44 ms·

Before the Electric Car Takes Over, Someone Needs to Reinvent the Battery

135 points by pdog 8y ago

martythemaniak 8y ago
No they don't, everything is already in place. In a few years the industry will catch up to Tesla and we'll see further price decreases across the board and mass EV adoption using current tech. The battery will have to be reinvented for large planes to become electric, but that's a different discussion. Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech to start the electrification of that whole industry.
- eptcyka 8y ago
  Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech for about 50 miles max.
  - nickik 8y ago
    Yeah but you can use the potential energy of the plane to produce power, just like car going down hill. Probably not gone work for small planes but it does have interesting advantages and new ways of thinking about planes.
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      For an airplane, there's no particular reason to turn potential energy into chemical energy for storage. Use the potential energy more directly to glide down to your approach point. Airplanes are typically "driven" (using positive power) all throughout the flight regime, including descent and approach.
      - AshleyGrant 8y ago
        > Airplanes are typically "driven" (using positive power) all throughout the flight regime, including descent and approach. No, not really. Descent in most aircraft is typically done at idle. In jet powered aircraft, final approach will be done with the engines at some speed above idle, but that is to minimize spool-up time during a go-around, rather than because the aircraft needs the thrust.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        The airplanes where electrics could possibly compete are piston powered and flown with power in the descent. Electrics don’t even compete well there yet (and may never as they are just as heavy on landing as takeoff). For airplanes with higher fuel burn (long haul jets), they benefit significantly from being lighter at the end of the flight. Even my piston airplane picks up about 5 knots in cruise at 1/4 tanks vs full. In jet descents, we rarely get what we prefer which is a slam dunk approach (much more fuel efficient to stay up high). Many times we’re down at 10K feet for 20+ miles because of sequencing. It’s only in the less busy airports where jets can regularly get slam dunk flight idle approaches. Even there, you probably want to use potential->kinetic rather than potential->chemical->(later) kinetic transfers because of unavoidable losses at each conversion. On the runway, using regen instead of thrust reversers or beta/reverse would be helpful, but that's a vanishingly small part of the overall flight regime.
        SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        > Descent in most aircraft is typically done at idle. Went on my first flight in decades last year. The moment we started out descent really stands out to me, I remember the eerie-ness of hearing the engines slow down a ton all of a sudden and no one looking disturbed by it at all.
        mrguyorama 8y ago
        Idle turbo-fan engines produce enough thrust to taxi around an airport
        ams6110 8y ago
        Even so, the aircraft still needs to make a comfortable gradual descent. It must maintain lift as it descends, otherwise it will stall (aerodynamically) and fall out of the sky. The controlled descent takes most of the energy that you might think could be recovered by e.g. windmilling the electric fan motors as generators.
        AshleyGrant 8y ago
        I'm not sure what you're talking about with "must maintain lift as descends otherwise it will stall and fall out of the sky"... Wings stall when they exceed their critical angle of attack. A descent is inherently a low AoA maneuver. Heck, in pretty much all aircraft of decent performance, they have devices on the wings to help "spoil" the lift of the wings to help the plane descend more quickly. They're sometimes called speed brakes, sometimes called spoilers.
      - kwhitefoot 8y ago
        Here is a quote from Pipistrel <https://www.pipistrel.si/plane/alpha-electro/overview> https://www.pipistrel.si/plane/alpha-electro/overview> Alpha Electro, the new 2-seat electric trainer: the greenest way of learning to fly! Performance of the Alpha Electro 2-seat electric trainer is tailored to the needs of flight schools. Short take-off distance, powerful 1000+ fpm climb, and endurance of one hour plus reserve. The Alpha Electro is optimized for traffic-pattern operations, where 13% of energy is recuperated on every approach, increasing endurance and at the same time enabling short-field landings.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Using propeller in the "beta" range for improved short-field operations and power recovery is a definite benefit to the Pipistrel. It's also an airplane that can't legally fly 95 miles/150 km and achieves those power recovery numbers only in pattern operations. I don't see that as representative or substitutive for even piston airplanes use cases.
        figers 8y ago
        I want this plane! why learn and deal with all the issues of an old school engine if you have this plane...
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Well, you might want to fly more than 100 miles...
      - nickik 8y ago
        Of course you don't turn it into chemical energy, I'm talking about batteries. And it defiantly makes sense.
        sokoloff 8y ago
        > Of course you don't turn it into chemical energy, I'm talking about batteries. How do you think batteries store energy, if not chemically?
    - outworlder 8y ago
      By windmilling the propeller? This massively increases drag.
  - aluskuiuc 8y ago
    As a backup for engine failure that could be a substantially safer and cheaper alternative to a second engine.
  - makerofspoons 8y ago
    We could make aircraft carbon-neutral by using carbon capture and producing synthetic fuel from water, like what the US Navy is working on: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-nrl-patent-carbon-capture-devicea.html https://phys.org/news/2017-10-nrl-patent-carbon-capture-devi...
  - martythemaniak 8y ago
    A "small" 737 will do about 50 miles, yeah. But by small I meant like small small: https://www.eviation.co/alice/ https://www.eviation.co/alice/
  - kwhitefoot 8y ago
    Small electric aeroplanes already exist and are in serial production. See https://www.tu.no/artikler/i-dag-skal-avinor-sjefen-og-samferdselsministeren-fly-elektrisk/440188 https://www.tu.no/artikler/i-dag-skal-avinor-sjefen-og-samfe..., https://www.pipistrel.si/plane/taurus-electro/overview https://www.pipistrel.si/plane/taurus-electro/overview.
