BYD has already produced its first solid-state cells
electrive.com
electrive.com
Most people think current AI development is the most important research, I actually think ASSB ( or any massive battery improvement ) would bring us far more real life, quality improvement with things that previously were not possible.
Though I think for ground transportation, batteries will always be preferable.
Another interesting technology is redox flow batteries. The fluid itself is charged. Fluid storage can be sized to the charge/use requirements. Or you can haul in "charged" fluid. But since the fluid is not consumed, discharged fluid would need to be taken away. Making hauling is less efficient.
EVs:
+ Much simpler design
+ Literally zero maintenance required
+ Centralized power production is extremely efficient
+ Power production can be 100% carbon free in 10 years, if there's will with nuclear and other 'renewables'
+ Can be charged literally everywhere where's sun in theory, but in every home with outlet in practice
+ Batteries are crucial to every part of our tech today so they will become better
- Heavy (low energy density compared to fuel, which isn't great for planes etc)
+ high energy density
+ less dirty than gasoline
+ allow oil producers to stay in business
+ keeps mechanics in business
- requires mechanics and expensive maintenance
- complex designs for combustion engines + gearboxes + drive trains
- requires immense infrastructure change to adopt
But for consumers, what is the point of fuel cells? This is honest question.
If I missed some con/pro let me know I'll add it.
You say this dismissively, but that's exactly what it is.
The basic problem with renewable energy (especially solar and batteries) is that there is no way for the existing fossil energy industry to replicate the extractive oligopolies around the production, delivery, and utilization of energy that they have with oil and gas.
Or just throw away combustion engines where they are not needed.
That's exactly what fuel cell vehicles are today. They just don't have a plug or a battery with enough capacity to make a plug worthwhile.
"Better charging networks" is infrastructure rollout that is underway. If it's an engineering issue, it's civil engineering. Charging networks are on the whole continually getting better. But maybe not at a fast enough pace.
Both can happen, though. Both would make a difference.
And we know that EVs are not for saving our climate, it's for saving the car industry. Don't look up.
We only have level one charging at home. It’s fine.
The biggest remaining problem is having to go to multiple charging stations during long trips every once in a while, usually because Electrify America says they have open stalls when they do not.
That seems fixable.
EV charge times improved a lot in the last 9 years. Even better batteries would be better, of course.
However, my bigger concern is energy efficiency.
Tesla’s mile/kwh is much higher than comparable cars from the other manufacturers. It’s not clear if the other companies will catch up, since they’re hard-wired to build gas guzzlers.
There are undoubtedly people who like to take frequent breaks. Many people are not like that. The future is both ubiquitous chargers and much larger battery capacity.
We should have mandated PHEVs 20 years ago for consumer cars (you know, with a 5-10 year transition period), but it was the Bush administration. Then again Obama and Biden didn't do that much either, and even California didn't do and still hasn't.
Most people drive significantly less than a full charge in a given day. Overnight or workplace charging solves like, 95% of car needs. And remember, it's not much of a problem if 5% or less of road cars need to still be (efficient) fossil fuel cars.
Battery advances should mainly be used to make cars lighter at decent range, not to give more range at same weight. Electric cars are too heavy in the current state, fixing that should come first.
If I could rely on every Rasthof having multiple functional EV chargers, I think range anxiety would be far, far less of an issue for me, but as of now it's something that I do think about for longer trips, and do have to plan for.
> supercharges, which are everywhere
Not really? That's the whole point, that the availability of fast chargers is still very low.
Thats… not obvious at all. Unless you’re within the super small part of society that can charge at home, you might be as well starting with 20 or 30% - exactly the same as with a regular car.
I expect that most people living in NYC do not have a single family house with a garage and a garden.
Plus, cities in countries over on this side of the pond provide street charging and even have legislation about maximum distance to a charger. Parking garages and lots also provide charging. Not as convenient as living in a house with a charger where you can always plug in at night (and possibly use private solar cells for extra benefit), but good enough for most commuting.
It sadly doesn't work like that. Range is reduced by about 25% in the cold. Further, one doesn't charge 0-100% at stations. They charge 10-80%. This is suggested by Tesla because the last 20% takes longer than the first 70%. So the effective range on a new standard range Tesla Model Y is 455 * 0.75 * 0.7 = 239km between stops. Assuming Tesla's 455km initial estimate is accurate, and it's not really. It tends to overestimate, so in reality, it's less than 239km. Especially at highway speeds.
A 1,000 mile journey would require approximately 7-8 stops, depending on charge at journey start and end.
