BYD and CATL aim to launch new EV batteries with 6C charge rate

Yes, the lithium shortage was heavily predicted.

Now it's a cobalt shortage. Most of these "shortages" ignore what can happen when prices rise and/or are regulatory shortages rather than actual shortages.

When folks talk about cycle life being limited, the cobalt and other items may be re-usable after in a new battery production. A 6c is an insane charge rate. There may be cases where the cost / benefit works for something like this if they can deliver.

The common hiccup in many battery stories is just the lab theory -> production reality curve. It's one thing to have a solid state battery that charges in seconds on a lab bench doing 1 picowatthour and another to have 1 megawatthour of storage.

NMC batteries are already common in EVs. I’d bet that it’s the most common chemistry by far. Most Teslas have NMC batteries for example, with the shorter range ones more recently moving to LFP.

The trade-offs you list are real, but we already have data showing NMC batteries lasting many miles (1,000 cycles at 250 miles per cycle is a long way) and fire risks of EVs have already been shown to be many times less than ICE vehicles.

I wonder if that wouldn't allow gas stations to add EV charging stations. The square surface of a gas station is rather limited, which is not an issue when you can fill up in a minute or so. But if it takes you 30 minutes to recharge, the gas station can't serve enough customers to sustain their business. However, if you can get to a full charge in 10 minutes or 80% in 5 (I'm guess the last 20% is slower, etc.), then EV charging can become a viable business for gas stations.

Range anxiety has more to do with density of charging stations.

I feel zero range anxiety in my Tesla when I'm in Austin, Houston, or Dallas. When I drive to somewhere like Galveston that has 0 superchargers, I feel anxiety because there's not one around if I need it.

However I do completely agree that a 10m full charge time could be a game changer for increasing adoption. I don't mind the 15-20m average charge time, but for people like my mom (boomer) who have zero patience, a gas-station speed charging situation would be huge.

Range anxiety is overblown anyway for most drivers. I have a 220 mile range Nissan Leaf and have only experienced range anxiety once.

I mean, the problem with charging isn't really the charge times right now. It's the fact that every non-Tesla charger is a piece of shit... and the fact that you need an account on every single different charging company, and some app on your phone that won't work properly.

I honestly doubt it. People with "range anxiety" will keep moving the goal post. They'll complain A) that's still not fast enough, B) there aren't enough public chargers, C) "the grid can't handle it."

What we have right now is good enough for a lot of people. I don't live in the most EV friendly area, but I know a few people who own EVs with no at home charging. And one of my Tesla owning neighbors parks his car in the driveway regularly, only charging occasionally.

If gasoline shortages hit tomorrow, a whole lot of people claiming they couldn't own an EV because of the limitations would figure out how to make it work.

The CLTC testing regime is ridiculous. They put the car on a dyno and then have it spin the speedo up to 50kph, 80kph, and 110kph for like 15km indicated on the odo to compute the range.

It's incredibly easy to show excellent range when there is no wind resistance to worry about and you don't have to accelerate the car's actual mass around. It's basically a test of rolling resistance. Not quite a perfectly spherical horse oscillating in a pure harmonic motion, but much closer to that then an actual road test. A good rule of thumb is to cut the CLTC figure in half to estimate actual range, cutting it even more if the car is especially brick like.

Charging stations in remote locations use batteries to smooth the load so that they don't need a 2.5MW connection.

I'm not into the latest EV power transfer technology, but that's more than the rating of a neighborhood distribution transformer per car. That's an insane amount of power to have someone casually handling. Would there be additional rules like in a gas station when charging up? Those cables and connectors must be massive as well.

Vehicle to load type solutions will make the grid impact of EVs negligible. In fact over time it will help stabilize the grid and add storage for peak solar/wind generation. Imagine having most vehicles plugged in at an office building during the day for example, in a power outage the office building would be able to run off of the vehicles. Nissan in fact has such a setup[1]

1. https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/STORIES/RELEASES/nissan-wor...

I believe that we CAN make EVs work with the grid in a way that's good for both, but I increasingly worry about political fights about EVs and grid stability.

12 x 350kW charging stations being installed at the moment, so presumably that work to prepare the grid has already been done.

The trip was totally fine though. Apart from lunch we only stopped for 1x15min per leg during 7 hours of driving.

Chances are when these batteries become commonplace, there will be chargers for it (eventually, in some cases)

On a recent trip home from the airport, there were 4 charging stations in range, three of which are 60kW, so I drove to the 150kW station.

Except 3/4 of the chargers there were out of order, and the remaining one was going at 30kW and there was a line.

After that drive, there was only one other station in range so I want there. There were 3 working 60kW chargers and an ICE’d in L2 charger and I was #2 in line.

When I finally got plugged in, it turns out that although the system purported to accept payment by credit card, you had to interact with the touch screen to do so, except the screen wasn’t actually a touch screen. So I downloaded the app, set the car charging, and went to lunch. And decided not to take the EV to the airport again until there are more DC chargers between there and home.

All of this was in Oregon.