Brighsun’s long-range EV batteries to enter industrial trials | Hacker News Reader

Brighsun’s long-range EV batteries to enter industrial trials

newmobility.global

63 pointsbastijn75 comments

This is one of those "either a major breakthrough or total bullshit" articles. OK, first, who's "Brightsun"? These guys? [1]

- Last news item on their site is from 2015. No mention of a battery breakthrough. No mention of battery R&D at all.

- Address on web site is 50 Hidden Grove Blvd, Keysborough Vic 3173 Australia. That's somebody's house.[2] An alternative address on the web site is Level 1 530 Little Collins Str, Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia. That's an office building. Level 1 seems to be a strip club.[4]

- Related companies. [3] They built an electric bus prototype in 2015, and it got a record for longest distance on a single charge, but not using any exotic battery technology. Just a big bus with a big battery.

Where did "newmobility.global" get this story? They don't cite a reporter. They don't cite a press release. Is someone doing a third party pump and dump here?

[1] http://brighsunauto.com/Index_En.asp http://brighsuntech.com/

[2] https://earth.google.com/web/@-38.00666219,145.15557573,13.3...

[3] https://www.aubiz.net/company/brighsun-ev-group-pty-ltd-1668...

[4] https://bigboysclub.com.au/

> Where did "newmobility.global" get this story?

Most other sites presenting the same news included the paragraph at the end suggesting it was a press release on the manufacturer's website. Example [0]. I linked to the original source below [1].

[0] https://www.jcnnewswire.com/pressrelease/58590/2/2000-km-on-...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22950468

The press release is better than the "story".

Plenty of reasons to doubt the claims made in TFA, but I don't think business addresses (and as other commenters have pointed out) a shitty website are good reasons. That just seems like a shallow leap of logic to me.

> They built an electric bus prototype in 2015, and it got a record for longest distance on a single charge, but not using any exotic battery technology. Just a big bus with a big battery

Do you have a source for that?

It's under the news section on one of their websites I listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22950468

For reference, they are claiming a specific energy of ~2000 Wh/kg, whereas current Li-ion batteries are in the 200 Wh/kg range. At least according to Wikipedia, so far the highest demonstrated Li-S battery specific energy is 500 Wh/kg.

They are also claiming a cost of $63/kWh vs $156/kWh for Li-ion today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery

That sounds suspiciously good.

Yeah I'm expecting a caveat like "they explode if they reach 40 degrees C" or "they degrade by 20% after 20 recharge cycles."

The article says their battery keeps 91% of initial capacity after 1,700 cycles at a rate of 2C, or 74% after 1,000 cycles at 5C, which sounds pretty reasonable given charge/discharge rates would likely be a lot lower than that in practice.

I do wonder what issues come from storing multiples of the same amount of energy in the same space, but I'm willing to wait and see. Anyways, beyond 400 miles or so, there's not so much value in longer range passenger EVs (obviously semi trucks for freight are a different use case). The real win if they can demonstrate this real-world will be the reduced weight or cost per mile of range.

Until chargers are as common as gas stations and charging takes five minutes, I'd see a lot of value in a battery that could get me through a road trip without ever needing to recharge.

If you can drive 400 miles on a single five-minute break, you must have very fast car or a hell of a bladder :)

What if I want to drive in 200 mile segments, but I want to stop places that are more interesting than electric charging stations?

Assuming you pee at the origin and the destination, and it's freeway driving, that's two rounds of three hours between the bathroom. As long as the weather is nice, and you don't overhydrate, that doesn't seem unreasonable.

400 miles isn't that far. It's approximately the distance from Minneapolis, MN to Milwaukee, WI, which is a trip that I've done nonstop. It takes around 5.5 hours, which isn't too bad. Start around noon and arrive just a little before dinner.

Minneapolis to Chicago is a bit longer (a little over 400 miles), and takes about 6 hours. For that I'd probably need to stop somewhere to eat.

You’re never more than about 100 miles from a Tesla Supercharger station in the US, and while charge times are roughly 20-30 minutes, it hasn’t been an issue for the ~20k miles we’ve driven traveling the US.

