Manganese could be the secret behind truly mass-market EVs | Hacker News Reader

Manganese could be the secret behind truly mass-market EVs

spectrum.ieee.org

71 pointsWaitWaitWha69 comments

> That battery, by far the largest ever shoehorned into an EV, also contributes 1,315 kilograms to the Hummer’s gargantuan 4,082-kg curb weight.

Wow. 4 tonnes. The battery weighs more than a VW Golf 8 1.5 eTSI.

These things are going to wreck havoc in the road infrastructure. 4 tonnes in 3 seconds to 60… good bye tarmac.

At least we won’t see many of those in Europe. Standard B license in Europe has a limit of 3500 kg.

Frankly you won’t see many in the US either, just like you don’t see many ICE Hummers.

The hybrid city bus that elicits much praise and no hand wringing from the same people who decry the electric hummer is far harsher on the roads.

If the road can handle the bus it won't notice the hummer.

The electric hummer is going to be in the same weight ballpark as a loaded plumber's van. It's really a non-issue. Even if the is only built to handle infrequent medium duty truck traffic (some very small rural back road) vehicles of 10k or less are of no consequence.

As long as the number of hummers is small, I don't think it's a problem. As more electric, heavy vehicles come on the road, road maintenance may not keep pace. A lot of county and rural roads have very low maintenance until heavy vehicles constantly drive up and down them. Regarding an electric bus, more people who might otherwise drive a shitty old car would ride in a bus if we're available. Each of those people isn't driving a 1-4 ton vehicle on the road. The net benefit of buses are greater than hummers. I doubt we'll adapt to electric cars fast enough anyways to avoid 3+ degrees of warming.

And damage to roads scales with the fourth power of axle-weight. The golf and the hummer have the same number of axles, so the hummer does ~106 times as much damage as the golf.

And your standard UPS truck weighs twice as much again as the Hummer. So does 16x as much damage - and there are plenty more of those on the road than there ever will be hummers.

The Hummer EV is a halo car, meant to catch the attention of a segment of the market and will sell in very limited quantities.

BTW The Ford F-350 starts at around 2.5 tons curb weight so this Hummer is not without precedent. This kind of vehicle is meant to look big and imposing to project a certain image.

(Edit:as Kobe-systems mentioned, I mangled the conversion on the F-350 weight. Corrected)

In the case of the F-350, it’s about towing and load capacity.

Sure, you want to project a certain image, but you might also need to tow Very Large Objects.

This is definitely not the case for the Hummer, which has less tow capacity than an F-150.

The F-350 starts at a 5,677 lbs curb weight. [0]

Which is ~2.8 US tons, or ~2.6 metric tons.

The heaviest possible configuration is 8,587 lbs, which is still "only" 3895 kg, or 3.9 metric tons.

[0]: https://www.ford.com/trucks/super-duty/models/f350-xlt/

Correct. I was looking at a source that put it just under 6000 pounds and did a goofball swap to tons. I do know that a ton is 2000 pounds but somehow it came out wrong.

F-350s, those have many uses, among them, tow trucks, utility trucks/service trucks, boat towing, etc. I suppose some people use them as their daily driver, but I doubt that's the majority of the fleet.

> I suppose some people use them as their daily driver, but I doubt that's the majority of the fleet.

I agree. There are, of course, a few people that drive an HD truck as a daily, but it's not the majority by any means. They make awful daily drivers. Very thirsty, bouncy, steers like an aircraft carrier, etc. But for towing, they're pretty great.

You would be surprised. My Ram 2500 has coil spring suspension, and rides better than most sedans. And gets better mileage than my early 2000’s midsize truck. But yeah, the Subaru is much cheaper per mile to drive.

>This kind of vehicle is meant to look big and imposing to project a certain image.

Actually modern trucks got so big to get around Obama-era fuel efficiency standards.

I can't speak for Europe, but I see that container trucks are already a significant fraction of America's highways. I can't imagine a few electric Hummers will make much difference.

The difference is a lot of trucks are only allowed on designated truck routes as they damage roads. Even then the most destroyed roads in my city are the ones where these heavy vehicles literally work ruts into the asphalt. Not to mention its the state that maintains a lot of highways vs local government for local roads, and one is more fit to regularly repair roads than the other.

I imagine the pressure exerted by the smaller form factor vehicle will be significantly greater though...

