Aluminium-air battery that can power electric cars for 1,500 miles
adaptnetwork.com
adaptnetwork.com
according to the article, the cost is £.07 per mile. 1500/.07 is £105 per refuel, or $135 USD at the current exchange rate. (they seem to base this on the apprx cost for British motorists, while they seem to base the fuel economy on a car similar in size to a Tesla 3, so I'm not sure that really works out)
In the US, it costs between $0.12 and $0.14 per mile in fuel to drive a BMW 5 series (25mpg at 3.00 to 3.50 per gallon) and about $0.08 per mile to in fuel to drive a Honda Civic (38mpg at $3.00 per gallon)
According to the Federal Highway Administration, the average American drives 13,476 miles per year, so each decrease per penny of fuel cost per mile represents about $135 with these metrics.
And on a final note-- we should stop marketing miles per gallon and start measuring cost per mile or or gallons per (100)mile(s) -- it shows the relationship between the actual economy gains (fuel consumption) in a much more intuitive way across the range of available fuel economies. The EPA started mandating that 'savings' be included on the fuel economy sticker,but that is not a widely recognized metric in marketing or common speech. Remember kids, a number and its inverse have a curvilinear relationship, not a linear one. For fuel economy, with the current range of available vehicles the point where the graph bottoms out is just past 35mpg. The steepest meaningful jump is from about 15mpg to about 20mpg.
Some science dudes did a study on this http://nsmn1.uh.edu/dgraur/niv/theMPGIllusion.pdf
For something that's designed to be swapped out of the car every so often that's a really really big qualification there. Tesla's battery pack is basically part of the chassis. With this aluminum air system you would basically need to be swapping out a huge component like every month or so.
Even with that caveat, I'm still skeptical, didn't Elon try and shoot for a battery swap station similar to a gas station and Tesla deemed it unfeasible?
Swappable batteries are a nightmare to integrate into the chassis. Look at any press release for a new car and you’ll see a paragraph about how they made chassis X% stiffer. Swappable battery will do the opposite!
It is extremely difficult to make a car with shitty driving dynamics and charge a premium for it to recoup your R&D. Thus, swappable battery car is not feasible commercially until structural engineers figure out how to make the 2 ton battery pack a stressed member while also be swappable. Give it a decade or two!
>>how to make the 2 ton battery pack a stressed member
Where did the article say anything about the battery weighing 2 tons? That is outrageously heavy, exceeding the GVW of most cars on the road by 40%, alone! Surely this cannot be accurate.
A triangle shape, or multiple smaller packs could help with the issue or structural rigidity. If they can build around a big aluminum engine block, radiator, etc, a battery pack is do-able.
But I've another bone to pick with this article, and it may be a simple matter of the UK vs US norms. It states the average driver travels about 7900 miles/year. That's less than half the average in the US. Also, it says the UK driver of a "small hatchback" spends around 12p per mile for petrol and this battery tech could drop that to 9p per mile. That's not competitive with current hybrid technology (and the Toyota Prius is a mid-sized car, as well) with a 700 mile per 10 gallon imperial tank. Turbo diesels are nearly as efficient. Why would one change?
The technology just doesn't sound competitive to me, overall.
It was developed and demonstrated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY My understanding is that it was deemed more unnecessary than unfeasible. That it would change the battery ownership model would also create administrative complications too.
Supercharging improved to 250kW, bringing down charging times. That people need to recharge their Tesla at intervals when they should probably take a break from driving anyway, on the occasions when they take long road trips, makes it hard to justify a battery swapping program.
Transporting batteries might make sense for some extremely remote locations with no grid access, but people don't commonly drive far away from the grid. As these batteries are very heavy, I would expect the handling involved to make this far more expensive than just charging on-site.
This sort of "mobile charging station" is probably much more convenient than the mechanical trouble of swapping a battery, especially with most of the EVs using the battery as a major part of the chassis and safety designs of the cars and the trade-offs of making them swappable aren't worth the loss of certain safety constraints.
A recent video on the subject of HFC tankers, in which Siemens and others are actually working to commercialize it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCmKAAh-vkE