Sure, it’s a bit longer than a 5 minute fill up, but between bathroom breaks, food, coffee, it’s not that much longer and we no longer have gas station trips when around town (charging our Teslas at home). Trade offs. Seems like the amount of folks who are waiting for 400 mile range EVs is exceedingly small.

You get used to it, but it is fair to call it a significant time cost. When we take the Tesla, we stop halfway to grandma's house for 20-30 minutes, then we stop again on the way back. Sure, it's a convenient break for the kids to go pee, but it's only a 2.5 hour trip each way and in our F150 we'd do the whole thing without any fuel or pee stops and it'd be fine. So it costs a solid hour, or 20% more time.

Larger capacity batteries will also last longer because of fewer charge cycles.

> I do wonder what issues come from storing multiples of the same amount of energy in the same space

If it makes you feel any better, gasoline stores 12,888.9 Wh/kg according to Wikipedia. So if you're worried energy density in car crashes, it's still much lower than the status quo.

The status quo is Lithium-ion batteries which have certainly been known to spontaneously combust or catch on fire. Gasoline, by contrast, is remarkably stable.

You better not Google car fires if you want to hang onto that belief in the safety of ICE cars.

Gasoline fires don't spontaneously restart, either.

I've also never given much thought to parking my gasoline fueled vehicles inside my garage. When ICE cars do spontaneously ignite, it's never because of the gasoline.

I do sometimes think about how prudent it is to park my Tesla underneath my kids' bedrooms every night while it starts charging unattended after everyone is asleep. I'm glad to have a smoke alarm in the garage.

I am glad you have a smoke alarm in the garage I am now thinking how mine died in the garage and I sleep right above it. If it was me in your position I would make sure I used a linked fire alarm system where if one goes off they all go off. It will buy you precious extra seconds getting your kids out as fires can spread incredibly fast.

Yep, ours are all wired together. Sometimes when I am a little over-enthusiastic searing a steak, I think they can probably hear the ruckus a quarter mile away when every single alarm goes off at once. Makes me feel somewhat secure that I'll be woken up if there is ever an actual fire.

ICE engine fires mostly happen on old, unmaintained cars. Very few almost new $60k++ ICE cars spontaneously combust because of the fuel (a short circuit in the dashboard would cause a fire in any type of car). When they do they're relatively easy to put out. And it's a bit easier to spot a potential fire hazard in advance, providing you do the regular checks.

On the other hand a battery fire is about the worst kind of fire a regular person might encounter in day to day life. It's a nightmare even for firefighters. They are very hard to put out and don't want to stay out. There's also no easy way to inspect the battery for such fire-causing potential defects. A single defective cell can cause a thermal runaway event.

It's the unpredictability that makes battery fires more dangerous. At this point we have no feasible preventive measures, no yearly service visits, no visual check for leaks, nothing.

We’ve gotten used to gasoline car fires, while EV car fires are new and novel.

Well, OK, but gasoline's energy storage includes its own mass, which is combusted to release the energy, whereas the mass of a battery is basically constant despite charging and discharging, so it's not directly comparable in the sense you describe.

However, now that you bring it up, given that the most efficient ICE cars are about 25% efficent, you get at most 3200Wh of actual usable propulsive energy from the kg of gasoline. If the claims pan out, that is within shooting distance of these Li-S batteries' specific energy, even when accounting for EVs' 60-80% battery-to-wheel efficiency.

The issue is that batteries can just short out internally and dump the stored energy into themselves as heat, all within a few seconds. Gasoline can't really do that, and needs an (external) oxidizer to release those 12kWh/kg.

Better capacity (but most importantly density) is important also for electric aircraft.

... and slaughterbots unfortunately.

Faster charging arguably is more important than range at ~400mi. At that point I need a break, regardless of what the car could do.

> Anyways, beyond 400 miles or so, there's not so much value in longer range passenger EVs (obviously semi trucks for freight are a different use case).

If you could have a much longer range, then you could put up with more hassle to charge, which in turn could make some technologies feasible that would not be with lesser range.

For an extreme example, if you can go long enough on one charge then it might be feasible to use a non-rechargeable battery and replace it when it is out.

