Volkswagen-backed Gotion unveils new EV battery with 1k km range | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen-backed Gotion unveils new EV battery with 1k km range

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49 pointshunglee246 comments

Meanwhile, Zeekr (Geely/Polestar/Volvo's new upmarket brand) is already delivering cars with a 1k+ km range.

https://thedriven.io/2023/05/19/zeekr-begins-deliveries-of-i...

That uses the Qilin pack mentioned (as a rival) in this story.

Which points to the real good news: that multiple, credible, (very) high volume manufacturers seem to be simultaneously announcing breakthroughs on density, cost, weight and materials so it's not just one company's PR getting a little excited.

The keyword appears to be "affordable" not "first"

Is this... actually anything meaningfully impressive? The article says they're doing it with a 140kWh battery. It just sounds like they packed a much larger battery into a normal sedan and got 1000km/620mi of range. The Lucid Air, for comparison, already gets 520mi of range on a 118kWh battery. Seems well within reason that if they packed another 22kWh of battery in then they, too could get that same range. And if you didn't actually need all the fancy performance that a Lucid Air gets, it seems like you could easily get well beyond that.

That's just getting ridiculous.

Sure, there are edge cases where this makes sense, but the average daily commute is well under 100km. A 500km battery is quite useful for family trips once a month, but beyond that you are getting into silly territory. For a "mainstream model", a 1000km range is just wasteful.

Using their numbers, you are carrying an extra 75kg with you all the time for each extra 100km in range - or 375kg for those extra 500km of range. It's like hauling a trailer 24/7, just because you might need it one day.

Real world highway range is lower than EPA or WLTP range (the range quoted in advertisements in the US or EU respectively), often substantially so.

EPA range is for a mix of highway and urban driving; unlike ICE vehicles, EVs get worse range on the highway, and typically highway driving is where you actually care about range on an EV.

Weather can also reduce EV range by quite a lot, particularly cold weather and headwinds.

But as others have pointed out, the elephant in the room is towing. Towing can more than double energy consumption. The F-150 Lightning will happily tow a 3-ton trailer, but if you tow that trailer at 70mph the Lightning will barely go 100 miles before needing a recharge.

So for a tow vehicle, an EPA range of 1000km would be extremely useful.

Oh absolutely, but extremely few people regularly tow a trailer - if at all.

There are certainly use cases for cars with a 1000-km range, but the average consumer isn't going to need it.

When I bought my car, I bought it with the sole purpose of doing cross-country travel. I wouldn't need a brand new car with a warranty if that wasn't my intention. I've regularly done 1200+km days of travel with it. I wouldn't be able to comfortably achieve similar numbers with low capacity electric cars today.

A car is rarely if ever the optimal solution for a daily commute. Let people have long-range vehicles.

You and the eleven other people who use your vehicles this way would be well suited with one of the handful of EVs with a range extender.

What charging stations will get me from Wisconsin to Washington state in a timely manner? I make the run in 40 hours over three days, typically.

In terms of time cost, I'd spend up to a full day charging (not including overnight charging, which means finding hotels with charging stations). In terms of short term cost, I'd save close to a 1000USD in fuel, which would be lovely. In terms of long term cost, as soon as I have an EV I'm signing up for a 40000USD bill to replace the battery packs in the future. No ICE car has that pending charge. My current car, almost 20 years old, needs at most 2000USD of work to get it into 'pristine' condition.

The issue with EVs is the sheer amount of infrastructure required to make them work, and all of that boils down to energy density. When batteries hit the same energy density as fossil fuels with the same environmental impact we'll be on to something. As it stands, the environmental burden and personal costs of EVs far outweigh the benefits.

Whatever, man. That's a lot of strawman arguments for why you can't drive an EV.

You can plug things into ABetterRoutePlanner.com yourself, and see that a common Tesla Model 3 could drive from Milwaukee to Seattle in 35 hours and 19 minutes. That includes only 5 hours and 3 minutes of charging, all at Superchargers along the highway. If you upgraded to the Model 3 Long Range, which it sounds like you ought to, that shaves the total travel time to 33 hours even.

The price of gas alone for that trip is more than half the cost of a direct flight. If you don't mind flying Spirit, it's less than a hundred dollars more. Since you care so much about the environment, you might appreciate that flying would also likely emit less CO2 than driving anyway.

> Whatever, man.

My guy, I have a perspective on life. There's stuff that I know, stuff that I've thought about, and stuff I don't know. The last of which outweighs the others.

> You can plug things into ABetterRoutePlanner.com yourself, and see that a common Tesla Model 3 could drive from Milwaukee to Seattle in 35 hours and 19 minutes. That includes only 5 hours and 3 minutes of charging, all at Superchargers along the highway.

I didn't know this! That's encouraging to know that we have the appropriate infrastructure to make this happen. I will actually consider a Tesla (or similar) as a possible vehicle just for this reason. I am still concerned about battery cell replacement costs as well as environmental impacts of lithium and other rare earth metals mining. There are other high capacity battery chemistries coming online -- I saw a sodium based battery article on HN just in the last two weeks -- that may make my environmental concerns less of an issue.

> you might appreciate that flying would also likely emit less CO2 than driving anyway.

Trees eat CO2. It's a common misconception that CO2 is somehow bad for the environment. When I say environmental impact, I'm not talking about climate change or CO2. Both of those take a back seat to the direct and immediate impacts of mining [0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/aug/24...

