Toyota has been developing a solid-state battery for EVs with a range of 745mi
topspeed.com
topspeed.com
E.g.—
• How much capacity per dollar?
• How much capacity per kilogram?
• How much capacity per litre?
• How quickly can it be charged?
• How quickly can it be discharged?
• How much energy is lost between charging and discharging?
• How predisposed is it to catching fire?
• How available are the materials needed to manufacture it?
• How available are the tools/skills required to manufacture it?
• How resilient is it to mechanical stress, e.g. vibration?
• How much does performance degrade per cycle?
• How much does performance degrade when stored at a high state of charge?
• How much does performance degrade when stored at a low state of charge?
• How much does performance drop at high temperatures?
• How much does performance drop at low temperatures?
• How well can it be recycled at end-of-life?
A sufficiently bad answer for any one of these could utterly exclude it from contention as an EV battery. A battery which scores well on everything except mechanical resilience is a non-starter, for example. Though it might be great for stationary storage.
I'm only a layperson and this list is what I came up with just a few minutes of layperson thought. I'm sure someone with more familiarity with battery technology could double the length of this list. But the point is, when you daydream about some hypothetical future battery tech, you need to appreciate just how well today's lithium chemistries score in so many areas.
Actually, not really. For one, no serious manufacturer currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't meet the most basic of the mentioned criteria.
Secondly, some of these, like storing at a low/high state of charge or high/low temperature performance are nowadays managed by the BMS - models that don't have that are already not competitive. The reason is that energy density already crossed the threshold at which some of the capacity can be spared for this purpose.
To me the more important question to ask than any of these is: is there a process in place to manufacture the batteries at scale?
That is what ultimately makes or breaks an emerging battery technology.
I don't think Toyota would qualify as a serious manufacturer of battery cells. Has Toyota ever manufactured battery cells before? Not battery packs, but battery cells.
This new battery tech is done in another subsidiary that is also co-owned by Toyota and Panasonic.
For Toyota to build up its own end to end manufacturing of battery cells is something quite different.
Its doable, as Tesla has shown, but its not easy. Specially with a new technology.
1. Do you have any memory of when SUVs went mainstream? Who'd have thought single women would want to pay the vehicle and fuel premium to commute so inefficiently. Of course men as well.
2. Americans are addicted to options that remove limitations out of anxiety over those limitations, even when the extra cost is very low ROI. Look at data plan, buffet, etc. preferences
Americans are addicted to features, lifestyle and luxury (actual or perceived).
It takes mere minutes to refill a tank, and there are gas stations everywhere throughout the country. It's quick, and incredibly easy. Far faster than EVs, and far more common that EV charging stations.
As a result, there's really no value in tanks that are that much larger, there's no range anxiety because even going long distance cross-country you're never that far away from a place to refuel.
I'm comfortable doing long distances in one day and even I would be taking 20+ minute breaks every 300km (200mi) or so. The current state-of-the-art long range EVs are plenty good enough with range and charging speeds, assuming a reliable charging network.
I expect dragging around 120 lbs extra fuel for 100k miles does become noticable on the bank book, you'd be surprised.
A range of 745 miles means ten hours of driving in the best of circumstances without a stop. I cannot imagine wanting to drive for ten hours without stopping. I cannot understand why EV manufacturers are putting such large batteries into cars, especially when I hear how much heavier they are making them.
When I stop with an ICE car during a road trip it’s for 15 minutes max and I know I can do it basically whenever I want. With an EV, you have to carefully plan your road trip around fueling.
There's an intuition that the minor additional flexibility gas cars give you on a road trip makes the experience better, but in practice I think it's worse.
So the whole issue is that on very, very long drive you might lost 15min. That not the end of the world.
The weight issue, however, should be talked about more. I don't think filling highways with 10,000lb minivans with the acceleration speed of a Corvette is an improvement on the whole.
But they aren't. The "minivans with the acceleration speed of a Corvette" exist today in the ICE world and are very few and far between because of price. You can buy a Lamborghini Urus that does 190mph, or a Range Rover Sport Turbo, or BMW X5. But those cars are all 6 figures++ so very few people can afford them.
Sure, a Rivian R1S can do 0-60 like a Corvette, but Bob down the corner isn't spending $100k on a car, so the ones that accelerate like a Corvette will be exactly as ubiquitous as a Corvette.
Meanwhile the fastest/heaviest Kia EV9 does 0-60 in 6.0 seconds, and weighs 5,700 lbs. Both a far cry from the numbers you're concerned with. Meanwhile a Chrysler Pacifica weighs 4,300 lbs, so the differences most people imagine are GREATLY exaggerated.
The vast majority of the "the vehicles are too fast and too heavy" are scare tactics by oil companies. The F-150 tips the scales at 5,500 lbs and nobody is worried about them "ruining our roads". Please don't buy into the nonsense.
In this source, the increase in car weight seems quite minor over the last 10 years:
https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-... (fig ES-3)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/660493/us-light-duty-veh...
Your link does not support your claim of a 77% increase, but this better source pegs it at 80%, so I suppose that's about right: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
That said, the rate hasn't gone up if you look at a 30-year timeframe, but it's a worrying trend nonetheless. It's a bit confusing though because I think you'd want to look at this per-capita. The absolute numbers show a 10-year upward trend, and the per-capita numbers are only split out by age group and show that same 10-year upward trend except it hasn't gone up at all for people under 20, which seems surprising.
But I remain confused because the 10-year weight increase is very small, less than 10% or so, so it is not clear to me that increasing vehicle weight is the most important factor. IIHS mentions road design and front-end design, but not weight as key factors.
For example, it's well known that EV range decreases by 20-30% in cold weather and a recent study is claiming about the same loss in hot weather. And on long drives you tend to be more heavily loaded than normal, also cutting a few percent off actual range. Further, you need a reserve in case you get stuck on the road for some reason. Also you need a further reserve to ensure you can make it to the next next charger should the next charger be unavailable for some reason. And the advertised ranges are in better-than-average driving conditions at slower-than-average speeds, so you lose another few percent there as well.
All these derates stack which means if you want to ensure low stress in an EV you might have to derate the advertised range 50% or more depending on charger density for long drives when you decide to purchase. ICEs also need derating, but 25% is usually lots and ICEs tend to have much longer ranges to begin with.
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/gas-powered-cars-lose-driving-r...
Sure it's a small market (most Australians live in their state's capital city), but there needs to be some consideration for those that need serious range. The issue is frequently mentioned when talking about banning ICE vehicles.
Toyota Landcruiser's with auxiliary fuel tanks (over 240 litres) are the workhorses in outback Australia.
In a case where you're trying to get emitted CO2 to zero, you'd probably prefer to just subsidize ethanol and renewable diesel to manage super-long haul to get their - too many tractors and other equipment we also need to run.
In hindsight I think it's an obvious technooogy: the conplexity of the combustion generator is pretty low, doesn't need gearbox, pistols, cylinders and whatnot. And the fuel tank still gives good range NY recharging the battery.
Got a Kicks with this tech, and so far it has been pretty good for both city and the road (5 hr drives to the beach!)
I’m 100% certain the market could exist. Probably the difficult part is car manufacturers supporting it and possibly some engineering problems (low probability of problems I think).
They have cost challenges - because if you want to drive one at a constant 80 mph on the freeway, you need at least ~50 horsepower of gasoline generator, ~50 horsepower of generator ~ 50 horsepower of generator inverter, ~50 horsepower of motor, ~50 horsepower of motor inverter.
Turns out all of that costs and weighs a lot more than just 100 horsepower of gasoline engine for a similar size car.
Cars like the BMW i3 with range extender undersize their gas engine and generator to save money and weight, yet are getting sued because in worst case conditions (driving up a mountain heavily laden), sometimes the car runs out of battery power and has to rely on gasoline alone, leading to a top speed of only 20 mph - not really usable!
I also don’t see why 50 hp is a good target. The oldest Model S cars can drive on the freeway (at moderate speed) using maybe 25 kW (33 hp). So a 25 kW generator would allow indefinite freeway driving at moderate speed. But almost no one does this except maybe long haul trucks that trade drivers.
IMO the right way to think of it is: a 25 kW generator will almost fully recharge the battery in under 4 hours. If you drive uphill or fast for two hours, and you run that generator, you have an extra 50 kWh. If you want to drive 10 hours (shudder), that’s an extra 250kWh — you should avoided about three long charging stops, so maybe one actual level 3 stop gets you there even if you drive moderately fast.
And you can stop for the night (or sightseeing or whatever, as long as you park outdoors), and you’ll be fully recharged afterwards. I would appreciate a 5kW onboard generator for this purpose!
Nobody is putting much R&D into new engine designs.
Lots of countries have laws saying an engine in a car can't be running without a driver present.
For all those reasons, tiny range extenders on large batteries don't tend to exist.
Instead you get moderate or large range extenders paired with smallish batteries (ie. total range 50 miles). And they still have trouble if you drive fast, heavily laden, up a hill, on a hot day for more than the battery capacity.
To add: you can always run the engine at its most efficient rpm, getting the most out of every liter of fuel.
Here's a nice page explaining the system -- a serial hybrid. https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHI...
According to the page, you can't plug in these vehicles, is that right?
Chevy Volt was conceptualized as a serial hybrid iirc, but the engine drives the powertrain at higher speeds so it's not a pure serial hybrid. Mazda has a rotary engine based serial hybrid / range extender out or coming out too I believe.
There are lots of pluses to not having a transmission, and always running your engine in a narrow, tuned, power band
Are you sure? That sounds like Mad Max to me :)
It’s a problem of charger infra, not range. We’ve already solved range.
You actually believed them? Tesla, that has a long track record of lying about what they can do, when they can deliver etc? That is facing major competition from every established car manufacturer who are all shipping vehicles with similar range to Tesla?
If they could release a car with double the distance/capacity they would. It would be a huge competitive advantage that no other manufacturer (except _possibly_ Toyota, if the article is to be believed) can match.
Tesla increases distance ideally by increasing efficiency. Their cars consistently score the best/lowest Wh/mi for their weight, by doing things like designing their own heat pump instead of traditional AC and resistive heating.
Because EV production is virtually always constrained by battery production, the number of cars you can sell is typically your battery production capacity (MWh) divided by your battery capacity per vehicle.
Their inherent efficiency combined with the Supercharger network to support longer trips lets them produce more cars at a lower cost / price.
This is just basic physics not a conspiracy theory.
It simply doesn't make sense to massively improve distance.
No - this is dishonesty by some battery/car manufacturers. They say "Our car can drive 300 miles", and "our car battery will last 10 years/100,000 miles", but the reality is that if you actually drive it 300 miles on each charge, you'll only be doing about 30,000 miles before it no longer meets your needs.
Instead car manufacturers say things like "only charge to 85% to prolong battery life" and "under 15% charge is for 'reserve capacity' use only".
An honest manufacturer would only advertise the amount of capacity you can actually use day to day, rather than the capacity that is there but you really shouldn't use unless you want your battery to die young.
On the flip side, I agree that the "100%" mark should be the mark that people regularly charge to, people don't leave empty space in the tank for fun.
Toyota do this. In fact, all PHEV manufacturers seem to do this: they keep their batteries between 15% and 85% and only advertise this range.
Insofar as they advertise it at all: the battery size in eg a Prius prime is buried in a footnote, and the range - miles/km - is what’s advertised, and is real, and corresponds to the 15-85.
I guess it is more important in a PHEV to never fully charge not discharge their batteries: most cycle from full-ish to empty-ish much more than a BEV. And so it is more logical for them to publish their 15-85. But the honesty is refreshing; BEV numbers feel disingenuous to me.
I ignore all breathlessly excited battery “breakthrough” headlines, but I ignore any from Toyota less!
Is that something they do, or do they expect users to be aware of these thresholds?
My gas car has a 42 litre tank, if i wait until the light has come on and the gauge is on (and then drive another 20km past that), I can only get 38.5 litres in.
I only know this because a motoring journalist filmed himself riding the same model dry.
The Silicon Valley style of “fake it till you make it” business is dishonest.
And is lapped up by all the mass media contributing to Musk building a brand to rival Mercedes while spending $0 on advertising.
It's quite something, isn't it? You don't have to like it either. Seems that a lot of the USA really does. P.T.Barnum and all that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA
There is nothing more to say about the 'glorious Tesla driver assistance system'. It can't even do basic tasks with super slow speed, no moving objects and all time in the world.
To me, the distinction between level 4 and level 5 seems abysmally stupid as well - how could you leave out the pedals and steering wheel if the car can’t operate by itself under all conditions, meaning level 4 = level 5. Maybe I just don’t have the IQ to understand what the industry academics and practitioners are conveying here.