Believe it or not that has actually been considered. There is a company or two working on EVs using aluminum air batteries. Those are among the highest energy density available in batteries, comparable to gasoline. They are currently used in some military applications for aircraft and submarines.

The claim I've seen is that you could do an EV with these that would have a 2000 km range using less battery weight than current lithium ion EVs use. As I said, these aren't rechargeable, so every ~1800 km you'd have to take it in for a battery swap.

Presumably they would design these cars so that this would be a fairly easy operation. The dead battery would be sent back to the manufacturer for recycling. As the battery is used, the aluminum anodes become oxidized. The manufacturer can replace the anodes, and can extract the aluminum from the aluminum oxide and use that for making new anodes.

There's lots of advantages of having more potential range. You can pull a trailer and still go a significant distance. How about driving in alaska? Sure, most people drive less than 30 or 40 miles a day. Having an ev has taught me you can never have too much range, at least in today's world.

I'm curious about the real range requirements for EV freight trucks. At least in Europe, there's very strong regulations for mandatory rest periods for freight truck drivers. It seems to me you would basically design the system including the infrastructure so the trucks end up on a charger during those rest periods, and therefore don't need a very long range battery unless it improves the economics.

I'm sure smarter and knowledgable people have done the numbers on this; I should go find a good source ...

The usual caveats are things like "we can't build a car-sized one" or "we can't manufacture it cost-effectively" or "we thought we could improve it a lot but couldn't".

New breakthrough every month! Shame that almost all of them don't pan out.

Not saying that the claims are all true but reading a little more closely, they aren't as extreme as you make out. The press release actually states that the batteries they intend to trial are 1000 Wh/kg and they quoted raw material price of $63/kWh, not battery price.

Link to the source announcement: http://www.brighsun.com/En/NewsView.asp?ID=45

The slightly different websites in different states of abandonment don't inspire confidence though.

http://brighsun.com/Index_En.asp

http://brighsuntech.com/

http://brighsunauto.com/Index_En.asp

Lithium sulfur batteries have a lot of potential and I really hope Brightsun’s tech works as well (or ever close to as well as claimed). However, I’ll believe it when I see it. There are just too many claims about battery tech that don’t pan out in actual application.

Or at least, they pan out in terms of 1% improvements and not 100% improvements like the breathless journalism claims.

>2103.8Wh/kg

~10x Tesla

>Trial production of high-power cells, with an expected energy density in excess of 1,000 Wh/kg, is about to begin

oh, so they dont exist yet, explains it

1000 Wh/kg would be roughly 2X the best currently on the market, so that would be amazing if true.

More like 4x. Where can you get anything past about 250 Wh/kg?

Lithium-Sulfur:

https://oxisenergy.com/products/

The catch here is that they don't last that many cycles and the figure per unit volume is not amazing.

Great for aircraft though.

That page says they're only hoping for availability soon.

I've been following this company for years. They used to be overly optimistic, but got a reality check along the way and now are more careful in their statements.

Anyway 400Wh/kg are available as samples - that's not far away from 500Wh/kg.

Makes me wonder if this came to pass. Could an electric car be too light? Is there a minimum weight a car needs to be?

If the battery got small and you don’t have the ice, could it be a problem? Would they add weights?

An ice is actually pretty light in some cars. Aluminum blocks save a lot of weight. In economy cars you can lift both out by hand (I wouldn't recommend it, the angles are not really what your body handle well but a normal human can do it)

Most of the weight in a car is the frame which is a lot heavier today than similar cars of 30 years ago to pass modern safety standards.

Even if there is too little weight it is best for the required components to be as light as possible. The ability to add weight where you need it for handling reasons verses where the drive train forces it to be is often important.

> Most of the weight in a car is the frame which is a lot heavier today than similar cars of 30 years ago to pass modern safety standards.

Yes, this is what I was saying to people that a lot of crash worthiness demands now are counterproductive when everybody now drives 1.5, 2.0t bricks on wheels because of that.

Yes, that allowed for few more percents survivability in head on collisions, but at the huge expense of everything else.

