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Comment by turblety | Hacker News Reader

Great, yet another new battery revelation that will never come to market. Why is this? Why do we constantly hear of these amazing, technical advances, but yet we never see any of it come to market?

- Lithium-Sulfur Batteries

- Solid-State Batteries

- Sodium-Ion Batteries

- Aluminum-Ion Batteries

- Silicon Anode Batteries

- Magnesium-Ion Batteries

- Lithium-Air Batteries

- Zinc-Air Batteries

- Flow Batteries

- Graphene-Based Batteries

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Some discoveries founder in the stage of figure out how to go from a science experiment to a process to manufacture actual batteries. Sometimes there are technical or economic issues that prevent commercialization.

Most of the research on this has only started in the last 10 years or so and it does take time to work out the kinks.

Even within the common Lithium-ion batteries, there have been constant improvements but it’s easy to miss the changes over time.

“Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose” https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

Did you know Tesla Megapacks have declined in price by 44% over the past 14 months? Sometimes the changes become very visible.

Seriously for real?

Why did the price of the cars not drop accordingly? Curious.

They have ? Tesla has made aggressive price cuts in the last year or so .

Yes, partly it was to simulate demand, but they can only afford to do so because of their costs going down.

Tesla has not been spending on a lot of new models recently , but they have been spending heavily on making them cheaper and better.

Rivian, ford GM and every other non Chinese car manufacturer has been loosing money per car expect Tesla for a reason

Supply and demand

The price of their cars did drop.

For example, look at the price of the Model Y over that time period.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221129054722/https://www.tesla...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240701220914/https://www.tesla...

Sodium-Ion is actually starting to ship. It's possible to buy 18650 cells. Not exactly competitive yet, but at least it's not vaporware.

Umm, a good number of those have hit the market.

Graphene anodes are pretty bog standard at this point in LiPo batteries.

Magnesium doping has also found its way into high density NMC batteries.

Sodium-ion batteries are currently being manufactured by CATL and in the ramping up phase.

You aren't seeing them because the chemistry of these batteries is usually only called "lithium ion" or "Sodium Ion" the various other chemicals are thrown into a soup of special sauce to raise battery density, cycle life, charge speed, etc.

One thing to note is that "coming to market" means being able to compete in the market.

And this is tough. There are only so many market niches, and if some competing technologies turn out to be better your product has no place.

This is the tragedy of engineering: most technologies, even technologies that "work", end up failing, because in any niche there can be only one winner. I'm sure if you've worked on new technologies you've experienced this, perhaps on every technology you've ever worked on.

EOS Energy (zinc-bromide grid-scale batteries), just christened their first automated manufacturing line and have entered mass production.

They've been around forever, originally with zinc-air batteries. That must have failed somehow.

Does this comment have a purpose?

If they're still rolling out new manufacturing lines, they are clearly still kicking and have investors who believe they have a viable product.

Did they have to move on from one technology? I mean I've never heard of them before but if you say so, that's not really that surprising with how fast with battery technology is evolving.

Yes, it's that they have a history of promoting a technology that never arrived.

Use of bromine doesn't sound terribly practical.

One reason seems to be that lithium-ion batteries are nowhere near as expensive and difficult to manufacture as advocates of the other battery technologies seem to want us to believe. Basically, the other batteries don't come to market because there is no market.

And as the other poster suggests, quite a bit of R&D does make it into existing devices in one form or another. All of these technologies are worth exploring, but the notion that replacing present lithium battery tech is super urgent is not actually correct.

If you're only interested in technologies ready for imminent public distribution, you should probably ignore coverage about early research and check out press releases from battery manufacturers. If that's not good enough... try amazon?

because the need for them has spiked resulting in an unprecendented level of R&D going into them in recent years? And R&D into tons of different approaches is a good thing, actually? And because it's frankly a young field of research? This is a publication from academia - of course they're trying new things! That's the entire point! That's their job!

The incessant press releases suck but PR people gonna PR.

Propaganda ? Someone has an agenda. /s

TBH, there are a lot of "news" with conditional: might, could etc. The sad thing is that they generate (spam) discussions on HN.

But hey, after all, maybe that's their purpose.

Because the market is made up of selfish human beings. First they don't care for long term environmental consequences. If that is not enough, then they use fossil because their enemies are using, and not using it means getting destroyed today.

What this person said isn't even true, what are you talking about?

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