tldr: "Basically they crammed a couple more rows of cells into the module."
That, and 100kwh for a Model S battery is pretty damned good, could probably set a 650+ mile record under special handling (current record is 550 miles on a 85D).
It may require some dimensional changes to the Model S though, as the cells are longer. So it may not be compatible with the existing versions of the Model S.
[0]: https://electrek.co/2016/11/02/tesla-panasonic-2170-battery-...
Not only that, there are different grades. A 18650 is a size and voltage specification. As in, it's like calling a battery a AA or AAA: any AA or AAA fits into a device and makes it run, but some AAs and AAAs last a lot longer than other batteries in flat out runtime, or survive usage in abusive devices, or in extreme weather conditions, or so forth.
There are low grade 18650s just as there are high grade 18650s. Maximum capacity isn't the only way to measure a battery, but also it's maximum discharge rate and thermal characteristics under load; as in, larger capacity isn't always better in some use cases.
It sounds like he saw one specification sheet of the new upcoming product, and generalized it to every battery in that size. A quick Google Search (tm) did not yield any useful statements on such.
I personally assume that the grade of battery used in the Model 3 battery packs is going to be similar to the lowest grade used in the Model S, but with lower available engine torque to compensate for the smaller overall battery pack size.
> A 18650 is a size and voltage specification. As in, it's like calling a battery a AA or AAA: any AA or AAA fits into a device and makes it run, but some AAs and AAAs last a lot longer than other batteries in flat out runtime, or survive usage in abusive devices, or in extreme weather conditions, or so forth.
18650 doesn't mean anything other than a cylinder 18mm diameter by 65mm long; it doesn't imply a certain voltage or anything else. I've worked with 18650s that have voltages from 2V to 4.4V. Nonrechargeable 18650s, though quite rare, exist at even lower or higher voltages.
I've got access to several spec sheets from Panasonic, who Tesla is pairing with, in combination with public spec sheets from existing 21700 cells. My guesses at Tesla's final 21700 battery specs are a combination of these spec sheets, my own knowledge about batteries, and some physical limitations (e.x. the theoretical max power density shrinks as the cell grows, and 21700s are roughly 50% more volume than 18650s.)
> There are low grade 18650s just as there are high grade 18650s. Maximum capacity isn't the only way to measure a battery, but also it's maximum discharge rate and thermal characteristics under load; as in, larger capacity isn't always better in some use cases.
Yep, that's why I addressed those things in my comment. Thermal issues are particularly interesting with Tesla's packs.
EDIT: an explanation of the downvotes would be nice.
I know it's anecdata but his usage has convinced me that electric cars are far more capable and practical than some give them credit for.
Even if you're in the US and you live in a remote location, the car is crap for road trips. For example, you live in Rock Springs, WY and want to drive to Buffalo, WY. You will be lucky to make it on one charge and adding a supercharger to the route will take you hours out of the way.
It's perfectly possible to express these kind of opinions in a way that wouldn't seem confrontational but apparently that's hard for people to do. (e.g. "my town is quite hilly, so cycling doesn't make as much sense for me as it does in flatter areas") In this case, possibly just leaving off the first sentence would have been enough. Probably not though, as it still comes off like the world revolves around their, not particularly common, use case.
That's maybe half of it, the fact that their comment is quite possibly just factually wrong, combined with the above means they don't get the benefit of the doubt.
There's lots of previous-gen EVs that would probably welcome the label of "good for in-city use", but it seems a stretch to say that is the limited application for any model of Tesla S.
I'm not seeing the confrontation, I'm seeing concessions made and a balanced comment.
This discussion has been had so many times, I can't blame people for downvoting it. Nothing new is going to come of having it again, it's just going to derail the thread.
When I first heard of electric cars they were convert your car with lead acid batteries. An interesting project, but not practical. Then the EV1, but since I don't live in California I ignored it. Then Tesla which was neat, but I make 300 mile (one way) trips and the supercharger was still a promise - the price made it a "I could make it work if there was a supercharger along my way, but it is too expensive". Then came the leaf - affordable, but the range was such that I didn't have confidence I could go to work, lunch and get back home again. Now the leaf has solve the above, but I'm learning about battery life - it can work for the first 60,000 miles, but after that replace the battery at a high cost.
