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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

(1) Those nasty things inside car batteries are easily recycled and in fact are recycled more often than not (like 95%+)

(2) Car batteries do not last only 3-4 years as per the OP. Car batteries can last decades. There are many variables, but the car in my battery is far older than 4 years. (lol)

(3) Replacing an easily-recyclable product with a less-recyclable one is no step forwards.

(4) XX addressed by OP comment, see below XX This thing is a capacitor? What's the voltage potential in there? Any device with internals significantly beyond that may be a serious fire risk in a crash..

(5) Car batteries are not needlessly heavy, nor are they a stock size. Manufacturers do care about performance. If they thought the car could do with lighter battery they would use one. Have some respect for the thought behind stock engineering before replacing it.

(6) Shutting down the voltage supply can be a real pain. A "dead" battery generally still has enough juice to keep electronics ticking over. Cutting it completely is not like turning off a switch. It often means resetting/rebooting stuff once the voltage is restored. For some (BMW) it can even mean a trip to the dealership for a special new battery ritual. http://www.bimmerforums.com/forum/showthread.php?1355106-Why...

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You're right! Lead acid car batteries are one of the great recycling success stories. What's interesting is that the volume of lead acid car batteries in the world is so high, that even at that high recycling rate, that still leaves 24 million pounds of lead each year from car batteries that don't get recycled. There's also been some problems recently with lead recycling plants contaminating the environment [1].

You're also right that it's more complicated to recycle lead than lithium batteries, but a recycling process does exist, and it's getting better thanks to the proliferation of lithium batteries in electric cars.

It's actually got 6 capacitors in series (2.7V each). We don't charge them all the way up to 2.7V, so it's normally at about 13V on the terminals. We are super paranoid about safety. The EDLC caps we picked aren't a fire risk, since it's just carbon and a few mL of electrolyte. You're probably thinking of what electrolytic caps do when you reverse bias them, but EDLC caps are much nicer. The worst they'll do is vent the electrolyte, not explode. LiFePO4 batteries are also really stable and are used in electric vehicles all the time.

[1]: http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/07/08/lead-contamination...

> that still leaves 24 million pounds of lead each year from car batteries that don't get recycled

Is that actually a lot? Similar statements are made with respect to nuclear waste, but frankly, I've regarded these statements in units of mass as deliberately misleading due to nuclear waste (or lead in this case) to be uniquely dense relative to what we are accustomed to dealing with on a daily basis.

Siri, via Wolfram Alpha, says that 24 million pounds of lead is about 33,900-ft3, or a cube of 32-ft a side. If correct, that doesn't feel like a lot considering this is framed as a the global lead acid car battery recycling waste.

All of the mined gold in the world is a cube about 70 ft on a side. Big cubes are hard to intuitively reason about.

Lead is also pretty bad for people. From some research on Wikipedia and with GNU units, an adult can get clinically significant lead poisoning by absorbing about half a milligram of lead into their bloodstream. (You would have to eat, breathe, or touch more than that in order to get it into the blood.)

If you took all of that non-recycled car battery lead waste and distributed it evenly across the whole U.S. population, you would have 6 orders of magnitude more than the absorbed dose required to give everyone in the country clinical lead poisoning.

(Obviously most of that waste has no likelihood of being absorbed into someone's body, so this calculation isn't necessarily that meaningful.)

In the more familiar unit of "swimming pools", it looks like it might be around 10.

Actually I get substantially less than that.

Olympic sized pool = 164ft x 82ft x 9ft 10 inches = 132, 300ft^3. Density of lead: 709 lbs per ft^3.

So a single Olympic-sized pool would weight almost 94,000,000 lbs if filled with lead.

(If you really want to blow your mind, that same pool would weight almost 200 million lbs if filled with Osmium, the most dense element. Of course, that's WAY WAY more than the amount of Osmium that exists...I can't find a world wide figure but US production is only about 250 lbs per year)

I have always been surprised how cheap osmium is given how rare it is ($400 an oz). I have wanted to buy some, but it is not the nicest metal to play with [1].