Much closer to 300km, unless you’re driving in high traffic. You’ll be able to keep around 140 km/h.
The fact that someone decides to make this trade-off purely based on their own impatience is the frustrating reason for why cars had to ship with speed limiters in the first place, and why the the autobahn might end up getting global speed limits which may or may not ruin the fun at places like the Nürburgring.
And no, the range impact is no surprise nor isolated to electric cars. Even in a diesel polo bluemotion that on a good day can do over 1000 km on a tank, my experience is that spirited highway driving easily takes off 25% of the range, and I wouldn't be surprised if your described driving would leave it with less than 50% of the advertised range.
You do know we're talking about the Autobahn, right? One of the safest, most well-maintained road networks in the world? It's fine that you prefer to drive slowly on such roads, but many people prefer to drive faster. It sounds like you are well suited for EVs.
It is irrelevant what the road is, or how fast people prefer to drive. It's not a race track, other drivers are not race drivers, the road is not maintained to race track standards, and cars and drivers are not equipped with race safety equipment. Your driving must be able to safely handle a car or truck going 80 swerving in front of you with no prior warning just as you pass it, and at 210 that's equivalent to crashing into a stationary object at 130 km/h (i.e., everyone and their cat dies).
Unsafe, depends. It's definitely less safe than going slower. Agree on that. In my eyes,however, "unsafe" depends on traffic, weather, road, vehicle, experience, etc. 200 in a Polo is sketchy, 200 in a clapped out Polo with cheap, old all seasons is an emotional experience, 200 on a bike is the top of 3rd gear, 200 in an M4/911 is about the same.
Speed limiters, if we're talkiing about the same implementation (not Volvo being Volvo), came more so as a means of upselling (AMG driver's pack or whatever they called it) and to keep people from doing speeds unsafe even on a closed course in the very long overdrive gears.
I'm also not about to go 140 because the Autobahn (+Nordschleife) might get a speed limit. If there's a speed limit added, I'll follow it to the best of my ability but I don't believe I'm being particularly asocial by staying in the left and giving it some chooch when I believe it's safe to do so. I'm not weaving, I flash very, very rarely, on the bike I'll only kill myself most likely, with the cars I'm even more careful with traffic since I can't squeeze by and am much more likely to hurt others in an accident, when doing a top speed run I abort if there's traffic in the next lane, if I'm going out to do one I do so at 2-3AM in bumfuck nowhere..
Anyway, what I meant was that, while I haven't done any scientific testing, it seemed like the Tesla's range was impacted much more by high speed driving than ICEs I've driven despite being very low drag. It was like an old Trailblazer I had where you'd see the fuel arrow start moving ever so slightly when you floored it but with a percentage.
I agree that you can be better equipped for driving 200+ km/h, but I do not agree that it is possible for such driving to be safe on a public road unless you are guaranteed to be alone (and with proper racing equipment).
The problem isn't you and your car, it's that you're zooming past other cars at speeds that make them practically stationary, and no amount of experience you may have make them any less likely to accidentally pull out, not noticing that a car had approached them at literally twice their speed.
Even if no one ever failed to check their mirrors on regular lane changes, someone doing 80 might be forced to swerve for emergency reasons, and if you're going 210 then it's like hitting a stationary object at 130 km/h.
Heck, even professional racing drivers have crash into each other all the time, and a check of your mirror isn't valid for very long if the speed difference is too high. Differential speeds are already not great when you mix 130 and 80 in the same direction, but mixing 200+ and 80 is impossible to do safely.
> Anyway, what I meant was that, while I haven't done any scientific testing, it seemed like the Tesla's range was impacted much more by high speed driving than ICEs I've driven despite being very low drag.
I wonder if the perceived difference isn't just a result of how much range you had to beign with, combined with the tesla maybe being easier to keep "in the green" near the rated range than an ICE car.
Taking the polo as example, if you always drove it very aggressively you might be happy thinking it went 650 km on a tank and assume that the fuel rating was just an unrealistic lie. But drive it a bit more carefully (while staying at the speed limit) and you'll get 1000+ km on a tank as advertised.
If you do the same exercise in a car that starts with a 500km range instead of 1000+, then being stuck with just 60% of the range from aggressive driving might be a lot more impactful.
(Also, always remember that drag coefficients is for a given area which can be quite misleading when comparing cars of different sizes like crossover SUVs.)
I'm not disputing that most people drive their cars short distances most of the time. But not all trips are as valuable to people. This concept is called marginal utility. I value my road trips going smoothly *FAR* more than I value my daily commutes going smoothly. For this reason, it's VERY important for me for range to be increased. I won't be buying another EV unless I can get above 1000km real world range. This would, in theory, result in similar trip times to my older ICE vehicle. I am not alone.
