EV batteries with 2-5 times the energy density would completely change the game. Imagine a car with a 900 - 2300 km range on a single charge.
The cost savings would immediately solve the business case around renewable energy storage, too.
The cost savings would immediately solve the business case around renewable energy storage, too.
The impact of this for EVs would not necessarily be cars with bigger ranges but much lighter/cheaper cars with similar ranges as current high end models with faster charging times that only need a third of the battery weight. Anything beyond a few hundred miles of range is basically irrational and overkill. Normal people have a bladder range of about 200-300 miles at best (I get uncomfortable way before that) and ought to stop for longer than five minutes when they relief themselves eventually. Perfect opportunity to top up a battery. But most people don't actually drive that far more than a few times a year; if at all.
I see 300 possibly being sufficient but I’d want the advertised range to be 400 to make sure I reliably get that.
Absolutely true, but, until we move to a "usage" rather than "possession" model for cars, this will be the biggest obstacle to massive adoption of EV as the primary car.
At this point people get that they probably only run 100km a day at most, and that an EV would perfectly suit their daily commute (small EVs would be the perfect yellow jacket thing.)
However, everybody has family to visit on the other side of the country twice a year.
The moment you cross the psychological threshold of 1000km on a single charge (or, roughly a full day of highway), the whole game changes.
Would it be better if people commuted by train and ebike, visited their family by trains and had small easy to rent EVs for the days they need a car ? Sure. Will it happen before 70 years of cultural impact of personal car change ? Hard to tell.
Relatively few people drive across the entire country twice per year. Many Americans do drive several hours to visit their family.
It takes basically one trip using a current long range EV (e.g., ~310 miles range) and modern HVDC charging to rid yourself of these concerns. A 9h (~500 mile) trip only requires about an hour of HVDC charging. You'll need to stop for 30 minutes anyway unless you're on some kind of cannonball run.
Except that on the holidays, there will not be enough chargers, so the “30 minute stop” is an ideal that simply cannot be reached under peak holiday conditions. Booking a charger could make things predictable, but it can’t solve the problem of not enough chargers available during peak periods.
I don't think any TV is going to resist filming infuriated would-be-holliday-goers burning under the sun while they wait an hour or two to fill their batteries. The first summer it arrives will be _very_ hard for the EV industry.
Also, those "highway areas" are owned by... gas companies. So will they put their best will into making sure the EV-holliday experience is top-notch (maybe ramping up charging capacity with portable batteries during the summer ?) Or will they let the experience be hellish, look at the number of EV stagnating, and lobby like hell to move the ICE bans further to the future ?
The good news is, it will be technically possible for people to continue to buy cars they absolutely don't need for money they can't afford. Not going to be a problem. It's not really a problem now, really. Manufacturers will be more than happy to take your money.
You seem to assume people are thinking about cars _rationnaly_. I don't know about other countries, but at least in France, this is _not_ the case.
About 30 to 50% of the TV ad space is devoted to cars. The surge of SUVs in the last decade is caused by people buying _entirely irrational_ cars (way too big, way too heavy, with - sorry HN - way too much electronics.)
This is also the perfectly predictable result of marketing incentives (car dealers sell what they're told to sell.) EU has some regulations that _might_ make it unaffordable for car companies to keep the same incentives in the long run - but I don't expect them to play nice.
People will keep buying what their friends, car dealers, auto magazine, music videos, movies, and, mostly, TV ads tell them to buy.
We've been post-homo-economicus in this market for decades.
Now, the "second-hand" market is much more rational - but EVs are not there yet.
If this turns out to have the purported benefits at commercial scale, it could have an immense impact on our future!
That's not too realistic, a Model 3 battery only weighs half a ton to begin with. So perhaps we could cut the curb weight of the car by 15-20%. I wouldn't complain, but it's not world changing.
Imagined:
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/mercedes-benz-vi...
The Lucid Air can do 804 km which is pretty close to your target range:
https://insideevs.com/reviews/562511/lucid-air-range-test-re...
The transition from a battery weighing 500 kilograms to one weighing 250 is something which I see as allowing electric cars from being highly specialized constructions to something needing much less care in their design. After all, there are ordinary cars with engines weighing 250 kilograms.