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmium

This might be an unpopular view here but I think artificially increasing core charge fee via laws could easily bring that recycling percentage to 99%. Could you imagine if you did not hand in your old battery when buying a new one it cost an extra $300 instead of $20 or so like now? A token portion of that could be used to fund state inspections of recycling facilities.

The whole dismantler/recycling system in place for automobiles is really something quite impressively successful. Having so many places to pull used parts to keep other cars going lessens environmental burden multiple fold. Battery recycling is probably the biggest triumph of them all though.

What if you're not replacing one?

Valid concern: it means every possible application of a car battery, if the $300 fee is to be avoided, must involve purchasing a product that already contains a battery. Bad news for DIY makers that need one: they'd need to find a containing product rather than purchasing a battery alone, which might make for a market where fake containing products (to be completely discarded aside from the battery) exist to fill the gap, thus rendering the whole model broken. Is there a solution?

That's a good point. For me though I have had plenty of cars that only last a few months before I drag them to the junk yard. I've used lots of parts from them for cores to offset the cost of rebuilt parts I need to keep another of my cars going. I've also borrowed the car battery from a running car that I'm not using much for art and audio projects. Considering how much some of them had cost another $300 would not have mattered much.

Glad to see you are on top of the voltage/fire thing. But I still see these things as non-recyclable in comparison to industry-standard lead-acid batteries. I can drop my current battery off at any number of garages without issue. Once this new device inevitably breaks down (anything under a hood will eventually) it seems like just more e-waste.

Yeah, we're still figuring out the best way to handle collecting the units at the end of life, but there's already places like this that we can send them to and keep it from turning into e-waste: http://www.kinsbursky.com/

You might want to add language re battery orientation. It looks like your device doesn't care about up and down. That's a big deal for car people. They pay extra for a 'dry' battery that can be mounted in weird places and angles. And mention venting or lack thereof. That's another sticking point for people shopping for aftermarket batteries.

Also, vibration testing if you have done any. Custom cars and offroad machines shake. Nobody wants a battery with internals that look like they might break loose.

If you really want to sell a premium battery, create a motorcycle model. Sportbike owners are really into weight reductions and eat through batteries. It might as simple as a smaller plastic shell.

Sportbike owners are already buying cheap LiFePO4 batteries sans capacitors in droves, so there'd have to be some kind of strong differentiation for Ohm.

Do LiFePO4 provide enough cranking amps for a sportbike?

Yes, absolutely. There are hundreds of LiFePO4 sportbike, ATV, and race car batteries on the market already (for example, http://www.batterystuff.com/powersports-batteries/LFX14L2-BS... ).

I've also used one to run my Elise (2ZZ 1.8L 4-cylinder) for a few years now without issue.

The three major issues I've heard about are are longevity, price, and reserve capacity. Cold weather is a bit of an issue, but strangely it's actually made better by more load as the battery's internal resistance eventually heats it up to the point that it works fine.

I really don't get this product yet. Unless the supercapacitor provides an incredible enhancement in longevity (maybe it does, but my understanding and experience is that temperature and poor manufacturing are the main enemies to these batteries, not instantaneous load), I'm not sold on buying one instead of one of the inexpensive existing alternatives.

Wow, 210 CCA from a LiFePO, I had no idea.

The supercaps provide a huge enhancement in longevity, since the maximum current draw from the battery is lower. This can even mean a difference in manufacturing for the battery in some cases, as there are design tradeoffs between peak current draw and lifetime.

It's also potentially lower weight and lower cost, since you won't need as large of a battery (EDLCs aren't cheap though, so there is a limit).

I run these on three Ducatis, including my track bike - http://earthxmotorsports.com Amazing batteries!! Super light, and super powerful. All the bikes start up faster/easier even after sitting all winter.

I wonder if an argument could be made for audio systems. Very "peaky" power draws from sub systems already have some people putting caps in parallel with their batteries (to mixed success).

If your device had an equal market share, what fraction of it would be recycled? What core charge would a new buyer be expected to pay for that recycling cost?

It will probably take a few years to get certified, but take a look at what goes for $600 as a flooded-cell battery in general aviation. The fact that you use LiFePO cells will probably help, as there is no way a LiPo would ever get approved.

Wasn't there a problem at Boeing recently where LiIon batteries overheated and caught fire?

