This is pretty interesting. It's about battery tech advances (solid state batteries, and high-silicon anodes in li-ion batteries) that will supposedly give a significant jump to power and energy density in EV batteries. Nothing about cost per KWH. Solid state might not be so great in terms of cycle life.
Right now I'm not in the EV market but am impressed by seeing LiFePO4 batteries at under $100 per KWH retail, for possible use at home with off-grid solar. See places like batteryhookup.com if you want some.
There's also potentially big advances to be made in single use but easily recondition-able aluminium-air batteries due to an expanding market. An anecdote I've heard is a lot of R&D is focused on these at the moment as they have a higher energy to weight ratio compared to lithium chemistries so are idea for "disposable" use cases such as suicide bomb drones. There's also the more pedestrian idea of automated battery swap stations.
On a similar note, thermal imagers have got shockingly cheap recently, 50KPixel cube camera modules are available for <$200 and <$800 for the 0.33MPixel version.
I recently picked up an integrated module with a 24x32 pixel sensor, LCD, uC and LiPo for £30n and it can "see" someone step out from behind a wall at a distance of 3 meters, ideal for my use case (airsoft!)
> An anecdote I've heard is a lot of R&D is focused on these at the moment as they have a higher energy to weight ratio compared to lithium chemistries so are idea for "disposable" use cases such as suicide bomb drones.
You could use normal fuel-burning engines for that, I'd suppose. Or rockets, depending.
> , 50KPixel cube camera modules are available for <$200 and <$800 for the 0.33MPixel version
The 50k case is not that recent (FLIR Lepton). Not sure about the 0.33MP. The 24x32 is very cheap and as you say, has enough res for some ok applications. I've been intrigued by it and wondered why FLIR seems to still have a monopoly over higher res detectors.
But with a higher estimated lifespan, an estimated a cycle count 2-5x that of traditional li-ion batteries, in paet due to it not having moving parts, $200/KwH seems reasonable vs $100/KwH if it lasts more than 2x as long as a product of similar other specs.
Yoshino has a large portable one on the market, 4000W, 2511Wh, though it's a bit pricey as it's new technology.
> $200/KwH seems reasonable vs $100/KwH if it lasts more than 2x as long as a product of similar other specs
I think that's highly dependent on the expected life of those cells in absolute terms. If I'm buying a consumer product and a $100/kWh battery cell will last 10 years, but a $200/kWh battery cell will last 20 years, I'll go with the $100 one every time.
Why? Because in 10 years, with inflation and advancements in battery technology, I'll probably be able to buy a replacement 10 year battery for $40 in today's money, for a total of $140 instead of $200. I'm also lowering my risk exposure in case something happens to the battery, it only needs to survive 10 years instead of 20.
Using actual numbers, if your cellphone battery lasts 2 years of nominal use before noticable degrading, you're looking at 4-10 years, but also contributing less e-waste to the world.
I doubt cell phone batteries are a significant part of the battery waste stream, compared to EV and utility scale batteries. If they only went back to phones with easily swappable batteries and used a commodity form factor, most users would probably prioritize energy density over cycle life.
A recent AstralCodexTen article pointed out that lithium battery price is 40x lower per kwh than it was in 1992. A few headlines about revolutionary battery technology have turned out to be vaporware; but there really has been a continuous tech revolution going on in the space.
Lithium is problematic in many ways. Security of supply (one of the big disadvantages of ICE is how much of the fuel comes from an unstable part of the world), environmental impacts of mining, the use of child and otherwise exploited child labour.
I have no doubt that electric engines are the future, but we desperately need something better to provide the electricity to them.
Also, contrary to petrol, we have at least a realistic possibility to recycle batteries and thus eventually need less raw earth inputs over time. While with petrol, you need a stable continuous supply.
Since we're on an engineering website here, I would like to be pedantic and point out that it's kWh. If you write KWH that would mean Kelvin Watt henry, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units. kWh means kilo Watt hours.
It could make sense for you to consider an EV with bi-directional charging. For off-grid solar, you can charge your truck/car/EV for free or/and extend your off-grid battery by using your car to de/uncharge it for your home.
