1k-cycle lithium-sulfur battery could increase electric vehicle ranges | Hacker News Reader

1k-cycle lithium-sulfur battery could increase electric vehicle ranges

news.umich.edu

79 pointsmaeln192 comments

It's not such a problem right now thanks to the supply chain crunch, but there are a lot of us sitting on the sidelines waiting for EVs to achieve better mileage before making the move. Our family has only one car, and it needs to be able to do not just the daily commute (for which I acknowledge at least 90% of the kilometers on this car will be used), but also the road trips. I rented a Model 3 LR to test out how realistic these trips are in Europe, driving 1,200km to Austria for a ski trip.

1. The stated range goes down the toilet at motorway speeds. Expected range plummeted from 500km to 300km. Actual range was more like 250km, probably thanks to the cold temperatures. This was a *50%* reduction.

2. We had to plan the trip carefully around chargers. There were 10 minute detours to find chargers, traffic jams at the chargers, and slow charging speeds (probably due to said cold). We tried to charge from about 10% to 80%, but this was taking more than an hour, and shifted to 10% to 60%, which was around 40 mins. Each stop averaged 1+ hour, including the detour, waiting, and charging.

3. There were no chargers at the lodge, and this meant a final charge before ascending the mounting to near 100% to ensure that despite the extreme cold we could make it all the way up and back down. We also wanted to ensure we had extra power in case we got stuck on the road and had heat. This final stop was another hour.

All up, the EV added more than *eight hours* to our round trip. Some of this time might have been spent on toilet breaks and eating anyway, but nowhere near *eight hours.* Bear in mind this was all on a near new Tesla with a near new battery and presumably the fasted possible charge rate and some of the best range available in an EV right now. This is just a huge fail for road trips, and I'm so glad I rented one to find this out before buying.

I'm hopeful battery technology like this makes it into production ASAP. There is so much R&D pouring into batteries right now.

Did the exact same trip with a Model 3 2021, 1200km ski trip from Germany to Austria. Came back yesterday. I experienced it way differently.

- We were able to make 300km with 90% to 10% battery (to not hurt the battery longevity too much)

- Outside temp was -4 to +2 °C

- Inside temp set to 20°C, seat heating 2/3 for two passengers

- So a we made a charging break every 300km, so approx every 2-3 hours

- Recharging those 80% at a supercharger takes about 30-50min depending on the Supercharger-version.

- We had 0 traffic/wait times at the super chargers (we drove both directions on a sunday)

- We would do a 10-15min break anyway every 2-3 hours to grab a coffee or do magic pee, so the extension of the charging breaks over our normal breaks aren't event that long

- All superchargers had a <5min detour from the Autobahn

Overall we spent approx. 2hrs more on breaks as we would have with a conventional car. I think thats a fair trade-off for 2-3 vacation trips a year, figuring in the time saved for normal refilling stops with a non-EV cars during commutes (when you are able to charge your EV at home).

To me, the future of "driving into holiday fully electric" is already possible with a Tesla LR model. With other EVs without Supercharger-Access/smaller battery/slower charging speeds probably not so much.

You can even save more time by using tools like ABRP[0]. This even gives you better charge-planning with shorter, time-optimized stops also figuring in detour times.

[0]: https://abetterrouteplanner.com/

The thing that gets me with the success stories is the issue with risks and planning for success only.

When you’re driving in the colder parts of Europe it’s generally advisable to keep your tank at least 50% full all the time. If the shit hits the fan, like it did for me in Switzerland once, and you’re stranded for 4 hours due to a crash out of your control, your car becomes a fairly important life support system until the road is cleared. There is no recovery option when there are a few hundred cars in the same shit.

So you’re 3 miles from a supercharger with 15% battery left and your car is a frozen brick in under an hour. You can’t deliver more fuel to it and your efficient route plan is a liability and there’s a queue of bricked EVs waiting for flatbed recovery.

I’m not criticising the concept but the current execution and the perception of it.

> So you’re 3 miles from a supercharger with 15% battery left and your car is a frozen brick in under an hour. You can’t deliver more fuel to it and your efficient route plan is a liability and there’s a queue of bricked EVs waiting for flatbed recovery.

There are a few things to consider.

First up, if you want to optimize for energy efficiency then the best option in an EV is to carry a blanket and rely on the seat heaters as much as possible.

Consider this scenario with a long range model 3. 80kwh, 15% means you have 12kWh available (Let's drop that to 8 due to cold weather). The seat heater consumes 500W at low power. That gives you 16/people hours of heat.

But let's say you just run the HVAC straight. You've still got 1 hour of heat (assuming it's using the 6kw restive heater. More if you are using the heat pump).

In any event, the approach to "I'm in an EV and stuck in traffic" is exactly the same as if you were in an ICE with low fuel. Shut things off. Wait until you are freezing, turn it on again. Ration your fuel/energy until you are unstuck.

To get to your charging destination in this scenario, you need roughly .9kwh of energy (300wh / mile, which is on the high end) or about 2% of your battery.

This is good practical advice for how to maximize EV energy use in an emergency.

That said, these vehicles are clearly not made for a long haul cold weather existence. Can they be made to work for occasional use with some planning and prayer? Sure. But these stories and the counter-claims leave no doubt that people who park cars in -30F and do 300 mile one-way trips through mountain passes and deserted highways should stick to ICE vehicles. If you're doing some variant of this with regularity (say 0F and occasional 150mile trips), you should probably do the same for safety reasons, even though EV will probably be fine for all but the rarest disaster.

Regardless of ICE or EV, people doing this kind of driving are well-advised to prepare for having a non-functional vehicle. It's always best to stay with the vehicle if it's habitable and if rescue is what you can count on, but having cold-weather gear, food, shelter, means to create/use external heat sources, and ability to "hike out" are some basic rules of the cold road that even 'tourists' should abide by. If you're doing remote winter driving, basically also pack for winter backpacking. This in addition to road flares, small shovel, tow strap, etc. to support the vehicle. It's less necessary now than it was in, say, the eighties when vehicles were far less reliable, but it's still practical advice: be prepared.

> That said, these vehicles are clearly not made for a long haul cold weather existence. Can they be made to work for occasional use with some planning and prayer? Sure. But these stories and the counter-claims leave no doubt that people who park cars in -30F and do 300 mile one-way trips through mountain passes and deserted highways should stick to ICE vehicles.

I'm guessing this is hyperbole, but really, this is a scenario that does not exist pretty much anywhere outside of Alaska and Russia. And even still, you'd probably be shocked (heh) at how many fast EV chargers present in these locations.

Every year, the situation with EV chargers has gotten better, by a lot. Consider the fact that John Day OR has a fast charger [1].

There aren't many places in the continental US more than 100 miles from a fast charger. Very little prayer is needed, though a bit of planning is nice. It's hard to find a location that you can't comfortably reach with an EV that has 300+ miles of range.