Yes, those were lithium cobalt IIRC. LiFePO were new technology when the 787 was designed (it's a long product cycle) and the FAA required a metal shield around the LiIon batteries.

LiFePO is much less likely to enter thermal runaway, and much less explosive when it does. Overcharging them is about as bad as non lithium chemistries (it's even possible to start a fire by overcharging a lead-acid). Don't try this at home, but overcharging and shorting a LiFePO isn't nearly as catastrophic as doing so with a LiCoO or LiPo. With those chemistries you're basically relying on the battery firmware to keep the battery from exploding under those conditions.

Some thoughts:

The price point is impressive if you can sell at only ~$50 more than a standard lead-acid battery. If pressed to find a flaw, I think the biggest is one you've already identified:

   There’s one: you can’t run your lights and/or stereo as 
   long with your engine turned off. Ohm’s battery reserve 
   comes in at 10 amp hours; most lead-acid car batteries 
   come in at about 45 amp hours. If you can run your 
   stereo with your engine off for three hours on your 
   current battery, you’d be able to run it on Ohm for less 
   than an hour.

Nobody with a modern car or SUV is going to get three hours' runtime for their accessory equipment. With the original equipment (AGM lead acid, 70 AH/450 CCA) battery in my two-seat passenger car, I'm lucky to get 15 minutes' worth of stereo/nav/etc. operation with the ignition off. There's no conceivable way that 10 AH is enough for this application. The more "luxurious" the car, and the newer it is, the worse this problem will be. Meanwhile, LiFePO4 battery cost will probably go in the opposite direction, leaving room for competitors to offer more power for less money.

So I'd reconsider the size of the LiFePO4 battery, even if it makes the product cost a bit more. You need those high-end buyers. You're not going to sell these to Joe Sixpack for installation in his '98 F-150 pickup.

And yes, your marketing materials are grossly exaggerating both the environmental problems with lead-acid batteries and their typical service life. There is clearly a global regulatory jihad against lead in all of its forms and uses, though, so you do have that going for you.

Edit: Don't forget that auto stop/start is growing in popularity as well. I think it's actually mandatory in some (European?) markets. OEMs are moving toward "smarter" (read: DRM-locked) batteries to handle these additional requirements. I wonder if a better business model might be to offer recycling/rebuilding services that swap out lead plates for LiFePO4/supercap hardware in existing batteries?

>Nobody with a modern car or SUV is going to get three hours' runtime for their accessory equipment.

Really? I've left the satellite radio playing for hours in my 2011 Hyundai Sonata at moderate volume with no hint of problem starting my car afterwards. It has the premium sound system (including subwoofer) and navigation.

There are always going to be anecdotes to the contrary, but the trend is pretty clearly in the opposite direction.

Usually what happens in my case is I forget to turn the headlights from 'Auto' to 'Off.' But even with the lights and fans off I don't tend to see more than 20-30 minutes of operation at most. The car's version of HAL 9000 tries to be conservative and shut things down as soon as the battery voltage goes below about 11.9.

Headlight != radio.

The headlights can be easily 150watt. I doubt the radio uses more than 15.

Those numbers are dead on. Just measured them the other day.

Are led headlights a similar draw?

I am not aware of any led headlights. Not in the US anyway. All the ones I know about have LED only for daytime running lamps and high beams.

If there were led headlights (or fluorescent for that matter) you should expect the draw to be about 1/5 that number.

That number includes marker and tail lights and those can be LED, so the number would be lower in that case.

Don't know about US, but many new cars in EU ship with LED headlights(and no, I don't mean daily running lights, I mean the actual headlights) - for example the new Nissan Qashqai. In US it's sold as Nissan Rogue.

DOT approved LED replacements for sealed beams made in USA:

http://www.pmlights.com/products.cfm?cId=1&fId=71

That's also anecdotal.

No, that's a repeatable observation. There's a difference.

Look, take it up with Volkswagen AG. They're the ones who designed the electrical system in the car in question. Don't shoot the messenger, but a long term business plan centered around aftermarket car batteries is going to be a challenging play, for these and other reasons.

You're probably getting downvoted because a c*4 discharge rate implies over 3 kilowatts continuous draw, which is rather unlikely.

