One gemini battery nearly doubles Tesla Model S range
motortrend.com
motortrend.com
But the demo battery is not. It's something else. What?
Why do these people think they can get that kind of energy density from lithium iron phosphate when nobody else can? BYD, which really likes that technology, has pushed the energy density per unit volume up by about 2X, but the resulting battery is denser and thus heavier. No problem for fixed installations, but mediocre for vehicle range.
There's a lot to be said for using lithium iron phosphate chemistry. The batteries don't blow up. They don't have the negative temperature coefficient which causes thermal runaway. They survive the "nail test". As electric cars go mainstream, and we have tens of millions of under-maintained cars on the road, we need all that.
So, is this for real, or a demo only?
For now I'm chalking this up to a fake, let's see if they get their 'production sample' up and running. I would not put money on it.
Other people can, but not within the same safety, regulatory, longevity, cooling, weight, and manufacturability constraints.
Which is why this demo is useless. It's easy to make one-off prototypes that accomplish something impressive as long as it only has to work a couple times, doesn't have to comply with safety regulations, and you have a massive budget to hand-build a couple of them. It's a different story entirely to try to ship it.
I suspect that they are doing something a lot more directly nasty than that: not rechargeable, or, entirely different chemistry.
Tested in cold Michigan weather instead of more idyllic conditions adds credibility.
This doesn't sound like vaporware. I wonder what barriers there might be to scaling this up to mass production.
The real mystery is the "non-LFP" battery cells they used.
How can it be double the capacity when the wikipedia article for LFP battery says it has "lower than that of other common lithium ion battery types such as Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) and Nickel Cobalt Aluminum (NCA)"? What type of battery does the stock tesla battery pack use?
99% of these articles are trash that never gets talked about again after 6 months.
Maybe this one isn't, I can't tell. Time will tell, though.
I live in the city. There are a fair amount of chargers, but not enough (and probably never will be). So 'enough', for me, is when it can compete with a regular ICE car: Charge it for about 5-10 minutes, and then not have to worry about it again for at least a couple of weeks. We're almost there, but not quite.
This is why I will switch to EV at some point.
Fast charging stations are unreliable and expensive, and with all the new EVs out there, harder to find open spots in general.
Hopefully the industrial revolution lifestyle will slowly fade over time :)
I understand the concern but as an owner its been less stressful than I feared it could be.
Even better though is the office parking lot.
Then you probably don't need a car, unless you have special needs or your city is some car-centric shithole (like, sadly, most cities outside the Netherlands are to a point, even in Europe, which often gets praise from US bike/public transport advocates).
lol
So you would rather have engineers solve the impossible, and then have 2,000,000 cars carry around additional 300kg of batteries?
How about getting city officials and landlord to do their actual job they are getting paid for?
And don't go 'oh no i have curbside parking' on. Me - you have millioms of lampposts in every city, don't you? They are already connected to power, is it too much to ask for all of them to be equiped with sockets?
What do you think makes more sense, forcing all cars to spend extra £7,000 and 300 kg of rare materials on extra battery capacity they shouldn't need, and then replacing those batteries every 15 years as they and cars are replaced?
Or picking up a shovel and upgrading some cable that will serve for 100 years?
Like these folks are doing? https://www.ubitricity.com/
That might involve pulling more wiring through conduits, or even raising the voltage on existing wiring and placing transformers, all of which can be done.
My comment was only on whether you could charge many cars without any of that.
Many municipalities (I'll use my current location of St. Petersburg, FL as an example) are working to make the roads safer in all that ways that you (I assert, incorrectly) presume will never happen.
Are you sure you don't have that relationship backwards? Similarly,
> Especially since there is a strong link between weight/size and safety.
Solely for the given vehicle's occupants, and to the detriment of everyone else around them.
The sprinter is more susceptible to wind and driving surface variation.
Not to mention that the operating cost of the small vehicle is about 1/10 that of the large one.
US has an irrational dislike for overhead wires, for both trains and trolley buses (ubiquitous enough they have Unicode)
This isn't a problem of technology, and we can't "innovate our way out". Our dispersed suburban land use pattern is simply a mistake, and impossible to make efficient.
