"The production intent Gemini battery will be LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate)"
But the demo battery is not. It's something else. What?
Why do these people think they can get that kind of energy density from lithium iron phosphate when nobody else can? BYD, which really likes that technology, has pushed the energy density per unit volume up by about 2X, but the resulting battery is denser and thus heavier. No problem for fixed installations, but mediocre for vehicle range.
There's a lot to be said for using lithium iron phosphate chemistry. The batteries don't blow up. They don't have the negative temperature coefficient which causes thermal runaway. They survive the "nail test". As electric cars go mainstream, and we have tens of millions of under-maintained cars on the road, we need all that.
> Why do these people think they can get that kind of energy density from lithium iron phosphate when nobody else can?
Other people can, but not within the same safety, regulatory, longevity, cooling, weight, and manufacturability constraints.
Which is why this demo is useless. It's easy to make one-off prototypes that accomplish something impressive as long as it only has to work a couple times, doesn't have to comply with safety regulations, and you have a massive budget to hand-build a couple of them. It's a different story entirely to try to ship it.
Looking at the marketing materials, it seems like it's just poorly explained, not a scam attempt. It's actually two batteries. The first is LFP which has poor energy density but wears slowly and so is used for daily trips, providing about 150 miles of capacity. The rest of the range is made up by the second "range extender" battery, which seems to contain their secret-sauce chemistry. The range extender only needs to survive relatively few cycles because most people aren't driving 700 miles very frequently.
There have been demonstrations of using non-rechargeable aluminium-air batteries for that purpose which would have to be returned to a smelter to be "recharged". Sadly, only prototypes.
We'll need to know how quickly it can be charged, how many charge cycles it takes, how it drains when not in use, etc etc, but you are right, it's a promising start, one to watch to see where it ends up.
In the article they state they charged it at 1C, which is 1 hour from 0% to fully charged (200kw for a 200kwh battery). Who knows what the final numbers will be, but very promising if true.
Yeah, but maybe that was one of the 100 the battery can take before it's at 70% life. There are just so many sliders with a battery, and they all effect each other. Getting them all up at once is the grail.
1C is usually not 1hr from empty to fully charged, because of CC-CV charging. Most Li based chemistries charge at 1C until a certain threshold (when the needed voltage for 1C charging reaches a maximum predetermined level, usually the target max cell level, e.g. 4.2V). After that, you charge at constant voltage until you reach full charge. If the battery is significantly oversized, i.e. it treats 85% charge as 100% for the user, then 1C might be possible from 0 to 100%, but usually it's not.
1C, which isn't fast charging, is already 200kW with this battery. So yeah, if you can make a battery with a massive capacity, but it can't fast charge, that could be a great tradeoff.
Just assume it takes twice as long to charge, since the circuit will be a factor if you double the capacity. Your 208 40amp circuit can only deliver so much power, and even dc fast chargers can only go as fast as they can consume power from there circuits.
How can it be double the capacity when the wikipedia article for LFP battery says it has "lower than that of other common lithium ion battery types such as Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) and Nickel Cobalt Aluminum (NCA)"? What type of battery does the stock tesla battery pack use?
The general rule of thumb for such fundamental breakthroughs is that unfortunately for 99% of the really huge ones we'll only know they're revolutionary when the inventors get Nobel prizes 5-15 years after the fact.
99% of these articles are trash that never gets talked about again after 6 months.
Maybe this one isn't, I can't tell. Time will tell, though.
The article says the battery is split, with an LFP traction battery and another undefined battery to make up the "range extender" - presumably the bulk of the capacity. So I suspect they've got some sort of novel high capacity low discharge battery which keeps the regular LFP battery topped up, which then drives the car.
Personally I wonder if it's going to lower prices. It takes a long time to use enough gas to make up the $10K difference between a cheap gas sedan and a cheap electric sedan.
> What mileage would be enough for these naysayers?
I live in the city. There are a fair amount of chargers, but not enough (and probably never will be). So 'enough', for me, is when it can compete with a regular ICE car: Charge it for about 5-10 minutes, and then not have to worry about it again for at least a couple of weeks. We're almost there, but not quite.