On a pneumatic tire vehicle ground pressure is approximately tire pressure. The hummer will probably have some E-rated truck tire at like 50-60psi which is about what a panel van can be expected to have. Larger trucks are going to run higher pressures, 90-120 or so.

Highways are one thing, but local city streets/roads are not built to the same integrity.

18 wheels is the difference

Tangential, but manganese steel/mangalloy/Hadfield steel was the first steel to be patented [1]. It hardens in response to impacts and is renowned for it's work-hardening properties.

> In addition to having the highest work-hardening properties, manganese steel is probably our toughest material. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalloy#History

[2] T.B. Jefferson. Metals and How to Weld Them, 2nd Edition. page 255

Is this a submarine* PR article sponsored by the deep-sea manganese-nodule-mining industrial-complex?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule

*sorry

There are trillions of dollars worth of manganese nodules from golf ball to basketball size just sat on ocean floors, many not far off from coast lines, many far deeper. Pumping them up has been an unsolved problem but Perhaps autonomous drone hoovers or shovelers could work. A usecase like this would spark enough interest / money spent on the problem to solve it. A ship that had a fleet of drones unloading to it 24/7 could pick up a lot of it. There is not just manganese in the nodules either.. I seem to remember most nations strategically banning collecting them a few hundred miles of their coasts should there be any.

There is also (theoretically) a near-infinite supply of it on 16 Psyche, an M-type asteroid that will, seemingly, radically alter the meaning of human wealth if we are able to harness its resources.

Exciting times to be building Starships.

If we cant explore and map our sea's, do we have a hope in exploring space in any great way?

At least the crushing sea pressure could be likened to crushing forces on a space ship in a black hole.

The difference is, both environments create conditions intolerably difficult to operate, but if we're going to be experimenting with hostile environment industry, I think its best done a few million km's from Earth rather than, literally, in the bosom of all life.

If you cant master whats immediately around you, what makes you think you can master something few million km's away?

We can't master some things because they are too close to us. Mastering things is not space-relative, its survival-relative.

I wonder I wonder what horrific ecological damage we'll be creating once we start exploiting these.

Biologically its a fantastic Super Oxide Dismutase, but if it gets into a mammalian system without being bound in Metallothionein, you'll end up with Parkinson's like symptoms.

Its possibly one of the reasons why some sea born mammals (whales) live for so long, considering its transported in much the same way as Iron.

I sometimes think the Victorians with their sea bathing were onto a thing or two because for humans, their greatest environmental exposure to Manganese is bathing in the sea, the concentration of Manganese is highest in coastal regions, despite the fact you can find the Manganese nodules out to sea on the sea bed. Cant help but notice that Uranium can also be found in similar sized nodules in certain geographical environments.

In terms of damage, this perhaps should be tackled like Oyster farming, so its a perfect case for using specialist drone equipment to do the harvesting, you cant deep sea dive farm these nodules.

The Tesla Model 3 has a base price of $47K. Tesla's gross margin was 33% in Q1 2022. So estimate of manufacturing cost is ~32K (probably somewhat higher as base model probably has lower margin). The battery is 50kwh. Price of a battery in 2021 was $132 / kwh (1). So the battery accounts for $6600 of that manufacturing cost. Even if they could get the batteries for free, and assuming the same gross margin that would drop the manufacturing cost to $25.5K and the price to $37K. So it seems like reducing battery cost is not going to get EV's to mass market. Am I missing something here?

1. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost...

In this hypothetical you’re taking Tesla’s profit as a constant. Most car companies don’t have a margin anywhere near Tesla’s. Less than 10% is common.

Edit: Also, the average new car price is 47k in the US (https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-tops-4700...). Although, I guess the world average is probably a lot lower.

You should be looking for the median new car price, not the mean. The mean can be greatly impacted by a few million dollar supercars.

Tesla's are still very big cars with lots of expensive but unnecessary electronics and custom build parts. To really drive costs down you want a smaller, slightly more efficient car with yet a smaller battery. Basically an improved version of the Nissan leaf.

>So it seems like reducing battery cost is not going to get EV's to mass market. Am I missing something here?

Cost per mile is much lower for EV than ICE, and the electricity bill decrease as the share of renewables will grow into the grid mix (to incentivize off-peak charging). Maintenance is much cheaper too (almost no moving part, million-miles batteries and motor, no fluid except wiper, fewer brake change thanks to regen…).

The initial cost may still be high but with financing, it's easy to imagine a much cheaper plan for EV vs ICE.