    - eptcyka 8y ago
      I stand corrected - last I checked, a production all-electric aircraft could do 15 minutes of flight time. It's nice to see a 4x improvement in the Pipistrel case. However, a 60 minute flight time is still 3 times smaller than the petrol counterpart.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  It does seem inevitable now, VW have said their new electric car will be priced at about the same level as a Golf Diesel.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    Yeah but it could also be Smart-sized...
    - _ph_ 8y ago
      No, it isn't. Prototypes have been shown already. It is roughly the outer size of the VW Golf, but offers larger interior space due to being designed to be electrical only, that means, the space of the engine can be saved: https://www.t-online.de/auto/elektromobilitaet/id_83655386/er-kommt-2019-vw-neo-aussen-xs-innen-xxl.html https://www.t-online.de/auto/elektromobilitaet/id_83655386/e...
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        I'm pleasantly surprised. I was considering a hybrid Jetta but I'll wait to see what the final offer is.
        ju-st 8y ago
        Here they are test driving the VW car (VW ID. First Drive from fullycharged) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Tqw9LX3QE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Tqw9LX3QE
  - prostoalex 8y ago
    What's the range though? Considering the battery pack is the main cost contributor, it's always possible to introduce a lower sticker price by further compromising on range.
    - clouddrover 8y ago
      330km to 550km depending on the battery size: https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/17/vw-id-range-and-more-info/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/17/vw-id-range-and-more-inf...
- Gravityloss 8y ago
  I think batteries with high investment but low operations cost, as well as self driving tech (comprehensive all solid state radars and lidars and cameras with sensor fusion can get quite expensive) fit the "mobility as service" or taxi / uber business model much better.
- b0bby_tabl3s 8y ago
  Planes are small potatoes in the carbon footprint. Overseas shipping via cargo freighters...that is where your big players are. The fuel they use is the cause of most the worlds pollution.
- Nimelrian 8y ago
  Last time I checked, the extraction process for lithium, which is needed for the batteries, still has a heavy impact on the environment. This article mentions a cost of 500,000 gallons (almost 2 million litres) of water for a tonne of lithium. [1] Considering that as of now the most lithium is produced in desert regions of Bolivia and Chile, using what little water exists there in the first place may be detrimental to the population of these regions. Are there any news regarding new, more environment friendly mining processes? [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    extracting fossil fuels now also requires a ton of water.
    - gleglegle 8y ago
      Water which is permanently and irreversibly contaminated, which is not the case for lithium extraction.
      - adventured 8y ago
        You can still recycle frack water for use over and over again, which is increasingly common. By necessity water recycling has become a big business in the fracking industry. "Sensing a chance for a big return, private-equity firms have invested more than $500 million into wastewater-disposal companies such as Solaris Water Midstream LLC, WaterBridge Resources LLC, Goodnight Midstream LLC and Oilfield Water Logistics LLC. There are roughly a dozen of these water-focused companies that analysts said could each be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. ... Some companies have a longer-term plan: recycling the wastewater to sell it back to drillers to reuse." https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-big-bet-in-fracking-water-1534930200 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-big-bet-in-fracking-wa... "The oil and gas industry is finding that less is more in the push to recycle water used in hydraulic fracturing. Slightly dirty water, it seems, does just as good a job as crystal clear when it comes to making an oil or gas well work. ... Until recently, many companies considered recycling too expensive or worried that using anything other than freshwater would reduce well output. But oil and gas companies are increasingly treating and reusing flowback water from wells, which unlike freshwater is very high in salt, with good results." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking-waters-dirty-secret/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking...
- stcredzero 8y ago
  In a few years the industry will catch up to Tesla and we'll see further price decreases across the board and mass EV adoption using current tech. Can this catch up be quantified? There must have been a study of how entire industries ramp up infrastructure and develop economies of scale. This has happened in wartime many, many times, and well resourced countries had an interest in how fast these things could happen. (And how they could be prevented.)
b0bby_tabl3s 8y ago
I've been saying this for over a decade. Forget 'reinventing the mouse-trap', reinvent the battery. The world will beat a path to your door.
kabouseng 8y ago
Half of the problem is solved, we only need the engineers to solve the last little part...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q
cmiller1 8y ago
People are trying, Tesla is investing HEAVILY into battery technology and research. CPUs 30 years ago were 8 bits and barely scratching 10s of mhz, we arrived at our modern era through incremental improvements, not by saying "we need to stop and wait for someone to invent something better!"
- gammateam 8y ago
  Now printers on the other hand....
  - tapland 8y ago
    Could arguably partially have been replaced by portable devices with high resolution displays.
    - Normal_gaussian 8y ago
      And electronic databases and forms. I have very very few pieces of paper in my life, but loads of webforms.
    - swish_bob 8y ago
      They'd have to be damned cheap. I give away printed bits of paper all the time ...
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Cpus were new tech, brand new tech. They have only been around now a few decades. Batteries have been studied for centuries. Even incremental improvements are much less likely, and much more expensive, when dealing with such mature technology.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  Fun story: the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. Yesterday's miracle battery of tomorrow that never quite happened, right? Well, the big picture story is a bit different. It was invented shortly before the lead acid battery and US civil war. It accumulated a few refinements and fewer practical uses over the years, until the Apollo era when there was a huge breakthrough (polymer electrolyte membranes). Then it went back to slowly accumulating incremental advancements, and that's still the story today. Exploitation is exponential (the scale of each success determines the resources people are willing to bet on the next win), but exploration is a punctuated equilibrium, and it's a recipe for disappointment to assume that all progress should behave like the former rather than the latter.
village-idiot 8y ago
My big fear is weight. Road damage scales with the per-axle weight raised to the 4th power. EVs are quite heavy to compensate for the lower energy density of lithium ion batteries.