In fact even with coal the amount of CO2 will be smaller per distance driven. The efficiency of the latest coal power stations is about 48%. With this and accounting for significant energy losses to refine gasoline from oil the electrical cars are already greener than gasoline or Diesel engines unless one use the energy from very old coal plants with low efficiency.
An electrical motor is very efficient, a battery system is moderately efficient and combined with all environmental costs to source needed materials, dispose of end-of-life batteries (witch means 5 to 8 years per battery in mean) are huge. Of course pushing refined oil around the world is not efficient either but such infra is already there, while no country in the world can recharge their potential EVs on scale nor we can produce them in sufficient numbers nor we know how to dispose of them.
Costs should be computed in total, not just in the running part. Like cost of trains must take into account the construction of the train network, it's entertainment etc NOT just the energy the train use.
Well-to-wheel, covering every single CO2 molecule involved in producing, transporting, burning and consuming ANY fossil fuel used for electricity production, electric cars are still more efficient and produce less emissions per mile. You could turn over the entire fleet of cars on US roads to electric today, and charging them would not pose a problem for the grid.
Batteries do not reach end of life in 5-8 years. Every EV battery on the US market comes with a minimum of an 8 year 100K mile warranty, and they do not get disposed of the day the warranty ends. They have 10-20 years of usable life in a car, then another 10+ years as stationary storage with reduced capacity. When an EV gets totaled out, the batteries never ever go to a landfill, even 10+ year old ones, as they have so much usable life in them they're still worth thousands of dollars.
For one point of reference, a 10 year old Nissan LEAF EV battery -- which were tiny compared to the batteries that come in new EVs today -- will still have more usable capacity in it than a brand new $11,000 Tesla Powerwall for whole-home battery backup and solar storage.
Before the pandemic sent used cars prices to the moon, there were people buying used Bolts (and probably Leafs, I imagine) to park them permanently just to use the battery capacity for their off-grid home. Apparently it was cost effective, and the Bolt wiring is pretty straightforward to work with.
From the Real Life World®©™ instead of the advertised world. Did you ever have a lithium battery of any kind for more than 10 years? Try to look for real EV patterns: there is not much easy to access but actually daily used EV with a bit of mileage can't be used anymore, at the performance level the owner need after 5 years. Less used EV cease to be usable in around 8 years. After that sure, if you buy a Tesla just for weekly casual trip and have ICEs for daily use things change, you Tesla can potentially last even 15 years.
Also sorry but NO statistic, at least not one public, cover the pollution of lithium mining since that happen in exotic and poor places. Almost no one these days want to publish against the Green New Deal, it's seen like a classic patriotic act by many, unfortunately if you are intellectually honest and really an environmentalist you should know that from advertisement and reality there is a big difference.
100k miles came quickly for anyone who use a car for real, in 4-5 years actually BTW, and while ICEs cars have formally equal guarantees in mileage terms, they can last issueless for around 200k miles, and with not marginal entertainment till 400k. EU commercial vans, bus, trucks are used normally for 2 million km and some last other two in third world countries. So please be intellectually honest. Even carmakers publicly declare that with actual chemistry it's impossible going electric on scale except marginal markets like the (in)famous "glorified golf cart" and few luxury car.
If today all USA cars switch to BEV the USA electricity grid will collapse in few hours and can't recover even with continuous rolling blackouts for years, even here (France) with all NPP operational it will be impossible to recharge the actual ICE magically transformed to EV. That not counting the homes switching to heat pumps.
Just to gives you a realistic dimension this month I've used form grid 151.2kWh and from solar 209.18kWh, in January 460kWh from grid, just 171 from solar, that's in a modern home super-insulated with heat pump heating/cooling/cooking etc. If I count consumed diesel in kWh (around 1000kWh/month), well, I need to triple my small plant. And of course I need two car per head to be used alternatively to recharge them. Now try the same basic calculation for someone who live in an apartment and do not WFH nor that near home. Just to dimension mere energy needs, not counting costs (in natural and economical terms, producing capacity in natural terms etc).
That's the world I live in, but you are describing a world that's totally unlike it. Is "Real Life World" a fictional world you've invented and trademarked with a nonsensical name in order to confuse readers?