Honestly a 15-20 minute charge isn't so bad if you can find a coffee spot by a charger. Same with just eating a long charge here and there. Its not bad at all.
I understand the concern but as an owner its been less stressful than I feared it could be.
In a usual commute scenario being able to charge you car like your phone saves you the trip and the time to refuel every week (if you add the time to actually get to a gas station is way more than 5-10m).
"Charge it for about 5-10 minutes, and then not have to worry about it again for at least a couple of weeks."
So you would rather have engineers solve the impossible, and then have 2,000,000 cars carry around additional 300kg of batteries?
How about getting city officials and landlord to do their actual job they are getting paid for?
And don't go 'oh no i have curbside parking' on. Me - you have millioms of lampposts in every city, don't you? They are already connected to power, is it too much to ask for all of them to be equiped with sockets?
There are roughly 3 cars and lampposts both in London.
What do you think makes more sense, forcing all cars to spend extra £7,000 and 300 kg of rare materials on extra battery capacity they shouldn't need, and then replacing those batteries every 15 years as they and cars are replaced?
Or picking up a shovel and upgrading some cable that will serve for 100 years?
Provisioning more power in order to provide streetside charging would be a boon for apartment dwellers with electric cars.
That might involve pulling more wiring through conduits, or even raising the voltage on existing wiring and placing transformers, all of which can be done.
My comment was only on whether you could charge many cars without any of that.
Then you probably don't need a car, unless you have special needs or your city is some car-centric shithole (like, sadly, most cities outside the Netherlands are to a point, even in Europe, which often gets praise from US bike/public transport advocates).
The irony to me is how we continue to discuss improvements in battery technology for EVs in terms of increased range, rather than decreased weight. I still have high hopes EVs will shift public consciousness about our environment and the way we live our lives, but true enthusiasm still seems to be for heavy vehicles people can spend more time in.
Yup, the means to solve climate change and electricity the US already exist, but people don't like them for stupid reasons.
US has an irrational dislike for overhead wires, for both trains
and trolley buses (ubiquitous enough they have Unicode)
This isn't a problem of technology, and we can't "innovate our way out". Our dispersed suburban land use pattern is simply a mistake, and impossible to make efficient.
Efficiency comes from:
* Electrified freight rail for cargo transport into and between cities and buildings
* High speed intercity electrified passenger rail
* Frequent, automated subway and heavy rail in cities and their peripheries
* Frequent, ubiquitous trolleybuses to bring people to rail stations
* Dense apartment buildings with good noise cancellation which share heated walls, and use heat pumps for heating and cooling
* Renewable electricity
* Flights for trips >500km, taking passengers from several nearby cities who take high speed rail to the airport
ALL OF THESE TECHNOLOGIES EXIST TODAY, we just need to be willing to adopt them. Because these technologies exist today, there is no sense in "waiting for technology to save us". We need to choose to adopt them, and abandon our inefficient policies now. These will always be the solutions, and we are just in denial that we need to adopt them.
Completely overhauling the entire built environment, housing stock, supply chain, energy flows, and air transportation network of the world's 3rd largest country is not matter of "just" choosing or "just" anything.
Innovation is still finite per unit of time. People's wants are infinite.
Everyone wants to live in a sprawling castle far away from pesky neighbors, they want to have an entire forest as a backyard and at the same time they want to have access to the same urban facilities as those in Manhattan.
There's no amount of innovation we could muster at least the next 2 decades to make that a financially feasible reality.
> Innovation is still finite per unit of time. People's wants are infinite.
That's what I say to people afraid AI will steal their jobs. No way we run out of jobs before we run out of desires. We can always imagine and want more, and it's so easy to become entitled to what you already have and think nothing of it.
People are not necessarily afraid of AIs on their own (though they are afraid of them, too, at least a bit, see Skynet).
I think the bigger fear is that of AI ownership. In a "winner takes all world" where people have a hard time sharing effectively, if there's no need for human labor for many fields and AI owners can just buy lawmakers, some people can just become infinitely powerful. Creating a permanent underclass of those who missed their chance.