A 100kWh battery can help you out when you come back home if you know you can charge it the next day.
For silicon-carbon composite anodes, the challenge in getting apples-to-apples cost per kWh is that while the anode material is more expensive per kg than graphite, it also is much more energy-dense, so you need much less of it. However, to take advantage of the energy density, you need to enlarge the cathode (which brings the lithium). A classic simultaneous equation....
Without giving away proprietary info, it's safe to say the ultimate "value" of the battery (read $ per kWh) is reasonably close to today's Li-ion - for much higher performance.
Since LFP cathode technology is a topic, keep your eyes on LMFP. It is a bit more expensive than LFP, but also carries 15%-20% more energy - so its $ per kWh is lower. Then, if you marry it with a silicon anode, things start to get VERY interesting versus today's Li-ion performance and cost.
Yes. The article quotes two US companies that don't actually ship batteries in quantity. The big players working on this are CATL, BYD, Samsung, and Toyota, all of which already make batteries in large quantities.
The current situation seems to be that solid state batteries have been made as prototypes and work, but volume production is hard to do. Various approaches are being tried. One of the big players says the technology maturity is currently at 4 (technology validated in lab) on a scale of 1-9.
Huge amounts of money are being spent on this. It's probably going to work, but it's not clear if it will be cheap.
It's simply early days. People think of this as a fashion industry where one product replaces the new product when it goes out of fashion in the blink of an eye. It simply doesn't work that way with batteries. Scaling up battery production to where it is today has taken decades.
These new battery cells need factories that don't exist yet, new machines that are still being designed, they need to benefit from learning effects resulting from volume production that hasn't happened yet, etc. That's not going to happen overnight; it's going to take years/decades. Initial production volume will be low and the resulting products will be very expensive and scarce.
There's nothing wrong with the current batteries. They work, they are cheap, they have decent energy density (plenty for essentially all road based use cases), they last thousands of cycles (i.e. 10-20 years at least), and they are being produced by the twh/year. These things aren't going away, they are just going to continue to get better and cheaper for decades to come. It's already a mass production market and the drops in prices is growing the market with new products.
Solid state will grab market share very slowly in e.g. high end sports cars, pointlessly large trucks for socker mums and similar snobs (these aren't work vehicles, they are way too expensive for that), electrical planes and drones, and other use cases where price matters less and where energy density matters more.
I expect several car companies will make a fair amount of money selling insanely large batteries to people who believe they need to buy those at a big premium. But that's not going to be a mass market any time soon. These will be niche products produced in small numbers and sold at a high price.
Mass production won't be happening anytime soon. Most regular people will be driving lithium ion, LFP, sodium ion based cells, or similarly cheap/effective cells for a long time.
The big players are saying small-scale production in 2026-2027, mass production in 2027-2028.[1] The US efforts are tiny startups, but CATL alone has 1,000 people on solid-state battery R&D. Toyota has a big effort.[2] Nissan is building a pilot plant.[3] Samsung is showing prototypes.[4]
They're still not here, though. Not even small expensive ones. Military laptops, power tools, and aircraft would use them regardless of cost. When we start seeing some small products with huge energy storage, it's real.
There's also a question of whether this is cracked by coming up with a battery chemistry and design that's easier to make, or by working through a hard manufacturing process.
Examples from the past include EUV semiconductor exposure, and tungsten lamp filaments.
In both cases, an insanely hard production process was made to work.
With EUV, for most of a decade, process engineers were trying to find some way to avoid the horribly expensive and clunky vaporized-tin EUV light sources. But nothing worked.
Not small synchrotrons. A big linear accelerator would work, and SLAC was once borrowed to expose an IC, but that wasn't really feasible. Electron-beams systems remained too slow. So it had to be done the hard way. That's what ASML does. So far, nobody has a better way. Work continues in China on synchrotrons.
For tungsten lamp filaments, it was known in the late 1800s that they would work if they could be made in quantity. What's needed is fine wire made of a metal with a very high melting point. Platinum works fine, but costs too much. It took until 1911 to crack the tungsten problem.
