Bosch gives go-ahead for volume production of silicon carbide chips

That and if you can remove all cooling, not just cost savings, but in some cases being able to remove active cooling and less moving parts is always an engineering win win.

I've seen a diamond FET operating at 700°C. Devices like that could use the Venusian atmosphere for cooling.

I wish that government electric car subsidies would be retargeted at cheap cars. I want to drive an electric economy car, not a luxury car. Here in Switzerland, we kind of have that: subsidies are in the form of a 99% reduction in road tax, so that every year you get a subsidy, flashy car or boring car. I'd like to see the kind of people who have to flash their cash (ahem, Tesla buyers) pay for moderate income car owner's road taxes.

The news won't stop when some technical or economic barrier is passed (which I'd argue has already happened) but when people generally believe it to be true.

But the news won't stop, because battery, motor, charging innovations now have an even bigger market and even more people will be working on it. They'll just change from "this is the breakthrough that makes EV practical" to "this innovation will make your already more than adequate EV even better and cheaper in a relentless progress of technology".

My 2015 Model S 70D has a range of 330 km in summer a little less in the winter. I use a supercharger to add perhaps 40% charge about once a week, the rest of the time I charge overnight.

Hardly anyone needs 600 miles and no one seems concerned that it takes an hour to add 300 km because most people charge overnight.

14.8% of private cars in Norway are electric now, more than 25% if you include hybrids.

The only thing holding most people back from buying electric is the cost and that is why we have so many in Norway, at the moment they are exempt from the purchase taxes and annual fees that ICE cars must pay.

I think what would really clinch this is not creating gargantuan batteries but simply making batteries universal plug-n-play. So if needed you just stop a battery station and replace it.

This solves also the unfortunate bottleneck of everybody charging their batteries during night-time, which (last time I checked) is when the sun is not shinning...

That will no doubt upset some ICE vehicle owners with enough disposable income that they could feasibly be targeted with a lucrative product that appeals to them. Good news is that cars with 600 miles and 10 minute recharge to 300 mile (50%) are totally feasible!

E.g. the hummer that GM is rumored to be working on will apparently have 200kwh. Of course it has the weight of a Tank and the aerodynamics of barn door, so it might not be enough to get to 600 miles.

If Tesla ever puts that kind of battery in a Tesla it would probably end up with close to 1000 mile range and they would need to make it a bit bigger. That's 20 hours non stop driving at 50 miles an hour. Absolutely nobody should be doing that. But you could build a car that does that. That's a about 3x what they currently put in a model 3 (75kwh). It will be a bit heavier of course so maybe not 3x the range. But you get my point. Solvable problem for people with money.

For the rest of us normal people, take a break & plug in, go to the bathroom, eat some lunch, stretch your legs, relax, etc. After the 300+ miles that you can get with a few decent EVs that's probably a good idea. It's not the end of the world.

If you stick to interstates, recharging at superchargers is easy. If you travel on smaller roads you have to plan more carefully to find destination chargers, RV parks, etc along the way but so far that hasn't been a problem for me.

Granted I recharge in my garage so I can commute locally without ever needing to think about range, but for purposes of long-distance driving I think range anxiety is an overblown issue, at least for Teslas in the US.

Range anxiety will stop being a thing when electric vehicles are common and nobody thinks of them a something special. It's a matter of social acceptance, and the infrastructure that follows.

In my opinion the Battery equation is already solved. Even for those who are at the end of longer driving range curve, we have a solid and realistic roadmap of battery technology. Pick Tesla tabless battery for example. It isn't Solid Battery like Holy Grail Battery, but it gets to the point where even if you are somewhat skeptical of EV, surely this is edging close to good enough?

People often confuse range anxiety with battery capacity. I dont think that is strictly true. It is one of these things where engineers would come in and suggest we need bigger battery to solve our customer's problem. But here is an product person POV, what if you have fast charging station everywhere. From your car pack living in cities, to packing in a mall or pubic parking space. This is similar to charging smartphones. Once you can charge your smartphone even dinning in Restaurants or on a Bus. You dont get nervous about running out of battery.

So as many comment have suggested, the biggest obstacle to EV isn't battery, is the abundance of Charging station. And given I actually believe City transport in the future should be micro mobility, whether that is e-bike or something else we have yet imagined, we need charging port for both bike and EV. And this needs some government planning.

While this is all good discussion, I really wish we focus more on silicon carbide :)

I wonder why they didn't jump straight to 300mm and only upgraded to 200mm wafers. They could have completely cornered the market with better economy of scale.

Current EVs need a 20 min charge per 3 hours of driving. It may not be ideal for pee-in-a-bottle cannonball racers, but IMHO it's entirely reasonable for most people. It's approaching a point of diminishing returns.

Compare this with charging of smartphones vs brick phones. Daily charging used to be considered a dealbreaker, but fast charging made it a no-big-deal, and people got used to it.

It also can operate at higher temperatures more effectively, so it can be driven harder than a silicon transistor.

In a motor controller you will probably bank that as an efficiency improvement, probably on the order of 1-2% at cruise and maybe a bit more during heavy acceleration or deceleration. In a charger you will probably change your optimization to reduce its size and weight for a given power delivery capability. In case that's on onboard charger, that means you haul around less weight and further improve vehicle efficiency a bit. That improved figure of merit also reduces the cost of having more power handling capability, which is how it might incrementally speed up charging.

To my mind, the biggest thing we can do to improve cars generally is to figure out how to reduce their weight. It's not obvious how to do that without either cutting back on passive safety or dramatically driving up the structural cost (e.g., with metallic foams for energy absorption in crashes).

If you open up an electric motor controller you'll find it's full of MOSFETs, and they get really hot the harder you push them. The ones in EVs usually have liquid cooling and/or fans and lots of heat sinks.

So with this chemistry it sounds like less energy spent cooling, and more energy spent driving or charging.

Also sounds like they're more efficient at higher voltages in general. So again, more range or more power, or both.

So GaN is more efficient for higher frequencies and higher power and SiC is better for high temperatures and has higher potential power density than GaN

SiC will be cheaper and probably dominate GaN in production volume. Epitaxial GaN on SiC (and even GaN on diamond substrate) are used for high power, low noise at high frequency RF where the applications can justify the cost.

Stopping short of looking up EU grant numbers, the wording seem to be meant to address a target audience and not meant to educate the public.