh, and another 160g/kwh
160g/kwh is 0.16kg/kWh… But yes, it varies based on chemistry. 0.16kg/kWh is on the high end but hardly the limit. There are a lot of different electrode options: Lithium Cobalt Oxide, Lithium Nickel Cobalt Aluminium Oxide, Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide, Lithium Manganese Oxide, etc
In general if you assume high lithium prices then we would expect lower lithium use per kWh given sufficient time for the manufactures to adjust.
https://joinyaa.com/guides/nio-battery-swaps-coming-to-ameri...
I kinda wish Tesla would merge with them in China.
The car companies should standardize their batteries as well and provide market differentiation on how the car makes efficient use of the power. That would eliminate a lot of waste, kinda like the USB-C standard for mobile devices. EU needs to get on this.
I wouldn't be surprised if we will see this tech in the US soon. Especially after we get back to a somewhat normal business environment with China. Next election I hope. Consumers win when they have more choice.
Maybe it might be possible for heavy plant machinery where removing the battery and transporting it to the charger is easier than transporting the machine back to the charge point.
But yeah, that seems more viable for stuff like electric scooters/motorcycles, as the cost of infrastructure would be much lower.
However, there are so many cars coming out (particularly from startups with manufacturing in China) at the moment that it could quickly overwhelm the efforts of the limited number of car hackers to keep up. There should be a reasonable path to detailed specifications if / when manufacturers no longer are willing to supply a replacement battery.
A bit like I've kept my iphone for ~5 years now but did a battery refresh halfway through. Its the best option within constraint given
When the vehicle comes up for sale, a regular person could buy it for $x, or a gigafactory will buy it for $x, put a new battery in it and then sell it for $y.
Seems fine to me, and exactly what happens now if you buy a used vehicle as-is, or if an intermediary buy its, rebuilds the engine and trans, puts new tires on, etc. etc. and then sells it for cost+
Why do you think that the battery degrades that much? Do you change the engine and the transmission on your petrol car every three years when the warranty runs out?
https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-...
Your link has a graph[1] that indicates that while using 75%-25% charging states, which is what most of the electric cars use by default, you would get 10 000 cycles and still retain 80% of the original capacity. On a 500km range electric car, like that hypothetical Tesla Model 3, that would be 80% capacity left after 2 500 000km. You can Google quite easily that there are for example Tesla Model S cars with over a million kilometers driven.
[1] https://batteryuniversity.com/img/content/capacity-retention...
There are also buyers who are overwhelmed by simple maintenance (oil changes, brake maintenance, window regulator failure) that help get their cars into these states.
Luckily, evs require so much less maintenance, even these buyers are likely to be surprised.
>"in the region of 30%-50% capacity"
Why are we saying 10 years? Why are we in the region of 30% capacity?
I'm so curious why you'd invent such pessimistic numbers... I am hoping there is a beneficent reason for the choice..
But to inject a frame of reality in your imagining, my 2012 Nissan leaf has worse battery chemistry than modern EVs, has been left for up to 6 months off the charger, charged fully to 100% it's entire life, and still maintains 83% of original capacity a decade later.
In fact, out of spec motoring channel recently bought the cheapest EV in the country, a $3.5k 2012 leaf with a broken charger, and they were able to get 53 miles out of it at a constant 72mph indicated.
Most other EVs, even of that era, had a cooling system and their batteries have been lasting for many years.
The body, the steering system, suspension, wheels, passenger area, brakes and electronic stability systems etc. they can be used for another 20 years.
A 15kWh conversion kit will turn all these clunkers into perfectly usable daily drivers.
There have been pilot projects that take batteries from EVs where the range has dropped too far to be useful and put those into stationary installations. The batteries are used in buildings to store power from solar panels.
One problem cited by people working on recycling batteries is that the batteries are lasting a lot longer than initial estimates and the number of batteries that have degraded significantly or have failed outright is rather small. It’s hard to setup a reuse or recycling industry if the supplies are so small.
As more cars get to be 10, 15, or more years old, more will degrade to where they are no longer fit for vehicle service or the batteries will fail. That will feed back into the resume/recycle processes.
What does this mean? Vasteras Stockholm, known for its satanic mills?
The abuse was horrific- health and safety was a joke (this was the age pushing for making it illegal for kids to work in factories (cleaning behind moving engines, losing limbs), sexual predation from capitalist owners was rampant (you think Hollywood was bad), and the usual financial exploitation.
Combine with coal soot and Dark Satanic Mills is a good term.
Although Blake was more concerned about people losing their "natural" state because he barely was aware of the abuses in detail and he was middle class and worried about the loss of innocence that educated urban middle classes always worry about - the loss of an idealised non-existent state. People left farms for good reasons.
The external dependency of the petrol car is the production of petrol. Huge amounts of global state focus goes on making sure there is a garage near you selling petrol at a "reasonable" price. I mean wars, repression, pipelines that have their own countries and armies, vast ships across oceans, bending millions of people globally to the needs of us users - "the spice must flow" is a very apt phrase.