First, there's a complex sequence of grinding and chemical operations to get tungsten out of ore. There's a smelting step. There's more chemical processing, involving both hydrochloric and hydroflouric acid steps. Not fun. Then washing, separation, and grinding. That just gets you tungsten powder, not wire. So there's a sintering step in a heated press that makes fragile tungsten ingots. Those are annealed, reheated, and rolled down to long round rods. The rods get pointed so they can be started through a die to be drawn into wire. This realigns the crystal structure and the metal becomes ductile. Heating, cooling, and lubrication are involved. After passes through many dies, some made of diamond, fine tungsten wire emerges. General Electric had a big plant in Cleveland doing this for a century, after about two decades of struggling with the process.
Then along came LEDs, and the Cleveland twire factory is now a vacant lot.
Sometimes, though, the solution is to simplify the thing to be manufactured. A good example was TV camera tubes. The early tubes, the iconocope (Zworklin) and the image dissector (Farnsworth) had poor light sensitivity, but for quite different reasons. The iconoscope integrates light over a full frame time, but lacks a photomultiplier stage to amplify the emitted electrons. The image dissector only counts the light from the moment when the scan beam is hitting the spot being scanned, but it has a photomultiplier to amplify the few electrons knocked loose. So RCA bought the rights to both technologies and combined them into the image orthicon, a tube that cost US$10,000 in the 1950s. An image orthicon integrates light over a full frame, and has a photomultiplier built in, so light sensitivity is good enough to be usable. It was insanely complicated, required a large number of different power supplies and sweep signals, was a pain to adjust, and you needed three of them for color. So a color camera weighed hundreds of pounds and had hundreds of manual adjustments. But it worked and was used by TV stations.
Then the vidicon was developed, which is much simpler and can be built with internal color filters. One tube does the whole job. Goodbye, image orthicon. In time, goodbye, RCA.
We don't yet know where the solid state battery ends up on this scale. Making a ceramic as a paste on a roll to roll machine is quite a trick. There are some videos of a prototype production line in China which claims to do this. They show lots of battery packaging machinery, which is about the same as it is for lithium-ion, but the ceramic-depositing step isn't shown at all. It probably involves heat and pressure plus other tricks, and they don't want to give those away.
There's some worry about making massive investments in a process that rapidly becomes obsolete. There's worry about being run over by someone who does make those investments, takes over the ...
My laptop and my tablet are on Linux, and my daughter's PC (my other daughter's too, and she has a chromebook as well, but she is an adult and has her own household, and her work laptop is Windows). I might buy the teenager a Chromebook too.
Great analogy, it illustrates the goal post moving that always occurs. The year of the Linux Desktop will never arrive if you always move the goalposts to massively remove successful Linux installs like servers, embedded, Android, Chromebook, Steam Deck, etc.
Yeah, we'll know the battery revolution has arrived when the US needs punitive 100% tariffs to stop imports of low cost, high performance EV cars from a developing nation. Until then it's all talk.
Meanwhile we can talk about two US companies promising that their magic beans are the future.
I wonder how long it will take before people start shopping in Mexico for a cheap BYD and importing those privately. There are probably some hurdles for that. Might be happening already.
> we'll know the battery revolution has arrived when the US needs punitive 100% tariffs to stop imports of low cost, high performance EV cars from a developing nation.
Somehow US made EVs managed to be priced higher than the Chinese EVs with the imposed tariffs [1]:
[1] Chinese EVs still cheaper than Teslas in US after tariff hike:
It was probably the last time I allowed the, uh, implications of such a technology to overwhelm my judgment about whether or not it will actually happen.
It's been ongoing for several years but you might have missed it. Vast reductions in cost. Continuous improvements in energy density. New chemistries. All very real and on the roads right now. Compared to 2008 which is when Tesla started producing cars and now (16 years), there been a massive progress on this. Even in the last few years, prices have come down a lot.