What will be the next goalpost? I don't know. The number one goalpost for me is always is it cheaper to replace my car or not. The reality is my current car is still working (though we will see what my mechanic says, there are some signs that the body is starting to fail), and at 40+mpg electric is not a better deal than keeping it working.
Every year they roll out more and more Superchargers, and the 100kwh battery for the Model S exists now.
1. "Across the United States, mega-commuters on average spend two hours to traverse 166 miles just for the lighter morning commute " http://www.mercurynews.com/2013/03/04/bay-area-tops-new-mega...
Pedantically, some would, since to be a mega-commuter you only need to travel 50 miles in each direction. Average != all.
Really? Traveling +300 miles before needing a 3.5 hour recharge still leaves it "long from being usable"?
We shouldn't optimize for the exceptional cases. It's far cheaper and easier to think of the main usage first and deal with the exceptions when the time comes. Renting a shipping container once every few years is not that expensive.
This is an easy argument to make, and I've made it myself in other cases, but there are two parts to the equation. The first is how often you might need to travel a long distance, but the second is what the consequence might be if you can't.
Personally speaking (this thankfully hasn't happened often) I've had to make literally last minute 12 hour drives to attend to gravely ill relatives. If our only car had been a 300 mile range electric, those drives wouldn't have been possible in anything close to the same duration. (Looking for an alternative/rent car at 11PM isn't really an option. Looking for a Supercharger station in rural Virgina at 3AM even less so.)
Most trips can. Coverage is pretty good nowadays. You don't "look for" them, the car tells you where to go. 3AM is irrelevant, they're open 24/7. If your trip is well covered by the network, you're looking at a 10-20% time penalty. If it's not, you're screwed, of course, but people seem to overstate how likely that is.
Running the route I'm describing through a trip trip planning website, the travel time goes from 11:12 (h:m) to 15:52 (3:53 charging)... so more like a 40% penalty. In my particular scenario, it would have translated into 4-5 hours of (minor) detours and waiting at Supercharger stations in the middle of the night with sick family waiting. For me, personally, the flexibility to avoid that kind of delay is something I've found valuable at particularly important moments of my life.
Aside from the fact there are fewer Supercharger stations, some of this is just an inherent limitation of the technology. Even a Supercharger station (145KW) is slightly more than two orders of magnitude less capable of transferring energy than a gas station pump (16MW). Even if the battery technology got to the point it could handle that level of power transfer, I'd hate to be anywhere near a 16MW electrical charging station. (>2K amps at 7,200 V, not to mention the required >100MW feed INTO something like an 8 car station with that capacity per car.)
This makes me wonder about the idea of swapping out battery packs. It seems like that could possibly be made just as fast as filling up on gas.
Of course the limited charging speed has an effect, but it's not gigantic, especially if you're going to be taking breaks anyway. If you're not taking breaks, the effect is larger.
I'm not trying to tell you not to care about this, mind! I see a lot of people thinking it's worse than it is, saying long trips require extreme patience, etc. Having done many thousand of miles of long trips in my car, it's not bad at all. But certainly there are cases where it really is just too much, and as long as the facts are out there, I don't mean to try to convince you to alter your priorities.
As far as battery swapping goes, Tesla did develop this, and built a station in between LA and SF. They originally showcased it as being twice as fast as filling up a tank of gas, but that was before they added the titanium shield under the battery, so the version they put into operation was more similar to gas filling time. It never got very popular, partly because it was expensive, partly because they never pushed it, and partly because most people didn't mind the Supercharger stops. I'm not sure if the station is still in operation or not, but it'll probably remain the only one.
Philly to Atlanta.
To be honest, I thought the Supercharger coverage along the route was excellent. I don't know what the individual sites are like (ie: would I really want to hang around an hour or two), but the spacing and locations looked really quite good.
> If you're not taking breaks, the effect is larger.
Yeah... we usually do take breaks. (Without breaks, it's a doable drive, but not easy.) A supercharger station in the middle of a cluster of restaurants would be a good opportunity for cross-sales, etc.
> I'm not trying to tell you not to care about this, mind!
Understood. To tell the truth, I don't think this specific use case is necessarily a huge deal. Even though it did impact us, it's a low priority event.