- _ph_ 8y ago
  Electric cars are not that much heavier than ICE cars. The Model 3 is pretty much on par with its gasoline competition. The real road killers are not passenger cars, but heavy trucks and semis. They have a multiple per-axle weight of any car.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    > Electric cars are not that much heavier than ICE cars. this isn't really true. a model 3 is about 400lbs heavier than a base a4 (~12%) and 300lbs heavier than a base 3 series (~8%). that's a pretty big difference for a midsize sedan. your overall point is valid, of course. any sedan is going to do negligible damage compared to a large truck.
    - _ph_ 8y ago
      The base models of the named cars have of course much less powerful engines than the Model 3, so the weight difference goes down as you equip the ICEs with larger engines. Yes, some weight differential is left, but a small one compared to trucks and semis.
      - leetcrew 8y ago
        the engines of the named cars are essentially on par with the lowest specced (and lightest) model 3 that's currently available. the only situation where the model 3 has a strong advantage is in sprints from 0-60, a number most people pay entirely too much attention to in my opinion. edit: I'm actually wrong, according to car and driver, the 0-60 numbers are really close on all three cars. I don't want to digress too far on the performance characteristics of the cars, as this starts to be a bit subjective.
sbradford26 8y ago
This is coming from a person who would like to buy an electric car. But lets say we get to batteries that can survive incredibly high charge rates, aka the 10 minute charge time. Some quick math: 100kWh battery needs 100 kW to charge in an hour. To charge in 10 minutes we need 100kW * 6 = 600kW. Now that is a bit of an over simplification but it gives the magnitude of instantaneous power needed. From a grid perspective charging a lot of cars slowly is not terribly difficult to handle because it appears mostly as base load, but if you have ton of cars starting and stopping charging at 600kW you will get massive fluctuations. Thankfully a lot of cars will just slow charge overnight most of the time. Then for a fast charging station they could have large batteries or super capacitors to help offset the fluctuations.
- cmiller1 8y ago
  Alternative solution: when technologies like resonant inductive coupling improve enough for efficient medium to long range wireless transfer of power we could just build cars with small batteries or capacitors that are almost always trickle charging.
- UI_at_80x24 8y ago
  Easy, just put a pebble-bed reactor every few blocks. /s We have come full circle Mr.Edison. Nikola would be spinning in his grave. (just attach magnets!)
- arkh 8y ago
  There is already a way to manage that: remove the petrol from petrol stations and add huge batteries / capacitors. Charge those at normal grid load when no one is using the station then unload like crazy.
  - epanchin 8y ago
    This has the added advantage of levelling the grid load beyond just the charging, like V2G without the car.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  EVs make it easier to manage the grid - the challenges are in local distribution. The vast majority of EV charges are overnight, because that's when electricity is cheap, because that's when we have more supply than demand. Most generation sources can't be quickly switched on and off; renewables generate whenever the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. EVs help to balance the grid simply by sucking up lots of off-peak capacity. The next generation of cars and charging points are expected to support vehicle-to-grid technology; in exchange for a reduction in your cost of charging, you allow your car to be used as a grid storage battery when you're not using it. A few million cars with 40kWh batteries add up to a very big storage reserve, even if you only take a couple of percent from each car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rb808 8y ago
I really thought a Volt like car would be the answer. Electric for most of the year, but a gas powered motor to go for those vacations away. I don't know why that wasn't more popular.
- sbradford26 8y ago
  So one of the major perks of electric cars are fewer moving parts. Once you add a gas engine to the car, you increase the weight, remove space for batteries, add cost, and finally add a lot more complexity and moving parts. Now the gas engine added convenience but personally it doesn't add enough to compensate for the downsides. But I would not rule out plug in hybrids, from what I have read GM stopped making it since it was a sedan which are not selling great for them. But also because the newer bolt platform is a better base for an EV or PHEV, since it was designed from the ground up to run on electric motors.
  - petre 8y ago
    So add a small gas turbine range extender. Like the BMW i3’s range extender but use a small gas turbine instead of a scooter engine. Also make that optional. No need for a conventional ICE drivetrain.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Yeah, GM killing the Volt seems more a weird side effect of GM's manufacturing plant shell game than an intentional strategy. The Volt was original intended to be the "savior" of the venerable Hamtramck plant, as it was the future of what was to be built there. The original goal was to make more of the cars over time at Hamtramck resemble the Volt, which was closer to a cross-over in G1. The short-sighted decision for cost cutting in the G2 Volt was to push it more proper sedan-like to make it more like everything else that Hamtramck was producing. So the Volt shutting down was further short-sighted side effect of GM killing all sedans/Hamtramck. Obvious rumors are that GM is already in the works on a new cross-over PHEV. It's dumb that the sedan-ification of the Volt brand between G1 and G2 probably means that it will be yet another new brand instead of just the obvious Volt G3. (It's also a dumb shame that GM didn't actually save Hamtramck in what could have been a smart move of electrifying more of it and moving it all more cross-over-esque according to the original Volt plan.)
exabrial 8y ago
We neeed batteries that can charge at a rate faster than they can be discharged. And we also need continuing advances in conductors, magnets, and alternatives batteries such as fuel cells.
- checker 8y ago
  I would love to have such batteries but I'm not sure we need them. Doesn't hot-swapping effectively achieve net charge rates faster than discharge? I can see why people might be less interested in hot-swapping for personal vehicles, but why isn't hot-swap on the table for buses and cab fleets? Is it because few people are willing to invest in R&D and infrastructure when sufficient batteries seem to be just around the corner?