[1] https://www.plugshare.com/location/304770

Canada has high latitudes as well. Only part hyperbole, which is why I make the statement that even if you're doing only 0F and 150m, the same prep is a good idea. Really any drive where, in the event of your vehicle breaking down exposure would be life threatening (Alps, Rockies, Cascades, you name it), you should prepare accordingly whether EV or ICE. Having climate control in your vehicle should not be your primary contingency in the event that forward movement ceases.

Considering EV's lose range based on temps, that charging stations are still sparse in hostile environments, that a passers-by can't siphon out fuel for you (I know an ICE can jump start a Tesla, but not sure how practical it is to charge a Tesla from an ICE), ICE engines are still a better bet if you're in such conditions.

Car and Driver did a test using an older Model 3 with a resistive heater (the newer models use a much more efficient heat pump), and found that it used around 2.2% an hour to keep the cabin warm.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38807463/tesla-model-3-cl...

In your example with 15% left, you'll use ~9% battery while in traffic for 4 hours keeping the heat and car on, leaving 6% to get to the next charger. At ~300wh/mile you'll arrive with ~4-5% left. There's also buffer under 0%, but it's not guaranteed.

4-5% is not a comfortable number to be at, but I think it's acceptable in a worst case scenario like this. That being said I would definitely turn down the heat, and drive slower for the next few miles (and check for alternate chargers) to minimize power usage.

Man, the heat pump hvacs are impressive :). My 2018 model LR 3 has a resistance heater and a heat pump heater is the one thing I really wish I had.

I really wonder how a heat pump can achieve so much efficiency gain. Heat of electric resistance is about 99% energy efficient: almost all energy is converted into heat, nothing else.

A resistive heater directly converts electricity to heat, whereas a heat pump instead moves heat, from the outside to inside of your car. The heat your car gains is reflected by the heat the outside loses. In that way, they can be 300-400% “efficient”, because we do not care about the outside air around the car getting a little bit colder.

> whereas a heat pump instead moves heat, from the outside to inside of your car.

I completely forgot that the energy of the outside air is used, that explains it of course.

It can be that efficient when set to some point that would cook you. For low human temperatures that we call comfortable, it is not so efficient.

What is the electrical energy converted into at lower temperatures if not heat?

It just goes back to the battery to complete the circuit. Heat is created by resistance and if the energy going through the heater isn’t being resisted enough, there is no heat, just wasted energy. Most of these heaters regulate temperature by turning off/on/off and it’s the coming up to full resistance that is when the energy is “wasted” and doing it at human temperatures is a lot of off/on cycles. Also, it’s worth pointing out that not 100% of the energy is converted to heat, or you’d have a gigaton bomb instead of a heater.

I do ~900 km trips with 2019 Model 3 SR+ multiple times per year in Scandinavia. -20°C winter temperatures are not unusual. Travelling with my family, including young kids. No problems. 2-3 hours driving, then 30-50 min charging. I actually like how EV forces you to have more breaks.

What's a magic pee?

Go to pee even if you don't feel the urge to not feel it 20 min later when you are back in the road.

Heard it the first time when an American from California said it to their kids

A 50 minute per session.

Thanks for sharing your experience. If I may ask, how long was each leg of the trip in total?

Not parent, but calculation from given data: 1200km, charging every 300km for about 30-50min -> 4x 30-50min -> 120-200min -> 2h-3.3h in one direction -> 4h-6.6h in both directions

I did a similar trip earlier in January. 1100 km from Germany to the alps (550km per way).

I had to stop once for the full 1100km trip to refuel (before leaving Austria on the way back cause it’s cheap to tank there, not because we actually needed to refuel).

It was ~4:30 per way. Nobody in the car had to pee, etc.

I think doing 15 min break per way would have been ok. But doing 1h per way or more if breaks is really not great. Particularly with kids in the car (we leave really early put them as sleep, they woke up for the last 2:30 h or so and that was borderline).

> - So a we made a charging break every 300km, so approx every 2-3 hours

> - Recharging those 80% at a supercharger takes about 30-50min depending on the Supercharger-version.

How is this so totally different to the above commenter? I also need brakes during my rides and after a three hour ride a break sounds totally reasonable. But nowhere between 30 to 50 minutes?

My brother and I made a very similar road trip (Skiing holiday to Austria ~ 1000 km.)

I drove a 'normal' car and he drove a tesla Model 3. He left an hour earlier and arrived 30 minutes after me (with a relatively full battery to avoid the need of destination charging). He has the car for a little over a year so he probably optimized the charging schedule a bit better, but I still wonder why there was such a big difference between his and your experience (1.5 extra hours vs 4 extra hours for a single trip). He did not have to wait at the chargers, so that could account for some of it..

We only stopped for gas, toilet breaks, and took a 15 minute break for coffee and lunch.

I'm not sure but to speculate:

1. I drove fast on the Autobahn. I'm usually cruising at 160kph+, and did the same with the Tesla. Doing some homework, this kills efficiency fast. I imagine your brother was driving slower. Probably more within the high efficiency band.

2. Temperature delta. It was -5C + wind chill for most of our trip, and much colder up the mountain.

3. I kept a healthy battery reserve when seeking chargers (10%+) Tesla owners seem to encourage letting the battery drop below even 5% as this means an even faster charge to 60%. I am told there is an optimal cadence to charging which I suppose one perfects over time.

4. I did not conserve heating, as I'm told many EV owners do on longer trips. My wife likes our car to be subtropical.

5. Our Tesla might have been abused, though I recall it having <20,000km.

6. 1,000km is 17% shorter than my trip, further compounding (reducing) these differences.

7. Maybe my regenerative braking was set to low. I didn't think or know to check.

8. My route took me to at least a few regular chargers instead of superchargers. Maybe if I had been smarter and spent more time planning I could have used only super chargers.

9. Perhaps you stopped for a lot of breaks, reducing the relative advantage you might have had in your car.

10. Perhaps he left more than an hour earlier than you.

11. Perhaps my charging lines were longer than his.

I'm sure there are many other factors I'm not considering.

You said motorway speeds, but then state you were on the Autobahn doing 100mph+. Most other jurisdictions/autoways this speed is illegal. I definitely see my battery going down massively at 80mph/130kph speeds+ on my non-Tesla EV.

In fact, going such speeds is probably massively inefficient for ICE cars as well, just that they're already incredibly inefficient already that you don't see much of a loss.

You are aware that on the German Autobahn, outside designated speed limits, there is no speed limit? Believe it or not ...

On Austrian highways its nominally 130km.

I dated an vehicle design engineer once. She told me that cars create drag at a logarithmic rate at basically for every mph over 80, most people design them to use nearly double the fuel consumption to maintain. You can get some aerodynamic cars that are designed for 90mph, but it’s pretty rare in the consumer space. This was also nearly 10 years ago and I could be remembering it wrong.

Drag is the square of velocity, so not sure how your former date got logarithmic for that, sounds quadratic.