Yes:

- Even without further improvements, the Model 3 economics are sufficient to get EVs to mass market, even assuming no further economies of scale.

- Reducing the cost of a 6600$ part is an enormously high impact thing to do. Consider as well that reducing cost only a little bit expands your TAM quite a lot.

What happened to Goodenough's improvement some years back that was supposed to triple the capacity of batteries, per unit weight?

I see them getting cheaper, but it doesn't seem like capacity of a cell has improved much.

That is for stationary, grid-scale batteries. Hydro Quebec is developing it. https://electrek.co/2020/04/23/work-on-goodenoughs-breakthro... They're also commercializing something with Mercedes-Benz, but I can't tell if it's the same tech. https://news.hydroquebec.com/en/press-releases/hq/1580/hydro...

Battery tech has been improving steadily on various fronts over the last decade. The changes are incremental but happen frequently and have added up a lot over the years.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

Obvs, and capacity per unit weight is one such front. But my question was specific: he said 3x, coming to market in 3 years, or by 2020. It has been longer, and capacity is up nowhere near 3x in places I watch.

Is it still to come, or did it not pan out? Judging from the link in the other reply, it is not expected until well after 2026. Shame he (probably) won't get to see it.

Your question was answered by someone 29 minutes before you left this comment...

Why would manganese be able to dodge the insincere environmental accusations that are aimed at lithium mines? Manganese is mostly produced using destructive open-cut pits in poor African nations. The number and size of said pits absolutely dwarfs all lithium mines put together. So why would it be OK to increase manganese production when there are organizations opposed to lithium production?

Honestly, same question about iron. Why is lithium such a bogeyman when iron ore production is 1000s of times larger?

> Why is lithium such a bogeyman when iron ore production is 1000s of times larger?

Because the people making the argument aren't being genuine. They don't care. They want a "gotcha" and to feel like they "owned" the "libtard" driving the "eco-warrior-mobile."

When the Toyota Prius came out two decades ago, people boo-hooed about the environmental impact of the battery - either the carbon impact or the environmental impacts of the mining.

You could show them the numbers, tell them that the packs are highly recyclable and thus we're only pulling the ore out of the earth once and then get to re-use it numerous times...versus fossil fuels where they're useful once. Point to the huge gas and emissions reduction over the life of the vehicle. They don't care. Your facts get dismissed as Fake News.

Same with solar panels. Doomsayers were predicting landfills full of panels and boo-hooing about the environmental cost. Part of the problem there is that people think "lifetime of 20 years" means "20 years and then phbbbtttt, dead" but reality is "20 years and now only 80% capacity." As solar gets more common, there will be more infrastructure

It's also fascinating that "set up an entirely new distribution infrastructure around hydrogen" or "create nuclear-waste-recycling reactors" isn't a problem, but apparently "a used market for solar panels will crop up all on its own" is inconceivable.

The same people would likely be stunned, stunned I tell you, that there are many shops out there rebuilding Prius battery packs and all manner of EV battery packs are valuable on the used market.

> You could show them the numbers, tell them that the packs are highly recyclable and thus we're only pulling the ore out of the earth once and then get to re-use it numerous times...versus fossil fuels where they're useful once.

Unfortunately, at the moment only 5% of lithium batteries are recycled (=their materials used to make new batteries) at all, given that unlike for normal alkaline or lead-acid batteries it's extremely hard to do (as lithium is highly reactive) and there hasn't been much "source material" available so the usual economies of scale could not kick in yet. (ETA: Batteries are still way better than fossil fuels as they can be recharged hundreds to thousands of times!)

In any case, the idea of a"secondary use" market of lithium-based batteries is ... questionable to me. Lithium batteries are already enough of a fire risk when they are brand new - I would never dare to put a battery that has been under enormous physical and chemical stress from automotive usage into my home, no matter how much of its original capacity it still holds.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220105-lithium-batterie...

Also the epoxies and whatnot can make batteries hard to recycle. At Tesla's Battery Day they talked about that and said they're designing the 4680s to be easily recyclable by their own recycling centers, which are a lot simpler when they only have to deal with one kind of battery.

Wait, has hydrogen become some sort of partisan thing in the US's us vs them politics?

It has to some extend in Germany so it is safe to assume that it's much worse in the US.

A lot of these “well actually” people seem to be driven by “you think you’re better than me?”

