Before the Electric Car Takes Over, Someone Needs to Reinvent the Battery
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I'm thinking of a modular battery that is hot swapable at the charge stations and where you only pay it's depreciation based on what you actually use. This would significantly lower ownership costs for light users and drastically increase efficiency and flexibility for heavy users who are no longer dependent on charge times. Since it's modular, you load the number of units you need, say one battery unit for a Leaf, two for a Model S or 10 units for a light truck, all in standardized format and with their own computing that tracks things like life span, charge cycles performed by the user himself for proper billing etc.
I know Tesla experimented with and later abandoned battery swap, but that's predictable without the proper business structure in place, no one is going to leave the most expensive part of their car back at the charge station. If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.
I wouldn't. Not to be a naysayer, just giving some context. The cars I buy are already in that price range, and I already pay "comparable gasoline prices" (via gas, hah), so in my area all I'd gain is a different type of gasoline when in city, and when I go camping/etc I'd be at risk due to being in slow adoption areas.
Don't get me wrong, I want electric, but due to the areas I drive I've already settled to likely being stuck with Hybrids for the next X years.
With that said, if the model you laid out still ended up cheaper than gasoline it would at least tip the balance towards its favor. I just can't handle a zero sum trade - and I imagine the same would be true for many around this large, slow to adapt land masses.
Cities will become much, much nicer though. Air quality alone. I look forward to it
For a quick recharge the current-generation 120 kW SuperChargers were deemed good enough. Now that they're growing their fleet of mobile service trucks, battery replacement might get re-introduced as an at-home service.
Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation, but private practice is moving too. The number of 25-year-olds with driving licenses is dropping, I've seen surveys that list the iphone above a BMW as a status symbol, and then there are phenomena like this: https://www.citymetric.com/transport/driving-london-has-been...
Picked up our Model 3 in September. We've already driven it to West Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, as well as multiple trips inside of Florida. Hit 10,000 miles yesterday.
I would never argue that road tripping in a Tesla is as worry-free as it is in a ICE-powered vehicle, but with a modicum of forethought I'd say the Model 3 is plenty good enough for driving on vacation today. The hardest part is limiting yourself to hotels that offer Level 2 chargers, but pretty much all new construction hotels have EV charging of some sort.
It could be that a quick hot swap is technologically complicated, especially given Tesla manufacturing tolerances. Also if the hot swap fails, you're stranded without a car.
There was an Israeli battery/car tech startup that was built on that model, but it sadly went kaput. I still firmly believe that the hot-swap model is the winner long term.
The last time I tried to do that (6 months ago) they rejected it. I had to go to the original supplier, as they were no longer refilling each others branded containers. In spite of standard fittings/sizes/etc. They've become significantly less fungible, and I can no longer just go to the nearest or cheapest supplier based on my needs.
Even worse, I've just realised that I now effectively have two un-refillable tanks, as Homebase just shut down all my local branches. Which I paid deposits on when I bought them, obviously. Nice ...
Batteries aren't as "fungible" as something like gas or electricity is. (is that the right word to use for this?)
You can be reasonably sure that gas is gas, and electricity is electricity, but not all batteries are going to be the same. Some will be higher capacity, some will have greater life, some will be heavier or lighter, some cars or trucks will need bigger or smaller batteries, etc... Some could even be damaged and unsafe, which is something you don't really get with gas (sure bad gas could ruin your car, but gas from a pump isn't going to catch fire randomly and hurt you because it's bad)
At the end of the day, it's just too much variation for me to trust a random battery pulled from a depot of them.
The thought experiment that put me over the edge was imagine instead of batteries, we were talking about tires. What if it was deemed better to swap out your tire when you had to put air in it. So you brought it to your shop and they pulled the wheel and tire off, then put one that they had in-store on full of air, and they refilled the one you gave them and handed it to someone else.
Would you trust that? How would it change how we handle tires on cars? Would the public go for it? I really don't think they would, I know I wouldn't, and it's the same kind of feeling with car batteries.
Sure, I put 87 octane in our SUV and 89 in the audi, but yeah for the most part gas is gas, unless something is wrong.
Getting 2 random batteries to have less than 10% variance among them is going to be a lot harder (especially when battery health changes a lot depending on how they are treated. Users running them to near empty in cold weather is going to shorten the life a lot faster than the guy who only runs it to 50% before swapping out every time), and I have a feeling that the amount of "problem" batteries will be much higher than the amount of times i've ever had "problem gas" (which is basically 0 times so far).
For starters, with gas and other things like it, there is a supply chain which is pretty tight. If one supplier starts giving bad gas, you can blacklist them and move on. With batteries you'd have to test them after every single use, because you don't know what the last user has done to them.
Then they need to be physically inspected, because a puncture or deep gouge or crack or something could cause big issues.
Then their actual capacity needs to be tested some how. I'll admit that I've been outside of the battery ecosystem for a while, but years ago it wasn't all that easy to "spot check" a random battery to find it's health and capacity. Most devices would gain that knowledge about a battery over a few charge cycles. You need to make sure you know it off the bat, and you can't be wrong or I'll lose faith in the company and the tech.
Then throw in the complication of different sizes, different shapes, different technologies, different requirements (this isn't just the "gas" part of fuel, it's also the "gas tank", so one size will never fit all), and now you are maintaining huge banks of different kinds of batteries all while charging them to the right amount without degrading them, and checking that users didn't run them in below freezing to almost 0 percent which would reduce the lifetime and aren't damaging them in any way which would be very unsafe.
In an ideal world, it sounds like a great idea, but I just don't trust that it can be pulled off without making the user's life worse than if they didn't do it.
Bringing it back around to the topic, I don't know that we can wait on solid state and this represents a work around while smarter people that I can figure that out.
IIRC ours is the average of 2 different methods (it normally shows as R+M/2 on our pumps), whereas I believe the EU uses only the one that tends to be a lot higher (RON I think)
Most gas stations around me have 87, 89, and 91, and sometimes 93. I believe your octane numbers will be on average like 6 higher than ours for the same gas.