Equation [1]: F(d) = 1/2v^2CdA

Lowering the Cd (drag coefficient) and area can significantly reduce your drag.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)

I think she was talking about fuel consumption and drag, not just drag. But like I said, it was a really long time ago.

In Germany, the autobahn is the motorway.

I typically drive at 180-190kph, that’s my “relaxed driving” speed. 160kph is “falling asleep” kind of speed unless you have a super loud car.

The US interstate speed limits are at most 120 kph (75 mph) and are 105 kph on average (65 mph), and can be as low as 90 kph (55 mph), so that's almost certainly what Tesla bases their "highway" estimates off of.

160 kph+ (100 mph+) is way past the efficiency sweet spot :)

US interstate speed limits have their roots in fuel conservation for WW2 (or noise control in wealthier spots), safety was just a side effect at least at first.

> The US interstate speed limits are at most 120 kph (75 mph)

Minor nitpick: there are 80 and 85mph interstates/sections.

Really?? Where?

I've lived in a few different states across the US and I've yet to happen across one. (I am an American, yes we all learn metric in school, you can blame Reagan canning the attempt to switch in the 80s)

Edit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/US...

I've not spent much time in any of the dark-green ones (or the blue bit), so that's why.

I've seen them in Utah in more rural sections of I-15.

Wow, 160 kph! That's why. That extra drag really kills the battery. In the US I have never driven above about 130kph, anything higher is pretty much illegal everywhere.

It's a normal speed in Germany. And yes, driving that fast also drains a gas tank very quickly. Not sure why GP is surprised -- an ICE car will also perform much worse than advertised at those speeds.

But it's also pretty much only normal in Germany, and only on Autobahns. Almost everywhere in Europe the highway speed limit is 110 to 130 km/h, similar to the US.

Eastern Europe limit is usually about 140kph, and everybody frequently speeds a bit. With a waze app to check for cameras/policemen you can easily do 160kph in a dingy corolla.

People with expensive german cars usually go 220kph up to 280kph if they are pushing it. Doing 300kph on safe straight sections is not unheard of, but hard to pull off due to traffic.

140kph in Poland.

I drove a similar route as the GP, 1100km round trip for a ski trip to Austria, aiming at 190kph.

I didn’t have to tank for the round trip, but I decided to tank on the way back cause in Austria tanking is much cheaper.

My car isn’t particularly new, but the lowest I’ve seen it use is 4.5l/100km and at 180-190 it uses 6.5l/100km.

In Germany most people don’t drive huge SUVs. Mine is a relatively sleek station wagon.

Reducing the aerodynamic surface of cars significantly improved fuel economy.

So consumption increases about x1.5 from the "best case" to "autobahn speeds"? Sounds about right -- a 500km range would get reduced to ~340km. It's better than the 500km -> 300~250km claimed by GP, but it's still a big reduction in range.

> So consumption increases about x1.5 from the "best case" to "autobahn speeds"?

Yes, pretty much. I wouldn't say 1.5x is a constant factor.

If I drive at 200+kph (e.g. 240kph) then consumption explodes.

This stuff must be online somewhere, but for me at least it seems that consumption increases exponentially (e.g. x^2), which makes sense since air resistance increases with v^2.

You should checkout https://abetterrouteplanner.com/ for your next trip :)

Thanks, that's a cool site.

Oh, internal combustion vehicles also get their mileage very reduced at 160km/h. A 50% drop is completely normal. It's even on the small side.

The person you are replying to says they rented the Tesla and your brother owns one. I wonder if the rented vehicle was somehow abused or poorly maintained.

Or there were longer lines at the chargers. Or they chose different chargers. Or the chargers were broken/slow (common occurence). Or the car burned more power due to lower temperatures.

There's a lot of variance that comes into driving an EV on a longer trip.

I own a Tesla and regularly make very long trips. Travel in an EV requires a completely different mindset from ICE and takes a little getting used to. I'm not surprised that a one-off road trip experience was less than smooth, but once you get into the habits of EV travel it's already a perfectly satisfactory experience.

> I wonder if the rented vehicle was somehow abused or poorly maintained.

Very likely. Though more likely is the owner of a Tesla is more apt to the nuances of charging and planning ahead.

Maybe the temperatures on the drive were higher in your case? That seems to be a downside of EVs at the moment, low temperature means bad range.

1.5 extra hours would be my expectation as well. If we consider a long trip for vacation 3 times a year, the 4.5hrs invested into charging is offset by less day-to-day charging stops with an EV (if you can charge at home), the reduced costs of electricity vs gas and the reduced costs of maintenance.

I would optimize the car choice for the 90% use of daily commute instead of optimizing for the 3-times-a-year vacation trips.

> 1. The stated range goes down the toilet at motorway speeds. Expected range plummeted from 500km to 300km. Actual range was more like 250km, probably thanks to the cold temperatures. This was a 50% reduction.

This, to me, is the worst part of buying an EV right now - the marketing does the Apple "30 hours of battery***" lie and it varies so horribly that it's hard to trust anything about it.

I guess it would be easy if you're just a daily commuter, but I regularly do 800km trips and all projections show that it'll prolong an already long trip for hours.

Absolutely so does the gas mileage of normal cars. Whatever number you see on the sticker (in Europe) is a laughable lie, real life mileage is about 1.5x worse, and no one makes a fuss about it - it's just one of life's lies everyone adapted to ignore.

The difference between the number stated for my ICE car and the number actually achieved is a drop from about 750 to 650km at worst. It doesn't suddenly run out of gas when it's cold outside halfway through Germany.

The 30 hours of battery life lie can be worked around with a (common enough nowadays) external battery pack/power bank, it's a lot of time I wonder how there isn't a market for "power bank trailers" for EV's, something that you can rent for the times you need the extra range (or actually buy if you need it often).

Driving a car with a (low, not prone to lateral wind effects) trailer is inconvenient but doable when needed.

BMW gave out an ICE "range extender" for their i3s - so I guess that's the "power bank" approach to these.

The commenter mentioned they were on the Autobahn at 160 kph/100 mph. The aerodynamic drag on your vehicle is 3 times higher going from 110 kph/70 mph to 160 kph/100 mph. No wonder the range went off the cliff.

Very strange. The Norwegian version of AAA just tested lots of different EVs in winter conditions. Most cars lost 10-25%.The link below is in Norwegian, but the results table should be easy to understand:

https://www.motor.no/aktuelt/motors-store-vintertest-av-rekk...

There is a lot of potential variation between their tests and my use.

* Norway doesn't have speed limits which go anywhere near 160kph. I was on the Autobahn for most of my trip. How fast were they driving? 50-80kph appears to be a lot more efficient than 160kph.

* Did they drive to maximise efficiency of power or time? I have a heavy foot accelerating.

* Were they using the heater liberally? We were. I'm told this uses a lot of power, especially on models which don't have a heat pump.

* Was brake regen high or low?

For the record, I'm not arguing that the Model 3 can achieve better efficiency than I achieved. I was simply explaining that in my case, it was poor.