This article is talking about the next wave of improvements that are already out of the labs and in early test production. For example Quantumscape has been delivering on the roadmap they talked about years ago with regular updates. A few weeks ago, they announced that they are shipping so-called B Samples, to VW and other partners for testing. Right on time.
A B Sample is a pre-production quality but more or less feature complete battery cell. The next step is A samples, which are the more or less finished product. Those are supposed to be ready end of next year. From there they go to production; probably starting around the late 26/27/28 timeframe. That last step will be conditional on massive investments needed to build factories.
There will be a lot of new cells getting to production around the same time from companies like CATL, Factorial, BYD, Toyota, etc. CATL has announced 500wh/kg cells two years ago.
I know it's popular to be dismissive about any talk of battery improvements here. But this is not the same as some new hypothetical thing but companies that are in the final steps of bringing proven & working technology to market. They've all gone through many years of testing and iterating already. This stuff is coming to market. The only question is when and for how much.
People have unrealistic expectations. This won't be high volume, low cost production from day 1. Rather the opposite with cost gradually coming down and volume gradually going up. We'll be driving very cheap versions of existing chemistries for years to come. They're not going anywhere. Production for those cells is measured in multiple twh/year now. The revolution there has been the scale and cost.
I'm excited by sodium ion batts, especially in the 18650 format. Everyone's aware the danger of lithium ion with this format - lots of burns, fires and a death[1] caused by the cap of a flashlight being propelled into the throat of the user while holding it in his mouth during auto work. Stab a lithium 18650 and watch out! Water makes it worse. Stab a sodium 18650 and it wants to boogy for sure, but sans flames.
While sodiums can't yet compete with liths, I think they'll get close enough for the safety benefit and cost to make them viable. And there will be new tech too.
The battery revolution is here. Each year the price declines while energy density goes up.
Just a few minutes ago, for example, Xiaomi released a video of their SU7 Ultra on the Nordschleife. They got a time of 6:46:874 [1] which places them on position 6 of the overall leaderboard [2]. So a Chinese smartphone manufacturer is very close to being the fastest car on the Nordschleife. A decade of experience vs. a few years of experience. With this pace, my guess is that they'll beat the German manufacturers somewhere next year.
Beating a gasoline car with an electric car on the Nurburgring isn’t remotely in the same realm, as you mentioned decades vs years of experience - it’s significantly harder to build fast gasoline cars. This isn’t a knock of the gasoline cars, but a compliment to the engineering knowledge and prowess of the aforementioned German automakers. The fact that the records for real production cars are still held by Porsche is wild considering the power to weight ratios possible with EVs.
When companies like Porsche feel they can be bothered to make an electric race car, they’ll probably blitz everyone else simply because of their decades of chassis and suspension design. They haven’t done so yet because they are acutely aware of their fan base and customers don’t want one.
There is a lot of people who feel racing electric cars is just boring and too easy, and I am happily part of that population because as you mention, there’s very little engineering effort to compete against or with.
You need an electric car to race for several hours, which is still a challenge. Time attack hot laps are one thing, racing a series is a whole other beast. We’ll get there.
I didn't even know if it'd be seconds with enough people. Have a team unlocking and dropping the current battery and a second team wheel in and attach the new battery. That could all happen at the same time that tires are being swapped.
“The new cell that [Molicel is] coming out with, the X series, boy, they’re claiming they can charge that from zero to 100% in 90 seconds,”
That's great but how do we push all that energy into the battery at home in just 90 seconds? OK, we can push it in maybe 9 hours at home and still be happy so another question: what kind of equipment would back a charging station on a highway to make it able to charge a few of those batteries at the same time?