There's no reason that batteries can't be checked that the meet spec before they are replaced in your car in the same way.
For EV fleets we used to only be able to do this per vehicle (not by battery) while the vehicle was home and charging, by shipping the fleet battery metrics to a central aggregator. But that is overkill for consumer vehicles.
There was a time where gasoline brands mattered, and the gas you got from Esso might have been slightly different than the gas from Sinclair or Hess or whatever, but that was intentionally regulated into irrelevance because the benefit to consumers of a consistent product was more valuable than allowing brands to differentiate themselves.
It took several decades after the widespread adoption of the car (and gasoline as the dominant fuel) for this to happen, and during this time users had to struggle with varying fuels produced from different feedstocks, gumming of engines, dilution of crankcase oil, etc. (This is referred to in period motoring publications as "the Fuel Problem".) The automobile industries and the oil industries basically pointed fingers at each other until the US Bureau of Standards had to step in and mediate on a consistent set of standards that the refiners would produce fuel to, and the engine manufacturers would design their engines against. If this hadn't happened, and the market had been left to sort it out, I suspect you would have ended up having to fill your Ford car only at Sinclair stations, based on some Ford/Sinclair arrangement or whatever.
Unfortunately the 'solution' to the Fuel Problem in the 30s involved the introduction of tetraethyl lead, which mars what would have been a good example of mutually beneficial public-private cooperation and useful regulation.
Would you take the marginal risk of a battery swap (plus the costs of all those batteries in inventory throughout the country) in order to save 60 minutes on a 600 mile trip?
And is the infrastructure to do all of that really less expensive than putting a charger at enough restaurants for you to just stop and eat while the car charges?
I honestly think I would for a trip like that. But at the same time I wouldn't want to be stuck with a potentially "sub-par" battery after that trip either. And those 2 things seem pretty at odds with one another.
Like in a perfect world I'd love to be able to have it as an option, but I'm not willing to give up "my" battery in my current (hypothetical!) car for one of unknown quality.
Perhaps a "booster" system would work then in this case? You don't swap out the actual battery in the car, but instead swap out batteries that go in your trunk or something and charge your actual battery while driving! Then you don't care about how shitty that pack is, you are only using it to "recharge" on the go!
Another thing to consider, it is much more likely that we will see 400mi range electrics sooner and/or easier than we could roll out a large network of battery swap stations. I think the concept of battery swap is solid. Most batteries have BMS systems that prevent over/under charging and any physical damage can be detected. Plus the battery would likely be owned by a third party, so it would not be a big deal if you got stuck with a bad battery, you would just swap it out for another one. The main issue is logistics. Much harder to build a network of battery swap stations then it is to put some fast chargers in parking lots. And if we can get the range up to 400 miles, then a 600 mile trip could be done with 20-30 minutes of super charging.
[1] Assuming a ~300 mile ICE range, you need to fill up at the start, at the middle, and at the end (although one could wait till the next morning, but I think it should still count). Whereas electric, you start full (because you plugged in overnight prior to departure), and you end full (assuming you can plug in overnight at your destination). These are rough assumptions, but I think 2 fuel stops is a good approximation, but many would need 3 (including my own ICE car, which gets ~250 miles per tank).
The major one being your first paragraph. Charging tech is getting better every day, and we are already at the point where 15 minutes can get you a good chunk of charge with current batteries in some cars. I think things will change (no more "gas stations" (or places solely devoted to providing fuel), and a lot more charging spots at destinations that are worth spending 30 minutes at), the bit of charging time every few hours will begin to become a non-issue, and the whole complicated logistics nightmare of managing a fleet of physical battery packs at various depots across the country will go the way of the flying car. That thing that everyone thinks they wanted but it was just never practical to have.
This was really the point that I was getting at. It is ultimately cheaper to put good chargers at every restaurant and bathroom stop than it is to put battery swap stations (with inventory) at enough locations.
Automated battery swapping takes tight standardization. It's in use for some industrial robotic AGVs.[1][2][3] Mechanically, it works, but all the vehicles have to be very similar. A taxi fleet, maybe.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvqbw0UT5pM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKg8Zxmmpv4 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJwtwdeAXhM
So then, the business challenge becomes to extract more value from a pack than a car owner can. There are many opportunities to do that:
- much improved inventory management, buy in bulk, monitor and adjust charging parameters etc. to prolong battery life based on observed performance of the specific battery type.
- this allows you to optimize battery purchase and chemistry to minimize overall cost even at the risk of a reduced lifetime
- centralized recharge gives you economies of scale to purchase cheap electricity during the night and enter all sorts of contracts where you can earn money by acting as a last-resort supplier at peak times, without actually using significant charge cycles on your inventory.
- the same economy of scale is passed down to customers who won't be bothered to install high power fast charge circuits, or are simply unable to.
- differential pricing based on customer needs, for example, new, top performance packs for home users and degraded packs with lower peak current for less sensitive customers, taxis and commercial fleets etc.
- batteries depreciate even when they sit charged; a modular system will allow customers to keep (and pay rent for) a single or low capacity unit on a regular basis for city use and opt for full capacity when they really need the extra range.
Just the labor cost for the procedure is likely to greatly exceed the $20-40 estimate.
They replaced the battery in 90 seconds and it was completely automated.
I really like the idea of having gas stations replaced with battery stations. Drive in to the "pump", put in your credit card, and let the automated system replace your battery.
The space that was used for tanks could be devoted to charging infrastructure.
I am very skeptical of that claim. This seems to hold true for laptop batteries. Not cars.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...
Cars overall depreciate on the scale of 10/15 years or so. Right now the depreciation rates are the same. It's an interesting artifact of ICE vehicles that people don't expect any car's drive train to last more than ~15 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers were skeptical of battery tech right up until they hit about that same magic lifetime number. It also shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers won't have a lot of incentive to push it past that magic lifetime number, because that would affect car replacement rates and that would affect the bottom line.