Also see Tesla's site (buried in the support pages, rather than the marketing copy):
> FSD Beta is an SAE Level 2 driver support feature that can provide steering and braking/acceleration support to the driver under certain operating limitations. With FSD Beta, as with all SAE Level 2 driver support features, the driver is responsible for operation of the vehicle whenever the feature is engaged and must constantly supervise the feature and intervene (e.g., steer, brake or accelerate) as needed to maintain safe operation of the vehicle.
https://www.tesla.com/support/recall-fsd-beta-driving-operat...
> how could you leave out the pedals and steering wheel if the car can’t operate by itself under all conditions, meaning level 4 = level 5.
The graphic gives an example of how this can be offered: local driverless taxi. Waymo's Firefly is an example of this. It had no steering wheel or pedals. It would only operate when, where, and under the conditions where it was capable of doing so.
Traditional hybrids hide all these details. Most plug in EV’s only show 15-85% as 0-100 because you have a fall back for range extension. Many EV show the close to full range because you might daily drive just fine on 15-85% while charging at home and want to take the occasional long trip or use 0-15% capacity if a charging station is down etc.
Also, charge cycles become less important as range increases an EV with a 220 mile range is noticeably worse at 180 mile range where a 440 mile EV sees 1/2 as many charge cycles and is still perfectly useable with a 360 mile range.
Pretty much. There's a catalogue of EVs here:
Where nominal and usable capacity is stated. Currently even Tesla includes a few kWh of buffer capacity.
State of charge in li-ion batteries isn't a straightforward thing anyway. 4.2V used to be considered 100%, but nowadays some chemistries allow for going up to 4.35V safely - doesn't sound like much, but it translates to ~15% more capacity.
Why? It's not common to use your cars full range every day. Most people I know drive <100km on most days, and use the full range of their car maybe twice a year when they go on vacation.
Why would manufacturers advertise worst case numbers if they are not representative of the average consumers needs?
If they advertise their cars for business use, they probably should put some more detailed info somewhere. But if you advertise your car to commuters, it makes sense to use numbers that the average commuter can expect.
Just inform the customer instead of doing the advertising mumbo-jumbo.
However, I do not commute with my car. And most people should press their local authorities to develop infrastructure so that they don't have to either :)
If you use a tank full of petrol each day, your car may not last 10 years. If you only do 1 mile a day, every day, it may not last 100k miles.
All mechanical things have usage patterns that are worse than others. You just get used to the tradeoffs.
car manufacturers have been overstating range/fuel economy since the dawn of time. people are tuned to look at those numbers and think "in perfect lab conditions." and no one expects these numbers to be their day to day numbers
False. Nowadays manufacturers include a capacity buffer, so you're not actually fully charging/discharging. Teslas used to have no buffer whatsoever - exactly like smartphones - but they dropped the practice a few years ago.
Case in point: the battery in the Mercedes EQS 450+ has a nominal capacity of 120kWh, while usable is 107.8kWh - that's a 10% buffer - likely on the top end because that's where most of the wear happens.
You can reasonably expect 200,000 miles out of that before range degrades to 80% of the original figure. And no wonder - that's less than 600 cycles assuming highway driving. Consumer-grade batteries last this much, and the ones in EVs are anything but consumer-grade.
I have a 5 year old EV which is always charged to 100% and it’s lost maybe 5% of its range capacity so far. Perhaps it was over provisioned (undersold the actual capacity) but it’s unlikely as it’s a cheap compliance car (that I still love to drive).
Until you realize that Toyota is peddling hydrogen as the future which makes about the least sense of anything you could choose.
It isn’t the the one with fewest infrastructure changes (that would be biodiesel).
And it is the result of stuck about things in terms of the past: we used to power cars by pumping molecules into it, therefore we need another molecule.
Most of our green electricity will start as electricity. So it makes more sense to keep it as that and pump it directly into the car.
Given the choice, why would people still want to have to take their car to a pump when they can simply charge it at home or at work as much as possible?
If my cellphone lasted 5 days without a charge but needed me to go to a special charging station, I would never buy it. I just charge it overnight, or at work, and forget about it.
The problem with electricity is that you can't easily store it. And the only way to do so at large scale will be converting it to molecules. That implies hydrogen.
As a result, green electricity just means a nearly infinite supply of green hydrogen at the same level of cost. That implies nearly free hydrogen for any purpose.
Economically, that all leads to the hydrogen car as the future. You avoid both the weaknesses of ICE cars and BEVs.
This adds up to: 0.750.90.6*0.95=38% efficiency.
With an electric battery car. Its about 75-80% efficiënt in the whole chain. That means you need twice as many wind turbines to run the same amount of vehicle miles. The math just doesnt hold up.
So unless we cannot produce enough batteries or cannot make the grid stronger. Which both are possibilities. Hydrogen cars will probably be a dream. At this point it just doesnt make sense.
You're reading too much pro-BEV propaganda. They're just spreading FUD and trying to stop people from realizing there are alternatives.
It is not FUD or propaganda to say that the fuel cell cars you can buy today (or in the next 10 years) are not even close to 100% efficient. Nor is their round trip efficiency better than BEV. Nor or either of those numbers likely to change over that period.
Meanwhile, no one is looking at compromise solutions. Something like a PHEV or even a plug-in FCEV would solve a lot of these complaints right away. There are ways around these issues even in the real world.
Finally, it's not like 10 years is that long in the car industry. If FCEVs end up matching BEVs in efficiency in 10 years, that's means we're pretty much at the verge of FCEVs taking over.
Now this is propaganda.
You should talk to this other guy who's currently arguing that the current paradigm doesn't matter and we should focus on what will make sense.
It takes 50% more energy to generate hydrogen than to just use electricity itself. It takes million dollar facilities to generate that hydrogen and turn it into electricity.
Then, it has to be stored at a very high pressure in your car, which has a number of risks. Then, if you have an accident and it doesn't completely blow you up, there can be a fire, in which case you are now on fire but people just think you are a crazy person running around because hydrogen has an invisible flame.
Or, you just use electricity.
In reality, fuel cell cars are literally just EVs, no different than BEVs. There are no fundamental downsides. But since FCEVs don't have the huge need for raw materials that BEVs do, they will be a far cheaper solution. Once you understand the unsustainable nature of BEVs, you'll realize that nearly all cars will have to switch to hydrogen eventually.
And hydrogen is safer than gasoline. This is just more FUD, and is of the fearmongering variety.
Hydrogen will eventually be nearly free. It is just going to be made from excess wind and solar energy and will follow the same cost reduction curve.
How is that different from charging a battery at a super charger? Because it can be delivered via more expensive pipeline or trucks rather than cheaper wires? Heck, it doesn't even store well, you need to keep those tanks cold so the hydrogen stays compressed, you are going to be using more electricity for that.
A pipeline is cheaper than a wire at moving energy around. About 10x cheaper in fact. This is just another example of BEV FUD. BEV companies just make shit up to demonization the competition, and often times the exact opposite is true.
Again, whether or not your dead doesn’t change the fact that the tank will explode, not just burn.
The system as a whole is not leak-proof. All you need is a leak in a contained area, like a garage.
[0]: https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/exclusive-hydrogen...
In the latter case I sympathize; I feel the same about the failure of swappable-battery tech, which would have given us the best of both worlds. Charge at the point of generation or at least at a point of efficient distribution, deploy instantly at the point of use.
And either way, I envy your ability to generate an enormous quantity of posts without getting rate-limited.
And FYI, the anti-hydrogen argument is a generic anti-green, anti—progress viewpoint. It is easily described as outright Ludditism. It’s pretty obvious the critics are totally wrong, and likely just Tesla fanboys or investors.
Wrong. It is the only technology in current existence that actually makes sense. Everything else is unsustainable and eventually has to be abandoned.
Just like the trend with hydrogen, where things are going absolutely no where and the waste majority of car makers who just 5 years ago were still betting on hydrogen have systematically dropped it.
Even the most hydrogen crazy Toyota expects its global hydrogen sales to be about Tesla production in a month in 2030. And those are optimistic numbers.
But don't let the real world prevent you from believing in easy to produce 100% efficient cars that can be fueled for free. Just keep living in a fantasy world, just stop spreading the lies in HN.
Note that BEVs were selling in the thousands only about a decade ago. FCEVs could easily reach the level of sales of BEVs in a short period of time.
The other point is that FCEVs don’t have the resource limitations of BEVs. They can easily exceed current levels of BEVs without serious trouble.
Your problem is that you are closed-minded and stuck in the past. You think that EVs are the future, but that it can only be one type of it. That the world will shift towards a 100% BEV monopoly and that no other type of EV can sell in any number. You can’t even make a coherent argument why this even is. If you want see an example of a person brainwashed by propaganda, that is it.
A battery is a box of minerals with electrochemical reactivity, i.e. it can catch on fire if something goes wrong. More energy from the battery means more minerals, which means higher cost. More reactive chemistries can reduce mineral inputs, but tend to be more expensive or less stable.
Tldr; there are no quantum leaps available for batteries. If Toyota has a giant range EV it's either really expensive or it's a research vehicle staying far away from consumers.
This is a fundamentally false understanding of battery innovation.
> More reactive chemistries can reduce mineral inputs, but tend to be more expensive or less stable.
Less stable, sometimes but not more expensive.
What a BMS can do, depends on what the underlying cell alows or doesn't.
> I'm only a layperson and this list is what I came up with just a few minutes of layperson thought.
It seems like they've been stewing on the list for the greater part of a week, at least.
I won't claim more familiarity, but...
- How frequent/difficult is required maintenance? Recall that old lead-acid batteries often needed distilled water added to their cells.
- Does it need access to air - either supplied to it, or to vent gasses? That introduces a whole host of issues, even if it's not venting (say) hydrogen gas.
- How much does performance degrade when its only cycled through part of its charge/discharge range? Recall the NiCad batteries of yesteryear.
- What are its waste, OSHA, HAZMAT, and other environmental & safety issues? Those apply all the way from the raw materials mines to the final disposal. Which includes accident scenarios - fire / flood / whatever in a facility with many batteries (or parts thereof), one-off car crashes, and things more interesting. "Disposal" includes cases such as "abandoned in a pole barn".
(BTW - kudos for specifying "How available are ...", which covers a far longer list of real-world supply issues than "What is the (current) price of".)
The fact that the chemistries are changing and diverse is the most difficult thing from an End-of-life perspective. A lot of businesses born around recycling todays battery (lots of lithium and cobalt relatively speaking) are not economical on some of the newer chemistries (looking at you Li-Fe) because they cheapened out the expensive elements.
1. What is the 1.0 for distance, and model of car doing it
2. What is the expected multiplier for said new technology
3. What is the life expectancy curve for the new tech
4. is it any worse/better than the old battery on safety. I'm just not that worried about battery fires other than if newer tech is more apt to do it. I've been riding around sitting on gasoline tanks for decades now and it can't be much worse for safety.
Some of us remember prior generations of battery breakthrough claims like eestor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor
Amazingly they are still around although they have rebranded and are now chasing some other unlikely scheme. It seems there is a limitless supply of suckers for these OTC deals, regardless how borderline their claims or history.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2017/07/25/ultraf...
Well, it's six years now, but that doesn't seem that much of a delay?
https://youtu.be/xvacBzZtYag?t=1m3s
There's just too much Bannon-esque "flooding the zone" these days...
And now, we wait for the entirely justified downvotes (though, this thread being so AG-ED* at this point, more likely I'm just talking to myself. Again...)
I wish this was a stupid meme, but apparently this is more reality than meme.
[1]: https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22960448&cid=6...
If Tesla can work that way, why can't Toyota?
I was looking at plug-in hybrids and ran across a reference to people having to wait 2 years for a RAV4 Prime.
Getting an EV with 200 miles that effectively is 120 is a joke. I couldn't even drive to and from work comfortably with that.
For most people who commute that far, their "choice" is not being able to afford rent anywhere closer where it's sufficiently safe and schools are sufficiently good.
It's also a catch-22 because even if those people could live closer to work, they would then need to park on the street, which would make the range just as -- if not more -- important.
All other times the car is sitting and charging while I'm doing non-driving things anyway.
And yet in lots of places we are 30% of total market and its growing.
Mileage isn't actually that important because most people don't actually need it very much.
Yes, if Tesla had some uber mileage car that would be nice, but that's not actually where the main market competition and limits are.
I’m sorry to tell you, only crazy outliers commute 100+ miles roundtrip to work (feel free to prove me wrong with real data) so current gen EVs are just fine in range for mainstream[1]. Just as some people NEED a snowplow attachment on their car because they live on a 5 mile driveway in the mountains, or NEED a v12 engine to pull a 20 ton RV, you will always have special needs with that commute.