I think at that point you basically need to use one of these batteries as a buffer to charge it, and you're still gonna need one hell of a cable (already the really fast-charger cables are water cooled because the water cooling adds less weight than the copper you'd need to avoid the active cooling)
On that theme if you're interested in a repairable eBike battery, We're engineers/designers from France, and we've built a DIY Battery that you can repair and refill :)
It's launching as an IndieGogo and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com for a 25% discount on the battery!
the new [revolutionary] chemistries being developed by startups/universities are running against slow incremental, yet non-stop everyday, improvement in lithium batteries produced and used by huge industries. I.e. yesterday new chemistry was required to beat 170Wh/kg, $500/KWh of the yesterday's lithium batteries, and today the goal post has moved to the $270Wh/kg, $100/KWh of the todays' lithium batteries. I'm all for the new tech, yet the situation looks tougher and tougher for it.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadRight now I'm not in the EV market but am impressed by seeing LiFePO4 batteries at under $100 per KWH retail, for possible use at home with off-grid solar. See places like batteryhookup.com if you want some.
On a similar note, thermal imagers have got shockingly cheap recently, 50KPixel cube camera modules are available for <$200 and <$800 for the 0.33MPixel version. I recently picked up an integrated module with a 24x32 pixel sensor, LCD, uC and LiPo for £30n and it can "see" someone step out from behind a wall at a distance of 3 meters, ideal for my use case (airsoft!)
You could use normal fuel-burning engines for that, I'd suppose. Or rockets, depending.
> , 50KPixel cube camera modules are available for <$200 and <$800 for the 0.33MPixel version
The 50k case is not that recent (FLIR Lepton). Not sure about the 0.33MP. The 24x32 is very cheap and as you say, has enough res for some ok applications. I've been intrigued by it and wondered why FLIR seems to still have a monopoly over higher res detectors.
Yoshino has a large portable one on the market, 4000W, 2511Wh, though it's a bit pricey as it's new technology.
I think that's highly dependent on the expected life of those cells in absolute terms. If I'm buying a consumer product and a $100/kWh battery cell will last 10 years, but a $200/kWh battery cell will last 20 years, I'll go with the $100 one every time.
Why? Because in 10 years, with inflation and advancements in battery technology, I'll probably be able to buy a replacement 10 year battery for $40 in today's money, for a total of $140 instead of $200. I'm also lowering my risk exposure in case something happens to the battery, it only needs to survive 10 years instead of 20.
*Exact figures made-up on the spot.
I have no doubt that electric engines are the future, but we desperately need something better to provide the electricity to them.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-lithium.pd...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-68896707
and environmental aspects of mining and disposal AFAIK?
A 100kWh battery can help you out when you come back home if you know you can charge it the next day.
For silicon-carbon composite anodes, the challenge in getting apples-to-apples cost per kWh is that while the anode material is more expensive per kg than graphite, it also is much more energy-dense, so you need much less of it. However, to take advantage of the energy density, you need to enlarge the cathode (which brings the lithium). A classic simultaneous equation....
Without giving away proprietary info, it's safe to say the ultimate "value" of the battery (read $ per kWh) is reasonably close to today's Li-ion - for much higher performance.
Since LFP cathode technology is a topic, keep your eyes on LMFP. It is a bit more expensive than LFP, but also carries 15%-20% more energy - so its $ per kWh is lower. Then, if you marry it with a silicon anode, things start to get VERY interesting versus today's Li-ion performance and cost.
The current situation seems to be that solid state batteries have been made as prototypes and work, but volume production is hard to do. Various approaches are being tried. One of the big players says the technology maturity is currently at 4 (technology validated in lab) on a scale of 1-9.
Huge amounts of money are being spent on this. It's probably going to work, but it's not clear if it will be cheap.
These new battery cells need factories that don't exist yet, new machines that are still being designed, they need to benefit from learning effects resulting from volume production that hasn't happened yet, etc. That's not going to happen overnight; it's going to take years/decades. Initial production volume will be low and the resulting products will be very expensive and scarce.
There's nothing wrong with the current batteries. They work, they are cheap, they have decent energy density (plenty for essentially all road based use cases), they last thousands of cycles (i.e. 10-20 years at least), and they are being produced by the twh/year. These things aren't going away, they are just going to continue to get better and cheaper for decades to come. It's already a mass production market and the drops in prices is growing the market with new products.
