Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures
> However, this battery faces range limitations
Yes they are less dense but plentiful for typical passenger car (and not so much for full sized trucks or even "mid-sized" US SUVs).
> the issue of how to improve charging speed
I think CATL demonstrated 1MW charging on these already. Definitely shipping 500kW charging (tho best measure is still average km/hr).
> Solid-state batteries should be the next big thing
Sodium will (great cold weather performance and even better charge rates), but it's less (vol) dense and prices won't reach LFPs for another 10-15 years (unless you believe hype, not actual analysts).
Doesn’t the thermal management system of the battery packs handle this?
Ps: the heating is increasingly heat pump based instead of resistive.
It's noticeable even in climates like NZ.
There are coldgating stories about LFP. Some even reduce output and very low SOC and temperature, so you drive 60km/h in highway.
Sodium is vastly superior here and CATL is not going to be giving it away for free.
Volume is important because the more volume the more space there is for batteries.
Aerodynamics is important because at common highway speeds this is the dominate energy cost. This is a factor that goes up by the square of speed, so at low speeds it doesn't matter but at high speeds it does.
Weight is least important because it has a linear change and is a small factor in efficiency.
There are real safety concerns with SUVs, but their larger size means there is more space for batteries and so they can overall go farther then a Sedan in normal driving despite the other costs.
LFP charging in cold has pretty much been solved by adding a heater to battery pack.
> (Sodium-ion) prices won't reach LFPs for another 10-15 years (unless you believe hype, not actual analysts).
Given CATL is scaling sodium-ion production to to GWh scale next year, it sounds like they are betting for a much shorter timeframe.
That's a hack, not a solution.
> Given CATL is scaling sodium-ion production to to GWh scale next year, it sounds like they are betting for a much shorter timeframe.
Wanna bet? LFP is ~1,000 GWh scale right now. GWh scale is 0.1%.
Why do you say that? It sounds like a simple solution to me.
You are driving a giant killing machine around... it isn't too much to ask that you have some foresight to avoid the situation you describe.
In my friend group, if you run out of gas you get made fun of. You forget to flip your kill switch and can't crank your motorcycle, we all laugh and call you a dipshit.
Getting stranded isn't always harmless, and proper adults don't get stranded. Proper adults manage their vehicle safely. That's my point. Yes, exceptions are allowed, but we need to make sure everyone knows they are exceptions. Don't leave 5% on your battery when in the freezing seasons, it's improper.
TBH that's majority of people. And it's a good thing since tyres got so good.
I get it tho. It's obvious. But it's better when things work better.
It’s not to say a hack/workaround isn’t useful, and I would say that it’s perfectly acceptable to simply use a battery heater in the winter. But calling it “solved” confuses solutions and workarounds, and that’s an intellectually dishonest thing to do.
Now, we can go into the weeds as to what constitutes solved and we might agree or disagree.
By the time I had finished my coffe, SoC had gone from 30-ish to 90-ish percent.
LFP tech anno 2023 is perfectly good enough for road tripping in large cars in severe winter conditions. For almost everyone.
Let’s not pretend better batteries shouldn’t exist.
This can’t be more than single digit days per year? This is the case where people in for example Sweden have 230V engine block and passenger compartment heaters for their car.
It’s like the definition of an edge case.
It’s -30C and the heat pump doesn’t really work. Is there any advantage to heating the cold side with, say, a resistive heater?
Conservation of energy says no, but what if it’s also being heated by waste heat from charging the batteries?
(Maybe the answer is “if that’s the case, you are actively cooling the batteries with the heat pump!”, but I’d like to think someone more clever than me could make the scheme work.)
Now imagine there's battery technology that solves that + removes equipment required for battery preheat...
I'm not against further progress, I'm just stating that using current gen LFP in cold climate for large cars driving long distances is not a problem. It is more than fine. At least Tesla's implementation of LFP, I can't speak to any others on the market.
China and India both have EVs much cheaper than we get in the EU. Like, "<€10k new" cheap.
What I do wonder about is how much of Africa can get EVs; I've only been once, to Nairobi over a decade ago, so take it with a pinch of anecdote-flavoured salt when I say that what I saw there was a lot of 20-30 year old vehicles.
Charging being a couple minutes slower a few weeks a year is a minor convenience. If you have a house with a garage, like many people in the US Midwest, I doubt it even poses a problem even on the worst days. It's more in the winter-long -35C areas that (purpose-built) combustion engines have obvious benefits.
Cold climates suffer more from cold batteries having reduced range, but with modern battery ranges the problem isn't even that extreme anymore.