But!! As far as Americans tending to absolutely obsess about range you’re right. Even dozens of non-outliers I’ve heard worrying themselves sick about “what if they do that road-trip they’ve been meaning to do.” And in a country where suburbanites buy $90,000 pickups and never even get the bed dirty with any kind of cargo, people will be buying vehicles with odd priorities in mind like the once-yearly road-trip.
[1] they’re not fine in infrastructure though since owning one without at least some home garage charger is certainly worse, and tens of millions of Americans live in apartments with garages and carports not even remotely equipped for even a handful of residents to electrify, and others just have to find a spot on the street. This is the thing really capping adoption today.
One of those "corners" that are more like a telephone pole that we keep going around.
I truly think Toyota's ignorance of EVs will end up turning them into the next Kodak or Blackberry.
They don't NEED a breakthru battery like this, the current ones work well -- I drove 1200km today in a Tesla. What they need to do is develop and sell electiric cars.
It's such a shame. Toyota had the first hybrid. And it was good -- I drove a Prius for ten years. They even made a plugin hybrid. They were the leaders. Now they seem to be last in the electric car race. Tragic.
Sorry, was this in one day, with a single charge? Or over multiple days (ending today), with charges in between?
The Cross-US race in an EV managed to average 66 mph - 80 mph average while driving, with twenty-four 18 minute charging stops.
Obviously a 1200 km drive could do even better than this - since it could start the day at 100% and end at 0%, saving ~25 mins of charge time.
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Personally, I want the boutique car shops of the early 1900s style to re-open - whereby they build bespoke vehicles on a standard EV sled, such as this or the Tesla sleds that they open sourced their patents for back in the day...
I'd love to be able to literally design and build my body-work around a safety-rated-regulated frame/sled - and then have these made - the problem with this idea is the advent of monoquoque frames which is the frame and major body-panels are all one-piece, which then required the advent of automotive robotics to be able to pick-up the frame and turn it at angles where the degrees-of-freedom assembly arms can reach, insert/weld things...
but I'd rather have a "tesla" or this "toyota" guts with a custome body set that I can design with a studio, have them fabricated/printed and affix to the standard mounting holes/brackets of my safety-cage.
I especially would like to do this for what would be a camper-van design where you plop the van body atop the sled, have some interconnects for internals to controls etc... and then have the van body mount in a sensible manner...
However, it doesn't matter, I could do 750 miles a day in my Model 3 just as easily as my gas car. It would be more comfortable in the Tesla, too.
I've driven lots of cars and nothing beats the comfort of a premium German station wagon such as a Mercedes E class for long trips followed by Volvo ones.
A model Y or 3 are in a very different tier of cars.
A Model 3 is decidedly in the middle, I'll grant you, but it has adaptive cruise and lane centering, which makes long cruises effortless.
But before I'd take a Mercedes E class or any other station wagon, I'd take an F150 King Ranch ;-). Truly that is the land yacht of the modern era. Inefficient, expensive, but there aren't too many cars more spacious or soft for cruising down the highway. In the US, obv.
That's all stuff that Mercedes cars have since decades?
The first radar-based dynamic cruise control was implemented on the 1999 W-220 S class. Mercedes cars had lane centering and even automatic lane changing since 2013.
Even today Mercedes is the first and only manufacturer to offer level 3 automatic self driving.
There's lots of things that Mercedes has been doing wrong in years (design wise especially, but engine choices on AMG models have also been questionable lately) but the safety and comfort of their premium cars (E class and upwards) is still at the top end of the industry.
Lot's of people all the time? Perhaps you live in a small country or have all your important people quite close to you if these numbers don't seem reasonable. I must make 1-2 road trips like this a year to attend family events, weddings, funerals, etc. It's not fun to drive 12 hours straight, but it's doable, especially with 2 drivers.
My median driving is very short (<30km/week), but I'll make one way drives of 1800km about 6 times a year. I did lots of research about the long range capabilities of Tesla when making my last purchase.
I'm pretty good at long distance driving (e.g. 14hrs of driving with no stops except gas and bathroom). I could drive 700 miles in a day in an ICE vehicle, but I'd never call it easy. Add in any charging time, and it gets even less so.
I'm not happy with FSD yet, but Autopilot is excellent and really helps with driver fatigue. The charging stops don't really change anything. You just stop when you would otherwise bathroom break or eat.
I charged 6 times that day, but those were around 40% to 90%, not 0 to 100. It could have been 3 charges if I risked getting closer to zero and spent more total time charging.
The car mapped the charging stops out for me. Sometimes multiple supercharger stops are better as the car can charge faster when the battery is low - I.e. 30% to 40% is quicker than 90 to 100, so if they're not much out of the way it's quicker to stop for 6 quick charges than 3 slow ones.
Combined with other failures Japan is going through right now, it really is tragic how far Japan has fallen from its former glory.
Just like if I were to buy a Porsche with a flappy paddle gearbox, I'd ask their Sonderwunsch dept, to put a clutch peddle in, for those times I need to dip the clutch in order to gain control of the vehicle when driving on the limit because of the reasons why the 930 got its nickname the Widow Maker.
At best all I could do at the moment with a flappy paddle gearbox is try to boot the gearbox into a high gear like 6 or 7 and hope it can change gear fast enough whilst hoping the engine is not too powerful to act like the handbrake has been pulled up unceremoniously when taking my foot off the accelerator.
Now where in the controls do I alter the regen amount on an electric car, in order to stop it from contributing to an accident when driving on the limit? I bet its not a single action control, but something buried deep inside a menu somewhere. Of course the added weight of the batteries and thus increased weight of the vehicle, makes the experience much more like driving an electric train on the open road, stable and safe most of the time, but one hell of an accident when one does occur!
Glad to see your default impression of Porsche is speed though, that reinforces my desire to purchase one. :-)
Thing is the 911 Dakar which is ideal for the above mentioned conditions doesnt come with a towing eye, so I'd have to have the surfboards on the roof rack or poking out through the sunroof, and I've got no where to tow some jet skis if I wanted to hit the beach but you can do anything you like between the high and low water mark on a UK beach and I know some fantastic beaches perfect for this car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqc-HPeaQv8
Toyota I think have announced they are simulating a gearbox in one of their new EV's which in my opinion is an admission that EV's are much harder to control because the need to feather the accelerator becomes a necessity unless the rate of acceleration is dialed back by the manufacturer. And then extra acceleration performance sold as an in car purchase like we are now seeing in some cars with heated seats can be sold unless the owner doesnt know someone who can hack the vehicle management system.
But just like many people complained about the brakes of the mk1 and mk2 VW golfs and polos, and porsche's in the 964's and earlier ie pre-ABS brakes, what those people complaining about is exactly how you want your brakes to work like if you dont have or need ABS. I could apply the brakes in such a way, I could have the front passenger side wheel locked up, but the remaining brakes not locked and then feathering the brakes so as to not flat spot the tyre.
Its virtually impossible to do that in todays ABS braking system world and I would always switch the traction control and other systems off because I could react faster than the systems could. Although I have to admit the Mercedes AMG S63 has for over a decade now, have a better braking system which enables the rear end to slide out a bit more around roundabouts in certain conditions, like what is today known as drift mode.
Are you speaking from personal experience here? The accelerator takes some getting used to, but most people adapt in like 30 or so seconds. What Toyota wants is something on an EV that simulates a manual transmission...for people who like sports cars, they like shifting. Sort of like EVs that put a subwoofer under your butt to simulate voom voom engine sounds. These are niche products.
I think Pirelli and Michelin will like to know this one as will half of the experts in physics!
In racing, there is something called Marbles. Now this is debris, typically rolled chucks of rubber thats peeled off tyres on a race track, but on the open road, this will typically be aggregate, chunks of stone that has been released from the road surface.
You find this on the edges of roads or on the outer edge of roundabouts.
These are an absolute nightmare to drive on, but if you have a lightweight car you can drive on these parts of the roundabout fast enough to undertake people who cut across to the inner lane of the roundabout, even in the wet.
I would not dare attempt that in an EV, the car would just just slide off the road. I dont care for the lower center of gravity that much, in fact if its too low it starts to affect the suspension and handling, where the suspension hits the bump stops.
Front wheel drive diesels have this problem over the front axle, where their suspension bottoms out on the bump stops.
I think they were hoping I wouldnt see them and I'd be tired from such a long journey, and the use of a deer enables a car crash whilst being able to blame it on "wildlife"!
There really are some right royal nutters living here, thats why I hope the porsche night vision system can record these events besides just being a display for night time use.
Ok, hold up. You have:
1. roundabouts, ok, no problem, we have lots of those, I've never had a problem in an EV.
2. Gutter curbs around roundabouts. Yes driving in those is bad, you'll get a flat tire pretty quickly that way (no matter your car). I used to ride my bike in those and got flats all the time.
3. You want to race around other people in the round about. Ugh, this isn't the USA is it? I'm guessing Russia or China, or some other developing world country?
I think this is a niche case, like doing donuts or drifting.
In some states some developments aren't even hooked to the gas network, and the homes standards are such that electrification is the default.
You have to measure electricity demand over years, not months, because seasonal changes and or weather can really corrupt your data.
Do you remember news about the California grid straining under the heat wave in 2022? The governor sent text messages to every Californian asking them to minimise their power usage? Power consumption across the state* reached 52GW.
Every April, by the rules of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, each state receives submissions of new projects that people want to build and connect to the grid. Each of these is called a "Cluster". In April 2021, cluster 14 included a proposed 110GW of new power generation. This was so many submissions that the state couldn't even finish their legally mandated analysis of all of the proposed projects in time for the new submissions for April 2022, so they pushed Cluster 15 back to 2023 (approved by FERC). It's past April 2023 and Cluster 15 projects proposed 354GW worth of power. If we take that CA can produce 50GW now, and add clusters 14 and 15, that's a little over 10× our current maximum power generation. You could argue that maybe some of these projects won't get built, that always happens in every cluster, but the number of withdrawn applications is a smaller percentage than usual.
Estimates are that EVs will require us to double our current power generation.
The glut in new power construction is not a California-specific phenomenon. https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-proposes-intercon...
* technically across the California Independent State Operator, https://caiso.com , which is about 80% of California and also includes a tiny bit of Nevada for geographical reasons.
> The Innovator's Dilemma is the title of an excellent book by Clayton Christensen. The dilemma itself is the fact that though large innovators have some motivation to innovate, they also have a strong disincentive from doing so as new products will undermine their existing ones.
I don't think the biggest markets will mandate EVs in under a decade. More importantly, it's possible the bigwigs at Toyota don't think so either, and they will act on what they think, even if it happens to be wrong.
Electric cars require much less assembly time, have a much smaller supply chain, and require much less maintenance.
Japan is literally propped up by its auto industry - they make it prohibitively expensive to own a vehicle more than a few years in order to artificially create a market for newer cars. The other result in a huge used vehicle export to most of the world except for the US.
I don't think the average non-Japanese understands that owning an old car in Japan is a significant status symbol.
Also, did you notice that damn near every model year of Japanese car has different headlights, taillights, and bumpers? And small narrow bits of the lights now extend well into the quarter panels with unique shapes? You think it's coincidence that parts most likely to be damaged even in a minor collision are year-specific and thus more expensive and harder for non-OEMs to keep up with manufacturing compatible parts?
The lights extending into bumpers and quarter panels aren't just a styling thing, they're physically keying the parts. They even do unique rest-of-world vs US styling to make it even more difficult for third party parts.
It also lets them keep cranking out models people think are new and exciting...when in reality the underpinnings rarely change. The Corolla is a perfect example, using largely the same underpinnings for nearly two decades.
"Does the electricity grid have enough capacity for charging EVs?
The most demand for electricity in recent years in the UK was for 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.
Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we believe demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range of manageable load fluctuation.
The US grid is equally capable of handling more EVs on the roads – by the time 80% of the US owns an EV, this will only translate into a 10-15% increase in electricity consumption.1
A significant amount of electricity is used to refine oil for petrol and diesel. Fully Charged’s video Volts for Oil estimates that refining 1 gallon of petrol would use around 4.5kWh of electricity – so, as we start to use less petrol or diesel cars, some of that electricity capacity could become available."
There may have been increases in production, but it would have been shocking if we'd had rolling blackouts this year, given how mild the summer has been. Other parts of CA are warmer than SV, but AFAIK (having family in Sacramento and LA) this summer has been cooler than last summer all over CA.