  - exabrial 8y ago
    Tesla tried to do the hot swap, and it presented a few problems. First, the infrastructure cost is massive. You have to keep an inventory of expensive parts (the battery) on hand. Tesla tried to fix this by having you set an appointment, but that eliminated the whole point of hot swapping: convenience. It's also harder to put a warranty on a battery if you're swapping them all the time. What if you get a dud swapped into your vehicle?
yholio 8y ago
Maybe the solution is to have better business practices around the technology that we do have. Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so. I'm thinking of a modular battery that is hot swapable at the charge stations and where you only pay it's depreciation based on what you actually use. This would significantly lower ownership costs for light users and drastically increase efficiency and flexibility for heavy users who are no longer dependent on charge times. Since it's modular, you load the number of units you need, say one battery unit for a Leaf, two for a Model S or 10 units for a light truck, all in standardized format and with their own computing that tracks things like life span, charge cycles performed by the user himself for proper billing etc. I know Tesla experimented with and later abandoned battery swap, but that's predictable without the proper business structure in place, no one is going to leave the most expensive part of their car back at the charge station. If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.
- asdkhadsj 8y ago
  > If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics. I wouldn't. Not to be a naysayer, just giving some context. The cars I buy are already in that price range, and I already pay "comparable gasoline prices" (via gas, hah), so in my area all I'd gain is a different type of gasoline when in city, and when I go camping/etc I'd be at risk due to being in slow adoption areas. Don't get me wrong, I want electric, but due to the areas I drive I've already settled to likely being stuck with Hybrids for the next X years. With that said, if the model you laid out still ended up cheaper than gasoline it would at least tip the balance towards its favor. I just can't handle a zero sum trade - and I imagine the same would be true for many around this large, slow to adapt land masses. Cities will become much, much nicer though. Air quality alone. I look forward to it
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Renault already offer battery leasing - you buy the car, but lease the battery based on your annual mileage. It has been reasonably popular, but it's far from a game changer. https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finance/battery-hire.html https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finance/battery-hire.html
alistproducer2 8y ago
I'm surprised there isn't a discussion of the Goodenough lithium glass battery [0]. The fact that I haven't read about replication or a failure to replicate is really weird to me given how world-changing such a technology would be if it were proven to be viable. 0: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/26/the-solid-state-lithium-ion-battery-has-john-goodenough-finally-done-it/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/26/the-solid-state-lithium...
spenrose 8y ago
The article begins by contradicting itself: "To deliver an electric vehicle that’s cheaper, safer and capable of traveling 500 miles on a single charge ..." That's not a "car". A "car", as driven by a billion people every day, takes trips whose distances have a power-law distribution falling off from ~2 miles down to 150 miles, by which point you are looking at < 0.1% of trips. A large fraction of cars have never been driven on a 500 mile trip.
- lakeeffect 8y ago
  I think there is an advantage of only having to charge your car once every couple weeks if you are a short distance trip taker.
  - umeshunni 8y ago
    What's the advantage? Most people with EVs are charging overnight, not once a week.
    - macintux 8y ago
      Of course most people today with EVs do that, but for broader adoption it would be useful for that to not be a requirement. Many urban dwellers don’t have a garage to charge overnight.
      - ju-st 8y ago
        I think the future for urban dwellers is fast charging your EV while shopping. With large enough batteries it should only be necessary to charge the car once a week.
        WorldMaker 8y ago
        Also, most streets and parking lots in urban settings are already by law required to be electrified for minimum lighting requirements and/or parking meters. Extending the electrification requirements to include car charging seems only a matter of time. (Potentially especially in the cases where it makes sense to push for Smart Grids at the same regulative time.) Some companies have already built interesting versions of street lamps and parking meters that double as car chargers (including at least one London company that was working to make sure that they could meet historic preservation standards of the street lamp design in London's core). Road-embeddable induction chargers could even be an option soon in urban environments (particularly large parking lots for instance) where there isn't such existing "furniture" to take advantage of.
CydeWeys 8y ago
I disagree with the premise of the question. How many people really need a 500 mile range? How often does the average person do a long road trip? Is it really such a hassle to stop and stretch your legs (and maybe eat) while charging in the middle of a once-annual road trip? Hell, even if you're doing that drive weekly, you might still prefer the electric since it'd save you a lot on gas money, even though it enforces a mid-trip break.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Most new EVs have more range than the average human bladder. After four hours of driving, most people are going to need to pee. Current-generation EVs on 50kW fast-chargers can hit 80% charge in 30 minutes, which is only slightly longer than the average dwell time at a freeway service plaza. 150kW chargers are now commercially available, which (when connected to a vehicle with suitable battery cooling) cut the time to 80% charge to about 15 minutes. I'm sure that some people do drive for over four hours without taking a break, but I don't think that it's a safe or healthy thing to do. The technology is good enough already - we're just waiting for it to become widely distributed.
  - dwighttk 8y ago
    30 minutes is close to the average? Wow. I don't think I've ever spent more than 10 minutes at a gas station.
    - mikestew 8y ago
      Ever time yourself? I'm not doubting your estimate, but I wonder how close your are. Out of idle curiosity (and for more purposeful reasons), I've timed myself on the motorcycle. Pay-at-the-pump, and don't get off the bike, and I'm out of there like a LeMans pit stop. But getting off, hitting the restroom, and grabbing/paying for drink took longer than I would have guessed. And as sibling comment points out, it all goes out the window if you have passengers.