Probably your battery is near dead.

Also F150 pickup trucks are about $60K when loaded with options. Those guys are free spenders compared to commuter car drivers.

> Also F150 pickup trucks are about $60K when loaded with options.

If you buy new. The parent commenter specifically mentioned a '98 F150.

Personally, though, I'm interested in one of these for my Blazer for the cold-temperature performance alone. If the lower power capacity is an issue, I could always just carry around my jumpbox.

That's not how it works. By design, there is still plenty of capacity left in the battery when the car's computer shuts down the accessories.

The accessory draw is enough to lower the (indicated) terminal voltage from about 12.6 volts to about 12.0 in 15-30 minutes, depending on what accessories are actually turned on.

My car has a timer that shuts things down after 15min (or so). Regardless of battery voltage.

I can't emphasize how wrong you are about the whole "you can only get 15 minutes of radio off a car battery".

Your battery is broken or you have a near-short somewhere. I sit in my cheap-ass Jeep for 45 minutes a week listening to the radio for 5 times a week and have for years. Replace it, if it doesn't work seek professional repair.

Amusingly, I also have a cheap-ass Jeep, and gee, you're right, it has no problem running the radio for at least an hour with the ignition off.

So if you think this is a sustainable, scalable state of affairs, at a time when automotive tech is undergoing its greatest disruption since the horse, we'll leave the discussion at that. I'll just say that I think this is a really bad time to aim their business plan at a fixed target, and one that I'm not sure they actually understand.

I wasn't putting a dog in this race with that comment, just urging you to get that battery checked up on before it dumped you at the side of the road. Headlights pull some wattage, but a radio really shouldn't and there's no way 15 minutes should cause any concerning symptoms. Just trying to help :)

I'm not sure how I feel about it, personally. I share a lot of the concerns that have been raised here (battery cutout wiping my clock+radio, vibration, longevity, cranking+jumping ability, etc), and I'm always a bit wary of "One Weird Trick; Auto Companies Hate Him!" claims. I'm certainly not going to be the test dummy for that one, I got places to be that aren't the side of the road. Give me 5 years of early adopters and we'll see.

Neither here nor there, but I was one of the early adopters of electric motors in R/C airplanes. I was doing it since before brushless was a thing (about 15 years), my first plane used a brushed Graupner car motor and Sub-C car packs (boy howdy was that underpowered). I can tell you that batteries have a very finite lifetime, especially when you abuse them under high-current loads. I worry that a lot of hybrid/electric owners are in for some sticker shock when their packs wear out. That one unit is a pretty significant fraction of the total cost and it's a wear item. I know there's steps taken to lengthen the life of the pack, but you can't run them indefinitely.

If you look at this purely from the standpoint of the benefit to a consumer, it doesn't seem like a great deal.

You gain:

* Auto-shutoff when your battery gets too low.

* Possibly some increased lifespan

* ~34lbs in weight reduction, which might deliver a small performance increase.

You lose:

* 78% of your battery capacity

* $20-$150 on the purchase price of the battery

Personally, I don't like the idea of paying more money for less battery capacity. If, however, Ohm came with a rock-solid 7-year replacement warranty, I might be able to get over that.

Suppose they did offer a 7-year warranty, with strong language. Would you really expect Ohm to be around in 7 years? If they want people to take a warranty seriously, it needs to be backed by at least an A-rated insurer, not whoever is funding these guys.

There's also the problem that they apparently offer only a single size/form factor (which is roughly equivalent to 34, 34/78, 75/25, or 35), and that for many applications this device does not offer enough starting power. Never mind reserve capacity. But even if this size is appropriate to your car, there are other reasons to be skeptical.

I guess the pitch is that you do not need the extra battery capacity?

Are you sitting in parking lots listening music these days? That did sound cool when you were kid, but majority will never do that (or take their car camping).

And even if I did take my car camping, I probably wouldn't be using its electricity except in extreme circumstances; I'd sooner bring - at the absolute most - a separate generator (preferably one of those quiet Honda ones) if I really feel the need to be plugged in (which is rarely the case; the point of camping for me is to get a breather from tech).

If, however, Ohm came with a rock-solid 7-year replacement warranty, I might be able to get over that.