Mostly battery replacements look to keep the used car / secondary markets busy, and if we expect to see interesting innovations in battery replacements that's probably where we'll see them as more electric cars get resold to secondary and tertiary owners. (Just as we see the used car markets pushing innovations in after-market parts in general.)
You are right in that maybe leaves room for a disruption that someone might be interested in a "car for life" model where electric cars might be built far more sustainably with an ideal towards larger reuse of the vehicle over the owner's lifetime and a larger depreciation scale on the order of multiple decades.
That would be a huge game changer, and would potentially be great for the planet (less steel production alone, conceivably). It would also take a lot of work to make it happen, given the existing industry reliance on the current business model for most of a century now. It would also be one extremely huge disruption in so many downstream industries, secondary markets, etc, to the point where it may be more of a revolution (in the industrial sense, but also perhaps the war sense) than a "simple" disruption.
Of course, we can view the car as a single purpose ‘move from A to B’ device, but there’s other viewpoints where the car has a performance (speed, efficiency, handling assist, smoother engine management) profile, quality of life and security features (auto cruising, speed limit detection, tire pressure detection, auto braking etc)
All of these should have evolved enough in 10 years that you get significant benefits from an upgrade.
Obviously new cars are in general an upgrade. Most people driving old cars do not do so because they want to, they do it because new cars are too expensive.
Not necessarily by design, it's simply inherent to electric drive, you have much less "metal grinding against lubricated metal with a controlled wear rate" situations that seems to doom ICEs and the associated transmissions on the long run.
The other side of it too is accidents are likely to always be an issue with cars (even in a world of self-driving cars, I suspect), and there are plenty of other safety reasons cars shouldn't be expected to be driven for too many years without replacement.
There's certainly degradation that occurs to a car with lots of mileage, but it's generally with the interior and the electrical systems. There may be some exterior corrosion, too, if you live in the appropriate climate though corrosion resistance has improved a lot on cars lately. And, of course, all bets are off if you don't properly maintain the car.
I should get around to replacing some suspension components to make it more comfortable to drive, probably will later this year when I get some time. They're not terribly expensive.
Electric or ICE, as you hit 150-200k, you'll have long since worn through all kinds of rubber bushings on virtually every part, you'll be approaching the point where you've had to replace starter or alternator, you'll have (hopefully) replaced your suspension a couple of times, and so on. As the value continues to decline, the 'value' of spending parts+labor money on any of these replacements starts to decline.
Having said that, I remember that 20 years ago, those kinds of parts would need to be replaced after maybe 60-80k miles. However, everything seems to be better built now - my van has 214k on it, and no sign of needing replacements - same goes for all the cars I've bought and sold (20 or so) in the last 3 years.
Going a little deeper, probably your tie rods and sway bar links are shot, as are the control arm bushings (which may or may not be integral with the entire control arm).
Further on down the mileage line, virtually everything is wearing out. Rubber bushings in control arms. Rubber bushings in all your rear suspension points. There's rubber EVERYWHERE on cars, and it all wears out. Motor mounts, transmission mounts, shock mounts. Again, it'll still go down the road, but it won't drive like new. You might have a lot of slop in steering, slop in cornering. The car might pull one way or another under acceleration. It'll be louder, harsher, clunkier.
It helped that I was able to get a brand new loaded Volt for $9,000 off plus an additional $7500 tax rebate. which in the end means that I have the best of both worlds for $25,000 with a full warranty etc..
[0]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-ba...
Basically, the point is a standardized, easily removable, hotswappable widget makes a lot of sense when it's a minor item. But when it's half the weight, value, volume, and engineering challenge, you have to sacrifice all of those attributes to use the hotswap widget.
This originally made me think, if only we could pump fluid electrolyte in & out of the car, and let the battery take whatever form it likes. Then I realized that's called a flow battery, and then I realized that a hydrogen fuel cell is a type of flow battery.
What? Most laptops on the market today have removable batteries, to the point where you can buy spare battery packs for them for long trips. Same with a lot of smartphones.
Unless of course you mean Apple products.
* Nexus 4
* Nexus 5
* Nexus 6P
* Samsung Galaxy S7
* Samsung Galaxy S9
The only recent phones I was aware of with removable batteries were the LG G*, but I don't think the latest model of those has a removable battery anymore either.
Even though swappable batteries do continue on the low-end, I think maybe [in the US] only Motorola actually makes spare batteries available for consumers to purchase, even for devices that don't have readily swappable batteries. I think this year Motorola will ditch swappable batteries, pretty sure, but will supposedly continue to make spares available for select models via Ifixit.
There are few consumer laptops with removable (pops right out) batteries these days. I haven't seen one since the early 00s.
At best there are still those which are user-serviceable (requires a screwdriver and some finesse at the least). And Apple products where you cannot do even that.
Some business models still have the external removable battery, but have lower specs and higher price than consumer counterparts.
Almost no modern smartphones have removable batteries. It's rare enough that the LG G5 tried to make it a selling point a few years ago.
A big reason for Tesla's design was that Panasonic's Cells (a partner of Tesla) was superior on power-density / weight.
I expect that power-density / weight will continue to be an important factor in electric cars, especially when you need thousands of these cells to power an electric vehicle. As such, I don't expect lithium ion cells (even "standard" 18650 ones) to become a commodity.
I get that you said that they each have their own chemistry, but are the owners of all of the chemistries choosing their customers?
Spoiler alert: Chevy Bolt is over 230 miles. Nissan Leaf is 150 miles. If you want 300 mile electric range, your only option is Panasonic (and by transitivity, Tesla, who is their only customer at the moment).
That feat alone means that Panasonic cells give you a real technological advantage. A Panasonic Li-Ion cell is worth far more than a typical Li-Ion cell. It is NOT a commodity, but a fundamental business advantage these days. If the other LiIon cell manufacturers manage to get real improvements to Power Density / weight, then maybe we can talk about Commodifying LiIon cells.