    - harperlee 8y ago
      If you measure the time impact on the trip, and you count deceleration/accelaration, parking, etc. going above 20 minutes is super easy. That’s not useful for recharging, but a point to have in mind when discussing stop times with more people in order to avoid misunderstanding :)
reacharavindh 8y ago
What we really need is a standardisation to cover for the improvements in the background. Kind of like a USB interface for batteries. Imagine, you could buy a car, that has slots for you to attach standard batteries. You could leave the batteries charging at home, office, shops that lease you charged batteries(like gas stations) etc. It would also take care of "I live in an apartment and park my car by the side of the road, so no home charging.. problem". Also, gets rid of the range anxiety if you know you could get batteries everywhere or at-least charge yours everywhere. Now, when technology genuinely improves by a magnitude, replace the cells, but keep the interface for a decade or so. Bonus if that standard catches on for other uses. Imagine same batteries being used for power tools at home, emergency power supply at home, camping stuff, plug those boxes into the edges of solar panels while they are not in the car etc. Leave it to the competing business that are "battery suppliers" to figure out how to make them more efficient, cheaper, and do further R&D. Car companies can stay at making cars that are essentially safe, aerodynamic shells with electric motors waiting to be powered up by customer supplied batteries.
- nradov 8y ago
  The batteries are too heavy and bulky for most people to physically carry and install. The only way regular battery replacement can work is with a large automated system, which means it would have to be in a dedicated service station rather than an apartment complex.
solidr53 8y ago
It may be an unpopular opinion, but what about radioisotope thermoelectric generator? (Nuclear)
- ackfoo 8y ago
  Limited in the amount of current it can generate. Doesn’t respond well to changing power requirements. Horrendously toxic if the casing is breached traumatically.
- cpcallen 8y ago
  Also: extremely limited availability of the require isotopes. Even NASA has had to redesign missions to use solar instead because their supply was running out.
mrep 8y ago
Talk about moving the goal posts. Tesla's are way less flammable than gasoline cars and some have more range (my dad's Ford has like 250 miles of range)
- clouddrover 8y ago
  Why settle for mediocre batteries? EV battery packs are still catching on fire in scenarios where they shouldn't have: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-model-s-catches-fire-twice-after-flat-tire-report-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-model-s-catches-fire-t... We can do better on batteries and solid-state batteries are clearly safer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Tesla's are way less flammable than gasoline cars This is false. Talk to any tow truck driver. A breached battery is almost a guaranteed fire. A breached gas tank is nothing of the sort. A battery pack provides its own ignition source. Gasoline needs external ignition. While external ignition sources are available on cars they don't seem to ignite with nearly the same frequency. In theory the EV can be less flammable. In practice they seem to be about the same (Volt, Leaf, etc) or worse (Model S) than your average ICE car. It all comes down to the design. Pinto < Tesla < average ICE car.
  - jungturk 8y ago
    These FEMA stats suggest that only 1.6% of car fires are related to the fuel tank or lines https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v19i2.pdf https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v19i2.pdf "Mechanical failure or malfunction was the leading contributing factor of highway vehicle fires (45 percent). These mechanical failures include a leak or break in a component of the vehicle, automatic or manual control failures, or the use of an improper type of fuel. An electrical failure or malfunction, such as a short circuit, was a contributing factor in 21 percent of highway vehicle fires. The misuse of a material or product, such as spilling flammable liquid or gas too close to the vehicle, was the third leading factor contributing to the ignition of the fires (13 percent)." That same document goes into lots of detail about what heat source initiates those fires and what materials are actually catching fire. "Where the necessary data were available, the leading category of items first ignited in fatal highway vehicle fires was “liquids, piping, filters” (65 percent). Flammable liquids and gases in general were, by far, the most deadly (67 percent of deaths). Specifically, fuel in or from the engine area was the second leading item first ignited in all highway vehicle fires (18 percent) but was, by far, the leading item in both fatal fires (43 percent) and deaths (45 percent). Additionally, insulation around electrical wiring or cables was responsible for 29 percent of all highway vehicle fires, but only 2 percent of fatal fires and 2 percent of deaths."
devy 8y ago
The article is written as if solid-state battery designs are going to be the future. So my honest question is, is that really so? What about others, like Graphene batteries and supercapacitors [1][2]? [1]: https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-batteries https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-batteries [2]: https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-supercapacitors https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-supercapacitors
- MentallyRetired 8y ago
  No mention of graphene in the article and this is the only mention of it here. We can't have the battery discussion without graphene. It's the future, imo. Soon as we learn how to charge it and maintain stability while doing so.
xte 8y ago
Oh, someone start to understand that... Many in the industrial sectors have understood it well only in the sixties...........
jpm_sd 8y ago
This is ridiculous. Good-enough solutions are here already. Daimler just issued purchase contracts for $20 BILLION worth of battery components! https://electrek.co/2018/12/11/daimler-billion-battery-cells-electric-vehicle/ https://electrek.co/2018/12/11/daimler-billion-battery-cells...
DeonPenny 8y ago
It's fine now, but if anyone gets close to the mythical solid state battery it would change everything. Trucks, trains, and bigger vehicle have no chance without them they'd weigh to much.
NoNameHaveI 8y ago
Really? This is a problem? How is a battery any different from any other auto part? Radiator, water pump, alternator, etc. Yours goes bad? You go to the auto parts store and get a new one with a "core" fee. You return your broken radiator, water pump, etc. and get your fee back and the re-manufacturer rebuilds yours for someone else to use. We don't NEED to have the same mileage as ICE vehicles. 80% of drivers are just fine on 100 miles a day. We don't NEED just ONE battery pack for all vehicles. Just get er dun, and get me my electric pickup!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
modzu 8y ago
um, no, it sure looks like the electric car is already taking over...