That's a good idea, and they could even make it a lifetime warranty (lifetime of the car, that is). "Ohm: The last battery your car will ever need" could make a nice tagline.

In the fine print, the implementation would be a replacement guarantee for as long as the customer owns their car. Since most people don't keep the same car for 7 years, it would be a safer bet than a fixed 7-year guarantee.

I leave my lights on and kill my battery once every few months, so this is easily worth it for me, but I'm probably an outlier[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit...

Why not add the smarts to a lead/acid battery? Probably only a few bucks worth of electronics.

My impression was that said smarts are possible in the Ohm because of the otherwise-wasted space caused by the smaller internals.

On the other hand, if there's that much more space, I'm curious as to why some more battery or capacitor banks couldn't be added to address the low-capacity concerns.

You could probably even do it as an add-on to batteries, although now I'm wondering why it isn't built into the cars themselves. They could easily do it.

Or as a separate component you could drop in and then use whatever battery you want.

I'd pay almost as much for that.

Such a component already exists. Check Amazon.

> I leave my lights on and kill my battery once every few months, so this is easily worth it for me

I compulsively check to make sure my lights are turned off yet my battery still dies at least once a year because I don't regularly use my car, costing around $200 in on-site service and replacement per go. The smart shut-off feature is worth it to me - even if it's just to save time waiting around for someone to perform a replacement. The reduction in weight is a bonus as I have a small car with a fairly humble engine displacement.

One of the best tools I ever bought was a 6 amp battery charger. Plug it in, and in 20-30 minutes the battery has enough charge to start the engine, then you're good to go.

This has saved me many, many hundreds of dollars, being late for work, etc.

I also have a battery maintainer that keeps a battery sitting around charged up.

The last thing is a battery shut-off switch that sits on the battery terminal. If you're going to leave the car a while, shut it off. It prevents the trickle going to keep the radio alive from killing the battery (which takes a week or two).

When I bought my Civic Type-R it didn't even have an option for air conditioning due to the weight it added. For some types of car every pound (though they are called grams in the real world) counts. I suspect this will be popular in the lightweight performance car world.

For sure losing 30+lbs is a big deal in the high-performance automotive world, and Ohm's price premium is nothing compared to, say, replacing structural elements with carbon fiber etc.

But I don't think your average mass-market consumer is going to care much about 30lbs, or notice a difference in performance or handling if they did.

> But I don't think your average mass-market consumer is going to care much about 30lbs, or notice a difference in performance or handling if they did.

In reality, if you looked through the car of a random sample of the population, you'd probably find about 30lbs of crap in their car that they could remove (sporting equipment, rubbish, bags, etc).

I'm not sure why my comment got so downvoted, that's kind of weird as I was just stating facts.

Absolutely the average buyer of a Camry is not going to care about this. But that wasn't at all my point. Some cars (more often in Europe/Japan where driving is more fun because they have corners), take weight seriously. I think car manufacturers might take this option seriously in their sport divisions.

> I'm not sure why my comment got so downvoted

Probably because of the "in the real world they're called 'grams'" remark. I vastly prefer metric over Imperial, too, but that came across as a tad snobbish, eh?

I upvoted, though, for what it's worth; weight savings aren't just the purview of racecars.

I don't get your (4). It's a capacitor + lithium battery. It's got to be nominally 12 volts, or else it wouldn't work in a car. Capacitors only charge to the voltage you apply -- in this case, 12v. I'm not sure if you mean voltage by "beyond that", but fire risk isn't really correlated with voltage - more with chemistry, energy, and fusing.

As for (5), they clearly care about cost.

I was thinking about the internals. They might have components with higher potentials that are then regulated down to 12v. In a crash, those could be a source of high-voltage shorts that might be a source of ignition.

No worries there. Everything is right around the 12V level. We can boost the voltage on the capacitors some, but we never exceed anything that the alternator is spitting out.

But a car alternator's output is nominally 13.8V.

13.8V is around the 12V level and is not high voltage.

What are you objecting to?

Oh, one other thing I wanted to add: The 3-4 year lifetime of lead acid batteries is the average lifetime. There are certainly outliers, but if you go to the store and buy a lead acid today, the warranty is about 3 years.