But for now, its Panasonic only.
* better sustained performance compared to NCA
* better peak/burst performance compared to NCA
* easy to adjust formula to show preference for capacity, performance, or longevity (most automakers skip on the 3rd)
Tesla prefers NCA battery because:
* it has more capacity / weight
* it's much cheaper due to lower cobalt requirements (main reason)
The main reason traditional automakers tend to shy away from NCA because:
* it is far less stable than NCM, which puts it a much higher risk for fire or explosions
* it costs more than NCM to make stable (I suspect Tesla chem is cutting corners in this area)
You can decide whether the trade off of safety for range is worthwhile for you; traditional automakers err on the side of safety.
Here's a scientific paper about the safety of various battery chemistries (warning, PDF): https://res.mdpi.com/wevj/wevj-06-00572/article_deploy/wevj-...
Summery is that, compared to NCM, NCA inhibits thermal runaway at much lower temperatures, offers significantly less short circuit resistance, slightly less overcharge buffer before thermal runaway, significantly faster thermal runaway after overcharge buffer is exhausted.
The result of thermal runaway is fire or explosion.
But in any case, technically even the Tesla just uses hordes of 18650. But that doesn't make it any easier to remove the pack itself.
In principle they should be good (you just need some small battery to start them), but the problems of making them safe may overwhelm any gain you get from using fuel cells.
Off road driving
Unless we get a battery that has - at a minimum - the same capabilities as a tank of gas, off roading is going to be relegated to strictly internal combustion, or maybe hybrid powered only.
Right now, even the tech in a Tesla would not get a decent off road rig (up-armored, lifted, accessories, large MT tires, etc) out to the trail, over/thru it, and back to civilization. What we have right now will generally get you over a decent trail - but you'll probably have to trailer the rig in and out of the area.
Even if solid-state batteries prove to be practical, it still might not be enough for any kind of serious off roading capability; that is, anything more than a "day trip", or where unplanned excursions off the route are involved.
Because you won't have any easy ways to recharge the battery while on the trail.
Right now, you can carry your own fuel with you, and refuel as needed or if there's an emergency or whatever. Other people when out with a group may also have fuel others can use - so the concept of universality comes into play.
It's not possible to bring a generator (and fuel) or a solar panel with you to charge the battery of a hypothetical off road vehicle, unless this new battery tech allows for short charge times at lower voltages/currents as well (which probably isn't on the table). And you likely can't bring along spare battery packs - the size and weight would be prohibitive (then again, some people bring along replacement axles); unless the weight and size of such solid-state batteries are less.
Yes, off roading is a small segment of the population, and so maybe it would be ok if that portion remained to use IC engines; presumably a battery swap system, or a solid-state battery pack might be the solution for the majority.
All that to say there is a lot to be gained by not doing a battery swap system.
I bet in ten years having your battery swapped is about the same as having your belt and pump swapped. A couple hours mechanic fees plus the cost of a new battery minus the resale value of the old one. Done within a day, simple once every 250k kilometers to keep your car run as new.
A model 3 without a battery would still be 30k, and that's with Tesla on razor margins and with the much cheaper supercharger infrastructure.
The battery will have to be reinvented for large planes to become electric, but that's a different discussion. Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech to start the electrification of that whole industry.
Airplanes are typically "driven" (using positive power) all throughout the flight regime, including descent and approach.
No, not really. Descent in most aircraft is typically done at idle. In jet powered aircraft, final approach will be done with the engines at some speed above idle, but that is to minimize spool-up time during a go-around, rather than because the aircraft needs the thrust.
In jet descents, we rarely get what we prefer which is a slam dunk approach (much more fuel efficient to stay up high). Many times we’re down at 10K feet for 20+ miles because of sequencing. It’s only in the less busy airports where jets can regularly get slam dunk flight idle approaches.
Even there, you probably want to use potential->kinetic rather than potential->chemical->(later) kinetic transfers because of unavoidable losses at each conversion. On the runway, using regen instead of thrust reversers or beta/reverse would be helpful, but that's a vanishingly small part of the overall flight regime.
Went on my first flight in decades last year. The moment we started out descent really stands out to me, I remember the eerie-ness of hearing the engines slow down a ton all of a sudden and no one looking disturbed by it at all.
Wings stall when they exceed their critical angle of attack. A descent is inherently a low AoA maneuver. Heck, in pretty much all aircraft of decent performance, they have devices on the wings to help "spoil" the lift of the wings to help the plane descend more quickly. They're sometimes called speed brakes, sometimes called spoilers.
If you scrub off all your forward speed by turning your propeller/fan into a generator to charge the batteries, you have to push the nose down to maintain AoA.
Alpha Electro, the new 2-seat electric trainer: the greenest way of learning to fly!
Performance of the Alpha Electro 2-seat electric trainer is tailored to the needs of flight schools. Short take-off distance, powerful 1000+ fpm climb, and endurance of one hour plus reserve. The Alpha Electro is optimized for traffic-pattern operations, where 13% of energy is recuperated on every approach, increasing endurance and at the same time enabling short-field landings.
How do you think batteries store energy, if not chemically?
https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/17/vw-id-range-and-more-inf...
Are there any news regarding new, more environment friendly mining processes?
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...
"Sensing a chance for a big return, private-equity firms have invested more than $500 million into wastewater-disposal companies such as Solaris Water Midstream LLC, WaterBridge Resources LLC, Goodnight Midstream LLC and Oilfield Water Logistics LLC. There are roughly a dozen of these water-focused companies that analysts said could each be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. ... Some companies have a longer-term plan: recycling the wastewater to sell it back to drillers to reuse."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-big-bet-in-fracking-wa...