Something I do not hear much about but must be hitting military thinkers around the world is ... what happens when EV really takes over.
A tesla powered off my roof can take me to the local supermarket but can you drive a main battle tank on Lithium ? How long does the recharge take from solar cells? How do we fly a helicopter when the only people doing fracking are doing it for military?
Who runs a oil refinary just for the US Navy? And what if the US Navy decides not to sell you their oil from the only working refinary?
The impact on mechanised warfare of the change to EV is something I don't hear much about.
The point is that once everyone is in an EV car, your traditional car hits all those problems. At some point the western world will think "phew we can stop paying Saudi and just drive EVs from our solar cells" - and the whole fucking thing collapses. That's somewhere around 75% of cars being EV.
At the price a liter of any fuel gets at the end of the supply chain, a lot of things become economically viable: beamed energy from space, for instance. One advantage of this is that, contrary to liquid fuel or solar panels or even portable nuclear reactors, the enemy cannot capture your source of power (unless the war reaces space, of course)
Edit: found a source https://afresearchlab.com/technology/space-power-beaming/
Imagine a world where oil stops being sold to the Western world - we have enough EV and solar to keep ourselves happy. Say 2040. And then imagine how Saudi and Iranian armed forces will think - those armies have petrol powered tanks and aircraft. And they have oil wells and refineries in their countries borders. If we blow up the refineries then they won't threaten us anymore. Now add in domestic resistance to the regiemes who see the same calculus.
Once the money stops flowing in the oil will be blown up by someone and quickly.
We are yet to see EV trucks adoption, it is too early to talk about other more demanding uses.
And that accounts for something like 50% of western energy use or more. And yeah there is no replacement for a fuel burning jet engine for an F35. Right now or even decades out.
So what happens to global oil production if half the customers just go away. I don't think the answer is "same as previously just double the price to compensate".
The issue is that the supply chain can / might / will collapse, become more fragile, less reliable etc. States will accept interruptions in oil production if their hospitals can keep running and their citizens keep warm. So that means that the hyper focus on armed support of the global oil industry goes away - and that changes global politics.
Predicting what happens after this 50% ish tipping point is a fools game but something big happens - and that leads to all sorts of effects.
More drones? More missiles and less fighters? I don't know. But there is a new equilibrium and we are probably only guessing what the levers are
Umm, there are many other components to solar, wind and EVs that don't magically start getting produced in your backyard. Not having to buy crude from Saudi Arabia is something the US could do tomorrow, if they wanted to. There are tons of reserves in the US and Canada.
Add to that, that you pay much less per kilometer/mile for the electricity than you pay for gasoline/diesel.
The battery might be the weak point currently, but with faster charging (already today you can charge 80% full in 30 minutes) it will be a non-issue. You could then live with lower capacity batteries. And as battery prices go down you could most likely in 10 years replace your battery for much less than today.
Cars have much bumpier roads and less professional maintenance, and batteries, but at least the motors etc aren't something to worry about.
It's even better than that. The by far most expensive part –connecting the power source – has already been done. All you need is build a charger. You don't need fuel deliveries so it's in fact a huge logistics simplification.
One doesn't belong with the others and hasn't remote mountain stations let alone mountains as the name implies. Did you think of Finland?
As an exercise, try the Tesla Go anywhere tool ( https://www.tesla.com/trips ). Note that this is only using Tesla charging stations which are merely a small part of the whole network. But a very convenient part. You plug in for 25 minutes and do a bathroom or lunch break or go shopping or watch a short movie - typically possible since the stops are at convenient locations for that.
Remember that you never need to think about any of this. You tell the car where to go and it will plan all the required stops for you.
Having used an EV for some time now, I don't want to buy one that charges much faster. Once the charging is complete you quickly have to leave the charging spot, because there are fees. So you don't want to be stuck in a queue at the bathroom or shop.
In any case, new chargers have improved to 250 kW and 350 kW is coming, so charging times can be down to 10-15 minutes if the car supports it. And let's remember that most people only need this for long trips, such as going on vacation. I never charge on a public charger day to day. I have not charged anywhere except at home for many months now.
Source: did that with my family several times.
Also, people go on vacation more or less at the same time, so be prepared to be in a line before you can charge.
...with EV market share at small single digits.
It's easy to imagine from some tech-utopian perspective, but scaling that up isn't straight-forward, and we don't know how the business or subsidization should work, or how much infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. Remember, EVs are far heavier than equivalent ICEs.
I don't think any infrastructure will need to be rebuilt. EVs aren't that heavy. Certainly not as heavy as many vans.
With people just having to sit inside, because if they leave they lose their spot in line.
If we could trim peoples requirements to a reasonable worst case rather than a "what if" we could save a huge amount of energy and environment impact.