Regarding efficiency, for your "average car", driving at 160 kph requires 3x the energy as 110 kph (aerodynamic drag mostly), while only increasing velocity by 1.45x. Simply put, you're requiring 2x the energy per kilometer, which pretty neatly lines up with losing half the manufacturer rated range.

Isn't it true that in most of Norway you'd be hard pressed to find places where you can drive faster than 80-90 km/h?

Meanwhile, in germany, you have the autobahn...

in a few years the autobahn will be limited to 130 km/h aswell I guess.

Yup. So the ev owners can feel better about their choice.

>> Expected range plummeted from 500km to 300km. Actual range was more like 250km, probably thanks to the cold temperatures.

It is currently -17c where I am. Expected to go down to -28c in the next couple days. A 250km range in winter is simply unacceptable in my area (northernish canada). That is only a couple hours at highway speeds. But the real killer remains the absolute temperature limits on the batteries. If it cannot handle -45c without invalidating some warranty, then it just isn't useable. I cannot afford to spend that sort of money on something that I cannot park outside.

Where it can get that cold, are outlets near parking spots common for block heaters?

Common? They are ubiquitous. You won't see them at the mall, but every job location has them. At my work there are 4-foot poles at the end of every parking stall (1-pole for 4 spots) with outlets for everyone. The reality is that most cars start easily down to about -20 without external heat.

But those outlets mean nothing in term of whether I can buy an EV. If the power goes out then we loose those outlets. Or what if I need to park somewhere without outlets such as at the airport? It is one thing for a car to not start. You can always tow it and warm it up somewhere else. But a car that will take damage if it gets cold is totally unacceptable.

I agree with you, which makes me think that there's a misconception here. That seems completely insane, you can't predict the weather, especially say if you've parked at the airport for 2 weeks.

Looking at the current Tesla warrenty: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/tesla-ne...

I think your info might be just out of date. I don't see any references to specific temps, just normal don't be dumb stuff (like exposing the battery to a fire)

I did find this from 2014 though: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/battery-warranty-and...

This says the warranty at the time said:

• Exposing the vehicle to ambient temperatures above 140°F (60°C) or below -22°F (-30°C) for more than 24 hours at a time”

So it sounds like they took it out eventually?

> motorway speeds

Do you mean 110..130 km/h EU speeds or 150+ km/h Autobahn speeds?

Driving 130 km/h can knock ~30% off your range compared to driving 90 km/h according to various sources[1]. Add cold on top of that and losing 50% over advertised range seems reasonable.

If you want to optimize for range you should apparently aim for holding a constant 50-55 km/h.

[1] https://teslike.com/

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/15/tesla-range-plotted-rel...

50% loss in the cold is pretty darn high. You can mostly eliminate the cold range loss by:

- preconditioning the battery & cabin while the car is parked and plugged in

- using one of the newer models with a heat pump

- turn the cabin heat down and the seat heating up

The first point is the most important. We often have little range loss on our way to the destination but significant on the trip home because we couldn't plug in at our destination and the car got cold.

It is indeed unrealistically high, and I say this as a Canadian driving my Volt in a Canadian winter. I only see about 30% reduction even in -20C.

That said, the Volt will warm the system with the ICE if it gets below -10C. But I've heard similar numbers from pure-BEV owners.

> If you want to optimize for range you should apparently aim for holding a constant 50-55 km/h.

I think rather 80-90 km/h, at least for Nissan Leaf, as well as from the table you linked (55 mph ~~ 89 km/h)

I own a Nissan Leaf and can confirm 90km/h is about the sweet spot for trip duration. Above it, you're draining battery faster than you can recharge it. Below it is unsafe on motorways. I usually set it at 104km/h, which makes the estimated range pretty much exactly match reality.

However, for newer EVs the sweet spot will be at higher speeds, because those cars are able to recharge at much higher speed (at least 2 times faster).

from the table you linked (55 mph ~~ 89 km/h)

The table doesn't show any data below 55 mph. This site: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/15/tesla-range-plotted-rel... has a graph that plots range vs speed all the way to 0 (for the Model S) and it shows the 'optimal' speed to be around 35 mph.

My bad, didn't check the second link, thank you. The data looks too smooth. Is there raw data somewhere? Or analysis without too much regression applied?

And draft behind a truck! I know a guy who’s skoda has something silly like 3.6l average consumption over 250km.

For your "average car", driving at 160 kph/100 mph requires 3x the energy as 110 kph/70 mph (due to aerodynamic drag), while only increasing velocity by 1.45x. Simply put, you're requiring 2x the energy per unit distance, which pretty neatly lines up with losing half the manufacturer rated range.

You can’t drive in a German motorway at 110kph. You’d be in the truck lane at 80kph for your whole trip, having to over take every single truck, of which there are many. So 130kph+ is the minimum unless you are towing.

I was doing 160km on (most of) the Autobahn from basically the top of Germany to the bottom.

Sounds incredibly dangerous. You mentioned you had most of the voyage at -5C. Were you worried about road ice?

Lived in Germany several years and it was not unusual to get wild game cross the street at the worst times. Most Authobahn have protections against, but some parts are badly maintained and I have seen some crossings...

"Wild Boar Crash Test Highlights Growing Accident Risk" https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/road-carnage-...

In 2010 for example... "...A total of 27 people died and 3,000 were injured in a quarter of a million collisions with wild animals on German roads in 2009, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of animals that perished in the process..."

I was not worried. The Autobahn is one of the safest road networks in the world because of how well it's maintained and how well drivers follow the rules. Of course one should always stay vigilant. I've done the trip many times before and know the potential hazard zones. Wild animals jumping out at high speed is a risk almost anywhere in the world. According to your stats, that risk is exceedingly low compared with the actual miles driven each year.

My understanding is that solid-state lithium ion batteries (which should roughly double capacity while also being much less fire prone) are likely to be the next big thing with pretty much all major car manufacturers working on bringing them to market and the estimated timeframe being 2025-2030.

From what I've understood LFP (also much less fire prone) is poised to be the next big thing. But maybe that's more in the short term and for "budget" models.

LFP is pretty much already here. It's mainstream enough that's it's shipping in Teslas. The catch is that while LFP is cheaper and less fire-prone than more traditional lithium ion batteries, it's less energy dense. So it's unlikely to be solving range issues any time soon.

It's cheaper but with less capacity, so I guess it's alright for the second car that is strictly used for commuting.

Less energy density. Capacity is dependent on size of the pack.

Notably it’s lower energy density by weight, but not substantially by volume.

True, I was thinking about density. Unfortunately weight to size for an EV is complicated and more weight is not good.

does LFP stand for less fire prone?

LFP stands for LiFePO4, or lithium iron phosphate, a sort of battery chemistry. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery

As a counter-anecdote, we did a 3000km one-way trip this summer in a Tesla. We spend a grand total of 15 minutes waiting for a charger. In other words, significantly less than we would have waited for gas pumps.

