Tesla made $1.6 billion in Q3, is switching to LFP batteries globally

With Lithium iron phosphate batteries the charge cycles are in the 5000-9000 cycle range.

TLDR: They can be discharged significantly more times than conventional lead acid batteries.

The LFP battery will also last for ~5000 cycles, after which it'll still have ~80% capacity, and thus is still valuable. Lead acid only has a life of 500~1200 cycles. In other words: you'll have replaced the lead acid battery 4~10 times before you need to replace the LFP.

IIRC, lead acid has a higher voltage drop when drawing a lot of current. Meaning that with LFP you can power larger loads.

Taken together, for most use-cases, the lifetime TCO of LFP is better than lead acid.

Peukerts law does not really apply to lithiums [1] so with lead acid your capacity is greatly reduced if you do high amp draws.

You can really only use 50% of lead acid capacity without significantly effecting their lifetime, so most people cut the capacity in half when discussing, lithium can be run to 80% without issue and really even 100% with minimal loss and LFP's have much greater cycle than lead anyway so you probably pay less in the long run with a LFP than buying multiple lead.

LFP hold their voltage pretty consistently right up to the end of the discharge cycle while lead acid will drop significantly, this increases amp draw and has other negative effects (dimming light etc). The low internal resistance makes them pretty stiff voltage sources.

LFP accept bulk charge much longer before hitting absorb than lead so they can be charged much faster, this helps when charging from a generator as you don't have to run it as long to get full charge. Also you don't really have to worry about partial charging, where as with lead you want to do a full absorb regularly to keep their capacity up.

At least half the wieght.

Top tier lead AGM like Lifelines are basically the same price, I have these in my RV now and are a out 7 years old and now need to be replaced due to not holding a charge. Lifelines are considered gold standard and have high charge and discharge capability for lead acid, but LFP still blow them away, so no reason to go that route again.

Those cheap lead acids are not going to be decent deep cycle and will be wet cells, so will have off gassing and cause corrosion. AGM solve that and good deep cycle AGM's are not cheap, see Lifeline, Trojan etc. You can get relatively cheep "golf cart" batteries but again wet cells that need water checked and have to vented properly.

There are downsides to LFP:

More complicated, they need a BMS to protect from over and under charge, the BMS has current limits due to using FETs to switch on/off, so most of the drop in replacements can only do 100 amp continuous with short burst of say 300 amps. So they are not great engine starting batteries. You can run in parallel to get more current capacity obviously. BMS is a full microcontroller with high current disconnect so much more to go wrong, although some have bluetooth with an app to monitor individual cells etc.

They can't be charged below freezing without damage, so most BMS have low temp disconnect to protect against that. Also there overall temp range is narrower than good lead acid, my lifeline are rated -40f to 160f I believe. Lead acid are simple tough and reliable.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peukert%27s_law

Most of the energy you buy with a tank of gas goes to heat the air around and behind the car as you drive.

Curious example since that's one of the drawbacks of an EV. If you forgot to fill the gas tank and have to stop, you'll be 5 minutes late. But if you forgot to charge the EV, now you're looking at several hours late (or give up and call a cab).

For consumers (at least in my own experience) there is a range threshold that, once surpassed, means I almost never have to worry about fill ups again. So the Every day convenience outweighs the once or twice a year inconvenience of longer “fill ups“ vs gas for extended drives.

I bought mine because I hate little annoyances like having to remember/go to the gas station and fill up periodically.

For long-haul trucking though Tesla's benefits would be in automation/assisted driving, not in electrification. Short of some sort of carbon credits/regulations it’s difficult to imagine widespread adoption of a technology that has more downtime and higher initial costs than a previous technology.

The stop/start of small truck deliveries (and subsequent energy recapture) makes sense but for long-haul I can’t see it feasible until the battery energy densities jump by a sizable margin without a corresponding increase in price.

And at that point there's still few financial advantages of electrification I can think of... what am I missing there?