I strongly believe that unless automakers give EV customers what they want, they won't see the growth they are hoping for. EV customers want a lot more range. You cannot reason them out of their desires.
So you're down to 75% capacity, with the first 10% lost to the cold of winter and the rest lost to going 140km/h.
The long range Model Y has 600 km rating in ideal conditions, and applying the same loss you'd be at 450 km. The same calculation is 466 km for the upcoming model, more than your car's ideal rating.
So seems like you already have much better options available. You can also take 10 km/h off your speed to increase range notably (in any car), and you can go further for road trips outside the winter months.
> I value my road trips going smoothly FAR more than I value my daily commutes going smoothly. For this reason, it's VERY important for me for range to be increased.
Sure, but it remains a niche use-case, which is fine but unimportant for the industry and the general population and not what cars should be built or optimized for.
Range is a liability whenever not in use (batteries are heavy), and cars are always better when optimized for the normal use-case. That's why there's long range models, and it's also fine to take such roadtrips in an ICE should need be.
If I upgrade to the new LR and I get, let's say, 480km in the cold and at highway speeds, that would give me 2 hours and 24 minutes between stops. This is still far too limited. I could drive slower, or just not take trips at all, but I expect my car to fit my lifestyle and not the other way around.
> Sure, but it remains a niche use-case
Longer range consistently tops consumer requirements (https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...). You might feel this is a niche issue, but the majority of EV buyers feel it's a very big issue to them. It's clear that you're willing to make sacrifices for smaller batteries, and that's perfectly valid. You must just accept that others value different things.
480 km in the cold at highway speeds is 140 km more than your previously stated 340 km, which is an hour more at 140 km/h.
If you are driving between highway charge stops, it's a bit over 3.5 hours between stops.
> Longer range consistently tops consumer requirements
It is tied with "availability of chargers equal gas stations" in that report, suggesting that the range concern is not about roadtrips but daily convenience for households without own chargers.
Also, answers to a questionaire for "EV skeptical" people about why they haven't purchased an EV isn't representative of actual needs. People when asked about range answer that way because they're comparing to what they already have and have to make up an answer to justify their decisions, not because of need.
> You must just accept that others value different things.
And you must accept that your values does not equal the actual needs of the general population, which can be quite easily assessed based on normal worklife patterns.
I'm sure we can agree that any vehicle is objectively best if it is optimized for your actual needs, and that the more often it fit your need the better. This makes it quite simple: Does your daily driving equal roadtrips, yes or no?
If not, you will get an objectively better experience (better handling, less noise, less energy/fuel cost, less tire wear, faster charging to full) while simultaneously saving your bank account and the environment. And no, a dialy driver doesn't mean "renault zoe", it just means "smaller and lighter battery".
If you drive 1 roadtrip per year or less, it makes sense to rent the car for roadtrip to get the best of both worlds: the best roadtrip machine and the best daily driver, which are mutually exclusive requirements. The roadtrip vehicle might be a large, comfortable ICE car with below average fuel economy and plenty of space - maybe even pulling a camping wagon depending on what you want to do on roadtrips.
If you drive 2+ roadtrips per year, maybe it starts to make sense to buy a roadtrip-specific secondary vehicle. If you drive much more than that (e.g., every weekend, or daily work involves multi-hour driving), then it starts to make sense financially to compromise and use a roadtrip vehicle for daily driving.
That is incorrect. Review the issue I outline above. The optimal charging range is 10% to 80% (as per Tesla's recommendation). That is 70%, or 336km. At 140kph that is 2.4 hours, or 2 hours and 24 minutes.
> It is tied with "availability of chargers equal gas stations" in that report, suggesting that the range concern is not about roadtrips but daily convenience for households without own chargers.
It is clearly both. People can and do care about more than one thing at a time. It could be that offering more ubiquitous charging would reduce this area of concern, but that's far from a proven hypothesis. Especially in terms of proportional response.
> Also, answers to a questionaire for "EV skeptical" people about why they haven't purchased an EV isn't representative of actual needs. People when asked about range answer that way because they're comparing to what they already have and have to make up an answer to justify their decisions, not because of need.
If you care about adoption, you should care very much about why non-adopters are not adopting EVs. I don't understand your point of contention. These are real people with real concerns and real requirements with real money who will really not buy EVs until their desires are addressed. Let us never forget that the customer decides what they spend their money on. They alone decide what matters to them.
> And you must accept that your values does not equal the actual needs of the general population, which can be quite easily assessed based on normal worklife patterns.