Anecdotally, my A/C energy usage (compared to last year) far outweighs my energy usage in an EV.
https://rga.lis.virginia.gov/Published/2022/RD216/PDF
If you scroll to page 66 of the PDF, it’s insane how much more demand is needed for datacenters. It completely dwarfs forecasted EV power usage.
There was a huge fire that was caused by a power line slowly mechanically wearing down its connector. OVER A HUNDRED YEARS. Nobody bothered to check or replace it.
Also you have exceptions for oil and gas pipelines. 1-2 permits on a high level and the land owners can pound sand if they complain.
For power lines you need levels on a dozen different levels and even after that everyone who can even see the power poles has the irrefutable right to veto said wire or at the very least sue and slow it down to a crawl...
B) the US electricity grid is uniquely unreliable for a developed country.
Japan’s electrical grid has some unique challenges that explain why they are so interested in hydrogen. An article about the UK isn’t all that relevant for that,
Talking about the US electrical grid as a single entity doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when it’s not a single, nationwide market. There can definitely be local problems as we saw in Texas and California.
... every two weeks.
Yes, that’s nameplate capacity, so you can’t count on solar to delivery the power to get us over the line by itself. But we are nearly on track to the net zero goal when you add in …
… wind.
To Japan, Battery Tech would force them to be reliant on China or the US due to lack of natural lithium deposits, which makes the whole energy reliance aspect of battery tech moot.
To combat this, the Japanese government felt Hydrogen would be the best bet due to
1. An early lead in hydrogen technology, so first mover advantage in technology exports and hydrogen infrastructure deals (already happening in India and Australia for example)
2. A large LNG capacity that could be revamped for Hydrogen fuels
3. Good relations with cheap coal producers like Australia and India to produce brown hydrogen (ie. Hydrogen fuel from carbon resources)
4. The economics and logistics of hydrogen fuel cells can mimic that for Natural Gas, meaning a quicker ramp up.
These are a good overview -
1. Japan’s Hydrogen Industrial Strategy - https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str...
2. Japan Hydrogen Basic Strategy - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/japan-hydrogen-basic...
3. Basic Strategy for Hydrogen (the actual strategy paper. It's in Japanese) - https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/enecho/shoene_shinene/suiso...
Hydrogen will be needed for industrial processes as electric power can't generate temperatures high enough and hydrogen in the form of ammonia makes a pretty good energy storage system that does not need any special metals to use for power in a modified ICE. The sweet spot for ammonia engines seems to be long haul container shipping where batteries would be infeasible.[2]
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01195-x
[2]https://gcaptain.com/man-reaches-milestone-with-successful-t...
That said, this paper does look promising and it kind of reminds me of the heavy water electrolysis process used in Nuclear Energy.
Using saltwater instead of fresh+distilled water would be great, though I'm curious about the cost of productionizing this, as the kind of cost and energy outlay needed for this at scale might not be efficient.
That said, I am not a ChemE or Physicist so I could be wrong
> Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy.
Yep, but that will take time to build, hence the idea to use brown hydrogen in the meantime.
Incidentally, I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an issue for Japan. They are completely and utterly dependent on the US for their national security, without any remaining meaningful popular movement to divorce themselves thereof. The Japanese Socialist party had some language about getting rid of the Anpo treaty, but hilariously, they backed out immediately when they came into power; the Japaense journalist / commentator Akira Ikegami wrote a (Japanese language) book [2] about this era that I thought was pretty enlightening.
[0] Fair notice: the person who runs the channel is an MA and former UI/UX engineer, so YMMV with how far you trust the content.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zG-ZrC4BO0
[2] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/%E6%B1%A0%E4%B8%8A-%E5%BD%B0-e...
It's an issue the same way the US being dependent on Taiwanese Foundries even though they're an ally of our's.
Should some sort of a global commodities crunch occur (eg. hypothetically, China banning all exports of Rare Earth Metals), then prices are going to skyrocket in the global market because it will take 5-7 years for production to scale up in Australia, Bolivia, and the US.
For critical technologies, it's important to have some level of self reliance. This is why the US is now a net energy exporter, after getting burnt by the spike in commodity prices in 2005-2009 leading to a massive bipartisan push for fracking, natural gas, solar, Athabaskan oil sands projects w/ Harper's backing, etc.
Other large countries with limited rare metal supplies like Germany and India have modeled a hydrogen policy similar to Japan for this reason.
Also, Japan's economic recovery after 2008 was heavily at risk due to the spike in Oil prices, as well as a similar near recession that arose in the aftermath of the OPEC Embargo. Memories of both still resonate in Japanese policy circles.
> Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable, Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage
I'm not a MatSE or Physicist so I can't speak to the viability of that. That said, I can assume that rolling out any sort of mining and refining infrastructure would take time to scale out.
For example, it took China 15-20 years and an extreme amount of Govt protectionism to become a leader in the rare metals space. It's not that China has more deposits than other countries - it's just that it wasn't cost effective for most other countries to match the prices China was providing.
The BIG difference for lithium batteries is that you need to import lithium only ONCE then you reuse/recycle.
And yes there's big big money at play, so lots and lots of FUD around lithium and geopolitics, the obvious difference with oil is nearly never mentionned thanks to oil money.
Also : https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-to-subsidize-half-of-c...
I brought up the oil aspect in my comments below, but because this was a battery tech related convo I decided to bring up the (relatively minor) lithium portion. Though the battery tech issue did play a role in Toyota's decision to develop the Prius and the Mirai
Japan's hydrogen strategy is definetly a reaction to oil shocks a la 2008 and 1973
Wow that's some FUD, I didn't expect this one...
https://electrek.co/2023/03/02/tesla-cofounders-redwood-show...
"These packs weighed a total of half a million pounds, and Redwood managed over 95% efficiency in recovering important metals from them. This is incredibly high efficiency – especially compared to the 0% recycling efficiency of gasoline, the energy storage device for competing vehicles."
Note: I just took the first one from https://www.recyclingstartups.org/top/battery/
> The batteries are valuable and recyclable, but because of technical, economic, and other factors, less than 5% are recycled today.
https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...
And the redwood process is in production since last year with so "no such process has been implemented yet" is just a blatant lie. Quantities are modest because number of BEV being scrapped is tiny due to their yound age.
Article you cite is from 2019, we're in 2023 in case you don't know.
And the BEV world moves really fast.
You should just stop continuously spreading FUD about BEV in all HN discussions, this is boring...
Also, the battery chemistries and pack structure are wildly different between different cars. One of the reasons why lead-acid batteries are recycled is because they’re always the same design. But it’s the Wild West in the BEV world. Nothing is the same between any two car models. How the recycling process could even work is not at all explained.
We heard this story before with plastic recycling. But then we found out that only pristine plastics can be recycled. The rest is just trash. In the li-ion battery world, you’re guaranteed to get a giant mishmash of different chemicals and metals in the end. It’s almost literally just battery shrapnel because they have to grind it all up to get at the metals. So it sounds a lot like the stories of plastic recycling.
Here is what the DOE experts think about scaling up battery recycling with a cool 2 billions dollars:
https://www.energy.gov/lpo/articles/lpo-offers-conditional-c...
"Redwood Materials will use both new and recycled feedstocks—comprised of critical materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt—to produce approximately 36,000 metric tons per year of ultra-thin battery-grade copper foil for use as the anode current collector, and approximately 100,000 metric tons per year of cathode active materials"
"At full production capacity, the project’s anode copper foil and cathode active material output is anticipated to support the production of more than 1 million EVs per year,"
And this is only for one plant...
I'll believe any time DOE experts to judge wether an existing proven process is scalable or not over a continously FUD spreading forum poster.
And for your information lead-acid batteries are not all the same, see various electrolytes in AGM (fibers...), Gel, ...
There's no evidence anything of significance being recycled. All of this is projections of future recycling achievements.
Like I said, it's the same story as plastic recycling. No one should believe any of the claims made.
AGM and gel lead-acid batteries are recycled in a separate pathway compared to flooded lead-acid batteries. This is okay because there aren't that many variations and the chemistry is basically the same. Li-ion batteries on the other are effectively hundreds of different chemistries spread across many different packaging methods. It is a complexity nightmare and no one has given any answer as to how it will all be solved.
Evidence about recycling taking place has been given multiple times, you just choose to ignore it.
Ah then there's different lead acid battery recycling methods, you said the contrary in the post above ...
And since you obviously didn't read or learn anything about lithium battery recycling you make a fool of yourself.
Again, no evidence that this recycling is happening at scale. And given the enormous complexity of the problem, something no one has even bothered analyzing, it seems unlikely to be solvable anytime soon.
At this point, I can just proclaim that plastic recycling is 95% effective with the same amount of evidence. You’d have no choice but to believe me on this since you already believe the same thing about li-ion batteries.
Yes, and that's where it will stay in the future. Unfortunately, we need solutions that exist in the present.
Toyota is just not delivering on the EV front at all. They could be cleaning up by stealing some of the Model Y customers back by selling a ton of RAV4s, especially the Prime versions.
A) improving the eMPG (or is it MPGe?) of more cars on the road to reduce their fossil fuel consumption is better than giving a few cars zero-emission powertrains, courtesy of the 80-20 rule. (Hence the riddle about you having two cars you use equally and someone offering to magically take one from 40mpg to 1000mpg or the other from 10mpg to 40mpg - you are better off financially with taking the latter option.)
B) The infrastructure for fossil fuel mining is here but scaling up lithium mining is going to add new horrors to the environment and the developing world.
If you are having a widespread, long term power outage, those gas pumps will not run due to not having electricity.
Do you live in an area that has frequent power outages, then maybe this would be a concern, but in most areas an outage is pretty rare and are short term. If your area has unreliable power, perhaps they should be putting more power transmission lines underground?
Defeatism never accomplishes anything.
Personally, I've never found gas stations to be the beacon of reliability. They go down quickly in any kind of shortage situation. During the last ice storm here the local station ran out of gasoline in a couple days and diesel right after that. But I was able to buy propane without interruption, so that was good -- it doesn't rely on electricity to be dispensed. This is why my portable generators are now all dual fuel.
Blackouts can happen, but EV normally charge when power is cheapest and demand is lowest.
The Prius in 1997 doesn't count? Sure it was a Hybrid mainly because of no charging network. A decade before Tesla. And selling ever since.
They could have a dozen models in development ready to release who knows. It's a huge company.
Care to explain? Because by this metric every carmaker is a one trick pony. Tesla even more so.
Toyota invented the hybrid drive when the US was encouraging higher fuel standards with policy (and Toyota was concerned about being left behind), and have barely put forth a half hearted effort to build EVs. Their earlier compliance car RAV4 EVs used Tesla drivetrains, for example.
Meanwhile, Tesla sells almost 2 million EVs a year and continues to ramp manufacturing. Toyota manufactures press releases.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g15377976/what-came-be...
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/toyota-once-partnered-with-tesl...
Toyota isn’t dying tomorrow, but if they don’t switch to BEVs, they’ll die like Kodak or Xerox. There is no light vehicle hydrogen future.
Tesla is the company that is going to die. The BEV is not going to be the only car in the future, nor will last forever. If anything, it is an outdated idea, and was an overreaction to the 2000s oil shock. Toyota will just make whatever cars people want.
Many of the bans are happening by 2030. In Norway, 83% of new cars are already BEVs. I don't think they will look back, the market will make selling new ICEs in that country at least, impractical.
Hydrogen probably has a future in goods transportation (trucking), but even there they have to compete with a fully electrified rail system that goes to the arctic circle.
Hydrogen will just take over at some point simply because it is the only sustainable idea.
Hydrogen is a horrible idea for personal vehicles: it takes a bunch of new expensive infrastructure to even get going (gas stations, but with compressed hydrogen tanks), it is energy inefficient (a lot of energy lost in compression, keeping it compressed, and then turning it in to electrons). It is just not economically viable when compared to BEVs where the biggest worry is finding a power plug.
It might make sense for trucking given its power to weight density, and the fact that trucks can have huge hydrogen tanks without much consequence.
Attacks on efficiency are anti-hydrogen FUD arguments. They were made up by BEV companies and are almost entirely false. It's important to realize that fuel cells are electrochemical systems just like batteries. FCEVs are also EVs just like BEVs. There is no fundamental downside. The upside however is that you avoid the huge amount of raw materials needed for the batteries. So this will be a far cheaper solution once we hit mass production.
In short, it is pretty much guaranteed that we will eventually switch to hydrogen cars. It is only a question of when and not if.
The BEV companies aren't pushing FUD. They are just choosing the option that they see the most demand from, and can make the most money from. Japan has tried to make hydrogen happen for 20 years now, and it simply isn't going to happen.