Animats 8y ago
Now that's strange. Electric cars are working pretty well, and then this guy comes along and says we have to wait for a new technology that doesn't work yet. Who is "David Stringer", anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps? ("Stringer" in journalism is a freelance journalist paid by the article.) There's a minor Arizona politician by that name, but that's about all Google has to say.
- jws 8y ago
  He writes or cowrites a couple of articles a week for Bloomberg since 2013 in the mining and metals areas. https://au.linkedin.com/in/david-stringer-2096652b https://au.linkedin.com/in/david-stringer-2096652b
- clouddrover 8y ago
  > Electric cars are working pretty well They could work better, be cheaper, be safer, charge faster, have better range, and have longer cycle life for the battery, don't you think? Better batteries are needed. Solid-state batteries have the potential to outperform conventional batteries. We'll see who commercializes them first. ICE cars are still more practical than EVs today. ICE cars are cheaper to buy with better range and faster refuelling. If I want the most car for the least dollars then I'm buying a sensible Toyota, not a Tesla. We're at the beginning of the end of the ICE car. EVs with fast charging, energy dense, highly durable solid-state batteries represent the genuine end of ICE cars. > Who is "David Stringer", anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps? That's an odd criticism coming from "Animats". Who is "Animats" anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps? > There's a minor Arizona politician by that name, but that's about all Google has to say. DuckDuckGo says David Stringer is a senior reporter at Bloomberg: https://twitter.com/david_stringer https://twitter.com/david_stringer https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARMqcSMt218/david-stringer https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARMqcSMt218/david-stringer
  - Animats 8y ago
    I hold "ANIMATS" as a US registered trademark. I own "animats.com". I'm not anonymous. When I originally signed up for HN, I tried to use my own name, but it was taken.
graycat 8y ago
For an electric car, here is my summary: For a car, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with. E.g., the US is dotted with high density with gas stations, can fill a 20 gallon tank in just a few minutes, and at 20 MPG that tank will fuel the car for 400 miles. For a battery, apparently so far the range is about 200 mile; for the readily available charging sources the charging time is much longer, maybe hours; and from a really powerful charging source the battery will get hot and need cooling (e.g., see the Jay Leno piece on the new, all electric Mercedes which does cool the battery while charging). The weather is a significant issue: In hot weather, the battery needs more cooling. In cold weather, the battery loses lots of its power. So I agree with the OP: For a good electric car, need a better battery. IIRC long ago a Ford executive stated "You build me a good battery, and I'll build you a good electric car." Actually, all electric cars are not new but old and go way back to the first days of cars, e.g., before Ford's Model T. And as Leno mentioned, for all or nearly all the time since then, battery technology hasn't made much progress. Right: Battery technology is still based on basic chemistry, and that chemistry was understood well enough in 1900. Of course, people saw all this 100+ years ago and for one solution tried hybrids where a gasoline engine charged a battery. Apparently, net, that meant that the car had two sources of power, gasoline and a battery, and could get by with just one, the gasoline, which is just what has been done since then. Still there is some hope for hybrids. Yes, there are some uses for electric vehicles. Still: Yup, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with.
- frogpelt 8y ago
  This page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density) has a chart on energy density shows that gasoline contains roughyl 36 MegaJoules per Liter and 46 MJ per kg of energy density while a lithium-ion battery has less than 3 by both measures.
  - graycat 8y ago
    WOW. Good way to put it. Also, as I've done a few times, can take your 36 megaJoules per liter and ...: Let's see, a Watt is a Joule per second. So the energy in 36 megaJoules would be a million Watts for 36 seconds. A liter is ballpark a quart, and a gallon is 4 quarts, so 20 gallons is 80 quarts or ballpark 80 liters, and even with a megaWatt power source we're talking charging time 36 times 80 seconds, a bit over 40 minutes. So, drive up to a gas station, convenience store, plug in the mega Watt power source, get some lunch, check the air in the tires, clean the floor mats, put in a DVD for a movie, .... Before you connect that megaWatt cable, let me step back about 50 feet and look in a different direction. Let's see: My house has 100 A at 240 V, that is 24,000 Watts. So a mega Watt is ballpark 40 times that much. If use only half that power to charge the car battery, a mega Watt is 80 times that much. So the 40 minutes becomes 3200 minutes, something over 50 hours, two days. "Sorry, Boss, I'll be charging my battery on Monday and Tuesday and will be in on Wednesday. Since my commute is 100 miles a day, I'll need to do this two day charge once for each four working days. Or, I'll be okay Wednesday through Friday, drive another 100 miles on the weekend, and will charge again Monday and Tuesday of next week, too." Right, he could charge at work. Each day at work will need about six hours of charging at the full 100 A at 240 V. Uh, at 10 cents per KWh, the 40 minutes at one megaWatt would cost: A megaWatt hour would be 1000 times a KWh and cost 1000 times 10 cents or $100. The 40 minutes would be 2/3rds of that or $66 or the same as gas at $3.30 a gallon. Not a bargain. And that $3.30 per gallon applies wherever have to pay 10 per KWh, at a charging station, at home, at work, at a restaurant, etc. People don't give away gasoline and won't give away electric power for charging. In particular, a full charge like 20 gallons of gas at home, at 10 cents per KWh, will still cost the $66. Right, the gasoline burns with maybe only 30% efficiency, but there are efficiency losses from heat when charging the battery and again when driving the car. Yup, for powering a private car used as they commonly are, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with. For an electric, range is too short and charging time is too long. With electric power at 10 cents per KWh and gas at $2.75 a gallon, the cost will be ballpark much the same, no big savings either way. Ah, maybe it's just me: I want a Corvette or Dodge with 700 HP! :-)
all2 8y ago
There is no mention of Robert Murray Smith here, so I will add him as someone who has already reinvented the battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1jusadHkmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1jusadHkmM This is only one example of what he's done.