YMMV, but what enabled this:

- it takes a bunch of time to shuffle kids through bathrooms

- overnight hotel charging

- we didn't eat in the car

With a gas pump, you need to stay with the car while it's filling. With an electric, you can eat/bathroom/sleep. If you're doing a long trip with a family and want to stay sane, you need to budget time for that stuff anyways.

> With a gas pump, you need to stay with the car while it's charging.

Is that a realistic concern for anyone? The "charging" process at a gas pump takes around 1 minute (in Europe gas pumps have ~50 l/min flow rate, in the US it's 10 gal/min). At best you can get a battery recharge in 20min but more realistically today over 30min for 80% charge if the charging station hasn't reached peak charging capacity and starts lowering charging speeds for everyone.

Usually the longest wait is during holiday season where at the middle of the highway everyone needs to fill up around the same time/place and queues form. This is not something EV tech can help with intrinsically, if you don't wait today it's because there aren't enough EVs on the road.

Once most cars on the road are EVs wouldn't you have the exact same issue with queuing at busy charging station in holiday season? This will be exacerbated by the fact that charging takes longer than 1min, and too many cars charging at the same time would most likely lead to a drop in the overall charging rate of all cars in the station (it's unlikely charging station will support high-speed on all chargers simultaneously).

The way we drive and refuel now revolve around the concept of the quick refill gas pump. We need to adjust our expectations, driving style/planning/habits, and technology - induction charging roads, "third rails", things that address any shortcomings of EVs, not just adapting old solutions to new problems.

We were driving through Northern Ontario for most of the trip, so the busiest we ever saw a supercharger was 3/8 stalls. Most of the time we were the only car using a charger. The car rarely got below 50% because the kids always asked to use the bathroom or get a snack before the car needed a charge.

> We need to adjust our expectations, driving style/planning/habits

Before I was married, I had a diesel car with a 1000km range. I made that 3000km trip in 36 hours total, which I never could have done with an EV car. Driving that far that quickly by myself without stopping to rest more was reckless and stupid, so not being able to do so is a significant side benefit.

Are there penalties for staying on the charger longer than required? My concern with a half hour required time to charge is that people will go to "get a quick bite" and leave their car at the station. The 5 minute run in to pee at the gas station could become a half hour "the restaurant was busy" addition.

I have seen chargers that tax you per kWh and per minute and for the parking spot and sometimes also another per charge fee. So I have plugged into a charger that taxed ~€1.5 for plugging in, €0.5/kWh for charging plus another €0.05/min after 2h, and €2/h for parking.

It's up to the operator. When cars are smart enough they might even disconnect after a preprogrammed charge and move to a waiting area.

Edit. Updated currency for clarity.

Is "2E" 2€? If so, isn't that basically just the charge for paid parking?

> With a gas pump, you need to stay with the car while it's filling.

> With an electric, you can eat/bathroom/sleep.

With an electric, you can eat/bathroom/sleep because it takes so long that those things become possible. Yes, you can't sleep in the three minutes it takes to fill the gas car.

I don't stay with the car during fillups on road trips though, I start the fill and run into the convenience store to stock up on snacks and by the time I'm back 2-3 minutes later the tank is full and I can be back on the road.

>I don't stay with the car during fillups on road trips though, I start the fill and run into the convenience store to stock up on snacks and by the time I'm back 2-3 minutes later the tank is full and I can be back on the road.

That's illegal in many jurisdictions, like Pennsylvania. It's dangerous everywhere. Those click off latches aren't infallible, gasoline filling needs to be supervised. You don't have to stand there -- wash your windows or check your oil.

I don't have an EV but is in my future, and we do a long trip (500km) regularly, not sure how practical this is but i've always thought, is it worth buying a car for 100% of your needs? or get something for 90% and solve the 10% differently by renting?

Buy and use an EV for all the easy daily stuff, then rent something more suitable for the yearly/less frequent long trip. Other than range we have a similar problem with space, for big trips we end up with tons of stuff and more space is useful but day to day less so. So the 90% EV could be smaller as well and still solve the problem.

I do see the attraction of having one thing that solves 100% of the uses though.

I'm mostly waiting for the total cost of ownership to come down. Most TOC calculations are showing best case EVs against worst case ICE vehicles. With the difficulty to repair Teslas and with simple issues costing $15000+ to fix, I don't really feel comfortable spending an extra $20-40k.

If Tesla wants to get people who are more budget conscious or who will depend on their vehicle as a single car family then they need to really up their parts and repair game. I don't want to buy a John Deer EV that spends most of it's time at the dealer getting fixed until the warranty runs out.

Charging rails alongside major roads is the obvious solution to this problem. It will enable much more than vacationing in urban EVs, also things like electric semis, long range buses etc.

Since it is a fixed capital expenditure, you need suficient EVs on the road for it to make economic sense, but from that point forwards it's a no-brainer compared to stuffing every vehicle chock-full of rare minerals for the unlikely case of a ski trip to Austria.

That's the approach I've been advocating. Electrified roads (even if it's only short, regularly spaced intervals on major highways) make so much more sense than expecting everyone who wants to drive more than an hour or two from home to haul 800 pounds of batteries with them. No having to stop to charge. Less wear on the roads (from reduced vehicle weight). No need for diesel long-haul trucks. EVs can be cheaper, with more cargo room. Less dependence on cobalt or nickel (or you could use LFP batteries to get away from that entirely). Energy usage is shifted to the daytime (when solar power is available) when most people drive rather than charging overnight.

I think the thing that's lacking right now (despite political will) is standards for electrified roads. I like the general approach that Sweden is using, with rails embedded in the road surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZNHZnyxCm8

At that point you should probably make use of the preexisting "charging rails" and take the train (in central europe)

Recent headline from Handelsblatt: 1 in 4 trains does not arrive on time. No, thanks.

Because trains are known to split into family sized units that continue the journey on roads using battery power?

The public transport trope is tiresome and unlikely to prevent the warming of the planet with a single fraction of a degree.

Car trains (or "Motorails") do. Park your car on the train at the head station, drive it off the train at the destination after having spent the night in a sleeper cabin and drive on to where you want to go. Since trains are electric it would be easy to retrofit the car carriers with charging infrastructure to make sure EVs are topped up for the "fan-out". Everything but the charging infrastructure is already in place and in use, at least in Europe - from the Netherlands [1] you can take such trains to Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Austria, Finland, Croatia, Slovakia and Turkey (via Austria).

[1] https://www.treinreiswinkel.nl/reizen/autotrein

You can buy an EV for commuting and swap it with a friend for road trips. My experience has been that non-EV drivers are very excited for the opportunity to borrow one

A cool idea but I'm the kind of person who would lose my cool if I found a scratch on my Tesla after friends borrowed it for a couple weeks. I would also feel decidedly uncool asking them to pay to fix it. We also have a strange law here in Denmark where if my friend is caught exceeding the speed limit by a significant margin, or driving dangerously, I lose the car.