Realistically you are looking at trimming 20->30% of the range. If you drive 20 miles a day but have a total range of 200 miles, then it's really not inconvenient. It only becomes inconvenient if you need to travel long distances.
Also, a tiny fraction of the population will ever need to start their cars in Alaska, Mongolia, and Northern Russia. The small city worth of people living in these insane environments can stick to their wood-fueled diesel cars while the rest of the world just uses normal vehicles.
It handles "real winters" [1] where large portions of the human population live. [2][3][4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/staticarchive/e4ff248622e19fa303d72e25...
[3] https://engaging-data.com/population-latitude-longitude/
It can be solved, but at a cost, and makes the tech much more dangerous - you could end up in a situation where you freeze to death somewhere more easily in the climates it is a problem.
It’s similar reasons why diesel isn’t a great idea in Alaska and the like too, and people tend towards gasoline even in situations where it is more costly and less efficient (like industrial trucks). It can be mitigated with chemical additives (‘heat’), tank and block heaters, etc. but has similar risks.
Come on man. If you're in an extreme environment, get the tool appropriate for that environment. People in mountain environments tend to have 4WD or AWD cars because it's appropriate. Doesn't mean a non-AWD car is useless.
If you live in the extreme 5%, get something that works there. If you're in the rest of the 95%, other solutions work fine.
Negative temperatures or low temperatures are everywhere. Sodium will displace LFP pretty much everywhere (20 yrs), not just in extreme cold. I get slight coldgating 6months a year in warmest parts of New Zealand. It’s not even a minor issue, but if manufacturers can remove complexity - they will.
Which also occurs while driving, whenever you're decelerating.
Bjorn managed to get couple cars in coldgate condition - so cold and such low SOC that it's just not enough power to heat up battery and now you going highway at 60 km/h. IDK, maybe just a software fix, maybe an edge case, but it can happen.
Also LFP prices dropped enough that shipping cost from China became a significant part of the price. This will be even more of a factor should the less energy dense sodium batteries ever reach the promised $30/kWh.
That's a small home solar setup's entire battery.
I do all of my charging way above 0K. :-P
[https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/sodium-ion-battery-ev...]
Lithium’s curve is nearly flat, which allows for a pretty easy consistent power production (albeit nearly impossible to tell state of charge!) since you only need to target a pretty narrow voltage band.
Overall, that means sodium-ion has to be even cheaper to be competitive, and it makes even less sense in areas where power density matters like electric cars, as you’ll end up with far less power and/or needing much heavier motors and more expensive electronics to compensate when on the lower end of charge.
I don’t want to think of what it would cost to do a 100kw buck-boost power supply that can handle +- 25% (or more!) voltage differences. In reality, I don’t think anyone would try.
But, the real issue seems to be that fusion has a large nuclear waste problem. Ironically, probably more so than fission reactors. It can be fixed, but probably not in first gen reactors. However there are companies pushing designs that solve it already
They may be where you are, but they aren't generally here.
Anyways we’ve gone from “this won’t happen in our lifetime!” to “it doesn’t handle X niche use case yet.”
In the hills of LA you have sharp blind corners where people have installed public fisheye mirrors to help you see around, then you have crazy people in Hollywood throwing furniture in front of your car, and non-stop traffic and people passing on the wrong side of the road between blocks even when there is a median, school kids and crossing guards, emergency vehicles trying to through and people doing otherwise illegal things to help get out of the way…
In a city (especially in SoCal and the American Southwest, which is, AIUI, where all the self-driving cars are today), you can be nearly certain that the various mapping companies have accurately plotted the roads and destinations, and if you're trying to get to a popular Finger Lakes winery, you won't be directed down a limited-use seasonal road that's entirely covered in ice.
In a city, you can be pretty well guaranteed that there are speed limit signs anywhere the speed limit actually changes.
Just off the top of my head, as someone who's lived 40 years in the rural Northeast.
And yet Apple just isn't interested any more.
Toyota has been saying similar things for a very long time. But they continue to make extremely poor bets, except for their hybrids. There's something really odd about their management culture that prevents them from finding the common and easy path of lithium ion batteries that everybody has already taken.
Bonus if there's leap frog tech that obsolete all the CATL investments..
I'm sure Toyota management has their own set of false beliefs about supply concerns, or perhaps about competitive edges, or perhaps about biases towards fluid fuels.
I too felt Japs were taking EV quite casually pushing all others but I wouldn't underestimate their ability to move once they decide that's what it is. They have the same concept as China, move as one nation but much higher tech depth
Btw anyone ever heard of those fuel cell ones? Toshiba hyped it like you slot in a fuel cartridge and have months of use etc.