Adding Heat to Electric Vehicle Batteries Helps Them Charge in Just 10 Minutes | Hacker News Reader

Adding Heat to Electric Vehicle Batteries Helps Them Charge in Just 10 Minutes

singularityhub.com

18 pointscheinyeanlim15 comments

> A typical long-range electric vehicle today comes with a 120 kilowatt-hour battery pack that takes an hour to recharge.

120 kWh is a large pack that's not typical of EVs at the moment. 75 kWh is more typical.

It would be nice if most passenger EVs had even a 150 kWh pack. That would mean longer and very practical range but it'd make the cars more expensive. Better battery chemistries are needed for cheaper batteries with higher energy density.

Nio will introduce a 150 kWh pack soon alongside their existing 75 and 100 kWh packs. Because Nio's packs are swappable the new pack can be swapped in 6 minutes.

Why is there no small trailer that you can hitch on the highway portion of you drive and that gives you another few 100 miles of range. If you drive that far you will almost certainly drive in the highway and given it is very dense it should not have a huge air resistance. I am sure there are reasons but it would seem a very practical solution. You could then drop it off at the last highway depot and continue with a mostly full battery.

There's no standard for power between trailer and vehicle. You're probably looking at a 400V DC connector, which is going to need to be fairly tough, because you don't want to electrocute someone. You can't just borrow the existing DC charging connector, because most of them are on the side of the vehicle, and are also set to not allow the car to move if connected.

You'd probably need a DC/DC converter to bring the trailer voltage to match the vehicle voltage, or you get the trailer ending up charging the vehicle (and that'd be bad if you don't have something to regulate the current flow). Or you'd need to have another entire drive inverter set to run the motors off the trailer power, and have no HV connection.

And lastly, it's almost certainly better in the long run to just improve the charging infrastructure so there's a stop when you need it.

That said, your small trailer might be handy for things like: you're actually towing something, and being able to have the trailer supply power to offset the air resistance, would be handy.

How much would such a trailer cost, ball park? I’ve assumed that the batteries are a big part of the cost of ev’s.

$55,000 for this yet to be released trailer:

https://coloradoteardrops.com/ev/

It's a 75 kWh battery for charging your EV at 50 kW in the field.

I don't think any Nio is actually for sale here in The Netherlands. I see that they're about to make the ET5 and the ET5 available for leasing here, though the cheapest price is a monthly €1089. In my opinion, that would put it solidly in the luxury cars; a very nice family EV costs €500 per month (for example, Renault Zoe with a 50 kWh battery).

So it's going to be pretty rare here. I don't think that a swappable battery station will be realized in the lifetime of this car.

When the first affordable (to me, meaning ~ €30k) EVs were introduced here in The Netherlands, I had really high hopes that Chinese brands would introduce offerings with lower prices. That didn't happen.

> I don't think that a swappable battery station will be realized in the lifetime of this car.

Nio has deployed many swap stations in China and has started to deploy some in Europe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmWL1hZQmD0

They charge the packs to 90% so swapping in a pack charged to 90 kWh in 6 minutes is the equivalent of charging the car at 900 kW. Swapping in a 150 kWh pack charged to 135 kWh is equivalent to a flat charge curve of 1.35 megawatts.

Thanks for the pointer, I'm going to watch that. Very curious. It'd be amazing if they make it work.

Easily tested by comparing charging times in hot regions and countries as opposed to cold ones. For example, Kuwait versus Norway.

Teslas heat themselves on the way to superchargers

Battery preconditioning for DC fast charging is available on some CCS cars as well and is getting more common. Sometimes it's manually trigger-able and sometimes it's integrated into navigation.

Latest software update going out goes so far as to only consume enough energy to generate sufficient heat for the max charge current expected at the fast dc charger the vehicle is navigating to.

https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/version/2022.4...

Oh, so its a known thing already. In that case, the article isn't telling us anything new.

The novel thing seems to be the nickel sheet used for heating; the quicker you can heat up the battery, the quicker you can maximize the charge rate, while the quicker you can cool it back down again, the less damage you do to the battery.

Thanks for that explanation.

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