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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

>Ionic can help us get lithium-ion past cobalt and completely eliminate it with alkaline

There are already lithium-ion chemistries that don't use cobalt, eg. lithium iron phosphate[0]. This has lower energy density than lithium cobalt oxide, but it's safer and survives more charge cycles. It's already commercially available. Solid-state alkaline might be able to beat it on cost, but it's a long way from commercial availability and lithium ion technologies keep improving, so that's far from certain.

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

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You kinda had me sold on more charge cycle.

And as for commercially available, it seems all the good "professional/industrial" work tools (drills, etc) use LiFePO, even though it's bulkier and heavier (and probably explains why Milwaukee is so goddamned expensive).

Do power tools really use LiFePO? Based on everything I have seen they all use the common Li-ion chemistry cells. For example a common cell in power tools is the Samsung INR18650 25R, which is not LiFePO I think.

DeWalt used LiFePO for years, but now seems to be using generic lithium-ion batteries.

LiFePO has the nice "doesn't blow up and catch fire" feature. Boosted Skateboards first generation used LiFePO, and worked great, but was expensive. So they switched to generic lithium-ion for the second generation. Their battery recall followed shortly thereafter.[1]

[1] https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2017/boosted-recalls-electric-s...

Charge cycles are important but energy density is king at the moment. EVs need longer range. The 500km(300mi) of the larger models S, X and 3 and are the absolute minimum if you want the broader consumer market to consider EVs as viable alternative to combustion engine cars. It might be sufficient if the supercharger network is expanded.

But most EVs currently on the market have half that range. It's simply never going to be something people are willing to buy as a primary car (and most second cars are old primary cars that the family demotes to second car).

As for charge cycles, you could swap the batteries once in a while like you swap tires, if they are cheap enough.

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