Efficiency comes from:
* Electrified freight rail for cargo transport into and between cities and buildings
* High speed intercity electrified passenger rail
* Frequent, automated subway and heavy rail in cities and their peripheries
* Frequent, ubiquitous trolleybuses to bring people to rail stations
* Dense apartment buildings with good noise cancellation which share heated walls, and use heat pumps for heating and cooling
* Renewable electricity
* Flights for trips >500km, taking passengers from several nearby cities who take high speed rail to the airport
ALL OF THESE TECHNOLOGIES EXIST TODAY, we just need to be willing to adopt them. Because these technologies exist today, there is no sense in "waiting for technology to save us". We need to choose to adopt them, and abandon our inefficient policies now. These will always be the solutions, and we are just in denial that we need to adopt them.
but oddly, not for neighborhood electrical delivery.
Not compared to burial. The cost is up front (not amortized) and is a big enough multiplier that it won't overcome maintenance costs, especially when including buried repair/maintenance costs, which are significantly higher than overhead, even taking into account the lower frequency. (Tree roots, dug-up lines, cathodic decay and leaking conduits, necessary relocations, etc, all happen.)
There's nothing preventing the adoption of buried electrical today except the customer's willingness to pay for it.
New neighborhoods and houses that want it, pay for it. Simple as that. And nothing prevents replacing existing overhead except it becomes a 100% unnecessary cost, once overhead has already been installed.
>...and all it takes is a slight increase in capital expenses for installation to replace them with underground
>slight
4-10x upfront install cost. Higher in urban environments. Not slight.
If it paid for itself as you claim, why are companies almost universally making an irrationally expensive decision?
> If it paid for itself as you claim, why are companies almost universally making an irrationally expensive decision?
I don't think he made such a claim. There's an implication that it's 'worth it', but not that it's necessarily less expensive to implement.
Companies aren't making irrational decisions. They just haven't historically been paying for the externalities.
If you stopped subsidising the suburbs and suburbanites were forced to pay the 5x higher property tax rates it takes to maintain infrastructure, people's preferences would change.
Not to mention that they are subsidised within their own municipalities by commercial property and what little climate friendly housing is not NIMBY'd, typically by loud car sewers.
Not Just Bikes series on Strong Towns: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen...
Everyone wants to live in a sprawling castle far away from pesky neighbors, they want to have an entire forest as a backyard and at the same time they want to have access to the same urban facilities as those in Manhattan.
There's no amount of innovation we could muster at least the next 2 decades to make that a financially feasible reality.
That's what I say to people afraid AI will steal their jobs. No way we run out of jobs before we run out of desires. We can always imagine and want more, and it's so easy to become entitled to what you already have and think nothing of it.
I think the bigger fear is that of AI ownership. In a "winner takes all world" where people have a hard time sharing effectively, if there's no need for human labor for many fields and AI owners can just buy lawmakers, some people can just become infinitely powerful. Creating a permanent underclass of those who missed their chance.
See what's happening with coal mining, for example. People keep talking about reconversions but frequently what happens with these people is... Nothing. Their kids are the ones that move away or work in new fields, but most adults over 40 or 50 don't radically change their field of work en masse, or if they do, it's towards even crappier jobs.
It used to be that you needed a large dataset and a custom architecture for each individual task. Now you can use a general model and a few examples, it will catch on much faster on what you want it to do. Sometimes it's just as simple as telling it in free language what the task is.
What took whole departments multiple years to achieve will become something regular people could do. We learned to live with internet and cell phones, we can learn to program AI that is by design especially easy to program.
For example, how easy is it to make an image classifier with CLIP. https://openai.com/blog/clip/
Is everyone supposed to work in IT in AI-related fields?
Like is it efficient for me to live in a place I don't like?
> Like is it efficient for me to live in a place I don't like?
Is it more efficient to accommodate hundreds of millions of climate refugees rather than simply internalize the costs of climate change?
Please don't foist green hydrogen fantasy propaganda in response, I've read it, it has no application in consumer transportation
Get off of your horse. BEVs aren't good for environment. Okay, there is no local pollution but the damage is done somewhere else.
The problem with electricity is the storage. Using electricity to produce hydrogen locally is a method to store said electricity. Hence: hydrogen.