"The oil and gas industry is finding that less is more in the push to recycle water used in hydraulic fracturing. Slightly dirty water, it seems, does just as good a job as crystal clear when it comes to making an oil or gas well work. ... Until recently, many companies considered recycling too expensive or worried that using anything other than freshwater would reduce well output. But oil and gas companies are increasingly treating and reusing flowback water from wells, which unlike freshwater is very high in salt, with good results."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking...
On the other hand, that valley is amazing and should be protected land
Where are all these lithium batteries ending up at? Landfills? Many other devices use lithium batteries, namely cellphones.
Lithium batteries from cars and large storage systems will be worth recycling when they are numerous enough. It's unclear if a phone battery will ever be worth recycling.
Better mining practices are obviously still a good thing, but the environmental impact of lithium mining is pretty small when it comes to Tesla batteries.
Can this catch up be quantified? There must have been a study of how entire industries ramp up infrastructure and develop economies of scale. This has happened in wartime many, many times, and well resourced countries had an interest in how fast these things could happen. (And how they could be prevented.)
That's not a "car". A "car", as driven by a billion people every day, takes trips whose distances have a power-law distribution falling off from ~2 miles down to 150 miles, by which point you are looking at < 0.1% of trips. A large fraction of cars have never been driven on a 500 mile trip.
Many urban dwellers don’t have a garage to charge overnight.
Some companies have already built interesting versions of street lamps and parking meters that double as car chargers (including at least one London company that was working to make sure that they could meet historic preservation standards of the street lamp design in London's core).
Road-embeddable induction chargers could even be an option soon in urban environments (particularly large parking lots for instance) where there isn't such existing "furniture" to take advantage of.
I agree this may be the future but I really hope we can come up with something better.
On the other hand you still think about those 0.1% of trips when you buy your car, which is why people have big cars for their family to handle holiday trips even if they are half empty 99% of the time. And you don't want to have to stop every 400km to charge your car when you go in holidays, especially if it means staying in a saturated station for 30 minutes.
I know you have to get some rest but many people just switch driver and only have a real break every 5 -6 hours, which means around 700km, and current EV don't have that range. In addition, you can take some rest wherever you want, for instance by a lake or in the forest, whereas if you need to charge your car you will be forced to be in an ugly fast charging station :(.
I still believe in EV though and I am convinced it will take over the market progressively, those are just temporary problem that explain why their market share is still so low, but it's improving.
I can't imagine letting a few longer stops during infrequent long distance road trips being the deciding factor in what kind of car I'd buy.
In conclusion, my advice as a boat owner is: Never buy a boat.
Also, how sure are you that EVs are bad at towing? Don't they have lots of low-end torque? The Model X apparently has the highest towing capacity of any passenger vehicle. Beyond that you'd need a bigger truck anyway.
Consumers base buying decisions on the longest trip they expect to take.
Even if 360 days a year they commute for 10 miles, and then for 4th of July / Thanksgiving / winter holidays they take an extended 300+ mile road trip, they will consider a car capable of traveling 300+ miles.
When I was a kid my dad drove and older classic car daily, and for any trip longer than ~300 miles he would just get a rental and put the miles on that.
If people could get accustomed to that workflow, I think the need for 500 miles+ electric range is almost non-existent.
Daily drive the electric car, and spend ~$150 for a gas rental car once or twice a year for the big trip to visit the in-laws.
Once or twice a year it's tolerable. If you get to doing it monthly or more, it's becomes a major detractor.
I am guessing you are not in the US. Over there, most big rental companies will let you join their program, club, or whatever they want to call it, for free(online, even). Which means you are pre-screened. You can pre-decline all this stuff you are talking about.
Then, you just make a reservation online, walk to the parking lot, pick your car, and just hand your id for them to check when leaving the parking lot. The whole process takes a couple of minutes really. When you are back, you just park at the dropoff location and walk away. At no point you have to bother with going to the counter.
The business hours can be inconvenient, I agree.
Which makes little sense. I am frequently asked about this. Look, I'm optimizing for 99% of the trips I take, which are inside cities. The odd roadtrip? I'll take the savings from not having to pay for gas (workplace charges nothing) and just rent a car for that odd trip. Most rentals have unlimited miles anyway.
And that's because I have an earlier generation Leaf. A Tesla would be no issue.
CPUs 30 years ago were 8 bits and barely scratching 10s of mhz, we arrived at our modern era through incremental improvements, not by saying "we need to stop and wait for someone to invent something better!"
Exploitation is exponential (the scale of each success determines the resources people are willing to bet on the next win), but exploration is a punctuated equilibrium, and it's a recipe for disappointment to assume that all progress should behave like the former rather than the latter.
I'd say that investment turned out to be very valuable.
I think it will be much like in F1 - remember when the limitation on gearbox and engine replacements in a season were introduced and many commentators said it would lead to there being no cars on the grid at the end of the season? What actually happened was the engineers created hitherto undreamt of levels of reliability. I'm sure the same will happen for EV batteries once they are the only game in town and ICE is no longer any kind of option.
Hell, even if you're doing that drive weekly, you might still prefer the electric since it'd save you a lot on gas money, even though it enforces a mid-trip break.
I'm sure that some people do drive for over four hours without taking a break, but I don't think that it's a safe or healthy thing to do.
The technology is good enough already - we're just waiting for it to become widely distributed.
Wow. I don't think I've ever spent more than 10 minutes at a gas station.
It's way different with family in the car though. That's where you hit 30 minutes. Everybody needs the bathroom, everybody needs to pick out a drink, everybody wants food, etc.
And as sibling comment points out, it all goes out the window if you have passengers.
That’s not useful for recharging, but a point to have in mind when discussing stop times with more people in order to avoid misunderstanding :)
Also assumes there is not a wait. At 30min/charge, I could easily see a crowded charging station requiring a 60-120 minute wait.
0: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/26/the-solid-state-lithium...
Some quick math: 100kWh battery needs 100 kW to charge in an hour. To charge in 10 minutes we need 100kW * 6 = 600kW.