Batteries don't require much more raw material than the fancy cyrogenic compressed hydrogen tank and fuel cell you need for a hydrogen car. Those batteries are also than those two things also.
BEVs are over 100 years old. It is just a repeat of an obsolete idea. The moment we get serious about green energy, hydrogen cars will happen.
Hydrogen tanks are literally just tanks. They require very little raw materials compared to batteries. Fuel cells are tiny compared to batteries, and use up about the same level of raw materials as catalytic converters. Everything else is basically the same between FCEVs and BEVs. So you can quickly realize that the FCEV will be the far cheaper of the two ideas.
That is complete nonsense:
> A typical EV would require about 3,857 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. For 26.4 million EVs, that's over 101 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in a year or about 2.5% of what the U.S. grid produced in 2020. Although it's a small percentage, it's much more than what we're currently asking of the electrical grid.
https://www.evconnect.com/blog/can-the-power-grid-handle-ele...
Let's say we have 100 million cars, that is 10%.
You keep saying hydrogen tanks are literally just tanks. I get it, you don't believe compression is necessary, so no cyrogenic cooling at gas stations (powered by the grid of course), no fancy compression in cars. Is that what you actually believe?
Compression is not that energy intensive. It's more BEV FUD to make this to be a big deal. If done correctly, it is only a few percent loss of energy: https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/9013_energy_requirement...
Also, it is recoverable energy. Compressed gases are energy storage mechanisms in their own right. In the long run, this will be very minor loss of energy.
Will it? Why?
But it's manufacturing the actual battery modules that has been the hard problem for Tesla competitors as I understand it. I guess it's not surprising if so that Toyota would want to have their technology choice set for a while before ramping that up, since it probably affects many of the surrounding design choices.
As a reference, R&D for Mercedes' 2017+ OM654 diesel engine alone costed the company 3.5 B $. And that amount is relatively low because Mercedes had a huge know how in building diesel engines.
But in EV those amounts are much smaller, catching up is no longer a matter of decades and hundreds of billions, but years and ten times smaller investments (see Korea).
This is why China was never competitive in the ICE era, but companies like BYD are booming.
Also, I strongly believe that from now to 2035 multiple companies will be selling their electric powertrains to dozens of different automakers.
As a huge company Toyota may well have the people with ideas about EV transition. Unfortunately as a huge company there are a thousand interests that will be harmed by EV transition. Can Toyota (or VW, MB, Stellantis, etc) overcome those internal conflicts to produce something out of their wheelhouse? Or will it take an acquisition that moves with distinct branding that eventually becomes the entire company?
A hybrid is not an EV. It gets 100% of its energy from gasoline. Plug-in hybrids have a better claim to being an EV.
In hybrids the electric motor doesn’t have to be maximally efficient, because the electric range is only a nice to have, not the key selling point.
Hybrid battery density doesn’t matter much, because it’s 1/10th of BEV's size anyway.
In hybrids the charging speed can be an abysmal trickle, and still suffice to charge the tiny battery. In BEV you need to work with 4x higher voltages, 10x higher wattage, and push thermal management to the limits.
That’s why bz4x sucks. Its efficiency is meh. It charges at below average speeds, and still overheats.
So the hybrid battery is used for acceleration. Note that my Hybrid battery is a 200V 50Wh Nickel metal hydride battery - Note I think Toyota Hybrids didn’t start using Lithium batteries until late 2010’s).
When town driving it doesn’t seem to me that the regenerative braking makes much difference: It is very noticeable that the engine is in use during acceleration from a dead-stop. Certainly regeneration is insignificant on hills because the
It was a great car. I drove a Prius for ten years and only sold it because I moved overseas. But it was no EV. Even the plugin Prius is not what we mean when we say 'EV'.
They developed an entirely new platform for EVs [1]
They started a subsidiary for self driving with around a thousand employees [2]
They released EVs, the bZ3, the bZ4x, the Lexus RZ
Current battery technology is a huge reason why people don't switch to EVs. Everyone I know talks about the charging times, needing to find a supercharger route when going long distance.
A 10 minute charge on that massive range would convince me to switch easily.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_New_Global_Architecture...
My dad just bought the bZ4x, I’m not particularly impressed, but that’s just my opinion. My dad likes it, mainly because he wasn’t comfortable using the touch screen while driving to adjust things like windshield wipers etc, which I think is a good decision for him. But what poor marketing department came up with an unpronounceable name like that.
The important difference from ICE refuelling is that you don't have to be by the car when it charges.
I've taken road trips across Europe, and it's been fine. 20min is about as much as I need for a bathroom break and to get a coffee.
It's an outdated, proprietary standard in both form and function, even if Tesla claims it's a public standard; they exert total business control over the plug and their charger network. There's no way they'll allow a random car to plug into a supercharger ('safety' and such), no way they'll allow any other payment methods on their network. There's no way they'll support configuring your Tesla to work with third party NACS chargers and payment systems.
The only chargers that exist with NACS connectors are in one country and controlled by Tesla. The only cars with NACS plugs are (at the moment) Teslas and the only proposed additional users are companies that have signed agreements with Tesla.
This is why it's so infuriating that Ford, GM, and Tesla did what they did. They just effectively killed CCS, and thus dealt a major blow to EV adoption in the US for the sake of a market share grab. 800v architecture meant EVs finally could lay claim to being practical for long distance charging. Plug in at a rest stop, everyone hits the bathrooms, maybe a snack, stretch their legs, and the car is nearly full again. A lot of errands and such fit into the 18-20 minute window a nearly-full-charge takes. "NACS" can't offer anywhere near a 18 minute 10-to-80 charge.
The US version of CCS is far from perfect; the weight of the cable causes connection issues due to the poor mechanical design of the socket, and we never should have had a unique CCS connector from Europe to begin with. But Tesla's "North American Charging Standard" is outdated and their supercharger network in addition to being outdated has been woefully underfunded and undersized for a while; with Ford and Chevy piling onto the network, that's going to get even worse.
What's even more infuriating is that in Europe, there is no such thing as "Superchargers", because the EU forced Tesla to use CCS2. And meanwhile, congress hasn't even noticed that Tesla just effectively captured the US EV charging market.
Ask yourself this: what could possibly go wrong giving the world's richest man - an unhinged narcissist to boot - exclusive control over how electric vehicles are charged in the US?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/19/23689247/tesla-v4-superch...
And while not deployed in the wild, NACS supports up to 1MW with a forward and backward compatible larger 1000V connector in the NACS spec: https://www.tesla.com/support/charging-product-guides#techni...
You're wrong about the limits. v3 is 250kW, and the limiting factor is the vehicle voltage. Take it up to 800 volts and that's already 400kW. Pushing the amps above 500 is possible for both connectors, with similar levels of difficulty.
There is no reliable CCS network in existence in the US. Can you show me a video of someone using these mythical chargers at 400kw to take a long road trip?
Ask yourself this: what could possibly go wrong depending on Electrify America who only exist due to court ordered action and have no incentive to actually do a good job?
150kW charging is common in France. I hear it’s even better in other EU countries.
For road trips charging speed is IMHO even more important than the range. My breaks take 20-25 min typically anyway, but a 45-minute car would keep me waiting.
That's a disingenuous take. ICE fueling takes significantly less time. So it's not an advantage that you can take a 20-30 minute break away from your car when you can just gas up your car in a few minutes (attended) and be on the road again.
What I have experienced is having to take 10-15 minutes to find a gas station somewhere around my destination to fill up for the next day. I’ve also had plenty of stops where I’ve stopped for food or drinks and not filled gasoline because there wasn’t any gas station right there.
What’s remarkable with EVs is that on road trips I never find myself going somewhere I wouldn’t be going anyway. Instead of driving to a gas station at my destination, I just park at the hotel/resort I’m staying and charge right there over night.
In Norway almost every road side McDonalds have some fast chargers. As a father that’s where we tend to stop, and where we probably would have taken the kids for a break anyway. If we filled gasoline, even if there was a gas station right next by, that’d be an annoying distraction from what we want to be doing.
As a father with an EV I don’t recognise the situation in the article at all. Maybe Norway and even Denmark (where we took our road trip last year.. they’re a bit behind Norway) is ahead of USA in infrastructure. But it’s not that much ahead. 5 years at most.
Family road trips in EVs is fantastic because you’re encouraged to take breaks at places with playgrounds where kids can burn off some physical energy. And since the car is charging at the same time it doesn’t feel like a waste and you don’t feel any mental pressure to keep driving to get to the destination as fast as possible.
Lots of 'self driving' investments have invested a huge amount without much benefit.
> They released EVs, the bZ3, the bZ4x, the Lexus RZ
Their total EV sales are tiny. The bZ4x is universally mocked at one of the worst EV in class and not actually cheaper then the competition.
> Current battery technology is a huge reason why people don't switch to EVs.
And yet huge amounts of people are switching to EV and the actual limit is batteries supply limitations not battery size.
Made in Japan. Designed by Tesla in California.
Unsold electric cars are piling up on dealer lots
https://www.axios.com/2023/07/10/unsold-electric-cars-are-pi...
Okay, Toyota has technically released EVs. Still a half assed effort, and I think still a fair criticism - I can't buy one, as they don't sell it in Australia, and they barely promote them. They're not behind EVs in any meaningful way.
I mean, the fact that I just bought an EV and have never even heard of any of Toyota's says something. No mention of them on their Australian website. Never heard of them on social media either, and I'm constantly watching videos about EVs.
Kodak released digital cameras eventually. Blackberry released Android phones eventually. Didn't mean much, it was too little too late -- they ignored the writing on the wall for too long.
Not that big of increase.
With hydrogen based car though it's an almost exact copy of the ICE car. It's got a big, hot finicky fuel cell under the hood that requires ongoing highly qualified maintenance. It would require complex 'hydrogen stations' to refuel. If there's no battery then brakes will continue to wear out on schedule. In short, everything a ICE car offers except the CO2.
It's not surprising that this is the future that Toyota had its eyes on for way too long. Group think. Now they're playing catch up and they're far behind.
The capacity retention of a Tesla battery from a decade ago plateau at 88% after 200,000 miles. That's for nickel-based battery, and most OEMs are switching to iron-based (LFP) which degrade even less.
I bet that zero EV will have to replace their battery in the near future.
Zero is a pretty low number. A lot of them will have to be replaced. Especially for commercial vehicles where they often drive 100k miles every year.
There is absolutely no guarantee that it would be the case. The cost of batteries is largely determined by raw materials such as lithium, nickel, etc, and the demand for those minerals will exceed that of supply for some foreseeable time -- at least not until 2030.
>> Battery prices have been falling fast as the volume production of these batteries have scaled up.<<
Yeah, that's only if you get a brand different battery with improved energy density and chemistry. Your EV is stuck with the same old efficient and expensive batteries from the date/year of purchase.
That's utter bullshit. A fuel cell is literally an electrochemical system no different than a battery.
In the end, a fuel cell is basically a metal-air battery, and has the same level of efficiency.
It's not "well known." In fact, this is bullshit. Only some metals have this problem. Even then there are ways of preventing the problem via coatings and the like. Nor is it even necessary, as geological formations can be used to store hydrogen in the same way we store natural gas.
You are simply reading too much pro-BEV propaganda. These are solved or are easily solvable problems.
No it does not. Efficiency is about energy in at the source versus energy out energy out at the wheels.
What do you think happens to overall system efficiency if you need to carry an internal combustion engine, a gas tank, and gas along with you, in addition to a battery, inverter, and electric motor?
Hybrids are strictly worse than electrics in every measure except range, and most customers do not need the range they claim to need.
But salesmen are not paid commissions to explain why customers don't need things, so we have hybrids.
Thats the benefit of a plug-in Hybrid. Most people don't need to drive much on a day to day basis and the smaller battery can handle that fine. For longer driving you have the ICE engine. The ICE engine can weigh as much or less than a comparatively "long range" battery.
It's the classic innovator's dilemma, but hybrids are also great vehicle for who can't afford BEV for some reason now. Still, I think they should released moderate BEV (like Nissan Aria?) in 2021, even if they ship very limited count.
Unlike USA (and Europe?) public charging infra' is nonexistent in most part of the world. Compounded by unavailability of affordable home charging devices and easy/affordable installation logistics. Toyota perhaps does not see sense in riding the 'hype', instead continue to focus on where demand is - conventional cars.
However, they seem to be investing for the future when charging infra catches up. They started on electric car tech in 1992 (way before anyone else), and continue to invest in R&D; infact had released mainstream electric vehicle - Rav4, which they discontinued in 2014 as the "charging time was slow".