See what's happening with coal mining, for example. People keep talking about reconversions but frequently what happens with these people is... Nothing. Their kids are the ones that move away or work in new fields, but most adults over 40 or 50 don't radically change their field of work en masse, or if they do, it's towards even crappier jobs.
Use it or lose it - this new technology will also be available in open source, easy to use format for everyone to empower their lives, but those who refuse to partake will be at a disadvantage.
It used to be that you needed a large dataset and a custom architecture for each individual task. Now you can use a general model and a few examples, it will catch on much faster on what you want it to do. Sometimes it's just as simple as telling it in free language what the task is.
What took whole departments multiple years to achieve will become something regular people could do. We learned to live with internet and cell phones, we can learn to program AI that is by design especially easy to program.
Suburbs were not created out of a natural desire people had. There was a combination of federal financial incentives and racist motives in the 50s that created them, and they are far less efficient than cities by basically every metric.
Yes. Many people. Issue is lack of alternative and how the whole society is built to cater to this lifestyle so many people are forced into it if they want anything more than a shoebox 1 bedroom. That’s why understanding why this option became the only choice is interesting to study.
I have what I believe to be a rational dislike for overhead wires for neighborhood electrical delivery: They're unreliable (multiple outages every winter because snowstorms take out trees), unsafe when they're knocked down but still live, expensive in the long run due to pole replacement and tree maintenance, ugly, and all it takes is a slight increase in capital expenses for installation to replace them with underground utilities. I don't think I'm alone in this.
>expensive in the long run due to pole replacement and tree maintenance,
Not compared to burial. The cost is up front (not amortized) and is a big enough multiplier that it won't overcome maintenance costs, especially when including buried repair/maintenance costs, which are significantly higher than overhead, even taking into account the lower frequency. (Tree roots, dug-up lines, cathodic decay and leaking conduits, necessary relocations, etc, all happen.)
There's nothing preventing the adoption of buried electrical today except the customer's willingness to pay for it.
New neighborhoods and houses that want it, pay for it. Simple as that. And nothing prevents replacing existing overhead except it becomes a 100% unnecessary cost, once overhead has already been installed.
>...and all it takes is a slight increase in capital expenses for installation to replace them with underground
>slight
4-10x upfront install cost. Higher in urban environments. Not slight.
If it paid for itself as you claim, why are companies almost universally making an irrationally expensive decision?
Not at all, but it's totally beside the parent's point, which is the hypocrisy of scapegoating overhead lines to restrict public transportation options, while simultaneously letting them proliferate unchallenged for residential electric delivery.
Americans would like mansions too if they were massively subsidized to the point of affordability.
If you stopped subsidising the suburbs and suburbanites were forced to pay the 5x higher property tax rates it takes to maintain infrastructure, people's preferences would change.
The people who currently live there have chosen where they live based on their budget. They likely cannot afford the 5x in taxes, so the practical result is that infrastructure would be left to crumble. This is what is currently happening with a lot of post-war infrastructure in the US right now.
No, the practical result in the US is a huge Federal bailout every few decades, labelled "Infrastructure."
Not to mention that they are subsidised within their own municipalities by commercial property and what little climate friendly housing is not NIMBY'd, typically by loud car sewers.
> I still have high hopes EVs will shift public consciousness about our environment and the way we live our lives, but true enthusiasm still seems to be for heavy vehicles people can spend more time in.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while and so far I understood that: people posting here live in a bubble, people doing their regular jobs at a shop, hospital, local doctor, builders, people who have children, bills, mortgages to pay, for them what counts is next paycheque. They won’t care about ev vs ice saving the planet because saving the planet isn’t solving any of their immediate problems. And those problems are basically being squeezed tax wise and having to earn enough to cover for inflation.
There are just so many people out there for whom sitting at a coffee shop for 20 minutes and waiting for the car to charge isn’t an option.
Given the large long roads in the US, there’s always going to be a preference for large vehicles. Especially since there is a strong link between weight/size and safety.