There's an Australian company called Li-S Energy[0] that claims to have solved the same problem a different way, using boron nanotubes. They state the theoretical limit for a lithium-sulphur battery is 2,567Wh/kg, which is around 5x that of a standard lithium-ion.

[0] https://www.lis.energy

It is promising that a 5x increase is even theoretically possible. If one day even a 3x improvement became mass produceable that would be enough to make electric vehicles viable for all the use cases it isn’t currently that I can think of. Long range towing, extreme cold, track days, road trips with bikes and luggage strapped to your car etc

An alternate line of thought - do we need Electric vehicles to do all that? If we could reliably transition mass of passenger transport and daily commute options to electricity, that alone could crack the deal. We needn't eliminate fossil fuel driven systems completely. It can still have some use cases, which on a planet scale could be made viable through a select oil extraction infrastructure across the globe. A scaled down fossil fuel economy with electric replacing mass of private and commercial vehicle use looks like the most likely scenario for the future, imho.

Absolutely the approach that is needed: net zero, not zero. We cannot completely decarbonize the long tail of fossil fuel uses - but we can create a mostly renewable energy mix. It is unlikely that air and space travel for instance will ever be decarbonized - but net emissions can be reduced or eliminated. The same goes for manufacturing processes and materials science. It's not an all or nothing proposition.

I think fossil fuels are enough of an ideological rallying point that they're going to be targeted no matter how niche and justified their use is (see also: asbestos). We're likely to wind up with plat based synthetic fuels in those use cases to make the ideologues happy (see also: Brazil, though they use synthetic fuels for a different reason) even if that's not the best/cheapest way to make those use cases net zero.

> even if that's not the best/cheapest way to make those use cases net zero

It's likely to be for the foreseeable future given that net zero otherwise requires carbon capture equal to the extracted fossil fuels, and we seem to be some way off effective carbon capture let alone cost effective carbon capture.

Keep in mind that 10% of the worlds carbon emissions is tarmac/roads. Not building, just them being around.

So mass transit does more lift than EVs in terms of carbon neutrality. Not to mention noise pollution and tire particulates causing asthma.

So with a capacity of 1k cycles and recharging on weekdays only, the battery should last about 4 years?

Is that enough to make electric cars viable for all use cases? It depends on cost --- of the car initially and of a battery replacement. It would have to be less than the cost of current electric vehicles which have a much longer expected battery lifetime.

That would depend on the definition of a "cycle." If these truly enable 5x energy density there would be cars on the market with 1,200 - 1,500 mile range. The average American drives 40 miles per day.

If I were an average American driving an average amount and I charged my car every night it would be topping the battery from 97% to 100%. Does that qualify as a cycle? I don't know, but I doubt it. Even if I recharged once per week that would be 80% to 100%, and I would also doubt that qualifies as a cycle.

The authors estimated 10 year lifespan but I'm not sure how they came up with that number, either. If these batteries really do offer 5x density I would likely charge my car 30-40 times per year.

You wouldn’t be charging from 0-100% every day though. For most people it would be more like 1-2 cycles per week, if not less.

It's hard to say what "most people" will do.

My wife plugs her phone in every night as a matter of habit --- just to be sure, whether it really needs charging or not. I know from experience that this degrades the battery lifetime.

iPhones do have logic in software now to hold off on charging above 80% until the user is expected to take it off the charger [1]. Probably still not as good as personally optimizing your charge time based on battery level, but it's at least not quite as bad to be plugging it in every night as it used to be.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210512

Samsung phones on Android 12 have a toggle for "charge to 85%" now. Not as "smart", but a great way to extend battery life if that's your focus. That last 15-20% charge is apparently a killer.

I would say its even smarter. I don't want to charge my phone to 100% every day, and I don't want to babysit it.

Smart charging would be: "start charging now and finish at time my alarm is set, while reaching 80% battery." Slow charging to 80% and your battery can last multiple times what it would "normally". I don't understand the craze for 40-60-100 watt phone chargers...

My four year old Sony phone does this, and the battery still lasts around two days, just like when it was new.

Sony you say.. now that's a brand that haven't p*ssed me off so far, or I don't remember.. Maybe I should consider them when Ill be searching for new phone, thanks.

It'd work for me. I'd absolutely trade long battery life to only ever using 80% of the battery for pretty much all my electronics.

Yeah, I was happy to toggle that option on.

I babied my iPhone 12 Pro by using an automation to turn off a smart-outlet at 76% charge. After a year I'm at 95% health, basically on par with everyone else.

I've discontinued the automation and will just buy a new battery in another year or two instead. /shrug

Charging the phone from 60% to 100% is 0.4 cycles. So your wife is putting less than 3 cycles per week on the phone battery. Sitting at 100% does degrade the battery, especially since the phones all charge to 4.4V these days. I root my phones so I can set a 4.1V charge limit.

Any battery that has an even moderately intelligent chip moderating its charge will round-robin the individual cells so that it’s not the same cells being charged/discharged all the time.

If you’re always topping off the charge at night, the cells in the battery pack are still experiencing full discharge cycles eventually. (Cells will end up staying at 100% charge for a while though, which is probably ultimately bad for them, but they should still be fully discharged/charged eventually…)

A phone doesn't have a thermal management system that can cool and heat the battery if required. Charging your car every day is not an issue.

99% of commutes are less than 200 miles. Current car batteries support large numbers of charge cycles and have a capacity that's high enough for these trips.

However, many drivers do a bunch of 500+ miles drives per year; 1, 10, or 100, depends on the driver.

At 500+ miles, battery anxiety starts to kick in.

An electric car that combines current high-cycles-low-range batteries with a smaller low-cycle-very-large-range battery for those 10 500+ miles trips per year would be a killer product. We are talking here 1000+ miles without charging, which is kind of much farther than what most cars can get without re-fueling.

I do maybe one 500+ miles trip per month. That'd be ~24 cycles / year, such that these batteries would have a lifetime for my use of ~40+ years. That's more than enough for me.

There are a bunch of companies working on hybrid battery designs that combine different technologies to serve different purposes. Some of them are already hitting 800+ miles in real-world tests.

> At 500+ miles, battery anxiety starts to kick in.

I have a Tesla model 3, it's got a decent nav system, is aware of the battery state, current trip, average speed and the like. For me it makes range anxiety a non-issue. I had a 1200 mile road trip, did no preplanning, just filled the car with luggage and family, hit nav, and said "navigate to <1200 mile distant city>".

The Tesla experience is pretty transparent and the superchargers are pretty frequent and reliable. I've yet (over 30k miles) expected to charge at a supercharger and not been able to.

Generally I had more than one place I could stop and once charging it would give feedback like "charge x minutes to reach next charging station with 15% battery left". Sometimes we'd charge a bit extra waiting on someone and it would automatically pick a further charging station. While driving the car would helpfully say things like "You'll arrive at the next charging station with 15% battery left if you keep under 75 mph". Despite going through of some of the lowest density charging areas like eastern Nevada or southern Wyoming I had no issues.