If it was cheaper to buy, maintain and house a larger car and a smaller one just to save on fuel, people would do it.
Yeah, maybe not right now, but EVs are at 1% roughly in the US, so obviously the charging network is going to be a lot better. In fact, all you need is a fixed charging station (no fuel deliveries) since everyone is already connected to the grid, so that would not be a problem unless you plan on taking 400+ miles trips in uninhabited regions.
> time to waste charging up
Today you get roughly 200 miles from a 20 min charge with tesla supercharger, seems like a non-issue if stations are ubiquitous. The government should imo force tesla to standardize connectors and high power charging (this is critical infrastructure, stop playing walled garden). Anyway, that's a smaller kink to iron out.
> The loss of battery, the expense of replacement (it costs the same as the car)
New tech, we're already seeing heavy YoY price reductions. Plus lots of the perceptions of price comes from tesla which isn't a cheap-tier car. Not disagreeing fully, time will tell what the lifecycle costs will end up for a Prius-like EV.
> I honestly see electric cars as a non-starter.
Shit, I have my criticisms too, but non-starter? I mean, I get it that today it doesn't make sense for everyone, but clearly there's a lot of progress in the right direction, on all relevant axes.
I'm very interested in what this will actually look like. 20 minutes may not seem long every 200 miles for an individual person. But it's far larger than the equivalent gasoline fueling, which might take, what? 10 minutes per 400 miles?
There were National Parks that had to close this year due to too much traffic. Will 20 minutes per person provide the throughput? Will we have massive parking lots filled with chargers? Can the localized infrastructure handle that? What does this look like in practice?
1. It's way easier to install 100 chargers at a service station than it is to install 100 petrol pumps. 2. Lots of people can charge at home and will almost never charge anywhere else, so there will be fewer people wanting to charge there anyway. Maybe not at very sparsely populated American states but they surely have space for huge charging car parks anyway?
Each physical “charger” comes off a truck and the concrete foundation is trivial, of course. No limiting factors there.
The infrastructure to route sufficient power and energy to the site? Massive. Think in terms of a small town or aluminum smelter suddenly popping into being on a random street-corner. Every upstream electrical distribution component must be questioned and possibly upgraded.
Once the low-hanging fruit are gone, possible locations will get harder and harder to find.
Source: a friend who manages the physical installation of car charging stations.
1. Medium fast charging at home. Most people will do that. No problems with infrastructure, especially if combined with solar.
2. Slow charging on basically every parking spot at the side of the road in cities. Most people living in apartments will do that. This already exists, it's not a problem. It also means that most trips can now be done with just 50-75% of the range because the car will be able to recharge at the destination.
3. Superchargers for cross-country trips. These will become more expensive and even faster. Most people will use them on holidays.
Still, expanding the grid is a no-brainer, because everyone who comes off petrochemicals are going to need electrification. So, if you can't expand the grid (slowly over time) you have bigger problems.
Not only should it not seem long, but biologically all research shows it being meaningfully unhealthy to not get out of a static position for a longer break more often.
These types of trips are also the 5% exception (as opposed to the 95% errands and weekly errands)
> There were National Parks that had to close this year due to too much traffic.
Zion has had too much traffic for almost 50 years. IMO national parks are better enjoyed on ebikes and public transit - to get to the trailheads.
Then buy a Nio. Nio has designed their packs to be swappable so you can both charge and swap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmWL1hZQmD0
A completely reasonable option is to own an EV that covers the vast majority of your needs and rent the one or two times a year you require more.
This is so out of touch with mainstream America and will never happen.
The ability to get in my car and drive where I want to, when I want to (perhaps even away from a natural or man-made disaster) is a freedom that me or many others will not allow ourselves to lose. The idea of having to ask permission to travel outside some radius is unfathomable.
We're only doing something so insane because we have existing car-shaped infrastructure.
But the future isn't that. The future is mostly one- and two-wheeled personal transport on top of walkable cities.
This is not enough to make an argument. If you could plausibly argue why this approach can't scale or why we will run out of resources, fine.
> But the future isn't that. The future is mostly one- and two-wheeled personal transport on top of walkable cities.
Because you say so? There is nothing - nothing at all - that suggests things are going that way.
If anything there will be more public transport, such as trains, buses and especially subways. And there will be a lot of EVs.
But 99 percent of the time, people don't need the whole car. An electric kick scooter is more than enough, if there was somewhere to ride it that wasn't dangerous due to cars.
Economics will eventually fix this problem and infrastructure will match what people actually want.
I'm not trying to be drab on the article, nor people who found it to be something new that they just learned.
I will echo your sentiment and add that lead is also listed legally as a "hazardous substance" here in the US which means that incentivizing it to be recycled is the most economical while also being ecological.
Recycling is not a 0 or 1 operation, the rate is not as high as people think, and there are other hidden impacts (energy, resources used by factories, transports, etc)
They are working with Panasonic.