I have a sprinter van for business and a Tacoma for a normal driver. I drive more than some due to distance, not frequency. I also explore remote back/off roads.
The sprinter is more susceptible to wind and driving surface variation.
Be reminded that many of us are out here on bikes every day, and that our lives are at risk by the strange proclivities to engineer car-first roads and to drive oversized, heavy, fast vehicles on them (regardless of their means of propulsion).
Many municipalities (I'll use my current location of St. Petersburg, FL as an example) are working to make the roads safer in all that ways that you (I assert, incorrectly) presume will never happen.
You mean how tall vehicles are much less stable in high wind and are much more likely to roll over? Having recently driven a large vehicle and a small vehicle on the highway, I’ll take the small one any day as long as whatever I’m carrying physically fits.
Not to mention that the operating cost of the small vehicle is about 1/10 that of the large one.
It's all fun and games until you start looking up the environmental cost of mining the metals needed for batteries. Replacing all thermic cars with electric ones is already going to be a disaster, if we need two batteries for each car we're in for a treat
Mmmm, because digging up Greenland in the search of "green, nature friendly BEVs" is a better choice. Neither is good. None, there are too many of us with a wish to have all the convenience of current life standard but being squeezed by the pace of life.
Get off of your horse. BEVs aren't good for environment. Okay, there is no local pollution but the damage is done somewhere else.
The problem with electricity is the storage. Using electricity to produce hydrogen locally is a method to store said electricity. Hence: hydrogen.
"Okay, there is no local pollution but the damage is done somewhere else."
Is that the old coal/nat gas trope that the fossil fuel a-holes trot out to FUD? Have you looked at LCOE for coal? And nat gas is about to be economically uncompetitive as well compared to alt energy, without subsidies. If there was a proper carbon tax, then it wouldn't be close.
Power companies lose money on coal, and are breaking even natural gas. They will be strongly incentivized by economics, not LIB-UR-AL REG-U-LATION, to get rid of that stuff as quickly as possible. Solar/wind is STILL dropping. Things have slowed in the LCOE graph, but I wonder how much of that price drop slowdown is inflation.
If you're talking about battery materials and car construction, that is, AT WORST, the same as building an ICE vehicle... except ICE vehicles have about a 100+ more components and parts than an EV. LFP chemistry (and hopefully sodium ion) batteries will be very cheap. Cobalt/Nickel chemistries are rapidly becoming the domain of vanity and luxury cars... the 300 mile LFP/Sodium car is probably about a year away, but it is coming.
EVs will drive research into Carbon Fiber as well: hopefully we get an breakthrough like the Bessemer process or Haber process that will deliver low-energy economical carbon fiber bodies. ICE/Big Oil never cared about that.
As for hydrogen as grid storage, well, you're just proving my point that it is inapplicable to consumer transport. Thermodynamic losses for hydrogen generation, even temporary, will make it noncompetitive once mass scale LFP/Sodium or other grid storage chemistries hit the big time.
Sure throw some research towards Hydrogen and fuel cells. They do have potential in aviation and long haul trucking/shipping. Just like we should throw some research at LFTR and next-gen nuclear.
Nobody's talking about compatibility, which falls into right to repair territory.
This is not your father's Die Hard battery, there's intelligence and protocols that need to be integrated. How does one drop in a replacement without Tesla's blessing and support?
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology is is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
What does news like this do to current year EV sales? We needed to start transitioning the vehicle fleet around the world to EVs and alternate transportation modes years and years ago to make a dent on climate change.
But now if EVs are going to have triple the range and be cheaper in a few years' time, why spend money on a 300 mile range EV now? Surely the resale value will plunge and current buyers will lose their shirts on them.
I suppose that's good news for buyers in the secondhand market hoping to pick up cheaper vehicles, but it's a disincentive for new buyers.
Electric cars won’t “make a dent” in carbon emissions until most of our electricity comes from renewables and nuclear. At least in the USA, we are many years away from this. BEV uptake is unfortunately not the rate-limiting step.