The BMW thing is interesting. The reason they do that little "ritual" is because they want to program the ECU to use a particular charging profile for your battery, and it needs to know the age of the battery and the type (AGM or not). That's to try to extend the lifetime of the battery. We don't really need to worry about that, since we handle all the charging profiles internally. One of our testers drives a BMW, so we're making sure that we can handle that and similar cases.

You're right about the life. Who here has replaced a car battery after 3 years? My '89 Miata had the OEM battery (an AGM lead-acid battery), 25 years later.

Indeed. I wonder if Ohm works the same way, in that if you have an optimal driving pattern it will last you for 20 years. I suspect based on the Li-ion batteries in laptops and how poorly they last that the Ohm will have a much more predictable failure curve.

If you live somewhere hot, it can be rare to get even 5 years out of a battery (although if you buy ones with a 3 year warranty you may only be paying for a battery every 5 years or so)

A lead acid battery will last a long time if it is never deep-cycled (i.e. run down). Always keep it topped up with charge.

With regards to 5, my understanding is that car batteries are as big as they are because of the need to have over-capacity for reliability. Lead acid batteries are actually kind of fragile in the grand scheme of things. Charge controller smarts can trump over-capacity in the right context, however.

While I agree with points 1 and 2, I have a beef with point 5. Car manufacturers do whatever they can to shave costs, all over the car, all the time. Batteries are needlessly heavy because they are manufactured with the cheapest-possible components using the cheapest-possible technologies. They do put in a best-guess size to keep the median consumer masses happy, whether they drive the car once a month in Death Valley or six times a day in Duluth.

You can buy lighter-weight, lower-capacity batteries to use in competitions where weight matters, or higher-technology batteries for use in angles where lead-acid will give up the ghost. Batteries are frequently moved by tuners to places where their weight has less of an affect on the car's suspension.

That's not really true any more. Due to increasingly strict fuel economy rules, every car manufacturer now has cost models to trade off weight versus cost and reliability. So they will pay a little more for lighter parts.

> (2) Car batteries do not last only 3-4 years as per the OP. Car batteries can last decades. There are many variables, but the car in my battery is far older than 4 years. (lol)

I have a 2003 VW GTi. Had the battery replaced for the first time late last year. The AAA Tech was surprised that I had over 10 years of use with the stock battery.

Still, this product does seem interesting.

> For some (BMW) it can even mean a trip to the dealership for a special new battery ritual.

Really? That would kill any interest I'd have in a BMW. Heck, whenever I work on my car, the first thing I do is disconnect the battery.

Not really, BMWs have a battery management system that needs to be cleared of the learned calibration when the battery is replaced. If it's just disconnected and not replaced then you don't want to clear it. Also, if that were true it would make doing any work a terrible experience even for the dealerships. Heck the service manual probably says to disconnect the negative battery cable before changing windshield wipers.

Few owners of modern luxury cars do their own maintenance.

I find working on my car to be very relaxing after sitting in front of a computer all day. There's also something viscerally satisfying about it.

Of course, that's why I'm an engineer :-)

Working on a car also means sitting in front of a computer nowadays.

(7) This doesn't apply to all performance cars, but in track racing where you really need to save every possible ounce, it's common to take the battery out altogether after starting the car and run it off the alternator.

Co-founder here. Do the cars you're talking about use a distributor? The battery of a car works as a low pass filter for the alternator, and removing it entirely can cause huge spikes in the voltage it puts out. That can be destructive to just about any electronics it would be running. I've personally seen an accidental battery disconnect blow an ECU.

Good to know, thanks, I wasn't aware of that. I'm guessing the guys that I know who do this have either accounted for that or don't care.

The grandparent poster could be talking about magneto or traditional points-based ignitions, which are still common in certain classes of racing cars.

I've never seen anyone do this. We just run lightweight batteries and keep the car on a tender.

You've got a car in your battery? Damn

It's crazy how applicable the Presumption of Stupidity article that was posted a couple of days ago has been. Your comment is basically a re-hashing of that post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10034883

We presume stupidity because that's the default state of a person. You have to load instructions and data into a neuroprocessor, just like any other computer system.

Case-in-point: Woolfe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047721

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