Solid state will grab market share very slowly in e.g. high end sports cars, pointlessly large trucks for socker mums and similar snobs (these aren't work vehicles, they are way too expensive for that), electrical planes and drones, and other use cases where price matters less and where energy density matters more.
I expect several car companies will make a fair amount of money selling insanely large batteries to people who believe they need to buy those at a big premium. But that's not going to be a mass market any time soon. These will be niche products produced in small numbers and sold at a high price.
Mass production won't be happening anytime soon. Most regular people will be driving lithium ion, LFP, sodium ion based cells, or similarly cheap/effective cells for a long time.
They're still not here, though. Not even small expensive ones. Military laptops, power tools, and aircraft would use them regardless of cost. When we start seeing some small products with huge energy storage, it's real.
[1] https://www.electrive.com/2024/05/30/china-solid-state-batte...
[2] https://carbuzz.com/toyota-solid-state-battery-basic-design-...
[3] https://global.nissannews.com/en/releases/nissan-shows-in-co...
[4] https://www.samsungsdi.com/sdi-now/sdi-news/4041.html
Examples from the past include EUV semiconductor exposure, and tungsten lamp filaments. In both cases, an insanely hard production process was made to work.
With EUV, for most of a decade, process engineers were trying to find some way to avoid the horribly expensive and clunky vaporized-tin EUV light sources. But nothing worked. Not small synchrotrons. A big linear accelerator would work, and SLAC was once borrowed to expose an IC, but that wasn't really feasible. Electron-beams systems remained too slow. So it had to be done the hard way. That's what ASML does. So far, nobody has a better way. Work continues in China on synchrotrons.
For tungsten lamp filaments, it was known in the late 1800s that they would work if they could be made in quantity. What's needed is fine wire made of a metal with a very high melting point. Platinum works fine, but costs too much. It took until 1911 to crack the tungsten problem. First, there's a complex sequence of grinding and chemical operations to get tungsten out of ore. There's a smelting step. There's more chemical processing, involving both hydrochloric and hydroflouric acid steps. Not fun. Then washing, separation, and grinding. That just gets you tungsten powder, not wire. So there's a sintering step in a heated press that makes fragile tungsten ingots. Those are annealed, reheated, and rolled down to long round rods. The rods get pointed so they can be started through a die to be drawn into wire. This realigns the crystal structure and the metal becomes ductile. Heating, cooling, and lubrication are involved. After passes through many dies, some made of diamond, fine tungsten wire emerges. General Electric had a big plant in Cleveland doing this for a century, after about two decades of struggling with the process.
Then along came LEDs, and the Cleveland twire factory is now a vacant lot.
Sometimes, though, the solution is to simplify the thing to be manufactured. A good example was TV camera tubes. The early tubes, the iconocope (Zworklin) and the image dissector (Farnsworth) had poor light sensitivity, but for quite different reasons. The iconoscope integrates light over a full frame time, but lacks a photomultiplier stage to amplify the emitted electrons. The image dissector only counts the light from the moment when the scan beam is hitting the spot being scanned, but it has a photomultiplier to amplify the few electrons knocked loose. So RCA bought the rights to both technologies and combined them into the image orthicon, a tube that cost US$10,000 in the 1950s. An image orthicon integrates light over a full frame, and has a photomultiplier built in, so light sensitivity is good enough to be usable. It was insanely complicated, required a large number of different power supplies and sweep signals, was a pain to adjust, and you needed three of them for color. So a color camera weighed hundreds of pounds and had hundreds of manual adjustments. But it worked and was used by TV stations.
Then the vidicon was developed, which is much simpler and can be built with internal color filters. One tube does the whole job. Goodbye, image orthicon. In time, goodbye, RCA.
We don't yet know where the solid state battery ends up on this scale. Making a ceramic as a paste on a roll to roll machine is quite a trick. There are some videos of a prototype production line in China which claims to do this. They show lots of battery packaging machinery, which is about the same as it is for lithium-ion, but the ceramic-depositing step isn't shown at all. It probably involves heat and pressure plus other tricks, and they don't want to give those away.