And even if we had 100% renewables tomorrow, cars would still be incredibly inefficient (2 ton car for most times only 80 kg load (aka one human)), loud, dangerous for everyone not in a car, expensive for owner and state, etc…
Manufacturers could alleviate that by planning for battery pack upgrades. Offer customers an upgrade path, transition the old batteries to utility storage until the end of their life and then recycle them.
To the extent that the old range was a deal breaker for buyers of used cars, it will hurt. To the extent that buyers of used cars were needing a little bit more depreciation, the depreciation will be back stopped. And the depreciation, in turn, would shift some buyers toward those older EVs, to say nothing of the new buyers that could be enticed by range.
Look at depreciation of Intel Macs after M1 came out, maybe?
"range extender cells" == shorter recharge lifetime cells that are only supposed to be used in 1% of trips (long ones). I wonder if these are just experimental low-cycle cobalt/nickel or some other battery that normally isn't up to the cycle endurance of a consumer car.
LFP for an everyday usage (200 miles in a day), which are high-endurance, good temperature range, safer, etc.
I think this mixed mode is an excellent example of how "good enough"-density (200 wh/kg) LFP (and possibly even cheaper sodium) will be utilized.
All these different cell chemistries can each be combined in heterogeneous packs for different use cases. So even if a cell can't do 1000 cycles, it might be usable for the rare trips. Or maybe make that high-density module more replaceable, and the long-endurance LFP/Sodium does Cell-to-Pack and that type of stuff.
I think a typical consumer car in a few years will use a sodium or LFP for about 2/3 the cells (by weight/space) and 200 miles of range, and another higher density SSB or modern cobalt/nickel high-density cell for another 200 miles of range.
So the question is, what was the mix in this car? That's the big question.
I'll probably get down-voted, but I really think best way to improve BEV range for road trips is towing a diesel or gas powered electric generator. Your car becomes like a plugin hybrid, except you don't have to deal with the weight, mess and complexity of an ICE drivetrain on a daily basis.
I can imagine an infrastructure where you rent one of these towed generators at a national chain when you depart, and drop it off at your destination. Similar to renting a U-Haul trailer.
I have a Tesla with a 100Khw battery and ~290mi of range. The only time I need more than 100mi of range in a day is when I'm taking a trip, which is not a daily thing. If such trailers were rentable for a trip, BEVs could have much smaller and lighter batteries. Eg, my car could be substantially cheaper and lighter.
I wish Tesla and other BEV cars would allow charging while driving.
> towing a diesel or gas powered electric generator. Your car becomes like a plugin hybrid
The Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust used this method. OK, it had the generator in the back so you were always carrying it about, but you know, baby steps and all that.
How about a trailer that contains a battery pack big enough to last your whole trip? Going 600 miles? 100kWh trailer. 1000 miles? 250kWh trailer.
Drop it off at uHaul when you get there, and pick up another one for the return trip.
Of course, a 250kWh battery pack would be a lot more expensive than a diesel generator, but it would involve much less maintenance and wouldn't risk disastrous user error.
> If such trailers were rentable for a trip, BEVs could have much smaller and lighter batteries. Eg, my car could be substantially cheaper and lighter.
hypothetically if this trailer solution existed, I still don't see people buying BEVs with smaller batteries. In general, most like the piece of mind of that range. Things happen - chargers break, power outage or you end up taking an unexpected trip or you spend some time at a friends home where you can't charge
Given that the charger networks are growing at a decent clip and average charging speeds continue increase, not many people would want to bother going to U-Haul before and after a trip when you could just stop for a bit on the way, have some coffee and stretch your legs
In short, it'd be such a niche product it would make little sense for auto manufactures in invest in it
Rivan does have plans to let you add a battery pack for the bed of the truck. I hope that comes out and someday other brands do the same
The BMW i3 REX is like that. It has a small petrol tank and ICE - which is used as a generator to power the traction battery.
It's fine, as far as it goes. But most of the time you're dragging around extra weight and there's more mechanically to go wrong. You also might not be able to use some roads when you're emitting fumes.
I don't understand why people are allergic to stopping at a rapid charger every 2 - 4 hours. Surely people need to stretch their legs or go to the loo?