> Did you ever have a lithium battery of any kind for more than 10 years?
Yes, I have a 2012 Nissan LEAF which has a 24 kWh lithium battery pack. It is still working perfectly now after 10 years.
I also have a 2018 Nissan LEAF, a 2019 Kia Niro plug-in hybrid, and a 2021 Volkswagen ID.4. Suffice it to say, I have some experience with owning and charging electric cars in the real world.
> 100k miles came quickly for anyone who use a car for real, in 4-5 years actually BTW
The average car in your country reaches 100K miles when it's 14 years old, and in the US when it's over 8 years old.
> Just to gives you a realistic dimension... if I count consumed diesel in kWh (around 1000kWh/month)
You lead with "realistic", then gave a figure equal to driving about 4000 miles in an electric car every month. This is not realistic. Last month my electric cars consumed less than 150 kWh, or the equivalent of plugging in a small single room space heater for 3 hours per day. This fuel cost me about $20.
> If today all USA cars switch to BEV the USA electricity grid will collapse in few hours and can't recover even with continuous rolling blackouts for years
Converting 80% of all passenger vehicles to electric would only add about 10% to total electric consumption. Studies have been done, the grid would be fine.
From what I know, having experimented and seen that's can hardly been. Perhaps you use cars very little so they last longer and traveling just for short trips makes them usable for you even when they can just run 50 miles. But while that's a perfectly legit use case it's far from the mean use cases for all humans...
> Yes, I have a 2012 Nissan LEAF which has a 24 kWh lithium battery pack. It is still working perfectly now after 10 years.
After how many miles/km if I can ask?
> The average car in your country reaches 100K miles when it's 14 years old, and in the US when it's over 8 years old.
The average is meaningless, people living in major cities are a huge percentage of the population and use cars far less since in dense EU cities cars are a needed nightmare because just traveling 20km (~12 miles) demand 30'+ in good days and sometimes, few time per month, can demand hours. While people living outside those major cities travel much, much more. Where I live most travel around 50-60km/day (31-37 miles) around ~10+% travel 100-120km/day (62-75 miles) on average. I have few neighbors who bought Tesla, I see how much their batteries wire out, surely not linearly, but at a rate with their usage, that will make them useless in 8 years, they might last [1] 10+ years but with too little range to be useful. Not only, resale value is essentially zero here. No one want second-hand EVs, no one trust them. Use them to extract the battery to complement a domestic p.v. plant it theoretically possible but impractical since those batteries are not made in easy-to-extract modules, of course their are small cylinders inside, but practically recycle them is costly and complex enough that on scale the price of a new battery will not be much different than of an already dead one, counting it's residual life and fire risk.
> You lead with "realistic", then gave a figure equal to driving about 4000 miles in an electric car every month.
Diesel is rated 10.7 kWh/l (40.5 kWh/us gallons) I use around 60 liters/month (15.85 gal/month). You might counter that electric motors are more efficient BUT in practice they are just a little bit more because:
- I produce energy from p.v. so hopefully recharging out of my micro-plant means from DC (panels) to AC (solar inverter, ~89% efficiency) to DC again (car inverter-charger, probably around 60% efficient) means a big loss of energy;
- battery itself is around 90% efficient
- motors inverter from battery also loose power
Giving a scientific estimate is not easy, you also need to take climate into account, cars HVAC usage, ... but I think estimate a real total efficiency around 15% plus than an equivalent ICE car is realistic enough.
> Last month my electric cars consumed less than 150 kWh
I do not own and EV but I driven some, my mileage declared by their on-board systems was 150-210Wh/km driving normally, witch means ~270-378kWh/month. Assuming a similar consumption for you that means ~33km/day (~20.5 miles/day) witch is very, very little for anyone living outside a city.
> Converting 80% of all passenger vehicles to electric would only add about 10% to total electric consumption. Studies have been done, the grid would be fine.