There's some worry about making massive investments in a process that rapidly becomes obsolete. There's worry about being run over by someone who does make those investments, takes over the ...
/posted on my Windows 11 work laptop....
We have been a Linux household for over 20 years.
That does not count our Android devices.
Meanwhile we can talk about two US companies promising that their magic beans are the future.
0) Technology advances
1) Engineering advances it to a working, shipping, volume product: "the next generation of batteries are appearing" in cars from China.
2) Politics reacts: "Import tariffs to protect domestic jobs!"
3) People subvert it: "I can get a cheap vehicle in the country next door!"
4) accommodation: "build a factory in the state of Georgia / the country of Hungary to assemble them!", "invest in domestic industry" etc
And there is evidence of all of these steps.
Somehow US made EVs managed to be priced higher than the Chinese EVs with the imposed tariffs [1]:
[1] Chinese EVs still cheaper than Teslas in US after tariff hike:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544022
[edit] OK, :-( i missed that US has also huge tarifs on EV.
It was probably the last time I allowed the, uh, implications of such a technology to overwhelm my judgment about whether or not it will actually happen.
This article is talking about the next wave of improvements that are already out of the labs and in early test production. For example Quantumscape has been delivering on the roadmap they talked about years ago with regular updates. A few weeks ago, they announced that they are shipping so-called B Samples, to VW and other partners for testing. Right on time.
A B Sample is a pre-production quality but more or less feature complete battery cell. The next step is A samples, which are the more or less finished product. Those are supposed to be ready end of next year. From there they go to production; probably starting around the late 26/27/28 timeframe. That last step will be conditional on massive investments needed to build factories.
There will be a lot of new cells getting to production around the same time from companies like CATL, Factorial, BYD, Toyota, etc. CATL has announced 500wh/kg cells two years ago.
I know it's popular to be dismissive about any talk of battery improvements here. But this is not the same as some new hypothetical thing but companies that are in the final steps of bringing proven & working technology to market. They've all gone through many years of testing and iterating already. This stuff is coming to market. The only question is when and for how much.
People have unrealistic expectations. This won't be high volume, low cost production from day 1. Rather the opposite with cost gradually coming down and volume gradually going up. We'll be driving very cheap versions of existing chemistries for years to come. They're not going anywhere. Production for those cells is measured in multiple twh/year now. The revolution there has been the scale and cost.
While sodiums can't yet compete with liths, I think they'll get close enough for the safety benefit and cost to make them viable. And there will be new tech too.
Edit: ref for [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/comments/zm5ead/olight_e...
Just a few minutes ago, for example, Xiaomi released a video of their SU7 Ultra on the Nordschleife. They got a time of 6:46:874 [1] which places them on position 6 of the overall leaderboard [2]. So a Chinese smartphone manufacturer is very close to being the fastest car on the Nordschleife. A decade of experience vs. a few years of experience. With this pace, my guess is that they'll beat the German manufacturers somewhere next year.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWK6GcH0vqE
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_N%C3%BCrburgring_Nords...
When companies like Porsche feel they can be bothered to make an electric race car, they’ll probably blitz everyone else simply because of their decades of chassis and suspension design. They haven’t done so yet because they are acutely aware of their fan base and customers don’t want one.
There is a lot of people who feel racing electric cars is just boring and too easy, and I am happily part of that population because as you mention, there’s very little engineering effort to compete against or with.
That's great but how do we push all that energy into the battery at home in just 90 seconds? OK, we can push it in maybe 9 hours at home and still be happy so another question: what kind of equipment would back a charging station on a highway to make it able to charge a few of those batteries at the same time?
You can also charge supercapacitors and uncharge it very fast if you like.
You can use the whole capacity of a charging park for just one car (if not a lot of cars are there).
You could also do a more classical gas station setup instead of a charging park. Cooled cable, 1-2 proper ports on the bottom etc.
If they are talking about an individual cell with a nominal voltage of 3.7V, then "any" modern fast charger will do.
I don't think they were talking about a full-blown EV power bank.
It's launching as an IndieGogo and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com for a 25% discount on the battery!