Is that the old coal/nat gas trope that the fossil fuel a-holes trot out to FUD? Have you looked at LCOE for coal? And nat gas is about to be economically uncompetitive as well compared to alt energy, without subsidies. If there was a proper carbon tax, then it wouldn't be close.
Power companies lose money on coal, and are breaking even natural gas. They will be strongly incentivized by economics, not LIB-UR-AL REG-U-LATION, to get rid of that stuff as quickly as possible. Solar/wind is STILL dropping. Things have slowed in the LCOE graph, but I wonder how much of that price drop slowdown is inflation.
If you're talking about battery materials and car construction, that is, AT WORST, the same as building an ICE vehicle... except ICE vehicles have about a 100+ more components and parts than an EV. LFP chemistry (and hopefully sodium ion) batteries will be very cheap. Cobalt/Nickel chemistries are rapidly becoming the domain of vanity and luxury cars... the 300 mile LFP/Sodium car is probably about a year away, but it is coming.
EVs will drive research into Carbon Fiber as well: hopefully we get an breakthrough like the Bessemer process or Haber process that will deliver low-energy economical carbon fiber bodies. ICE/Big Oil never cared about that.
As for hydrogen as grid storage, well, you're just proving my point that it is inapplicable to consumer transport. Thermodynamic losses for hydrogen generation, even temporary, will make it noncompetitive once mass scale LFP/Sodium or other grid storage chemistries hit the big time.
Sure throw some research towards Hydrogen and fuel cells. They do have potential in aviation and long haul trucking/shipping. Just like we should throw some research at LFTR and next-gen nuclear.
You might as well have said "MONORAIL!"
I’ve been thinking about it for a while and so far I understood that: people posting here live in a bubble, people doing their regular jobs at a shop, hospital, local doctor, builders, people who have children, bills, mortgages to pay, for them what counts is next paycheque. They won’t care about ev vs ice saving the planet because saving the planet isn’t solving any of their immediate problems. And those problems are basically being squeezed tax wise and having to earn enough to cover for inflation.
There are just so many people out there for whom sitting at a coffee shop for 20 minutes and waiting for the car to charge isn’t an option.
This is not your father's Die Hard battery, there's intelligence and protocols that need to be integrated. How does one drop in a replacement without Tesla's blessing and support?
example: https://insideevs.com/news/459830/video-inside-tesla-model-3...
Dear battery technology claimant,
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology is is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
[ ] your claims are lies.
----------------------------------------------------------------
But now if EVs are going to have triple the range and be cheaper in a few years' time, why spend money on a 300 mile range EV now? Surely the resale value will plunge and current buyers will lose their shirts on them.
I suppose that's good news for buyers in the secondhand market hoping to pick up cheaper vehicles, but it's a disincentive for new buyers.
Looking that up led to an interesting and concerning article on the economic impact of the transition to BEVs: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/25/the-osborne-effect-on-t...
Look at depreciation of Intel Macs after M1 came out, maybe?
LFP for an everyday usage (200 miles in a day), which are high-endurance, good temperature range, safer, etc.
I think this mixed mode is an excellent example of how "good enough"-density (200 wh/kg) LFP (and possibly even cheaper sodium) will be utilized.
All these different cell chemistries can each be combined in heterogeneous packs for different use cases. So even if a cell can't do 1000 cycles, it might be usable for the rare trips. Or maybe make that high-density module more replaceable, and the long-endurance LFP/Sodium does Cell-to-Pack and that type of stuff.
I think a typical consumer car in a few years will use a sodium or LFP for about 2/3 the cells (by weight/space) and 200 miles of range, and another higher density SSB or modern cobalt/nickel high-density cell for another 200 miles of range.
So the question is, what was the mix in this car? That's the big question.
Supposed to be 1/3 weight, ~3x energy and 40-60x faster charging without heat concerns.
Article reads like an advertorial
I can imagine an infrastructure where you rent one of these towed generators at a national chain when you depart, and drop it off at your destination. Similar to renting a U-Haul trailer.