The charging stations I used were quite close to the major highways, and the strategy we used was to fill up to 50-75% and recharge when we had 10-20% left. This involves more stops, but also maximized charge speed, often 550 miles/hour or more. Charging slows as the battery gets more full. With 3 people and a dog the car was generally ready for departure about as quickly as the rest of us.

I did however carry power adapters for 120v, 220v, and the popular J1772 just in case, haven't used them, except when it's free like at some Universities (like Stanford) or businesses (like 2 hours free at Target).

When you are talking about super chargers, are you extrapolating to the whole planet earth? Or have you actually driven your Tesla across all 5 continents ?

The tricky part is the recharging.

The car can't possibly know if the owner is planning a 500 mile trip the next day. The only "safe" approach is to assume they are and top up all batteries every time it is plugged in.

If the owner plugs it in every day, how does this impact the usable life of this new battery?

The car doesn't necessarily have to know that someone is planning a 500 mile trip, the car operator can tell it to top up overnight when necessary.

<i>...the car operator can tell it to top up overnight when necessary.</i>

The car operator may not always know when it's necessary --- assuming he is not psychic. He may just top up to be on the safe side.

* With lithium ion you don't want to sit at 100% all of the time, but it is fine to always keep it topped off to ~80% or so. Topping it off daily is good.

* If you are someone who doesn't want to worry about not going to 100% all of the time the new iron based batteries (featured in base model 3 right now for instance) don't care, you can let those sit at 100%, and they are safer too. The downside is less total range range and/or more weight.

GM in their Volt and Bolt holds back a percentage of the battery capacity so that at 100% of charge the battery pack is only charging to 85-90% and when it discharges to 0% the pack is actually not at zero. They do this to limit stress on the cells and to ensure longer service life for the battery pack.

With lithium ion you don't want to sit at 100% all of the time ...

Someone who drives infrequently (a senior for example) or has multiple cars could easily leave a car plugged in for days.

Sure, but Tesla recommends charging to 90% for daily use (except for LFP batteries), personally I charge to 85% to help increase battery life.

It also helps the battery when it gets cold, the car will use power to help keep battery warm, which also helps increase battery life.

How much possibility? Like once per a decade? Edge case could be ignored by patience at charging station or rent a car.

What could possibly require you to take an unexpected 500 mile trip at short notice?

And without the opportunity to charge at a supercharger on the way?

That isn’t usually how “cycles” works out, no, unless you deplete the battery completely every day.

I know from experience that a lot of people will recharge every day --- just to be sure.

How this will impact their definition of "cycle" is unknown but again; based on my experience with batteries, it won't be good.

I think you may be misunderstanding the meaning of "cycle".

Charging every night for a 5 day week, from 80% to 100% is 1 cycle (in this crude example).

A cycle is not the number of times you plug in a battery to charge, it's a single charge/discharge full to empty and vice versa.

There is more to it of course because you never really "empty" a lithium battery, and for longevity it may be configured to never be fully charged to 100%, but that's roughly the point.

There is more to it of course ...

Yes, most rechargeable batteries will degrade over time just sitting there --- without any "cycling".

The article says it's a ten-year lifespan. Which seems reasonable since ideally, if it's a thousand cycles and a thousand miles per cycle, that's a million mile battery.

5x energy density (is that what this article is about? Kind of unclear to me) would mean a whole lot more than just longer range EVs. Thinking electric personal jetpacks, VTOL aircraft, etc.

True, but improvement on what? There's, let's say, doubling capacity (without doubling mass), doubling performance (discharge, without fire hazard), doubling how long it can hold a charge (without doubling thermals), doubling longevity (without doubling down on hazard materials)... Just of top of my head. Chemistry is hard, looks like it. What's the average doubling of any of these factors we've seen over the years? 10-20 years?

Energy density has at least doubled in the last 20 years. See figure 8 in [1].

And it's easy to overlook the most important factor for general applications - price - where the declines are much more dramatic.

People complain about the lack of progress with batteries but we've observed that EV range has doubled in 8 years. I see no reason that range wouldn't double again in the next 8 years - and I see plenty of reasons for that to happen.

[1] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2021/ee/d0ee0268...

Indeed. The first Nissan Leaf had a 20 kwh battery in 2010. The latest model you can get in a 40kwh and a 60kwh variant. And you can upgrade the battery in that original one with a 40kwh one that is a drop in replacement for the original one. The next ten years are going to be interesting. Assuming nothing will change seems more foolish than most other predictions. IMHO 2x capacity improvement is pretty much a done deal. There are multiple viable paths; it's just a matter of building and scaling production for this. 4x is very likely and 8x not unimaginable. More a question of when than if. 8x is probably going to take a while.

and aviation beyond air-taxis

right!

Kotov's lab has done a lot of brilliant stuff. It'll be interesting to see if this makes it to mass adoption; probably not this year or next, though. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-27861-w and seems to be open access cc-by.

If you asked me if organic polymers could resist the growth of metal dendrites, I probably would have said no, because plastics creep like crazy, and metal dendrites are hard and sharp, so over time they will inevitably win unless they stop growing. But lithium is soft like cheese, and Kevlar's creep resistance is comparable to steel's. Maybe this is why Wang and Emre are publishing groundbreaking material science in Nature Communications and I'm not.

If this also entails a 5x improvement in weight, let's see if that potentially enables hand luggable car batteries.

- Nissan Leaf 62 kWh battery: 410 kg= 6.61 kg/kWh

- order of magnitude for this type of battery: 1.32 kg/kWh

- power consumption: @15 kWh/100 km

- 100 km requires 15 kWh, or ~19.80 kg

If something like this in order of magnitude comes true, hand luggable batteries will be able to cover non-trivial distances. Some potential consequences:

- I imagine something like this could help enable a low-end, more maintainable second hand market in a not-so-distance future.

- For inhabitants of terraced town houses, this could enable them to charge their batteries at home too. Hand luggable batteries could simplify _a lot_ in terms of charging infrastructure.

- Exceptionally far trip? Throw in a few extra modules.

That would make swapping batteries at a (previously-) gas station much more imaginable as well, and comparable to filling up a tank.

This was the electric car future I always envisioned. Some sort of twist-lock cylinder that one fits into one of several slots in the vehicle depending on the range they require.

I'm not your how safe that would be, nor would I really want to be charging a 15kWh+ battery inside my home if I lived in a terraced house as GP suggests.

You'd be 100% right to be wary of charging this kind of battery inside your terraced home until it has thoroughly proven itself to be fire safe. The terrace or the garden shed might provide a safe alternative though.

The comment about recycling the aramid fibres from bulletproof vests amuses me. Bulletproof vests seem several orders of magnitude rarer around where I live than electric cars. Doesn't really make me want to move to Michigan...