Now that is a bit of an over simplification but it gives the magnitude of instantaneous power needed.
From a grid perspective charging a lot of cars slowly is not terribly difficult to handle because it appears mostly as base load, but if you have ton of cars starting and stopping charging at 600kW you will get massive fluctuations.
Thankfully a lot of cars will just slow charge overnight most of the time. Then for a fast charging station they could have large batteries or super capacitors to help offset the fluctuations.
We have come full circle Mr.Edison. Nikola would be spinning in his grave. (just attach magnets!)
The vast majority of EV charges are overnight, because that's when electricity is cheap, because that's when we have more supply than demand. Most generation sources can't be quickly switched on and off; renewables generate whenever the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. EVs help to balance the grid simply by sucking up lots of off-peak capacity.
The next generation of cars and charging points are expected to support vehicle-to-grid technology; in exchange for a reduction in your cost of charging, you allow your car to be used as a grid storage battery when you're not using it. A few million cars with 40kWh batteries add up to a very big storage reserve, even if you only take a couple of percent from each car.
https://electrek.co/2018/12/11/daimler-billion-battery-cells...
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-model-s-catches-fire-t...
We can do better on batteries and solid-state batteries are clearly safer:
This is false. Talk to any tow truck driver. A breached battery is almost a guaranteed fire. A breached gas tank is nothing of the sort. A battery pack provides its own ignition source. Gasoline needs external ignition. While external ignition sources are available on cars they don't seem to ignite with nearly the same frequency.
In theory the EV can be less flammable. In practice they seem to be about the same (Volt, Leaf, etc) or worse (Model S) than your average ICE car. It all comes down to the design. Pinto < Tesla < average ICE car.
https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v19i2.pdf
"Mechanical failure or malfunction was the leading contributing factor of highway vehicle fires (45 percent). These mechanical failures include a leak or break in a component of the vehicle, automatic or manual control failures, or the use of an improper type of fuel. An electrical failure or malfunction, such as a short circuit, was a contributing factor in 21 percent of highway vehicle fires. The misuse of a material or product, such as spilling flammable liquid or gas too close to the vehicle, was the third leading factor contributing to the ignition of the fires (13 percent)."
That same document goes into lots of detail about what heat source initiates those fires and what materials are actually catching fire.
"Where the necessary data were available, the leading category of items first ignited in fatal highway vehicle fires was “liquids, piping, filters” (65 percent). Flammable liquids and gases in general were, by far, the most deadly (67 percent of deaths). Specifically, fuel in or from the engine area was the second leading item first ignited in all highway vehicle fires (18 percent) but was, by far, the leading item in both fatal fires (43 percent) and deaths (45 percent). Additionally, insulation around electrical wiring or cables was responsible for 29 percent of all highway vehicle fires, but only 2 percent of fatal fires and 2 percent of deaths."
But I would not rule out plug in hybrids, from what I have read GM stopped making it since it was a sedan which are not selling great for them. But also because the newer bolt platform is a better base for an EV or PHEV, since it was designed from the ground up to run on electric motors.
Obvious rumors are that GM is already in the works on a new cross-over PHEV. It's dumb that the sedan-ification of the Volt brand between G1 and G2 probably means that it will be yet another new brand instead of just the obvious Volt G3. (It's also a dumb shame that GM didn't actually save Hamtramck in what could have been a smart move of electrifying more of it and moving it all more cross-over-esque according to the original Volt plan.)
GM is keeping the electric Bolt, which is not an SUV, Truck, or Crossover.
The Volt, as a hybrid, doesn't fit their long term strategy, so wasn't spared the axe coming down due to the short-term situation with the sedan market.
GM turned around and admitted that PHEV hybrids are still in their current long term strategy, to expect at least a "true" cross-over version in the near future, if not also SUV and Truck plans. Like I said before, the problem with the Volt seemed to be that G2 was nothing but a sedan made in the sedan plant that GM wanted to drop, not that it was a hybrid or electric. I still think that Volt G1's form factor would have been spared because it would have been easier to retool it next to the Bolt or in another cross-over facility.
I wonder if it was just too complicated compared to having a separate gas engine like most plugin hybrids today.
I do think that a market for trailers [possibly rentals] that have a small generator and some trunk space could exist. When people go on road trips they not only need the engine which is normally not needed, but they also want to have extra luggage. 4 suitcases and a small generator can fit on a trailer and run your electric car all day, leaving space in the trunk for other things.
https://www.google.com/search?q=trailer+hitch+platform&clien...
The majority of drivers will be fine but backing up will be a challenge until they get used to it. We're not talking about an overloaded rental trailer, we're talking about a ~20hp genset on wheels.
> Just imagine the chaos of SF Bay Area residents trying to tow trailers up I-80 for a winter skiing road trip.
As much as white collar professionals tend to suck at everything even vaguely mechanical I have a hard time imagining it could be any worse than your average boat ramp. Boat ramps work out fine even though half the people there in the afternoon are buzzed.
That said, I don't think towing gensets everywhere is the solution to range issues.
There are loads of them available and many are popular, heck even Toyota Prius has a model that has this capability (Prius Prime).
I am on the market for buying a PHEV, because fast charger availability in my country is very limited (which is weird given that we are super green electric giants), so pure EV is going to be hard unless I have a backup car for road trips.
Kia Optima is the one I like the most, but I may end up buying Tesla Model 3 and just ship it through the Atlantic (yes, we also don't have Tesla in my country) and have a backup car, or rent/borrow a car when doing road trips
PHEVs are perfect. I drive EV 80% of the time but still have all the convenience of gas. One day, when I buy a house, and charging networks are a bit more mature I would love a BEV, but right now PHEV's are a great inbetween.
Now, a battery pack for a ~250 mile electric car would cost ~6k. That still isn't ideal for long distances, but it would make a fantastic commuter car and an occasional long distance trip would only become inconvenient, not impossible.
Effectively it covers the same space and the cost increase to make a serial hybrid (like the Volt) is no longer economic.