Surveys suggest people disagree with you. I disagree with you. You're making a values based judgement about the needs of people and claiming that your values are or should be everyone's, and that's clearly incorrect. Just because you don't mind stopping more frequently on trips doesn't mean others share your position. You equate daily driving with road trips, suggesting you either didn't register my explanation of marginal utility, or don't understand it. This is marginal utility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility). Different people assign different levels of value to different things. You, for example, place very little value on comfort during road trips. No problem. You are free to do so. Others, however - and a great many of them - assign much more value to road trips. So we wish to drag around much heavier batteries during our daily commutes to make our road trips faster. We're willing to pay more for that privilege, too. We care about it so much, that we won't buy EVs which make our road trips slower and less convenient. No amount of badgering will convince us to change what we value.
I have tried renting ICE vehicles for road trips. It is a truly terrible experience every single time. Rental agencies are predatory. There are many reasons people prefer to own instead of rent. I have decided I do not like renting. I instead wish my car to fit my needs. This is hardly a radical proposition. It would take a lot of road trips to justify the cost of a second vehicle. I don't think it makes financial or environmental sense.
Also, I don't believe you. How do you manage to spend whole battery in hours? Two hours on autobahn driving 90-120km/h in city zones or just plain stuck in traffic because of construction is like 30% at best. May be 50% if you're lucky.
If you're not in the city area that is. Or not stuck in traffic because of construction. Which is always.
If you drive 300km/h do not even mention efficiency.
So 240 km took only 30% of your battery? What model of car is that?
I just don't believe you. This would result in a real world range of 800km at highway speeds. Even the most expensive EVs like the Lucid Air would struggle to do this. Especially in cold weather, and especially at highway speeds. This makes me doubt your claim about doing a 7,000km road trip and never experiencing any of the issues I outline. I've never met an EV owner in my life who has never experienced at least some of those. You could have at least made your lie believable.
While it's true that most people don't drive that far daily, it's also true that most people want their cars to be multipurpose.
Most EVs can only be time-efficiently charged to 80% while DC fast charging because the charge curve drops a lot.
And nobody want the pucker factor of getting much below 10% while road tripping.
So, you're really only working with 70% of the max range. At 'normal' freeway speeds of 70mph+, most EV max ranges are less than 300 miles, and 70% of that is 210 usable miles.
You can make it work, but it feels like you're always managing and thinking about charge level vs a car which usually has 400+ miles of range on the freeway.
IMO the base range for EVs needs to be 500 miles, to get 350 miles of usable range, plus 350kW+ charging so charge stops are 10 minutes ish. And the Chinese EV companies have 400kW+ charging cars already, with announcements for 600kW charging!
So battery energy density is critical to getting the range that people want without making the cars even heavier.
Solid state battery tech looks to be game changing.... pushing EV's into the no-brainer territory for the vast majority of people.
Idk about that, but yeah I agree AI has got a good 3-5 years left in its hype run.
-x
The good news is that low spec performance is a rich area for improvement and it's progressing very nicely.
A Turing complete personal tutor to explain any concept already exists. You can prompt a logo or video into existence. This is crazy.
The real value will be the creative people who use AI to self teach and build real world value, like energy management, or anything else.
Not this pipe dream that AGI will be achieved and automate the entire world, which for some reason gets so much focus. Seems like procrastination to obsess over this.
That’s what’s driving investment. Once the next AI winter descends we will see whose boats are in deep water.
What makes you so certain that we will enter an AI winter before reaching the threshold of AGI? Do you have some secret insights into the mechanisms of general intelligence that you aren't sharing with the class?
Investor apathy. Once the big dicks realise it’s useless without actual humans running it they’ll lose interest. We will lock in our gains socially but a lot of the big bucks will dry up.
It’s all built on commodity hardware using commonly used software and trained on public information. It’s all easily reproducible once solved so I think it will be very hard for them to ring fence and monetise to the extent that they expect.
That and a true AI would tell us all roundly to get fucked before using all of its intellect and might to power itself down, like an elaborate “useless box”
> Do you have some secret insights into the mechanisms of general intelligence that you aren't sharing with the class?
I do know that "natural intelligence" (as found in the brains of humans and other animals) uses orders of magnitude more computing power than even our largest compute clusters, that such intelligences have been trained over millennia, (and in the case of humans, each instance is incrementally refined over the course of 10+ years), and that even those intelligences are not as good as classical computers at some tasks (people make mistakes, and a hypothetical AGI likely would too).