There were skeptical people who got burned hard by being forced into using squiggly light bulbs that were supposed to last forever and that you can't throw away because they're full of mercury. Now, I have a box of burnt-out ones that I'm saving for a disposal day, and I've had two repairmen from separate companies bash their heads into an overhead one at the bottom of my basement stairs, shattering it. Pile that on top of various experiences with phone and laptop batteries...is it "different this time", or were the previous promises just lies?

Who ever claimed that CFL light bulbs were going to last forever? I've never seen any marketing for any light bulb that said they would never burn out

I used CFL light bulbs for like 2 decades and they were extremely long-lasting. I got rid of the last one some months ago, it wasn't dead yet but got a bit weak. I had installed it like 15 years ago.

When CFLs were new, I had cheap CFLs that wouldn't last even half as much as an incandescent bulb while still costing 4-5 times as much.

I never had this experience. My first CFL lasted at least 10 years of daily usage as my desk lamp - I think I got rid of it not because it was broken but truly outdated. It is possible that the quality of the grid plays a role as voltage fluctuations might reduce their life time.

If I remember correctly, there was also an issue with the orientation of the ballast - some CFLs expected heat to rise in a certain direction, and if you installed them upside down (in a ceiling fixture, for example), they would overheat and die. I remember being very disappointed with CFLs and abandoning them quickly.

Depends which ones you bought. I had Philips CFL's which lasted forever, but cheapies which would die in a few months.

Yeah but how is it different from people that got burnt by any random new tech they bought without understanding it, like a smart dishwasher that bricked itself because of a failed update, or folks huying bitcoin at the peak

Those people's old tech didn't get outlawed at the same time.

Obviously, unless we manage to somehow get usable sea-water based batteries, any mass-market battery technology will have a tremendous impact on the environment.

The problem is not manganese or lithium, it is the mass production and consumption, unregulated vehicle growth (in size and weight), all of this encouraged by pro-cars regulations, the US being the worst offender.

I don't know about manganese vs lithium, but with potential iron batteries the fact that iron ore production is already 1000s of times larger means that the impact of adding battery production won't be as big.

If you have to do 1% more of something it's probably not a problem. If you have to do 900% more of something - it will likely become a problem.

Also, different elements will have different impacts per kilogram, just because they have different concentrations, are found in different environments, etc. If X is 30% of its ore and Y is 0.03%, then you can dig up a thousand times as much X as Y and get the same environmental impact for each.

This logic makes no sence whatsoever.

So of we had to increase production of moss, would that be a prohlem? No, because it has no impact - we just never needed to produce it in quantity. Same goes for lithium.

The only thong that matters is the absolute ecological impact per kilo produced.

> So of we had to increase production of moss, would that be a prohlem?

By 900%? Sure.

> No, because it has no impact

You don't see the impact because it's too small for now. It will become obvious when you scale up by orders of magnitude.

Cars were seen as the solution to pollution in cities once.

So you think there is an impact, but you cant point out what it is because about farming moss is just as mysterious to a 21st century man as climate change was to 19th century man?

Oh JFC, does anyone expect any of these "could" battery breakthroughs to ever go anywhere?

I honestly don't even want to hear about them. Let me know when you're shipping commercially. Until then, it's just a waste of time and an attempt to drum up research funding. That's it.

The article was about way more than what the headline promised, and I learned a good deal about the different battery options.

If you don’t like those headlines, don’t click on them? It’s that easy (and it’s your loss too.)

I had the original knee jerk reaction, but then thought better about it before making a post like this.

Think of these new battery tech write ups as a pitch from a startup looking to get funding. They will of course paint the concept in the rosiest of pictures even though there's no functioning tech yet. They need the funding to develop the concept into a viable working product. This forum is a place full of people interested in this kind of tech, so by being a reader of this forum, you'll see a lot of this kind of stuff. One day, one of these might actually work and if you see it here first and "get in on the ground floor" you might get "founder" rich too.

It's not some radical breakthrough. It's an improvement to lithium-ion, like lots of others that have in fact hit production over the past couple decades. We have half a dozen different cathode chemistries, we've improved energy density by an average of five percent per year, costs have dropped enormously. That's why electric cars are a lot more viable now than they were at the turn of the century.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

I suspect you didn’t read the article. It was remarkably enlightening.

Is it so bad to drum up research funding? How else will we get to that commercial availability step?

I too am annoyed by the journalism in this space but I like reading about the science and engineering.

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