I have a Tesla with a 100Khw battery and ~290mi of range. The only time I need more than 100mi of range in a day is when I'm taking a trip, which is not a daily thing. If such trailers were rentable for a trip, BEVs could have much smaller and lighter batteries. Eg, my car could be substantially cheaper and lighter.
I wish Tesla and other BEV cars would allow charging while driving.
The Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust used this method. OK, it had the generator in the back so you were always carrying it about, but you know, baby steps and all that.
You just schedule your route and an app shows you where to dock with the roadtrain.
You can also carry your meat body into an actual train, but I think this is not the point here.
Drop it off at uHaul when you get there, and pick up another one for the return trip.
Of course, a 250kWh battery pack would be a lot more expensive than a diesel generator, but it would involve much less maintenance and wouldn't risk disastrous user error.
hypothetically if this trailer solution existed, I still don't see people buying BEVs with smaller batteries. In general, most like the piece of mind of that range. Things happen - chargers break, power outage or you end up taking an unexpected trip or you spend some time at a friends home where you can't charge
Given that the charger networks are growing at a decent clip and average charging speeds continue increase, not many people would want to bother going to U-Haul before and after a trip when you could just stop for a bit on the way, have some coffee and stretch your legs
In short, it'd be such a niche product it would make little sense for auto manufactures in invest in it
Rivan does have plans to let you add a battery pack for the bed of the truck. I hope that comes out and someday other brands do the same
It's fine, as far as it goes. But most of the time you're dragging around extra weight and there's more mechanically to go wrong. You also might not be able to use some roads when you're emitting fumes.
I don't understand why people are allergic to stopping at a rapid charger every 2 - 4 hours. Surely people need to stretch their legs or go to the loo?
Its not so much stopping every 2-4 hours that's the problem. If it was a 3-5 minute stop, it would be fine, but its a 20-40 minute stop (assuming no contention for chargers). I've taken many 900+ mile (each direction) road trips in my car. Charging generally ads about 25% to the overall elapsed time. The chargers (at least in the I95 corridor in the USA) are often not equipped with 24hr restrooms.
These will impact the resale value and the lifetime costs of the car. The second-hand market will be crucial when it comes to widespread EV adoption.
First you need people to understand, then to accept the necessary changes and then you need the money and time to perform those changes.
Even the Netherlands, the bike capital of the world, has a thriving car market, and North America is probably 30+ years behind the Netherlands, in the best US biking locations.
Look at Flanders (northern Belgium) and Germany for areas 30+ years behind the Netherlands.
After a while there's going to be a glut of vehicles, some will be known as lemons for whatever reason (sometimes it can be just looks) and their resale values will be low, various brands have already started producing cheap EVs (for example Dacia has an EV at around 20k in Europe, yes, it's crappy by HN standards but it's still an EV: https://en.media.dacia.com/news/all-new-dacia-spring-prices-...), etc.
My 2015 Model S 70D which has done over 160 thousand km seems to have pretty much the same range as it had when it was delivered (about 330 km) so if the decline is more or less linear from the start then the lifetime is actually rather longer than the manufacturers expected. Of course I suppose it is just possible that it will die on the day after the eight year warranty is over or perhaps drop to 70%! But how likely is that?
And surely once there are a lot of old EVs on the road there will be a big market for replacement batteries and competition will drive the prices down.
The Dacia doesn't have thermal battery management. The warranty is only 75K miles on the battery. It's already a small battery so there isn't much in reserve. The car is the cheapest EV on the market. Comparing it to one of the most expensive is ridiculous especially when we are talking about running cars on a tight budget.
Or is this a prototype of sorts? And if so has someone inspected that vehicle to make sure that it isn't a trick? Because if a factor of 2 in battery life works for EVs it works for everything and that would be pretty big news utterly unrelated to Tesla.
For a PR stunt, they put lithium–manganese dioxide or some similar chemistry into a tesla. They're not rechargable, but they have a very high energy capacity.
They'll obviously have a lab furiously working on trying to make a rechargeable version... But for now, this demo is great for getting investment.
Is there anybody pursuing the idea of charging stations where one swaps your EV’s battery for a fully charged one, and pays a fee proportional to how expensive it was to charge that battery at the local electricity rate?