Indeed.. I don't much care for solutions like the i3 rex. That's why I propose hauling around the charger only when needed.
Its not so much stopping every 2-4 hours that's the problem. If it was a 3-5 minute stop, it would be fine, but its a 20-40 minute stop (assuming no contention for chargers). I've taken many 900+ mile (each direction) road trips in my car. Charging generally ads about 25% to the overall elapsed time. The chargers (at least in the I95 corridor in the USA) are often not equipped with 24hr restrooms.
That's an interesting concept, but the towed generator model also allows you to go "off grid" to rural areas without fast charging. Such areas would be unlikely to be a common enough destination for a roadtrain..
At the moment second-hand values seem to be holding up well, even for old Leafs. I suspect the problem is going to be the opposite, a lack of cheap cars for people with a tight budget. Right now I could buy a cheap car for £1000 and although it might be a bit grotty it would get me to and from a job. That end of the market might disappear completely.
After a while there's going to be a glut of vehicles, some will be known as lemons for whatever reason (sometimes it can be just looks) and their resale values will be low, various brands have already started producing cheap EVs (for example Dacia has an EV at around 20k in Europe, yes, it's crappy by HN standards but it's still an EV: https://en.media.dacia.com/news/all-new-dacia-spring-prices-...), etc.
I wonder what the life of the battery is going to be in the Dacia and how much it will cost to replace. If in ten years it can only do 20 miles and a replacement is £5K then that car is leaving the market. The ICE equivalent will be fine as a cheap run around.
Why should the battery in the Dacia be so much worse than that in a Leaf or Tesla. Surely there can't be that much variation in battery quality within the major Western manufacturers (Dacia is a Renault subsidiary I think).
My 2015 Model S 70D which has done over 160 thousand km seems to have pretty much the same range as it had when it was delivered (about 330 km) so if the decline is more or less linear from the start then the lifetime is actually rather longer than the manufacturers expected. Of course I suppose it is just possible that it will die on the day after the eight year warranty is over or perhaps drop to 70%! But how likely is that?
And surely once there are a lot of old EVs on the road there will be a big market for replacement batteries and competition will drive the prices down.
>Why should the battery in the Dacia be so much worse than that in a Leaf or Tesla.
The Dacia doesn't have thermal battery management. The warranty is only 75K miles on the battery. It's already a small battery so there isn't much in reserve. The car is the cheapest EV on the market. Comparing it to one of the most expensive is ridiculous especially when we are talking about running cars on a tight budget.
My hope is that public transport and bike infrastructure will catch up by that point. However, this might help in Europe, but I could see a real problem with the market vanishing in the U.S.
I appreciate your optimism, but if you look at a Youtube channel such as Not Just Bikes, you'll see that the scale of the problem is humongous. Most people in North America doesn't even realize that car infrastructure is a problem.
First you need people to understand, then to accept the necessary changes and then you need the money and time to perform those changes.
Even the Netherlands, the bike capital of the world, has a thriving car market, and North America is probably 30+ years behind the Netherlands, in the best US biking locations.
That's sadly true. Not Just Bikes and their String Towns initiative is really eye-opening. A bit off-topic but I do wonder if covid and the current state of the economy will accelerate the debt crisis of small cities ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQUOHlAocY ) and force a downsizing to a more reasonable infrastructure.
This could well be a game changer. What I don't understand from the article: they claim they have just done a trip with that battery and then in the same breath they say they will have a production sample by 2023. How can those be reconciled, if they already have one isn't that sample enough?
Or is this a prototype of sorts? And if so has someone inspected that vehicle to make sure that it isn't a trick? Because if a factor of 2 in battery life works for EVs it works for everything and that would be pretty big news utterly unrelated to Tesla.
I have a theory that the 'trick' here is that the battery isn't rechargeable... Not yet at least...
For a PR stunt, they put lithium–manganese dioxide or some similar chemistry into a tesla. They're not rechargable, but they have a very high energy capacity.
They'll obviously have a lab furiously working on trying to make a rechargeable version... But for now, this demo is great for getting investment.