Something like a Volt with a ~100 mile electric range would be ideal. Probably diesel too, because the fuel keeps much longer than gasoline. Or maybe Propane/CNG.
They could work better, be cheaper, be safer, charge faster, have better range, and have longer cycle life for the battery, don't you think?
Better batteries are needed. Solid-state batteries have the potential to outperform conventional batteries. We'll see who commercializes them first.
ICE cars are still more practical than EVs today. ICE cars are cheaper to buy with better range and faster refuelling. If I want the most car for the least dollars then I'm buying a sensible Toyota, not a Tesla.
We're at the beginning of the end of the ICE car. EVs with fast charging, energy dense, highly durable solid-state batteries represent the genuine end of ICE cars.
> Who is "David Stringer", anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps?
That's an odd criticism coming from "Animats". Who is "Animats" anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps?
> There's a minor Arizona politician by that name, but that's about all Google has to say.
DuckDuckGo says David Stringer is a senior reporter at Bloomberg:
https://twitter.com/david_stringer
https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARMqcSMt218/david-stringer
E.g., the US is dotted with high density with gas stations, can fill a 20 gallon tank in just a few minutes, and at 20 MPG that tank will fuel the car for 400 miles.
For a battery, apparently so far the range is about 200 mile; for the readily available charging sources the charging time is much longer, maybe hours; and from a really powerful charging source the battery will get hot and need cooling (e.g., see the Jay Leno piece on the new, all electric Mercedes which does cool the battery while charging).
The weather is a significant issue: In hot weather, the battery needs more cooling. In cold weather, the battery loses lots of its power.
So I agree with the OP: For a good electric car, need a better battery. IIRC long ago a Ford executive stated "You build me a good battery, and I'll build you a good electric car."
Actually, all electric cars are not new but old and go way back to the first days of cars, e.g., before Ford's Model T. And as Leno mentioned, for all or nearly all the time since then, battery technology hasn't made much progress. Right: Battery technology is still based on basic chemistry, and that chemistry was understood well enough in 1900.
Of course, people saw all this 100+ years ago and for one solution tried hybrids where a gasoline engine charged a battery. Apparently, net, that meant that the car had two sources of power, gasoline and a battery, and could get by with just one, the gasoline, which is just what has been done since then. Still there is some hope for hybrids.
Yes, there are some uses for electric vehicles. Still:
Yup, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with.
Also, as I've done a few times, can take your 36 megaJoules per liter and ...: Let's see, a Watt is a Joule per second. So the energy in 36 megaJoules would be a million Watts for 36 seconds. A liter is ballpark a quart, and a gallon is 4 quarts, so 20 gallons is 80 quarts or ballpark 80 liters, and even with a megaWatt power source we're talking charging time 36 times 80 seconds, a bit over 40 minutes.
So, drive up to a gas station, convenience store, plug in the mega Watt power source, get some lunch, check the air in the tires, clean the floor mats, put in a DVD for a movie, ....
Before you connect that megaWatt cable, let me step back about 50 feet and look in a different direction.
Let's see: My house has 100 A at 240 V, that is 24,000 Watts. So a mega Watt is ballpark 40 times that much. If use only half that power to charge the car battery, a mega Watt is 80 times that much. So the 40 minutes becomes 3200 minutes, something over 50 hours, two days. "Sorry, Boss, I'll be charging my battery on Monday and Tuesday and will be in on Wednesday. Since my commute is 100 miles a day, I'll need to do this two day charge once for each four working days. Or, I'll be okay Wednesday through Friday, drive another 100 miles on the weekend, and will charge again Monday and Tuesday of next week, too." Right, he could charge at work. Each day at work will need about six hours of charging at the full 100 A at 240 V.
Uh, at 10 cents per KWh, the 40 minutes at one megaWatt would cost: A megaWatt hour would be 1000 times a KWh and cost 1000 times 10 cents or $100. The 40 minutes would be 2/3rds of that or $66 or the same as gas at $3.30 a gallon. Not a bargain.
And that $3.30 per gallon applies wherever have to pay 10 per KWh, at a charging station, at home, at work, at a restaurant, etc. People don't give away gasoline and won't give away electric power for charging. In particular, a full charge like 20 gallons of gas at home, at 10 cents per KWh, will still cost the $66. Right, the gasoline burns with maybe only 30% efficiency, but there are efficiency losses from heat when charging the battery and again when driving the car.
Yup, for powering a private car used as they commonly are, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with. For an electric, range is too short and charging time is too long. With electric power at 10 cents per KWh and gas at $2.75 a gallon, the cost will be ballpark much the same, no big savings either way.
Ah, maybe it's just me: I want a Corvette or Dodge with 700 HP! :-)
Imagine, you could buy a car, that has slots for you to attach standard batteries. You could leave the batteries charging at home, office, shops that lease you charged batteries(like gas stations) etc. It would also take care of "I live in an apartment and park my car by the side of the road, so no home charging.. problem".
Also, gets rid of the range anxiety if you know you could get batteries everywhere or at-least charge yours everywhere.
Now, when technology genuinely improves by a magnitude, replace the cells, but keep the interface for a decade or so.
Bonus if that standard catches on for other uses. Imagine same batteries being used for power tools at home, emergency power supply at home, camping stuff, plug those boxes into the edges of solar panels while they are not in the car etc.
Leave it to the competing business that are "battery suppliers" to figure out how to make them more efficient, cheaper, and do further R&D.
Car companies can stay at making cars that are essentially safe, aerodynamic shells with electric motors waiting to be powered up by customer supplied batteries.
The fact is that BEV's are already better than ICE's in many ways, and the best, Tesla's, are so good they are busy taking away market share. And lithium ion batteries are steadily improving in characteristics and also getting cheaper. Furthermore, China, the world's largest auto market, is putting a very big push behind BEV autos, and many other governments are also making efforts.
