New battery chemistry tweak could double EV range

I was a bit surprised, but 80% degradation after 1,000 cycles numbers they provide as a baseline seem to be accurate: https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/how-long-does-a-tesla-ba...

Degradation is less important as range increase. Average 500 mile range * 600 cycles = 300,000 miles.

At 350 watt-hours per kilogram a 200kWh battery is 570 kg + housing so feasible. Using a different battery chemistry for ultra high mileage models is probably a bad idea, but it is an option.

If you charge every night, 1000 cycles is about 3 years.

Then they have to be replaced. And there STILL ISN'T any system or process for recycling lithium (lab only, nothing deployed or near to deployment for 5-10 years best case).

Part of why I used lead acid batteries for my solar storage - it's cheap, ubiquitous and environmentally far more green than lithium because of the existent network for lead and lead-acid recycling. Plus if it doesn't move (it doesn't) the much higher weight isn't a problem.

Even so, there is a clear benefit to not having to stop at said gas station so often.

There is a Chinese company doing this. Tesla unveiled the concept years ago but decided not to do it.

There are multiple reasons that battery replacement is not as good as it seems.

Charging stations can be built in more locations and more densely than battery swapping locations. This is because you need to store those batteries somewhere and there is more space and machinery involved in swapping. So you trade off queueing time for charging time. Charging stations are most likely cheaper to build and maintain because of the space and machinery requirements.

A battery swapping station is more vulnerable to supply imbalances. Charging stations meet demand at charging rate.

Charging stations can be more easily made universal. Unless you mandate a common battery form factor, that won’t be the case for battery replacement. This means that charging stations can scale with the whole EV industry.

Swapping introduces inefficiencies to the car. You need at least a little additional structure which is weight.

The below article does point to advantages but again not what may first expect: cheaper initial cost for car, off peak charging time. Also note the industry standards.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/china-ev-swappable-batter...

If everyone were driving new, perfectly maintained vehicles, this might work. But in the real world, an automated system that can move around huge battery packs, remove and install them correctly, and do so consistently and reliably with all the variability of regular people’s cars is an engineering nightmare. That type of system is already introducing a ton mechanical complexity and failure points, which is the opposite of one of the selling points of BEVs, lower maintenance cost and higher reliability.

The system has to work at basically 100% reliability for it to be realistic. If your gas car had a 1% chance of not being able to fill up, and you had to bring it into the shop to find out what part of a complex gas cap system wasn’t functioning properly, that’s probably not a car you would buy.

Then there is standardization. Distributing batteries based on the individual vehicle shape and size is hugely beneficial. Forcing it into a standard removable “pack” brick would reduce capacity, handling, etc. And are you going to regulate all cars use the same pack? Otherwise every car manufacturer would have to build out their own battery pack stations across the country and you would have to find your car brand station.

Also, the whole idea of driving your fuel down, then going and refilling it all at once is a very ICE vehicle thing. 90% of people use their cars for daily commuting between home and work/shopping/activities and back home. If your car refuels every night and you start each day with 300 miles of range, why would you need to stop anywhere to refuel? Obviously this doesn’t cover all scenarios, but the roadtrip is a pretty small use case.

The storage is at the high end and better than most other EV chemistries by 50%+. It's unusable because it doesn't survive long enough, but I think the point is if they can solve the cycle issue then this chemistry becomes available.

It might not double the range of a Tesla or Kia, but it won't be too far off. FWIW, the 360 Wh/Kg number is not far off the 400 number where flight apparently becomes interesting.

In line with other batteries with much lower cycle endurance, but their energy storage is much higher than other batteries with similar charge cycle endurance. That's what matters.

When you read COULD in a headline, replace it with PROBABLY WON'T and see if you still want to click it.

Sure, but before you do that could you approve our grant funding?

Why is that in every battery article, people come to be dismissive? If you don't care, why click on the article?

Batteries are better because of all those improvements.

>In fact, gains in the amount of energy [lithium-ion batteries] can store have been on the order of five percent per year. That means that the capacity of your current batteries is over 1.5 times what they would have held a decade ago… A study may identify a way to significantly improve one characteristic, generating an exciting top-line conclusion. But the design may be impractically poor in some other way. While battery researchers learn from what does and doesn’t work, this means that a lot of laboratory batteries you may read about will never hit the market…A recent study noted that “the real price of lithium-ion cells, scaled by their energy capacity, has declined by about 97 percent since their commercial introduction in 1991.” The early lithium-ion cells in the 1990s were around $3,000 per kilowatt-hour. By the early 2000s, that was nearer to $500 per kilowatt-hour.[1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...