I'll believe it when they allow independent inspection of the test vehicle pack. Until then, skeptical. Too many fake-it-until-you-make-it schemes and this could easily be one.
Production though is 4 years away in 2026. What capacity will stock manufacturer and Tesla packs be at then? Especially since Tesla is not sitting still and has new designs also under development.
Question for the more EV knowledgeable people out there.
Is there anybody pursuing the idea of charging stations where one swaps your EV’s battery for a fully charged one, and pays a fee proportional to how expensive it was to charge that battery at the local electricity rate?
Specifically, what are the barriers? Legal? Technical? Patent-related? Capital? Or is it not worth investing in this vision, because there’s reason to believe we’ll reach ubiquitous availability of charge stations with <5 minute charge times for a 350 mile range (i.e. equivalent to a full tank fill-up at a gas station) in the not distant future?
To understand the use case better, we own a car and only use it to “get away” (i.e. 200-600 miles over the course of a day into somewhat remote locales). We’d love to have an EV, but the idea of pausing to take a long charging break in the middle of an already long drive is very unappealing.
One of the issues is the battery is the heaviest part of the car, and tend to be pretty large. Most EVs today are basically built around the battery, using it as a foundation that everything else attaches to.
Making it replaceable means sacrificing range, because the battery must be smaller and there's more weight for a frame to hold the battery pack(s).
This is in addition to the more practical problems such as standardizing packs, network of swap stations, ownership of the batteries. If the packs are big you need a machine at every station (which can break), but if they're small enough for a driver to swap you sacrifice even more range and increase other potential problems like theft.
Battery swap is sweet but mobile charging stations coming on demand using a phone app and charging your car as it is parked on the street - that's a new and interesting idea for me. You could call one overnight and have your car ready next day, even in a place without fixed charging stations.
The battery is probably the singular most expensive component in an EV Vehicle. And batteries degrade with time and are in different states. If someone comes in with a batter that's only half working, then swaps it for a fully working one? or One that comes to the station with a fully working one and swaps it for a half working one?
Batteries would need to be a communal resource - with them being expensive i don't see it happening. Batteries need to be cheap for companies and people to take the risk of swapping their battery with a random one.
> companies and people to take the risk of swapping their battery with a random one.
What if you don't own the batteries, just buy the car without a battery and sign a contract for X years and $Y that you will get the battery replaced on each station?
> with them being expensive i don't see it happening
People rent cars that are more expansive than batteries.
Similarly, EVs feel incredibly impractical for cramped city life. If you're living in a small London flat with no garage, parking etc. (hey!), the whole where and how are you going to keep something charged is very real. I'm completely unsure how that's meant to be solved in a real and practical long term way.
I don’t know about in London, but here in Canada a lot of businesses like grocery stores and movie theatres are realizing that charging stations are great for business.
If you have a car in the city, you probably only need to charge once a week depending on usage, is it really that outlandish to think that in an entire week you won’t take your car somewhere with a charger nearby? Besides that, you can slow charge off mains voltage using an extension cord in many cars.
We have wired every room in every building in every city across most of the globe to have electricity. I really don’t think it’s much of a stretch to run some extra wires to the curb as ecar adoption rises. The current system of moving billions of gallons of highly explosive liquids to custom built dispensing facilities placed every few kms on valuable real estate is far less practical when you think about it.
> I really don’t think it’s much of a stretch to run some extra wires to the curb as ecar adoption rises.
My flat is about ~50m from the road and 3 floors up. I absolutely get what you're saying, but charging from a cable inside the building isn't practical for anyone in this block (or many of the blocks nearby).
Could agree more with regards to the explosive liquids - but you can be in and out of a petrol station in ~5 minutes. I may only need to charge once a week, but it still requires my car to be somewhere with a charging point for an hour (or whatever) a week.
FWIW, I don't have an answer. I just don't think we're there (or close) yet. I suspect EV adoption will start outsides the cities and spread in.
The running the cable out to the curb was more meant as a municipal or collective effort. I don't think that running a cord from your window to your car is practical. More that the infrastructure to put a few charging stations on every block is already existent in every first world town and city.