elsonrodriguez 8y ago
The information in the article is good, but the premise is just a bunch of goalpost moving.
woodandsteel 8y ago
This is a good article on solid state batteries. But I think it is all wrong in claiming that we will have to wait for them before BEV autos will take over. The fact is that BEV's are already better than ICE's in many ways, and the best, Tesla's, are so good they are busy taking away market share. And lithium ion batteries are steadily improving in characteristics and also getting cheaper. Furthermore, China, the world's largest auto market, is putting a very big push behind BEV autos, and many other governments are also making efforts. From what I have read a tipping point is coming around 2023-25 when consumers will start flooding to BEV's, and ICE sales will start dropping rapidly. And then in another half decade or so solid state batteries will be ready and the trend will accelerate. The basic message is that the century-long dominance of ICE cars is coming to an end and in the not-so-distant future, it's just a matter of time.

135 points by pdog 8y ago

No they don't, everything is already in place. In a few years the industry will catch up to Tesla and we'll see further price decreases across the board and mass EV adoption using current tech. The battery will have to be reinvented for large planes to become electric, but that's a different discussion. Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech to start the electrification of that whole industry.

eptcyka 8y ago
Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech for about 50 miles max.
- nickik 8y ago
  Yeah but you can use the potential energy of the plane to produce power, just like car going down hill. Probably not gone work for small planes but it does have interesting advantages and new ways of thinking about planes.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    For an airplane, there's no particular reason to turn potential energy into chemical energy for storage. Use the potential energy more directly to glide down to your approach point. Airplanes are typically "driven" (using positive power) all throughout the flight regime, including descent and approach.
    - AshleyGrant 8y ago
      > Airplanes are typically "driven" (using positive power) all throughout the flight regime, including descent and approach. No, not really. Descent in most aircraft is typically done at idle. In jet powered aircraft, final approach will be done with the engines at some speed above idle, but that is to minimize spool-up time during a go-around, rather than because the aircraft needs the thrust.
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        The airplanes where electrics could possibly compete are piston powered and flown with power in the descent. Electrics don’t even compete well there yet (and may never as they are just as heavy on landing as takeoff). For airplanes with higher fuel burn (long haul jets), they benefit significantly from being lighter at the end of the flight. Even my piston airplane picks up about 5 knots in cruise at 1/4 tanks vs full. In jet descents, we rarely get what we prefer which is a slam dunk approach (much more fuel efficient to stay up high). Many times we’re down at 10K feet for 20+ miles because of sequencing. It’s only in the less busy airports where jets can regularly get slam dunk flight idle approaches. Even there, you probably want to use potential->kinetic rather than potential->chemical->(later) kinetic transfers because of unavoidable losses at each conversion. On the runway, using regen instead of thrust reversers or beta/reverse would be helpful, but that's a vanishingly small part of the overall flight regime.
      - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        > Descent in most aircraft is typically done at idle. Went on my first flight in decades last year. The moment we started out descent really stands out to me, I remember the eerie-ness of hearing the engines slow down a ton all of a sudden and no one looking disturbed by it at all.
      - mrguyorama 8y ago
        Idle turbo-fan engines produce enough thrust to taxi around an airport
      - ams6110 8y ago
        Even so, the aircraft still needs to make a comfortable gradual descent. It must maintain lift as it descends, otherwise it will stall (aerodynamically) and fall out of the sky. The controlled descent takes most of the energy that you might think could be recovered by e.g. windmilling the electric fan motors as generators.
        AshleyGrant 8y ago
        I'm not sure what you're talking about with "must maintain lift as descends otherwise it will stall and fall out of the sky"... Wings stall when they exceed their critical angle of attack. A descent is inherently a low AoA maneuver. Heck, in pretty much all aircraft of decent performance, they have devices on the wings to help "spoil" the lift of the wings to help the plane descend more quickly. They're sometimes called speed brakes, sometimes called spoilers.
    - kwhitefoot 8y ago
      Here is a quote from Pipistrel <https://www.pipistrel.si/plane/alpha-electro/overview> https://www.pipistrel.si/plane/alpha-electro/overview> Alpha Electro, the new 2-seat electric trainer: the greenest way of learning to fly! Performance of the Alpha Electro 2-seat electric trainer is tailored to the needs of flight schools. Short take-off distance, powerful 1000+ fpm climb, and endurance of one hour plus reserve. The Alpha Electro is optimized for traffic-pattern operations, where 13% of energy is recuperated on every approach, increasing endurance and at the same time enabling short-field landings.
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        Using propeller in the "beta" range for improved short-field operations and power recovery is a definite benefit to the Pipistrel. It's also an airplane that can't legally fly 95 miles/150 km and achieves those power recovery numbers only in pattern operations. I don't see that as representative or substitutive for even piston airplanes use cases.
      - figers 8y ago
        I want this plane! why learn and deal with all the issues of an old school engine if you have this plane...
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Well, you might want to fly more than 100 miles...
    - nickik 8y ago
      Of course you don't turn it into chemical energy, I'm talking about batteries. And it defiantly makes sense.
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        > Of course you don't turn it into chemical energy, I'm talking about batteries. How do you think batteries store energy, if not chemically?
  - outworlder 8y ago
    By windmilling the propeller? This massively increases drag.