Toyota couldn’t convince the world it wasn’t reluctant about EVs, in part because of Toyoda’s straight-shooting, plain-spoken approach. He (new CEO Toyoda) outlined insufficient clean energy and charging infrastructure as a “limiting option” for customers. At the end of last year, Toyoda said “it takes time,” while also noting that they’d “been investing in electrification” since they “started working on hybrids, with our sights on building BEVs (battery electric vehicles). [0]
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/this-is-toyot...
I'm not saying it makes business sense for Toyota to drop ICE sales immediately. But their feeble, half assed EV effort is going to turn them into another Blackberry if it doesn't change quickly.
My basic thought on TSLA's long-term prospects and the EV market in general is that the legacy auto makers are patient, not sclerotic.
(Also, toyota has several EVs: the Toyota-badged BZ4X, the Subaru-badged Solterra, and the Lexus-badged RZ. Branding aside, those are all Toyota EVs.)
Perhaps this battery's maximum rate of discharge is so low that such a massively oversized pack is needed to get sufficient momentary power to the electric motors?
* You can't use the bottom 10% without going against recommendations
* You shouldn't charge above 85-90% to avoid going against recommendations
* If you drive over 65 mph, the drain is above average.
* If you tow a trailer, your range is halved.
* If you install a little storage roof rack, you lose 20-30% of range
* You experience 10% battery degradation in the first couple years of ownership.
* 20% loss to cold weather (Thanks to a comment for this one)
I really don't want a reply to this comment to be "Well...gas engines..."
Right now, electric cars have improved and the ones being sold are in the 300km battery range.
That's already overkill for most of the normal usage. People have a warped idea on how they are using their car and think they are doing way longer trips than the statistics tells you.
I'm using an EV myself and I changed nothing to my behavior, everything is alright.
We like our road trips and while they're rare, they're important and we don't want to rent or have a second car in order to do that.
EVs need to be comparable with gas cars in realistic scenarios and that means a real 3-400 miles. Not 400 miles but with a giant list of can't do's
The last couple of decades have shown what happens if you warn people about some imperceptible (to them) danger and tell them sacrifice personally, even in minor ways, to stave it off.
Frighteningly little happens. The change that does happen has been frequently coming in on a wave of technical innovation making greener options superior to old ones.
Once you drive an EV you realize that the range is less of a concern than you though it would be.
One thing though:
> You shouldn't charge above 85-90% to avoid going against recommendations
Daily driving this doesn't matter much. Longer drives you can charge to 100% as long as you depart within a reasonable time frame of say within 6 hours, probably longer. More annoying is the charging curve after 80% at fast charging stations. In my experience you usually won't want to spend the time to get that last 20% unless absolutely necessary.
Except the roof rack one is bogus. I installed the cross bars of a roof rack on my Bolt EUV (it came with the rails), and afaict it affected my mileage not at all. I still get 320 to 330 estimated miles (against the EPA's 247 estimated miles).
And the don't charge above 85--90% one is bogus too; there's talk about that on forums, but the manufacturer says nothing about it.
And I wouldn't want to go below 10% on a gas powered car either...
Running your car to zero fuel may potentially damage your fuel pump while running your Tesla or electric car to 0% constantly will completely destroy the battery. Much more expensive issue. Someone can easily bring you a small Jerry can of gas if you run out while it's day near impossible to do the same thing for an electric car. It'll need to be towed.
Toyota, at least historicity, is targeting mass market, where they can make affordable and reliable car. Current EV works for you? Great! But it doesn’t for many others.
I have EV and PHEV, and I won’t abandon my PHEV (big car) till battery is significantly better - I need a second big car, with a big range, that comes without any asterisks.
Every positive aspect to a battery (lacking some novel miracle) means a tradeoff. Faster charges? More weight. More capacity? Physically larger. Better heat management? More expensive materials. (Obviously just hypothetical examples)
To the point of the root comment, 700+ miles of range is outrageous when you can refuel in nearly the same time as an ICE vehicle just doesn't make a lot of sense. So why bother accepting the other tradeoffs? Make a battery that's 500 miles and doesn't eat through tires nearly as fast due to weight. Make a battery that charges in 20 minutes instead of 10 and make the trunk a normal size. What technical challenges painted them into this specific corner that they're not talking about?
90% of people don’t need SUVs and trucks, yet they still dominate sales.
And, 700 miles in EV, after you add all asterisks can easily become 350 miles.
It's not about being "triggered", it's asking the legitimate question of whether (and specifically, which) technical problems led them to these battery properties. I think we can all agree that this battery isn't going to be a miracle innovation, or they'd have hyped its lack of downsides. That being the case, we must admit that the battery has problems (acceptable to some consumers or not) and that the regular re-hyping of this vaporware is indeed an admission of technical failure in some way.
If someone invented a battery great in all dimensions except a low discharge rate, it would just be paired with a regular lithium battery to provide brief bursts of power for acceleration.
In fact, thats the way most fuel cell vehicles work (fuel cells are expensive, so you use one as small as possible and use it at full power all the time, storing any excess in a regular battery)
Also from 2014 https://www.autonews.com/article/20140127/OEM06/301279980/to...
There are two metrics that matter for Toyota:
- How much gwh per year of battery production can they get online and how soon? They need to shift production of millions of ICE/hybrid vehicles to fully electric. So, we're talking many hundreds of gwh here.
- How expensive are those batteries going to be in $/kwh? Toyota is mostly known for its affordable cars. They have a few luxury models of course but mostly, they sell cars to people that can't afford those. The battery is by far the most expensive thing in an EV. I'd expect them to look at cheap sodium ion batteries rather than some fancy solid state batteries.
Toyota is late to market and they don't have much more than a few concept cars and a few models that they pay BYD to produce for them. They are certainly starting to invest in production capacity. But it seems they are still a few years away from having much to show for their investments. Also, are they going to keep up with BYD, Nio, VinFast, and all those other asian manufacturers that are not holding back and are already producing EVs by the millions? Tesla is a category of its own at this point with a clear lead in terms of profitability and production cost. And you have the likes of Stellantis, Ford, and GM also trying to get e piece of the action. Toyota is a no show so far and the last 3 are showing the transition to electric is hard and involves a lot of learning and reinventing.
Toyota needs more than a magic battery to catch up.
The thing is current battery tech is still too expensive. Can you imagine what will happen to the price if the production levels of EVs went up?
It’s simply impossible to mass produce EVs cheaply at the moment.
What's going to happen in the next 3 years is that several of those Chinese manufacturers are bringing production capacity online in Europe and North America. And they will start selling these vehicles at a premium and make a lot of profit because they don't have much local competition in terms of cost. Tesla is rumored to be working on a cheaper EV but they will likely build it for the international market and manufacture it in their Mexican plant.
Meanwhile, the cost price of batteries keeps on dropping. CATL and other manufacturers are announcing new batteries all the time. For example CATL has had some success with bringing sodium ion batteries to market as well as LFP batteries. Component prices for EVs are dropping as well. It's not impossible to scale EV production. That's actually what's happening. Production volumes are growing year on year and cost per vehicle is trending down.
Batteries would be pushed further down the experience curve and they'd get cheaper?
I mean, this is a Silicon Valley related site, so I assume you all understand experience curves.
Edit: Although a bit of a bummer further down: "Toyota claims it will be ready for sale in 2027 or 2028."
I think is a fairly common situation in Europe, you might live in a city but relatives are away. You visit but don’t see the point of making a complex planning factoring cold weather, vehicle load, potentially broken chargers no your planned stop,….
And train is not an option if you are carrying a family of 5 or plan on moving around once you arrive.
Why adopt a solution that is worse than the status quo?
Of course that's also worse than the status quo (well, probably cheaper than the status quo, but less convenient), so I don't expect people to flock to that solution
If it lets you get rid of your cars, maybe.
If you also need a daily car (or even two), rental is not necessarily cheap, and beyond convenience it has flexibility issues.
For instance the rental closest to me is a half hour bus ride away, and not open on the weekends, and the prices can vary a lot depending on time to trip or period, and obviously the type of car can triple the rental price.
It’s worth it to me, because I can otherwise get by fine without owning a car. But if I need a daily anyway, it makes more sense to upscale it a bit and get the extra freedom. Especially if relatives start getting up in age and you never know when you need to pack up quick.
It’s the same issue with timeshare vehicles, if people have kids they’ll all need it at the same time (because school schedules), and you’ll always remember when it was not available for an emergency.
I just looked up a trip in A Better Route Planner in a Hyundai Ioniq 6 going on a trip around Texas, 495km trip. 4h44min total trip time, 8 minutes of charging.
Do you really not take a 10 minute break in nearly 5 hours of driving?
People who are willing to look into the situation on the ground tend to react positively
Now I'm married with kids. Even road trips in my ICE, I tend to stop more often and for a little longer than I would have otherwise. And you know what? Overall, my road trips are more enjoyable. I'm far less drained when I arrive. I'm less stressed on my drive. I'm more alert in the car for more of the trip. Its a much better experience in the end taking a few more breaks on a long road trip, and I look back at my previous min-maxing attempts in regret of stressing myself out so much unnecessarily.
The road trips I've done in my EV have been absolutely pleasant, and my EV isn't even that great for road trips.
Depends. If you believe climate change is a hoax pushed by evil liberals or whatever, the status quo is fine.
If you understand that it is real, then you know that keeping the status quo of burning oil means working towards destroying human civilization. Then it's easy to decide that mild inconvenience of charging an EV is worth keeping humanity around.
How many miles do you need to drive an EV until you break even on the emissions required to balance out manufacturing of the car, recycling of the battery and car once it has reached its max lifetime use, and how the electricity to charge your EV was generated?
If your concern is climate change, lobbying for EV use probably isn’t the biggest bang for the buck.
I’m not 100% convinced an EV is better for the environment when you consider all of the indirect emission sources.
(I’m bracing for the downvotes, but would much prefer to be proved wrong with citations and research studies)
Absolutely is not. Passenger road transport accounts for only about 10% of CO2 emissions[1], and reducing that is one of the more difficult approaches because you're asking millions of people to each change their personal habits which individually have essentially no impact.
State regulatory changes applying to large industrial emitters will have the biggest impact and while the costs will ultimately be borne by customers, it is more likely to actually happen. This includes both encouraging "green" energy production such as nuclear and renewables, as well as demanding capture and/or reduction of emissions.
My EV is already a bit over 26,000mi, so it's most likely past it's break even and I plan on probably putting another 100,000+ miles on it before I sell it.
BEVs last a week or more between charges. If you have a charger at work, supermarket, gym, or such, you just plug it in when you have a chance.
The e-up from VW is the cheapest one they sell. It's 30k, more than double than the combustion version. I simply cannot believe that the same car but with battery an e engine costs 16k more.
Best-selling EV in China after Model Y is BYD Yuan Plus, which costs ~20k USD. That's the niche VW has to compete for.
VW is just behind on EV tech, they don’t have much to offer their Chinese JV partners beyond a brand.
I just believe the profit margins on those 2 versions are wildly different.
Electric cars are more expensive to produce, for now at least, but that that price difference doesn't excuse a 2x price difference to the end customer.
ICE cars have had decades to bring down the cost of manufacturing, through shared components and improved manufacturing processes.
EVs are newer, with a lot of cost going into R&D that must be recouped and parts that aren’t shareable across their entire lineup of vehicles yet.
The simplicity of EVs results in reduced ownership cost though with little maintenance required
If you only have batteries for X amount of cars, selling X amount of expensive cars makes much more sense.
Also despite being conceptually simpler, the cost of the battery is still high.
Tesla hatte VW im zweiten Halbjahr 2022 die deutsche Elektroautokrone abgejagt. Nun verteidigte das Unternehmen von Elon Musk den Spitzenplatz. Der Vorsprung schrumpfte allerdings von 7400 auf 2000 Autos. Die Marktanteile der Marken lagen dabei bei 16,5 und 15,6 Prozent der insgesamt in Deutschland neu zugelassenen Elektroautos.
See also in English: https://www.best-selling-cars.com/electric/2022-full-year-ge...
That way they can sell cheap shitty cars without damaging their reputation for high end vehicles.
The many brands are mostly historical by consolidation in the industry.
So yes, Tesla sold more cars in Germany than the Volkswagen brand, but fewer than the Volkswagen group.
That's 560 kilos more than what Bill Gates said.
No not really. When they say 1200km that's under ideal conditions. Put a roof rack, a kayak or two bikes, load it up with 4 passengers and a trunk full of luggage, and drive up into the mountains on a hot summer day with the air conditioner on full blast, and you're probably looking at a range of 400km. And your destination probably doesn't have a place to charge overnight.
