150kWh NIO ES6 Battery (2023) | Hacker News Reader

150kWh NIO ES6 Battery (2023)

batterydesign.net

20 pointscolinprince5 comments

The EV revolution does not look like this. There's likely nickel cobalt scaling issues in this battery.

The true EV revolution is cell to pack high density LFP and sodium ion which will beat ice in cost and have little to no material scaling issues.

There appears to be no substantial metrics about groundbreaking cost per kwhr. The density is decent at the pack level.

It is a big pack.

If manufacturing a 80kWh EV emits between 2,400kg and 16,000kg of CO2, then manufacturing a 150kWh EV might emit between 4,500kg and 30,000kg of CO2. Or perhaps more if you consider that a chunk of the 80kWh manufacturing pollution estimate is in the parts other than the battery. If building an EV with an 80kWh battery emits 80% more CO2 than building a gas car, then manufacturing a gas car emits between 1,333kg and 8,888kg of CO2.

So it costs between 3,167kg and 21,112kg of additional CO2 to build a 150kWh EV than it does to build a gas car. At .35kg of CO2 per mile to drive a gas car and .2kg of CO2 per mile to drive an EV, it takes between 21,113 miles and 140,746 miles of driving before your typical gas car pollutes less than a 150kWh EV.

Splitting that range down the middle, if both a 150kWh EV and a typical gas car both don't make it to about 81,000 miles before they become scrap metal one way or another, then a EV will have ended up polluting more than the gas car. By point of reference, my current BEV with a 100kWh battery has only made it to 24k miles in 4 years. It will take maybe 6 more years before it starts being better for the environment than an efficient gas car would have been.

I'd say that if you're going to buy an EV for environmental reasons, you should get one with the smallest battery you can get by with. A LEAF will cross the "better for the environment" threshold much more quickly. A 150kWh battery seems, well, a bit extravagant.

Sources:

- https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-co2-emitted-manufac...

- https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/are-electric-vehicles-defini...

Nio offers battery swapping, so the idea is that you do your daily commute with a small 40-80kWh battery and only swap to a gigantic 150kWh battery if you do a road trip.

For other cars this kind of battery size makes not much sense, which is why the vast majority of electric cars sold in the world have a battery sizes between 40 and 80 kWh [1].

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/electric-vehicle-sales-by-m...

I don't think you can just scale everything linearly by kWh. Total manufacturing emissions need to include all other car components, and there's literally a ton of them, plus overheads of running manufacturing plants, transport, etc.

Plus they're claiming a significant mass reduction, which if true, should mean that the battery doesn't use as much raw material as a simple scaling of older tech would suggest.

See also [1] "NIO's 150-KWh Battery Pack Reveals Its Secrets Ahead of Schedule in New Owner's Manuals"

[1] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/nio-s-150-kwh-battery-pac...

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