Being able to shave off 200kg off an average vehicle will save way more lives than the amount of lives those 200kg save during 60km/h+ head on collisions.

For sure! F = μN, so if the weight of the vehicle is too low there will be very little friction force keeping the tires from losing traction while breaking accelerating and turning. Practically speaking, it's common to load your pick-up truck with sand bags in snowy environments in order to increase the amount of weight on the back tires since some models of pick-ups don't have much weight in the back half. Personally, I have fishtailed off the road when there was nothing in the truck bed in icy weather.

Indeed F = μN, but also F = ma, so you don't need as much F to accelerate a lighter vehicle (that is, one with lower m).

What you're describing about your pickup is the balance of weight, not the total weight.

You are forgetting forces to overcome effects which are independent of mass. For example, you might find that your car is blown off the road by a light breeze.

Hah, yeah, an earlier version of my post said something about external/edge effects as you approach 0 mass, but I didn't think it was germane to my main point.

> For example, you might find that your car is blown off the road by a light breeze.

We should be so lucky! An EV as light as a bike...

I wonder where the danger point really is. I've driven some lighter, smaller cars that were borderline dangerous in a stiff crosswind.

Your comment reminds me of a FAQ I read years and years ago when the internet was first starting.

It was for a male enhancement product, and one of the questions was basically how large should I let this thing get? :)

What as the answer?

Just add more battery, nothing wrong with having more range.

https://xkcd.com/678/

I'm working in the automotive industry for over 15 years, designing components for both conventional and electric cars, and I've never heard of this company.

Very fishy.

I'm looking forward to laptops that can stay up one week on a charge.

Personal fans that run all day. Tiles that keep working for decades. Traffic lights that can be deployed by police wherever they're needed. E-Bicycles that can outrun and out-range most bus routes. Electric airplanes make air travel significantly quieter and much cheaper. Internal combustion engines made obsolete and reduced to a historical curiosity. Electric scooters dominate worldwide as honda cubs become too expensive to fuel. I want it all.

Indeed, this high Specific Energy (~2000 Wh/kg) would be enough to make electric airplanes feasible and economical.

Heck, even high-altitude supersonic electric "jets", because you don't need oxygen to run electric motors!

Ebikes can already outrange most bus routes. I'm building a battery pack right now that should give a range of 150-180kms realistically, for about 300$CAD. That said, it's going to be pretty heavy at 10kg, but that's less than the amount of textbooks I was carrying just a few years ago :)

That sounds interesting. How big will it be physically?

About 5-6 liters, should fit nicely on the rear rack.

That is very cool. What cells are you using?

Cheap LG LGABB41865. They are low discharge, but since I have 2kWh of capacity I'm not going to be going north of 1C so it is well within spec.

Industry is where something like this would really be useful. Imagine how much job sites would change if we could achieve this type of energy density in a battery.

Before even reading the article... battery "revolution" claims have been made every month or so for the past 10 years or so, and we rarely see the claims materialize into actual technological leaps. Is this one of those claims?

This kind of announcements have been way too many. At this point no matter how amazing battery someone has managed to build in a lab, I don't care unless it's manufacturable in large quantities. There are plenty of amazing batteries that lack that quality.

That said, it would be really cool if the claims are true. I so want this to be true. Just not holding my breath.

The problem for small cars is that while the specific energy (J/kg) is better than lithium ion the energy density (J/L) is most likely lower. In small cars the volume occupied by the battery is a significant constraint.

But it's good to see some competition, at least it will be if it works.

Forget large scale deploy test blah, outfit one car and drive it 1000kms, charge, got another 1000kms, video it, put on youtube, then we're onboard.

IMO the actually hard part is getting the tech to work the same as it did in the lab when you put it through volume manufacturing. A lot of things seem to go wrong in this phase even when the battery chemistry works well enough to create a hand-crafted battery pack that would actually show long range. I really hope they are successful, but until they can show manufacturing working I will keep my enthusiasm in check.

How bout do both?

Phinergy did just that with their aluminium-air (primary) battery and yet they never commercialized their tech.

Why is their name a misspelling?

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