This whole "in one day" mentality is the problem. If you're going to the backcountry of death valley where there is absolutely no civilization, you want your vehicle to hold enough energy for your entire trip, not just for one day.
At any rate, most people never do all those things, nor do they go into some death valley. Because most of us don't like death.
As for the charging places, yes that is an issue. I never had trouble filling my horse with that gasoline stuff, either.
Yes but when most people talk about 400 miles of range in an ICE car they are usually referring to at least typical (==harsh, if you are in the western part of the US) conditions with AC on full blast and lots of mountains.
When EV companies boast 400 miles of range they're testing it on an ideal track. Very different.
I have a model 3 long range, advertised 358 miles, I get nowhere near that, more like 200 miles in realistic California conditions, which are (a) searing heat in the central valley in summer (b) mountains everywhere else (c) biting cold in the winter anywhere in the far north or far east part of the state (d) stop sign hell in the bay area which forces you to stop and go every block.
It's not necessarily about the range, there's also charging frequency. I personally don't have anywhere to charge my car where I live (apartment complex) so I have to go to my office building or my city hall/library, etc.. and of course pay for it, while I coordinate whatever errands I have to match the charging time. I would like to do that as seldom as possible.
If you charge a battery with anything near the capacity necessary for 1200 km range within ten minutes, you will need at least a charger with 1000 kW (1 MW) output power.
For perspective: The two new units at Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant have 1100 MW each.
Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come from?
I live in an apartment building that has no charging infrastructure.
Many people work from home.
If everyone charges at the same time, you still have issues with "where will all this power come from"?
I did the math for myself, and with how far and how often I go places, I would need to charge a 400 km range Hyundai Kona about once every two to three weeks.
I do have pretty favorable conditions, though (and mostly continue to use the bus).
But people who work in offices do?
> you probably don't drive hundred miles every day, and as such don't need to charge the car very often.
The question of "where to charge a car" remains.
> I would need to charge a 400 km range Hyundai Kona about once every two to three weeks.
Let's say I have the same math. Where would I charge the car?
For me, I have paid charging station right in front of my building, because the electric company recently added charging to all local substations. But for myself I would probably charge the car at free charging places in one of the nearby grocery stores, I usually stop there like once a week anyway. We're also trying to get our employer to enable charging in the office garage, but it's dragging a bit. The larger shopping mall I visit with friends for cinema also has free charging for customers.
It's not that many places, and people in countryside or suburbia who can charge EVs with free electricity from solar panels have it easier, but since people in who live apartments are probably covered by public transport or can bike or whatever, and as such don't really need to drive ever day, I'm not convinced charging EVs is not solved problem right now. We'll see how it scales up.
No, we're not. We're talking about electric cars. I mean, come on. It's not even ten replies above: "Who says you need to charge it in 10 minutes? Plug it in overnight or while you're in the office and suddenly this becomes a lot less of an issue."
> For me, I have paid charging station right in front of my building, because the electric company recently added charging to all local substations. But for myself I would probably charge the car at free charging places in one of the nearby grocery stores
I live in a suburb of 50 000 people, we have about twenty charging stations in total.
> but since people in who live apartments are probably covered by public transport or can bike or whatever, and as such don't really need to drive ever day, I'm not convinced charging EVs is not solved problem right now.
So, the question of how I would charge my EV still remains.
The infrastructure will get built in time as there is a greater need for it. Within my city of 40,00 there are probably over 100 charging stations. Though we are next to a larger metropolitan area. Most all have been added in last 4 years.
As far as EVs, if one is in an apartment with no charging infrastructure and have a relatively long daily commute, and poor charging access at the worksite, an EV is just a bad choice. If there is good charging at work, and the commute is short enough, then an apartment can work but it is still inconvenient to have an EV if you can't charge it while sleeping.
I think eventually more and more apartment owners are going to start using charging infrastructure as a marketing tool so perhaps it will get better over time.
Anyway my assumption was that someone would likely either have a driveway or a public transport. But I'm sure there are places that have neither - I'm just not sure how common that is.
Because most discussions about anything, really, are incredibly US-centric.
Most suburbia in Europe will have apartment buildings. Here's a typical suburb near Stockholm (I live in this one, close to the city): https://goo.gl/maps/rC65fRaPrv2PgjFp8 This one is 40 minutes away by commuter train: https://goo.gl/maps/pHvvwxtY88tfEGiv6 and https://goo.gl/maps/yQCkPtEGSSn8s2PJ8
Note: even though there are parking lots, no one is adding chargers to them because it's either too expensive or the existing infrastructure cannot support it.
The company that manages my building manages about 3000 apartment blocks around Stockholm. They recently sent a letter that they have found the possibility of equipping 200 (yup, two hundred) parking places with chargers.
In your case, we're not talking about some kind of physical or technological limitation but about politics - it would be very easy to add chargers to the parking lots, and it would be easy to have better public transport. It is not an EV problem, but municipal elections problem.
Because it is suburban. Are they not suburbs? Are they not apartment blocks?
> When I hear apartment, I imagine place like this: https://goo.gl/maps/hArPffCzEF8GZfHh6
Here's a different suburb: https://goo.gl/maps/1cNS3zAe76UgpDyb7 (Solna) and another https://goo.gl/maps/3CaqDMBrB9G1hhqu8 (Johanneshov).
Whatever to match your idea of an apartment blocks or suburbs or whatever other idea.
> we're not talking about some kind of physical or technological limitation but about politics - it would be very easy to add chargers to the parking lots
Literally in my text: "it's either too expensive or the existing infrastructure cannot support it."
But sure, it's easy.
> and it would be easy to have better public transport.
Stockholm has great public transport. You still need a car from time to time. And yet, all we hear is "it's trivial to charge, just"
It seems that if there aren't thousands of chargers in Stockholm as of today, then it is horribly terribly inconvenient to use EV. And since it will never get better, I guess we just have no choice than to keep burning oil and destroying the planet.
* Charge at work (1-3kW so not always enough to fill battery, and chargers need to be shared some days... But my commute isn't long enough that I'd need a full charge every day)
* While shopping at the grocery store (some by me have free charging, especially if you shop at non-peak times)
* There's a few chargers attached to lampposts on my street. $2/hr at 7kW, so cheaper for me than gas. Sometimes these are ICE'd out, but parking enforcement in my city recently got the ability to enforce EV-only parking spots
* Public library (free). There used to be some issues with vagrants but less so since the library got a security guard
* Movie theater
* Mall (the problem is that these are 350kW chargers, so the car is probably full too quickly to do any shopping)
* Most of my long drives are to visit family, so they usually have a 120v plug I can use. If you're in a place where the standard voltage is higher, this is even more viable. And there's plenty of 350kW chargers along the freeways.
Unknown. An interesting data point, however: Tesla's "V4" charger uses liquid cooled (!) conductors to supply 1KA at 1KV; 1MW.
I can't explain where they're getting that supply, but apparently they're doing it.
Does it? Can you show me a public Tesla charger that delivers 1 megawatt?
Apart from a little less efficiency from the fast charging - there's just as much total much power being used as if slow charging.
There's clearly more power.
Maybe Toyota has wised up to the game after getting backlash for commenting honestly on its realistic strategies.
In 2023, we want vaporware that promises to fix climate change by emitting 6x as much CO2 during production, but don't worry, it'll break even with ICEs after a mileage that the battery will never get to.
Generally EVs get to 15-20k miles without issue, which is the break even point on the optimistic side:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...
Even ~40-80k (the high estimate for break even) isn't that many miles / doesn't take long to achieve.
There's been a lot of FUD recently about EVs being more damaging to the climate than ICE, please correct it when you see it.
Or you could just charge it at 500 kW for 20 minutes.
Chargers out perform the batteries at present. No current passenger EV can sustain 350 kW across the whole charge curve.
If Toyota's battery will sustain a flat 500 kW or even a flat 350 kW for most of the charge curve then that's a very good thing.
The peak load is clearly not coming from the grid. One issue would be that that power is relatively expensive. Using that kind of is a last resort. Instead you'd want a lot of on site battery that can provide lots of power quickly and can soak up power from nearby solar panels, or cheap night time grid power. Easy to say because that is already how a lot of fast chargers work. If you operate these commercially, ensuring access to cheap power is key.
Also, just because people buy bigger batteries doesn't mean they actually drive more or use more kwh. It just means they can spread out their charging a bit more. Which means fast chargers would be something they would need to use less.
With a battery that large, you'd almost never run out as driving that kind of distance on a single day would be very rare for most people. And honestly the few times you actually do that, take some breaks.
This charging pattern is of course already the case for EVs with far smaller batteries. Most EV owners rely more on overnight slow charging than fast charging. With a battery that big you might get away with never having to use a fast charger at all.
If you're asking "where do we get the power plants", that is a valid concern, especially as we want to get rid of coal power plants at the same time.
But ultimately it is not that much power - I did a back of the envelope calculation for my country and converting annual vehicle-miles driven into kWh with average EV efficiency ended up adding 11 % increase in electricity consumption.
Not sure how it stacks up with other countries, and yes, we need more and cleaner power, but 11 % increase is not insurmountable problem.
If you're asking "how does that much power gets places", electric trains routinely run as much power. My city runs hundreds of trams that take over 700 kW each, and full power electric locomotive usually takes about 5 MW. The grid already knows how to handle it.
1 Megawatt really isn't that much.
For a given size of EV fleet and usage amount it doesn't matter if they charge quickly or slowly from your power plants point of view, higher power charging means there is correspondingly fewer cars charging concurrently since they finish quicker.
Next generation batteries from their competitors are already hitting the market and the new Li-on is expected next year with double capacity which will match Toyota's stated battery and CATL are unlikely to be lying. Toyota has been talking about this since 2017 and nothing has been shown so far, whereas CATL have shown the tech off.
This coming year looks like it's finally the year when all the promises of new battery technology actually happens in volume.
I think people have a disbelief that there have been large improvements in battery lifespan in the last 20 years when there absolutely has been. Modern ion batteries aren't just 20 year old ones but cheaper. Degradation and charge discharge rates are substantially better.
Just search sodium ion on AliExpress and you will get all sorts from 18650s andmother sizes as well as pouch batteries in various quantities. The voltage curve on them is really extreme compared to Li-on, should make estimating SOC very reliable.
Because they don't actually have the technology and the manufacturing figured out and this is just marketing.
I'll believe it when I see it on a car.
To this end, It doesn’t matter whether there is any credible plan to deliver said research project.
[0] https://www.cars.com/articles/electric-vehicles-with-the-lon...
https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/
Some cars like the Porsche Taycan out perform their EPA range, other cars like the Tesla Model S under perform their EPA range.
[0] - https://www.electrive.com/2021/12/20/mercedes-buses-with-sol...
The 'solid state' technology in buses that is talked about in that article is a totally different thing. That tech has been known to exist for a long time and is a totally different technology that has nothing to do with the hype around 'solid state'. Its 'lithium-polymer' that as a far narrower application and isn't all that interesting and certainly not some amazing next generation battery.
This is a sad issue in battery marketing world where people mix up what these technologies actually mean.
my brother in christ, literally the entire world not only prefers metric, but it’s the only one we know
like, i don’t mind seeing miles, esp given that it’s a US publication, and i already pretty much automatically convert from miles to km in my head, but please be humble with your silly system :)
On one hand, Toyota is pretty good at scaling things up. On the other hand, they have not shown scaling it up, they have shown doing a thing.
We'll have to see. The time is running out.
What they showed is a bench experiment. What they need is a battery which is proven capable in an EV — in terms of resilience, power handling, environmental tolerances, etc. The challenge is scaling THAT up.
Toyota reminds me of Microsoft when the internet went mainstream. Very slow to respond, but once they got their giant tanker turned in the right direction they were all in. I suspect Toyota will be the same.
Title: With The 745-mile Solid-state Battery, Toyota Just Became A Force To Reckon With
1st link in article: Toyota's Solid-State Batteries Will Offer Over 900 Miles On A Single Charge
2nd link: Toyota's Solid-state Batteries Will Offer A Range Of 745 Miles And Charge In Under 10 Minutes!
- First-gen solid-state batteries will allow up to 745 miles of range.
- Second-gen solid-state batteries will push this to 932 miles.
It’s a distraction tactic.
I don’t know what they’re buying time for but it had better be good else this won’t end well for Toyota.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/04/toyota-clai...
Indeed. In fact from the article it would appear to be vaporware with no hard evidence at all.
My company is actually developing new lithium-metal battery chemistry that uses existing process for manufacturing, this is much more cost-effective and lower risk. You can just slightly retool an existing lithium-ion factory to pump out these new batteries.