From what I have read a tipping point is coming around 2023-25 when consumers will start flooding to BEV's, and ICE sales will start dropping rapidly. And then in another half decade or so solid state batteries will be ready and the trend will accelerate.
The basic message is that the century-long dominance of ICE cars is coming to an end and in the not-so-distant future, it's just a matter of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1jusadHkmM
This is only one example of what he's done.
this isn't really true. a model 3 is about 400lbs heavier than a base a4 (~12%) and 300lbs heavier than a base 3 series (~8%). that's a pretty big difference for a midsize sedan.
your overall point is valid, of course. any sedan is going to do negligible damage compared to a large truck.
I don't want to digress too far on the performance characteristics of the cars, as this starts to be a bit subjective.
yes, passengers also add a significant amount of weight to a car, but not enough to damage the road as much three separate midsize sedans.
No one is advocating for fewer passengers per car, even though each passenger adds weight. In fact, we prefer more passengers per car because (among other things) it is fewer engines pumping out pollutants. The same can be said about electric cars. Yet electric cars are getting complains about another 300-400 lbs, but gasoline-powered carpools are not.
No one here has complained about the added weight of the unnecessary cargo most people carry. No one is mentioning the weight of a full tank of gasoline (an average full tank is ~100 lbs) and advocating for smaller tanks or to run with just enough fuel to get to your destination. Air bags and anti-lock brakes and automatic transmissions and air conditioning and stereo systems all add significant weight to the car. No one would advocate removing those things from cars. No one complains about the added weight of things designed to make cars more fuel efficient because we like the fuel efficiency. Yet batteries do just that, and here we are.
My point is, arguing that electric cars have a problem because they're as heavy as a gasoline powered car (with no gasoline in it, since curb weight is empty) with two passengers is disingenuous at best and harmful at worst. It's a complete non-argument. Especially when passenger cars are some of the lightest vehicles on the road, by an impressively huge margin. An electric car may be 12% heavier than a gasoline car, but a semi truck is still 1600% heavier than that.
I am only trying to clarify a couple specific points. the first is that EVs really do weigh a good bit more than comparable ICE vehicles. how much of a problem this is depends on the conversation you are having. and since you mentioned it, I also would like to point out that, as defined by the EPA in the US, curb weight does include a tank of gas filled to the advertised capacity. [0]
And I'm not arguing against you, I'm just trying to contribute to the thread that village-idiot started when they said "My big fear is weight."
What I am saying is that the weight is a factor, especially since I am particularly concerned with the (in my opinion) unbearable cost of America's road network. You might disagree with with how much of an effect an EV will have, but ignoring tradeoffs and (unfairly) characterizing my concerns as "disingenuous or harmful" is neither helpful nor polite.
> An electric car may be 12% heavier than a gasoline car, but a semi truck is still 1600% heavier than that.
It's rather uncharitable of you to not apply my concerns to the EV conversion of semitrucks, since it's a direct and obvious parallel.
While Tesla's semitruck is expected to come in at the total weight as a Diesel truck including cargo, they are quite mum about how much the whole the truck itself weighs. This is important because a heavier truck means more trucks to compensate for reduced truck capacity. Walmart doesn't want less stuff shipped just because the truck carries less stuff, after all.
My concerns are even worse with semitrucks, because semitrucks do a lot of damage and pay very little for it in the terms of gas and usage taxes. An EV semitruck will be a complete free-rider when it comes to gas tax (they'll still pay for usage tax), representing an even larger transfer of wealth from the state to trucking companies than what already exists.
By comparison, four 16000# axles on a trailer are 8192 times the road damage per mile (and likely drive a lot more miles) of the 4000# sedan.
Of course, it’s not like EV semitrucks won’t have the same weight issues as passenger cars. The same issues with energy density apply there too. EV semitrucks will either need to be heavier or more plentiful to compensate for the loss of range or towing capacity compared to diesel.
As an aside, we need to revisit the 4,000lb standard for sedans. The heaviest Honda Civic weighs 3,000lb, my Mazda 3 weighs under 3,000lb, and a Mazda 6 weighs at most 3,500lb. These days you need a luxury or performance sedan before you start touching the 4,000lb mark.
Agreed. A quick Google search shows the average US vehicle is 4,000 lbs or above, but that includes vans and trucks and SUVs. The average sedan is closer to or below 3500 lbs.
Agreed. I picked 4000# as the reference against a Model S (which clearly competes more with an A6 or E-class than a Civic) and the Model 3 I compare more to an A4.
The point still remains that an EV is about 8-12% heavier than a sedan in its same class (see sibling comment below). This will apply to semitrucks too as those electrify, which'll be a bigger deal than sedans.
The Civic sedan is only 2" smaller length wise and 2" narrower than a Tesla 3. Size wise, this is a perfectly fair comparison, and the Civic weights 1,000lbs less. That's a pretty close comparison from a size perspective.
You are correct about the A3, it is indeed much smaller than a Tesla 3. But the A4 is 1" longer than the 3 (identical in other dimensions), and weighs about 400lbs less.
> I used 4000# as a typical mid-size sedan as-driven weight with an allowance for a person or two and fuel.
Curb weight includes all necessary equipment, including oil and gasoline for ICE vehicles. Given that there is no reason to expect that an EV driver is a different weight than an ICE driver, it's completely fair to compare the two by curb weight only.
And we also need continuing advances in conductors, magnets, and alternatives batteries such as fuel cells.
I can see why people might be less interested in hot-swapping for personal vehicles, but why isn't hot-swap on the table for buses and cab fleets? Is it because few people are willing to invest in R&D and infrastructure when sufficient batteries seem to be just around the corner?
First, the infrastructure cost is massive. You have to keep an inventory of expensive parts (the battery) on hand. Tesla tried to fix this by having you set an appointment, but that eliminated the whole point of hot swapping: convenience.
It's also harder to put a warranty on a battery if you're swapping them all the time. What if you get a dud swapped into your vehicle?