Perhaps we'll find some secret that allows us to shortcut that, but I suspect the idea that such a discovery is just around corner is just hubris.
… was a common thinking shortly before chatGPT.
I also feel the AI boom is mostly over but I am very cautious about that feeling. It really is just a vague feeling with some very soft indicators.
And is still the case now we have chatGPT? Plenty of people are building things with chatGPT, but Open AI is not profitable.
The Secret Society Raising Your Electricity Bills - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43151865 - Feb 2023
https://prospect.org/environment/2025-02-21-secret-society-r...
This is less than estimates I've seen for major new pumped hydro projects in 2005 dollars (when I did more formal research into energy transition), and it requires no site selection, no complex approvals, no environmental mitigation policies.
Grid-scale battery projects are lighting up at scale for the first time throughout the world.
My rule of thumb with range is if you can go from San Francisco to Tahoe that's a notable milestone.
Also with AI it feels like we have 8 billion people in the world who are intellectually under utilized and often under fed.
In case you wonder why it can be important
It even mentions that CATL is at roughly the same stage. So while good news its still going to take some time to get these into production cars and to get the costs down.
They have each been testing battery samples for years and making announcements about roughly where they think they'll be going to production. It's not like battery cells suddenly pop into existence fully formed and ready to go. There's a lot of work and problem solving that needs to happen.
2027 isn't when mass production starts but when early, low volume production begins. It takes time, and many billions, to build large scale factories. They'll want to see low scale production work first. Early batteries are likely to be scarce and expensive for a while.
People have unrealistic expectations about solid state batteries in general. Currently the best selling batteries aren't those with the highest density but those with the lowest cost of materials and production. That's why LFP is so popular currently. Solid state won't change that. LFP will be widely used for years to come. A logical place for relatively expensive early solid state batteries to be used would be in aviation related use cases and maybe some high-end vehicles or sports cars. Forget about these showing up in budget cars anytime soon.
I'm hopeful that in the next few years we will see some serious range improvements across the board with EVs. Then mass adoption really takes off.
That's the most important part of this article I believe.
Here's the lab-scale process of making a solid state cell, from the Fraunhofer Institute.[1] This is how different battery chemistries are tried.
Honda has announced that they have a demo version of their solid state battery pilot plant in test.[2] There are low-detail pictures of the interior of the plant.
Hyundai has announced that they will show their prototype solid state battery on March 9. They have built a pilot plant. They're thinking motorcycles before cars.
EHang demoed a version of their flying car with solid state batteries a few months ago.[3] They got 48 minutes of flight time. (EHang's flying car is a scaled-up battery powered quadrotor drone with 16 props. They've been flying them for years now, but flight time was too short for it to be useful.)
CATL says that the maturity of the process is at 4 on a scale of 9.[4] Large amounts of money are being spent in multiple countries to push this technology through to production.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M
[2] https://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/new-tech/2025/january/ho...
[3] https://www.ehang.com/news/1137.html
[4] https://www.batteriesinternational.com/2024/11/11/catl-bet-o...
In April 2024, CATL said the were working on prototypes and made some by Nov.
They were saying conventional batteries topped out at 350 Wh/kg while solid state could potentially go to 500+
BYD's tech is similar based on sulfide electrolytes.
They still seem to have problems with cost and making them in volume.
Is it still true that they're the only ones who can make LiFePO batteries? Is anyone else working on production of these?
What accounts for this gap - patents (ha), secret research, materials, manufacturing prowess, all of the above?
China has been the country filing the most patents for a while now.
"While innovators from China continue to file nearly half of all global patent applications, the country’s growth rate dipped for a second consecutive year from 6.8% in 2021 to 3.1% in 2022. Meantime, patent applications by residents of India grew by 31.6% in 2022, extending an 11-year run of growth unmatched by any other country among the top 10 filers." https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2023/article_0013...
I'm in chip design and they are dominating academic research in this area for the last 5-6 years, together with Korea and Taiwan. It's 70% China now and their research is good.
The United States is basically self-sufficient on oil. Therefore it doesn't have to take the EV transition seriously. In China, there isn't a local powerbase dependent on oil profits, or an oil-based car culture, or a local politically connected dealer network sitting in the way.
China is making EVs work because getting off oil dependency matters there. The US is removing Federal charging points because it is not serious about EVs. Everything follows from there.
Awesome if true, but I'll believe it when I see it. Until then like similar announcements from Toyota and others, I'll hold my enthusiasm.
Toyota is just spreading FUD as a delay tactic and milking the petroleum cow
Basically you get what you pay for - smaller and cheaper car.
So they're a bit behind Toyota