Bullet proof vests, racing harnesses, etc, etc, all sorts of safety critical fiberous stuff like that ages out long before the fibers are degrading because the manufacturers make assumptions about the lifetime of the product in chemically harsh environments (for obvious ass covering reasons) and assign it an expiration date and users are not willing to say "well I use the product in a cool dry basement so I'm sure it's fine to go 2x the expiration" and accept the responsibility themselves so these products get replaced/recycled at a very high rate.

As others have stated, kevlar is also used in all sorts of other applications. The material can come from wherever.

Police, security and army are probably most of the demand for bulletproof vests, and the supply of used ones.

Kevlar is used for lots of things. Did they change the link to remove a statement about vests or did you read into the statement about kevlar?

"Along with the higher capacity, lithium-sulfur batteries have sustainability advantages over other lithium-ion batteries. Sulfur is much more abundant than the cobalt of lithium-ion electrodes. In addition, the aramid fibers of the battery membrane can be recycled from old bulletproof vests."

Look at the third-to-final paragraph where it explicitly mentions recycling Kevlar vests.

Not a big believer in climate change huh?

As Elon would say. Send me a sample, then we'll talk.

Pretty sure Elon has promised insanely more powerful batteries multiple times and not delivered.

I’d like to see a citation for that claim.

I'm not sure Elon ever claimed that.

Unless poster is talking about 4680 batteries, which are going to be used in production cars in Q1 or Q2 2022. But those are 20-30% more efficient/cheap compared to the 2170 form factor

A perfect task for your Tesla humanoid robot.

See Elon Musk's claims from Battery Day: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/elon-musk-reveal-battery-...

What exactly were Musk's claims from Battery Day? That article didn't seem to make it clear.

I'm aware of promises of improvements related to the 2170 cells, which were delivered first in model 3 allowing lower prices and range of 300+ miles. Then a rev to the model S/X allowed for range and performance increases. Before the 3 the competition claimed sure the model S is an amazing car, but can Tesla actually produce an under $50k car to reach the wider luxury market.

There's a pending 4680 improvements widely expect to ship in the Texas gigafactory model Y this quarter, time will tell. I believe this is generally on the announced schedule.

Am I missing something? Tesla batteries seem to be delivering on promises and experts in the area seem impressed with the Tesla battery reliability, performance, longevity, and kwh/$. Some to the point of calling Tesla a hugely successful battery company that includes various packaging for their batteries in the form of power walls, and model 3/y/x/s.

Musk just promised self driving cars next year for the ninth year in a row. - https://futurism.com/video-elon-musk-promising-self-driving-...

From the video, the first thing that could be called that promise was talking about the end of 2019 for a couple of years then, which he then scaled back to "quite likely" in 2021.

So he promised it for a couple of years and so far he's been off by about 2 years from the first "promise" shown in that video.

Talking about how 90% of highway miles could be done with driver assist is not a promise and it's not self-driving. Not sure why dishonesty is required to attack Musk, there's plenty of material available.

“The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”

— The White Queen, Through The Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll (1871)

We're not in 2023 yet!

Range anxiety is probably the only limiting factor for EVs to fully win over the oil guzzling cars. If we could use an EV with a range of about 200 KM as a daily driver with the ability to easily add on extra battery packs for the long trips, it should solve the problem nicely. Cheaper, and lighter daily driver with the flexibility to add juice when necessary.

If such new battery tech makes it possible to deliver high capacity batteries with smaller lifecycles, they'd make great add on batteries. Imagine if there was a standard way to say place an extra battery pack in the trunk or the front trunk for the long trips to give an additional 400 KM range!

For now, if I buy an electric car, I should simply account to pay for a rental gas car for those road trips for the sake of convenience. I'm sure many people do road trips with 45 min breaks every three hours or so, and not be anxious about availability of charging slots or even a functional charging point, but it is not for everyone.

> Imagine if there was a standard way to say place an extra battery pack in the trunk or the front trunk for the long trips to give an additional 400 KM range

Unfortunately, the long trips are often the trips where you really want the full luggage capacity.

> range anxiety is probably the only limiting factor for EVs to fully win over the oil guzzling cars

For myself it's living in a 1st floor apartment, with price being secondary, and maybe concerns over the charging network in the UK at the fringes being third. I don't think range would be a big concern.

I won't lie, I'm looking forward to greater range. I've had a Model 3 (Performance trim, though, for which range is not a feature to brag about). My wife drives a Bolt. Neither car is/was capable of making a trip to grandma's house and back without a stop at a DC fast charging station. It's a day trip for us, 315 miles round trip, and setting aside 45-60 minutes for a pit stop has a significant impact.

I want an EV that can pull off this 315 mile trip without dipping into reserves, even in the winter. I expect we'll get there in a few years, and I'm willing to pay a bit extra for that battery.

Can't plug in for a few hours are Grandama's? Even 3-4 hours @ 4mph (120v) can make a difference.

Do you set a departure time so the car and batteries are at the optimal temperature?

If you charge under 25% I'd expect to charge at 550 miles per hour at a supercharger (again nav there so the car knows to arrive at optimal temperatures), so if you charge around 275 miles I'd expect another 100 miles in 10-11 minutes. If it's bitterly cold I'd expect another 10 minutes or so.

Shouldn't take anywhere near 45-60 minutes unless something is seriously wrong.

I wonder if this will improve prospects for battery-electric aviation? (It might not, if it's let down by energy density, for example.)

The theoretical limits of lithium sulfur batteries are about equivalent to methanol in terms of energy density, so if it is an application where methanol is out of the question (i.e. the vast majority of commercial aviation), then this is definitely too far away from practical. Looks like it could probably get close for commuter planes though.

I'm surprised that 1K cycles is seen as a lot.

Well, if the range of the vehicle is 300 miles per charge, that's 300,000 miles before needing to replace the battery.

Don't most people plug it in at home regardless of what battery is left? no one wants to leave the house on 40% battery just to run it down a "cycle". How does that effect the math?

It depends on the each battery chemistry but most lithium based batteries that would count as like .6 of a cycle or less. Those 1000 cycles are usually determined by full discharge and recharge which is the most demanding on the battery. Usually in the data sheet for batteries you can see cycles for full discharges and partial discharges.

Range anxiety decreases with ownership. Once you adapt to a 300 mile range you figure out what your daily usage is, and typically it's a small fraction of the range. After all who drives 5 hours per day on average? So it's not a big deal to let you car go a few days, even 40% is 120 miles, or 2 ish hours for most driving patterns.

Additionally charge cycles generally means full charges, so 1000 full charges = 10,000 charge of 10%. Similar rules apply to any similar battery technology, like in an apple laptop or pretty much any cell phone.

For more data points check out: https://electrek.co/2020/06/06/tesla-battery-degradation-rep...

From what I can tell various improvements in battery management and chemistry things have improved things since the above post.

300 miles per charge * 1000 cycles is 300k miles.

in mice.

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