Seen how much blackouts happen also in developed countries from Texas to Tokyo region just to cite some famous... I doubt that electricity grid can even satisfy actual demands. Since few years, France the most nuclearized country in the world have done very small rolling blackouts to remain at 50Hz. Swiss another big producer of electricity have had issues as Norway due to reduced hydro production. Just in the last years, with not much EV nor extreme weathers. If you imaging a "country wide smart grid" with cars connected to quickly step in if needed... That's a dream. Having a p.v. with lithium storage I see how quick a modern inverter is and the answer is not enough. If you add signaling and relevant vulnerabilities on scale instead of stabilize the big smart grid you crate continuous blackouts. Car's inverter will ripple anytime the load go down, fail to sustain frequency quick enough every time the load ramp up.
Consider a thing: EV actually can recharge super-slowly a 3kW/monophase or slowly at 7kW/monophase or 22kW/triphase (mandatory here for new houses and apartments parking since 2020 or so), actual grid consider around 6kW mean power per household, most apartments are 9kW maximum, most homes 12kW single-phase or if they have electrical heating, SPA, ... maximum 36kW. In some countries like Italy most households have just 3.3kW. And our grids are already in a tough situation now.
Consider that most will charge their car in the evening, no signaling infra exists to tells cars inverter when start to balance the charge in the night, no way to tell cars "when I need the battery full". P.v. start to be popular but so far most parking lot do not have p.v. and even those who have it can't recharge out of it more than few cars. Again no infra is in place and can't be done quickly.
Lithium earth resources are essentially unknown, but current estimates are not much optimistic and we still do not know how to recycle batteries. With the actual chemistry 80% of private vehicles can be EVs around 2050 if we push WFH much, something that start to happen just a little bit, with many resistances and schizophrenic behaviors.
That's what I call reality vs advertisement...
[1] if internal flash storage do not wire out before, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/flash-memory-wear-killing-... or an OTA upgrade block them https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/2/17413732/tesla-over-the-ai... or some other costly issue happen, costly enough to make convenient giving up
That not counting the environmental damage provoked by mining for solar panels and batteries. Not counting the fact that we already have issues satisfying electricity demand without much EV on the roads.
Sorry, I'm an environmentalist and an engineer, I know people like dreams, but I also know what we can have, so far the proposed new deal is simply a disaster. I've built my new house well insulated, with actual green standard, because that's a good and doable thing for those who can afford doing so and now I consume far less energy to heat/cool the house, that's good. If gas prices goes up a bit more I might benefit economically from an EV but that's not a green in environmental sense of green, that's dollar green. First we can't rebuild in a decade the 99% of existing buildings to lower energy consumption, it's good going fast in that direction, but we can reach that goal perhaps in a century, and "we" means in the western world only. That's do a good job for us, but it's only a part, even if big enough, of our energy needs. We have industry needs, transportation needs. For industry actual best option is nuclear (constant production per nearly constant demand in developed industrial systems) witch also work for ships, even if is hyper expensive. Some goods can probably be transported by intermittent rail service that move goods only when we have energy, but such commercial-only network is to be built and is a colossal and not flexible at all solution so probably not even worth the investments in environmental terms.
The sole Green New Deal I see theoretically possible is with a mass genocide that kill a large slice of humanity in very short time. With that scarce resources would be less scarce and so we can probably last longer enough to evolve if the reduced number of humans suffice to produce technological advancements witch is a bit uncertain, morality aside. Not counting the little issue of dealing with billions of death in a short time span and resulting social and biological consequences.
Really, try to imaging, to dimension a bit a possible new society and draw your conclusion, I've done that with what I know and that's what I conclude, I'm curious about others opinions. Remember in the game that even our small p.v. plant in modern houses are not born in the backyard and the supply chain and industry behind them need to been able to exists forever if we want to live with such model. Similarly EV does not born in our garage. Just to say I can produce around 25kWh/day in moderately good days, I use around 12kWh for my house in mean, try to design a recharge pattern for an EV. Extend the computation for actual population density and needs. Try to determine how much TWh we consume in gasoline for our cars and how much renewable we need just to recharge a hypothetical equivalent fleet of EVs. Do such basic and approximate math. Add to it, even if it's not needed, the energy we need for industry and for heating/cooling. Really try that instead of dreaming or swallowing advertisements like most do dreaming a miracle car with a solar roof that run autonomously as the owner wish.