Handful? The i3 Rex? The Chevy "Discontinued" Bolt? There are none.

The market here is Americans with massive vehicles or towing needs. You can provide many of these people all of the data that says they don't need that much range, but unless they can tow their boat 300 miles "on one tank of gas" then getting them to switch to an EV is impossible.

I'd imagine as more people buy EV's they will understand personally why they don't need 1,000km of range and then more of these batteries will go to use in large over the road trucks or planes.

This hasn't stopped America from adopting massive SUVs wholesale, even though they're only used to haul kids to soccer practice.

I'm a little out of the loop as far as electric cars go so I'm using Teslas as a comparison.

If you don't have any special equipment in your house and need to charge your Tesla you get 2-3 miles of charge for every hour you charge it. In effect you're talking an overnight charge to get anywhere meaningful.[1]

If charging times were comparable to filling a tank with gas then yeah I can see how 1000km would be wasteful, but if for instance you wanted to take your electric car camping anywhere interesting, or even make real progress on a road trip, this range starts to make sense.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/support/charging

You've not heard of rapid charging? Or even Level 2 charging? For $300 you can charge at 7kW at home, so that's 28 miles per hour. At rapid chargers you can charge at 300kW and easily get 1000 miles per hour

Right, read my post again. I used numbers for regular charging. I did that for 2 reasons. First even though it's only $300 to upgrade to level 2, in many people's cases you'd have to get a second line into your house. That's expensive. Second, I'm not confident that level 2 charging is easily available in the wider world which means you need to plan for a shorter round trip or, again, plug in over-night.

Who's using regular charging though?

Everyone gets a 240V connection, usually about 30 amps, and charges at 7kW at home, adding 224 miles in 8 hours.

If you want to go more than the 200-300 miles your car goes, you stop for 15-30 mins to rest while you rapid charge.

To quote the page you linked to: The Tesla Supercharger is the fastest charging option when you're away from home, allowing you to charge your car up to 200 miles in 15 minutes.

and

A Tesla Wall Connector offers the fastest charging speed for your home or office, adding up to 44 miles of range per hour charged

Honestly the expense of getting a second electric line into the house is one of the two things that's stopping me from replacing my gas-powered car when I give it to my daughter. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person in that situation.

Maybe when the rapid charging infrastructure is well-established what you describe will happen. One thing I believe though is that when cars with a 1k KM range hit the market it's going to make cars with a lower range less expensive and that will make everything you say easier for people to swallow.

Why do you need a second electric line? What's the existing one rated for?

Perhaps it's handy for apartment dwellers who aren't able to get charged up daily?

Existing BEVs already need to be charged only once a week.

e.g. US median commute is 35 miles, and you can get 350-mile EVs. EVs are most efficient at low speeds, so in city driving they can reach their advertised range.

Ok, some apartment dwellers. There's several popular metro areas where a long commute is pretty common.

How much unneeded steal does your car carry around all the time? I don't have the feeling that cars in the US are minimalistic...

I mean, for most people, none?

On the other hand, these cars will last forever. Even if they lose 80% of their capacity they would still be useful.

The weight doesn't decrease, so at some point it'd make sense to replace the battery just to avoid hauling dead weight. However, such batteries can still be reused for stationary grid storage.

The case where this makes sense for me is to not have to own a second car for longer trips.

Why does the innovation in this space appear to be mostly from China?

China became dependant on oil imports in the mid 1990s even as further massive economic growth was planned.

Being weak on oil and strong on manufacturing led them to take a less insane approach to climate change than in more oil dominated economies.

This is a hysterical take given that China, next to India, is the single largest polluter on the planet and continually refuses to have anything to do with the West's obsession with climate change.

> China has been the world's largest and fastest-growing producer of renewable energy for more than a decade, but has widened its lead over international rivals through a steep acceleration in the roll out of wind capacity since 2021.

> China added more wind generation capacity in the past two years than over the previous seven, and in 2022 generated 46% more wind power than all of Europe, the second largest wind generation market, according to data from think tank Ember.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-widens-ren...

Unfortunately, both can be true simultaneously[1].

1: https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

If you are implying that rating separates China from the West:

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/new-zealand/

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/canada/

Not at all, I would say pretty much all major industrial economies are failing to meet the necessary environmental targets, but that doesn't mean they aren't also deploying lots of renewables. China does seem to score a little worse, even than the US[1], but clearly lots needs to be done, everywhere.

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/

When people say "climate change" they really mean "internal combustion cars".

Ignore it, they don't know any better and don't want to.

not if you compare per capita. those countries you name have a significant sized populations that should be taken into account to normalize comparisons to other counties with much smaller populations.

It's pretty simple.

China strategically took over a huge percentage of the world's manufacturing ability, and access to essential minerals. They are now reaping the rewards of other countries' mandated switch to renewable tech.

The primary selling point of the battery discussed in the story is that it doesn't use certain "essential" minerals.

There's still a whole bunch of other stuff, other than nickel and cobalt, that's needed for batteries (and battery controllers). Global production and manufacture of all parts of an EV battery is dominated by China - of course all of the research will happen there.

Because they are in the process of building a new generation of car companies that don't have legacy products.

Manufacture happens primarily there.

Battery chemistry breakthroughs don’t come that usually from China, though.

Perfect opportunity to use megameter wasted.

Great to see competition and improvements in this field.

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