A government will instantly approve of a plan to install dozens of parking meters per block at a cost of thousands and thousands, and then employ an entire department to wander the city and enforce the rules. It really can't be that much harder to make it so that some of those meters also work as a charging station.
I imagine as battery and charging tech progresses, the difference between getting petrol and charging a car will narrow to the point that it really doesn't matter. e.g. For the better part of a decade Tesla had been able to charge to 80% in ~30 min. That's more than enough for the average city dweller to get their shopping done. This is one area where I think techno-optimism is extremely warranted.
Yeah, I don't think we're disagreeing which each other.
I'd assume eventually it will work exactly like you suggest - I just think we're very far from it right now. I see it very much chicken and egg - trying to encourage your local council to put charging points every 3 or 4 spaces on every street is going to be next to impossible when there's just not enough EVs; too much hassle/uncertainty to own an EV in the middle of a city if you have to park it on the street (and your charge options are super limited).
That said, I'm sure it'll change and change will come quicker as more people in the suburbs (with the space to charge at home) buy.
Long term this is probably the solution. Sort term though - the ratio of cars to street side charging is about 50 to 1 right now. Even if we put a charging socket in every existing lamppost we'd still only be at about 10:1. We basically need to dig up the streets of entire cities and lay additional high voltage cables and a charging point at every parking space. There doesn't seem to be any desire to do that right now.
It’s available in China today. I think I read somewhere the Chinese government will also enforce interoperability or something like that.
There was an Israeli company in the past, Better Place. It failed because car makers didn’t participate. But that was almost 10 years ago, so EV adoption was way lower.
I heard of an Israeli startup working on that, not sure what happened with it. More moving parts around delicate electronics probably make for a challenging combination, I'm guessing the biggest challenges are technical.
Driving 200 miles is doable today. 600, I definitely need to stop, stretch legs and eat. Sfbay to az and and I stopped more frequently than “required” just to get a break from the road. I’m middle aged though so ymmv
When I was in college, and much more willing to suffer, it was 335 miles from home to school, and took 5.5 hours driving. I could do that without stopping, though normally would stop at least once for snacks/bathroom. Now I’m more likely to stop two or three times on a trip that long.
Even now on a mountain west traffic-free interstate I don’t really count on going more than 500 miles in a day. And that includes a meal break.
Both of these use cases sound like they would be very minimally disrupted by planning my stops around a charging break.
I think that range anxiety is largely overblown for a huge majority of use cases.
I’ve tried thinking about this from Tesla and the auto manufacturer’s point of view.
I think, while battery technology is rapidly evolving, the incentives of EV manufacturers is not to create “open interfaces”, but instead to integrate the battery into the hardware as much as possible. This gets better performance but also creates lock in.
In short, my theory is that until there’s a “battery company” ecosystem that sells up to auto manufacturers, this dream of swap stations will not materialize. Barring some regulation, I guess.
I feel that charging an electric vehicle will always be a sore point. Because it takes so darn long. No amount of range improvement makes it less painful to recharge. There will always be complaints.
Just "splash and dash." Usually I just plug my Tesla into a supercharger, go to the bathroom, and then I have enough charge to make it where I'm going.
Could we be more careful about getting the capitalization right in headlines like this? "One gemini" not only reads different from "ONE Gemini" in English; it actually means something different.
To the extent this is legit it would be great news for electric aviation as well. Range would still be very limited vs. current aircraft but it starts to get more viable for short-haul applications.
But the demo battery is not. It's something else. What?
Why do these people think they can get that kind of energy density from lithium iron phosphate when nobody else can? BYD, which really likes that technology, has pushed the energy density per unit volume up by about 2X, but the resulting battery is denser and thus heavier. No problem for fixed installations, but mediocre for vehicle range.
There's a lot to be said for using lithium iron phosphate chemistry. The batteries don't blow up. They don't have the negative temperature coefficient which causes thermal runaway. They survive the "nail test". As electric cars go mainstream, and we have tens of millions of under-maintained cars on the road, we need all that.
So, is this for real, or a demo only?