Specifically, what are the barriers? Legal? Technical? Patent-related? Capital? Or is it not worth investing in this vision, because there’s reason to believe we’ll reach ubiquitous availability of charge stations with <5 minute charge times for a 350 mile range (i.e. equivalent to a full tank fill-up at a gas station) in the not distant future?
To understand the use case better, we own a car and only use it to “get away” (i.e. 200-600 miles over the course of a day into somewhat remote locales). We’d love to have an EV, but the idea of pausing to take a long charging break in the middle of an already long drive is very unappealing.
Batteries would need to be a communal resource - with them being expensive i don't see it happening. Batteries need to be cheap for companies and people to take the risk of swapping their battery with a random one.
What if you don't own the batteries, just buy the car without a battery and sign a contract for X years and $Y that you will get the battery replaced on each station?
> with them being expensive i don't see it happening
People rent cars that are more expansive than batteries.
I think, while battery technology is rapidly evolving, the incentives of EV manufacturers is not to create “open interfaces”, but instead to integrate the battery into the hardware as much as possible. This gets better performance but also creates lock in.
In short, my theory is that until there’s a “battery company” ecosystem that sells up to auto manufacturers, this dream of swap stations will not materialize. Barring some regulation, I guess.
There was an Israeli company in the past, Better Place. It failed because car makers didn’t participate. But that was almost 10 years ago, so EV adoption was way lower.
But I stand by my original point - it's hard enough to find somewhere to park, never mind the parking spot next to the charger.
If you have a car in the city, you probably only need to charge once a week depending on usage, is it really that outlandish to think that in an entire week you won’t take your car somewhere with a charger nearby? Besides that, you can slow charge off mains voltage using an extension cord in many cars.
We have wired every room in every building in every city across most of the globe to have electricity. I really don’t think it’s much of a stretch to run some extra wires to the curb as ecar adoption rises. The current system of moving billions of gallons of highly explosive liquids to custom built dispensing facilities placed every few kms on valuable real estate is far less practical when you think about it.
My flat is about ~50m from the road and 3 floors up. I absolutely get what you're saying, but charging from a cable inside the building isn't practical for anyone in this block (or many of the blocks nearby).
Could agree more with regards to the explosive liquids - but you can be in and out of a petrol station in ~5 minutes. I may only need to charge once a week, but it still requires my car to be somewhere with a charging point for an hour (or whatever) a week.
FWIW, I don't have an answer. I just don't think we're there (or close) yet. I suspect EV adoption will start outsides the cities and spread in.
A government will instantly approve of a plan to install dozens of parking meters per block at a cost of thousands and thousands, and then employ an entire department to wander the city and enforce the rules. It really can't be that much harder to make it so that some of those meters also work as a charging station.
I imagine as battery and charging tech progresses, the difference between getting petrol and charging a car will narrow to the point that it really doesn't matter. e.g. For the better part of a decade Tesla had been able to charge to 80% in ~30 min. That's more than enough for the average city dweller to get their shopping done. This is one area where I think techno-optimism is extremely warranted.
I'd assume eventually it will work exactly like you suggest - I just think we're very far from it right now. I see it very much chicken and egg - trying to encourage your local council to put charging points every 3 or 4 spaces on every street is going to be next to impossible when there's just not enough EVs; too much hassle/uncertainty to own an EV in the middle of a city if you have to park it on the street (and your charge options are super limited).
That said, I'm sure it'll change and change will come quicker as more people in the suburbs (with the space to charge at home) buy.
https://www.cycleworld.com/story/motorcycle-news/swappable-e...
Edit: added brands
Making it replaceable means sacrificing range, because the battery must be smaller and there's more weight for a frame to hold the battery pack(s).
This is in addition to the more practical problems such as standardizing packs, network of swap stations, ownership of the batteries. If the packs are big you need a machine at every station (which can break), but if they're small enough for a driver to swap you sacrifice even more range and increase other potential problems like theft.
Even now on a mountain west traffic-free interstate I don’t really count on going more than 500 miles in a day. And that includes a meal break.
Both of these use cases sound like they would be very minimally disrupted by planning my stops around a charging break.
I think that range anxiety is largely overblown for a huge majority of use cases.
Just copy and paste the headline.
The article is light on what the underlying tech is.