Large-scale lithium-ion ever became a thing because Sony pumped a ton of R&D into walkmans.
I think this just speaks to how much of an advancement this is, if true.
Like, this new battery technology is so advanced that there is no infrastructure for it yet.
I could run a class 2 charger at my house and that’s only a 1” conduit, but those take half a dozen hours to deliver that current. You’re gonna need a lot more shielding.
Going back to charging, for a circuit the size this would likely need your be looking at something with at least 3 1 inch wires, and would be at least 2.5 inches in diameter when packaged. It likely needs cooling too which means even more diameter.
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by the time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks to original poster!
https://pressroom.toyota.com/facility/toyota-battery-manufac...
Perhaps solid state batteries will first appear on luxury lines. If you're already spending $90k for an EV, what's another $50k for the new battery?
Instead of 80% I'd say optimal voltage but I don't know what that is, and the car doesn't show me the battery voltage.
Why isn't there a setting to charge to optimize battery longevity? Even if that means the battery is at 70% or 75% or whatever.
Often I get home with 60%. Should I wait until I get home with < 50% before charging? Or just keep it at 80%?
Just like every other battery announcement. Progress is progress though, so good news.
I don’t understand why people think just because you are late to market means you can’t get market share - or even dominate. Cars aren’t operating systems or social media platforms, there is no network effect.
Heck, Toyota entered the US car market when US manufacturers like GM and Ford were long established.
I think they will eventually not try. They see the writing on the wall and know they will be bankrupt and dissolved in some years. Thus spreading FUD about EVs plus promising much better EV of their own to simply slow down this process to make some final bucks before going bust. That is the smartest thing they can do at this point.
They have experience with electric drive trains/motors with the hydrogen vehicles and experience with batteries with their (plugin) hybrids.
They just haven't bothered to release a full EV for whatever reason. Maybe they don't think it will be profitable at the moment and it will hurt sales of more profitable existing product lines.
> Thus spreading FUD about EVs
Are they wrong about their concerns over the supply of lithium? Or that for many people EV won't be an option - due to lack of infrastructure in their countries, range issues, ... etc.
As for supplies of lithium - supply is created when there is demand. Surely today's lithium reserves are insufficient, just as existing oil reserves were insufficient for even the whole eventual production run of Ford Model T when it was first launched. Reserves are created by demand, we should ignore current data: when there is demand, miners will find and give it to us.
Of the top 10, five were German models. The top two, ID.4 and Enyaq are essentially the same car and combined outsold the only Tesla model, Model Y.
Yes Tesla has a tech advantage currently. Their advantage isn't magic though, and for some people other things matter more.
However I will agree that Toyota has some serious work ahead to get back into the lead here in Norway.
Bad news. Todays EVs are going straight to the landfill. Yet another hit for the environment. If only there was a more efficient transportation option…
While such fires are extremely rare, they have happened, and scare at least some of the potential market.
Considering that there are definitely those that do not buy a EV for fear of fire, that could be a selling point.
Their current hybrids are nice, though.
Every car band is moving into the EV space. These companies are lumbering beasts, but after moving with "deliberate speed" for a few years, it's becoming noticeable. I see electric VWs and BMWs on the roads locally, along with Hyundai, Kia, Polestar and of course Teslas.
There are plenty of hybrid Toyota Priuses around, but for pure EVs, Toyota is the outlier, the laggard, the company that appears to have made the wrong bet and is now struggling to catch up.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
How far are they behind really though? They have been working on hydrogen fuel cell (i.e. they generate electricity) cars ... isn't that practically the same thing except the power source is different? Serious question.
No, it's totally different.
"Hydrogen-powered vehicles don’t need charging like an electric vehicle. You refuel them with hydrogen gas, pumped in the same safe and convenient way you would a conventional petrol or diesel car" https://www.toyota.co.uk/hydrogen/how-do-i-charge-a-hydrogen...
You can't fuel an hydrogen car on the new electric infrastructure, or vice versa.
> isn't that practically the same thing except the power source is different
Nuclear power stations and coal power stations are same thing except the power source is different.
Sure, it's the same except for all the many things that are different.
Edit: And do they make plugin hybrids - https://www.toyota.com/priusprime/
If your question is "why isn't Toyota just catching up since the differences are so minor in my mind?" maybe ask them, but we haven't seen it happen yet. I've driven Toyotas and liked it, I'd welcome more Toyota full EVs, but they seem to be struggling with full EVs so maybe it's not that minor in practice. That's the main thing that I can tell you.
I'm sure you can google on the topic, takes that are sympathetic https://insideevs.com/news/650150/toyota-says-ev-extremists-... mixed https://slate.com/business/2023/01/toyota-electric-vehicles-... and negative https://thedriven.io/2023/01/30/toyota-faces-disaster-unless...
I'll add a couple of things that I do know: car companies that have been in business for decades and operate at huge scale in big factory assumbly lines across global supply chains are, as I said above, "lumbering beasts", the new models are planned multiple years in advance. They don't turn on a dime, changes in Toyota management this year translate to new models on sale in 2026 or thereabouts. VW, BMV etc have a head start, as they have EV models out right now, and not the 1st generation of them either - e.g. I see VW ID3s locally, and the VW ID6 will be out by end 2023. Toyota's 2026 model will compete with an ID6 successor. And a Polestar 4 successor, etc. This is hard, from a standing start.
You mentioned the Prius. Toyota owns this market, sure. I see lots of them around, it's the vehicle of choice for "minicab" private hire taxis. But for Toyota, that's also an barrier to doing anything that takes sales away from that market.
If it was so easy to pivot to full EVs, would people be saying "Toyota faces disaster unless new CEO performs miracle" ?
As to why they haven't executed and delivered a car, who knows. Could be lack of profitability at the projected numbers they could sell vs cost to bring up a manufacturing line - in addition to, as you mentioned, cannibalization of more profitable products. VW, BMW, ... etc. are they making money or just eating losses selling EVs right now?
Maybe they aren't rushing it, it is a relatively new type of "engine/fuel" for them, and they want all the kinks and gotchas worked out before they release something to preserve their reputation for reliability.
That said, just because they haven't released anything doesn't necessarily mean they can't.
It is not quite right to say that "they haven't released anything", there is e.g, the Toyota bZ4X, widely regarded as a really bad car (1). And other EVs that have made no impact (2)
1) https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/26/toyota-bz4x-first-revie...
So technically they have "joined the party". Granted they don't seem fully committed yet and don't seem to be trying very hard - based on the review you linked, they have QC problems ... on the wheels; and they haven't put much marketing muscle behind the others. At least they have a foot in the door.
Given that they're claiming it'll make it into customer hands no earlier than 2027, and there's countless ways a new technology can take longer than predicted, and Toyota has no experience manufacturing battery cells anyway, no. They're still not a company "to be reckoned with" yet.
Toyota might well end up being the Nokia of the EV world, modulo the Japanese Government's preparedness to do GM-style bailouts.
That was actually funny. Otherwise, please call me back when vehicles with such batteries will be available.
Very funny...
Problems are A, B, C, and D, and Toyota solved X and Y. What gives?
- battery-powered toys run out of power at inconvenient times; that's our benchmark
- gasoline fuel stations are everywhere, and we know it takes 5-10 minutes for everything to be completed
- we can't afford to have a second vehicle just for long-range trips, so our annual longest trip is what we think about. Adding 30 minutes to every 10 minute stop might or might not be a problem
- we've all had the experience of waking up a little late, needing to get somewhere immediately, and then realizing that we need to fuel the car -- and that makes us 5 minutes late. If the equivalent makes us 35 minutes late, that's not acceptable
- in five years, is this car going to be undrivable because the batteries only hold half as much charge? Is it going to be worth much less because it needs a new $10K battery pack?
But the number one reason why people aren't buying electric cars is the same reason they aren't buying new cars: too damn expensive. US passenger car sales peaked in 1986. In 2018 they were lower than any year since 1951, and they have sunk even lower in every year since.
1951 car sales: 5.3 million
1986 car sales: 11.4 million
2018 car sales: 5.3 million
2022 car sales: 2.86 million
You can even just pump some out of a passing car if you have a long enough hose and lungs.
Now I've never owned an EV and I suspect there is a way to use one car as a charger for another, in which case the latter becomes less of a point the more EVs are on the road. OTOH I imagine it would still take quite a while longer to get enough charge to drive to the nearest charging point than it does to transfer a little liquid fuel though.
https://insideevs.com/news/449438/sparkcharge-shark-tank-dea...
Also, I don’t think the point of comparison is battery-powered toys. People have experience with electric tools (I can’t even vacuum my living room properly and with good conscience with the meager battery life the top-of-line battery vacuums offer!) which is probably a fairer comparison.
BEVs report remaining battery very reliably, and keep going even at 1% (way better than all your gadgets). But you're very unlikely to even get a close call, because you plan charging stops before you leave (good EVs plan them automatically).
DC rapid chargers can add 50 miles of range in 5 minutes (nearly empty batteries charge fastest). 5min emergency on a 1h drive doesn't seem too bad. Traffic adds more uncertainty.
-Low-ish battery and cold temps are on the way? You are prompted to charge the night before.
- Planning to go somewhere, you don’t have sufficient range, and no chargers available on the way? Flashing red alert.
- Planned charging stop and there’s a power outage at that location? Automatically rerouted to the next best stop.
- Actually driving and don’t have enough range to get there? You are prompted to pick a charging stop or drive under 60mph.
Way ahead of a gas vehicle in preventing accidentally running out of power/gas.
Here is ProLogium's solid state battery failing to fail after it's been shot with a bullet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOubFHO1I3o
Here is Ionic Materials' solid state battery failing to fail after it's been cut with scissors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik
Can people who upvoted this please explain why they did? Thanks!
So at the very least, the article is a nice heads-up to me and others alike that are somewhat on the fence about EVs, that some of our concerns may very well be assuaged.
Until very recently, EV's weren't even a consideration for me, because of their limitations on range, but also because of difficulty of charging them if you lived in a condo or an apartment (heck, my current car is a Mazda, a company which _just_ started offering EVs in some markets). Because of that, I am not well versed in the specific details of the current generation of EVs. With that said, anecdotally, I have heard of old Prius hybrids getting 100k miles out of their batteries, but that was a decade ago. I don't know what modern battery chem is capable of.
I want them to be one of the leaders of next generation vehicles, what ever the technology, only because it means they will continue to support their previous generation vehicles, for which they have an honourable history.
I want my BJ74 landcruiser to run on diesel until it’s no longer available, and then I want it to run as a hybrid/electric vehicle until like the ship of Theseus we are debating whether or not it’s still a BJ74.
If we can get a battery with a massive range then charging issues subside a bit and these vehicles become much more viable for most if not all of the US.
Should be the first, last, and, honestly, single line of the discussion. We need those battery breakthrough yesterday, and we're still stuck with press releases and misleading car ranges.
I'll give all the credit due as soon as I can aford a car that let me drive the 500km of highway separating my house from my mom's with less than 2 charges. For all those who're readying to chant the gospel of Elon and tout the range of they model W, noticed how I used the word "afford".
And I'm a f-ing software engineer with the purchasing power of at least two people with a real job - and those two people would not mind getting an EV to get to their real jobs, too.
The clock is ticking, people are working hard, in the end the laws will force the car manufacturers to do what the market could not - but damn, in the meantime, am I tired of press releases...
I absolutely know you can recoup a part of that in the long run, especially given the price of gas, etc... But at the moment I'm already indebted to do insulation work in my house - there's a limit to how much an individual can invest at any given point, even if the investment is sure to pay off.
And again, remember that you have to be _rich_ to afford such a car. Real people are already having a hard time buying second hand cars at around 5000€/10000€.
I realize I don't have any real data point, so let's digg in.
At current exchange rate, $20000 is 18000€. I checked the 3 most sold cars for last year in France [1], and the listed price range from 12k€ to 16k€.
So, it's not obvious that a 18k€ car is "cheap" - but it's just a napkin computation.
I'm surprised to learn that each model accounts for a pretty small percentage of the total sales, around 5% each. I would have expected more for at least the top salers.
If we wanted to get a real sense of what "cheap" means, what would make more sense in your opinion ?
- A simple "average" of the prices ?
- A weighted average of the prices, taking the percentage of sales into account ?
Also, in the distribution, do you define "cheap" as "the lower half" ? "the last decile" ?
[1] https://www.caroom.fr/guide/voiture-neuve/meilleures-ventes#...
But in the non-fantasy version of 2023, they're selling EVs with weird tradeoffs, like how the bz4x AWD version has a worse charging experience than the RWD