> As far as battery swapping goes, Tesla did develop this,
Interesting. Based on what the article was saying about the battery's interface to the car, it didn't seem like a quickly swappable component.
Are the supercharger stations usually staffed with people to assist? I'd thought they were self-service. It may be that the reason they haven't pursued the battery swap idea more aggressively is that it requires more staff at supercharger stations, as well as all the logistics around keeping a stock of pre-charged batteries at all the stations where you can do the swap.
One other comment I should make here is that despite what it might seeem I generally am very positive about electric cars. This is true, both as a means of of transport, as well as a way to (potentially) manage the electrical grid's use of solar/wind/etc. power. (Power sources that might not be as continuously reliable as something like a Natgas plant, etc.)
Of course, it'll depend on what you're driving, too! I got those numbers by having it route for a Model S 85 (which is what I have, so that's what it was set to). If I switch it to a P100D and optimize from there, the total trip time is only 13:55. It doesn't have a 100D yet, but that should be even faster, since the non-P versions are a bit more efficient.
Which is to say, if you want to make trips like this faster, the bigger battery helps a lot. Applying some human smarts can optimize things. And it's definitely not the "hop in and go" you can do with a gasoline car. It takes some planning.
Regarding the locations, they're usually pretty good. Most of them are in commercial areas with places to have a meal, grab a snack, or whatever. Not always, though. The West Palm Beach location sticks out at me as particularly bad, being located at a Tesla service center in a pretty industrial area. I'd try to avoid that one next time I make that trip. This is another area where planning helps.
I'm not sure what you're referring to in the article that made it look like the battery wasn't easily swappable. It does talk about doing complicated things to change out the connector, but that's for a hypothetical swap of this new 100 battery into an older car. Tesla apparently changed the connectors at some point, so you'd need to do some work for that. But that wouldn't affect a battery swap station, where you'd presumably have a stock of batteries appropriate for your particular car.
You're right that supercharger stations aren't usually staffed. I have heard that some really busy ones sometimes have people helping organize, but that's rare. Mostly there would be no point in having anyone around. I think the goal was to have the battery swap stations be totally automated, but they never actually got to that point. There would definitely be a huge amount of logistics management and capital expenditure compared to supercharger stations either way. Even if it had caught on, I think swap stations would only have been on really busy corridors like LA to SF, or I-95.
I think the main issue is just that charging technology is good enough for enough people already, and is improving quickly enough. As you can see from the trip times above, the newer batteries already offer a pretty big improvement there, and hopefully there will be more to come.
Flying would've meant booking a last minute flight, waiting for whatever flight time, getting to the airport an hour or two in advance, landing at our destination, arranging transport, and then taking a two hour trip by ground transport. There was so much in the way of overhead and transition costs it didn't make sense. (Amtrak had the same problem.... we've tried that before too, but only once.)
Yes. it is a huge step back from what we are used to...
PS: It's not really safe to drive 10h without taking a few breaks. But, I know the appeal.
In short, the current superchargers are a good start, but if they want to make electric cars work for long distance they need to have them at every restaurant in the country, and every hotel needs to provide a charging station.
In most of the country you can find a gas station every 20 miles even in the least populated parts. (though I can name some areas where next gas is 60 miles) Since a fill up is only 5 minutes I can fill up and then go to the restaurant across the street. With fillups taking 40 minutes we need the charging station to have a different model from current gas stations: they need to be places where humans would want to stop for a long time. Parks, hotels, restaurants, museums and the line come to mind.
It will be interesting to see what happens as (if) electric cars become common.
Electromagnetic induction is expencive and less efficent, but visually more apealing and fewer weather related issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Electric_Vehicle or various forms of direct connections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-level_power_supply or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conduit_current_collection
However, if electric becomes the norm gas is going to have the same issues as there are ever fewer stations.
I might just be tired of seeing this exact same discussion on HN over and over again. I was hoping to see discussion on the battery tech, not a discussion about how big of a bikeshed we need. The range anxiety discussion has been beaten to death. It's not insightful. I can read the exact same comments on YouTube.
Me too, but after this[1] comment, I'm a bit deflated on the tech discussion.
Is that 40 minutes with the Tesla specific gear for charging?