- aluskuiuc 8y ago
  As a backup for engine failure that could be a substantially safer and cheaper alternative to a second engine.
- makerofspoons 8y ago
  We could make aircraft carbon-neutral by using carbon capture and producing synthetic fuel from water, like what the US Navy is working on: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-nrl-patent-carbon-capture-devicea.html https://phys.org/news/2017-10-nrl-patent-carbon-capture-devi...
- martythemaniak 8y ago
  A "small" 737 will do about 50 miles, yeah. But by small I meant like small small: https://www.eviation.co/alice/ https://www.eviation.co/alice/
- kwhitefoot 8y ago
  Small electric aeroplanes already exist and are in serial production. See https://www.tu.no/artikler/i-dag-skal-avinor-sjefen-og-samferdselsministeren-fly-elektrisk/440188 https://www.tu.no/artikler/i-dag-skal-avinor-sjefen-og-samfe..., https://www.pipistrel.si/plane/taurus-electro/overview https://www.pipistrel.si/plane/taurus-electro/overview.
  - eptcyka 8y ago
    I stand corrected - last I checked, a production all-electric aircraft could do 15 minutes of flight time. It's nice to see a 4x improvement in the Pipistrel case. However, a 60 minute flight time is still 3 times smaller than the petrol counterpart.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
It does seem inevitable now, VW have said their new electric car will be priced at about the same level as a Golf Diesel.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Yeah but it could also be Smart-sized...
  - _ph_ 8y ago
    No, it isn't. Prototypes have been shown already. It is roughly the outer size of the VW Golf, but offers larger interior space due to being designed to be electrical only, that means, the space of the engine can be saved: https://www.t-online.de/auto/elektromobilitaet/id_83655386/er-kommt-2019-vw-neo-aussen-xs-innen-xxl.html https://www.t-online.de/auto/elektromobilitaet/id_83655386/e...
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      I'm pleasantly surprised. I was considering a hybrid Jetta but I'll wait to see what the final offer is.
      - ju-st 8y ago
        Here they are test driving the VW car (VW ID. First Drive from fullycharged) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Tqw9LX3QE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Tqw9LX3QE
- prostoalex 8y ago
  What's the range though? Considering the battery pack is the main cost contributor, it's always possible to introduce a lower sticker price by further compromising on range.
  - clouddrover 8y ago
    330km to 550km depending on the battery size: https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/17/vw-id-range-and-more-info/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/17/vw-id-range-and-more-inf...
Gravityloss 8y ago
I think batteries with high investment but low operations cost, as well as self driving tech (comprehensive all solid state radars and lidars and cameras with sensor fusion can get quite expensive) fit the "mobility as service" or taxi / uber business model much better.
b0bby_tabl3s 8y ago
Planes are small potatoes in the carbon footprint. Overseas shipping via cargo freighters...that is where your big players are. The fuel they use is the cause of most the worlds pollution.
Nimelrian 8y ago
Last time I checked, the extraction process for lithium, which is needed for the batteries, still has a heavy impact on the environment. This article mentions a cost of 500,000 gallons (almost 2 million litres) of water for a tonne of lithium. [1] Considering that as of now the most lithium is produced in desert regions of Bolivia and Chile, using what little water exists there in the first place may be detrimental to the population of these regions. Are there any news regarding new, more environment friendly mining processes? [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  extracting fossil fuels now also requires a ton of water.
  - gleglegle 8y ago
    Water which is permanently and irreversibly contaminated, which is not the case for lithium extraction.
    - adventured 8y ago
      You can still recycle frack water for use over and over again, which is increasingly common. By necessity water recycling has become a big business in the fracking industry. "Sensing a chance for a big return, private-equity firms have invested more than $500 million into wastewater-disposal companies such as Solaris Water Midstream LLC, WaterBridge Resources LLC, Goodnight Midstream LLC and Oilfield Water Logistics LLC. There are roughly a dozen of these water-focused companies that analysts said could each be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. ... Some companies have a longer-term plan: recycling the wastewater to sell it back to drillers to reuse." https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-big-bet-in-fracking-water-1534930200 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-big-bet-in-fracking-wa... "The oil and gas industry is finding that less is more in the push to recycle water used in hydraulic fracturing. Slightly dirty water, it seems, does just as good a job as crystal clear when it comes to making an oil or gas well work. ... Until recently, many companies considered recycling too expensive or worried that using anything other than freshwater would reduce well output. But oil and gas companies are increasingly treating and reusing flowback water from wells, which unlike freshwater is very high in salt, with good results." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking-waters-dirty-secret/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/analysis-fracking...
stcredzero 8y ago
In a few years the industry will catch up to Tesla and we'll see further price decreases across the board and mass EV adoption using current tech. Can this catch up be quantified? There must have been a study of how entire industries ramp up infrastructure and develop economies of scale. This has happened in wartime many, many times, and well resourced countries had an interest in how fast these things could happen. (And how they could be prevented.)

b0bby_tabl3s 8y ago

I've been saying this for over a decade. Forget 'reinventing the mouse-trap', reinvent the battery. The world will beat a path to your door.

kabouseng 8y ago

Half of the problem is solved, we only need the engineers to solve the last little part...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q

cmiller1 8y ago

People are trying, Tesla is investing HEAVILY into battery technology and research. CPUs 30 years ago were 8 bits and barely scratching 10s of mhz, we arrived at our modern era through incremental improvements, not by saying "we need to stop and wait for someone to invent something better!"

gammateam 8y ago
Now printers on the other hand....
- tapland 8y ago
  Could arguably partially have been replaced by portable devices with high resolution displays.
  - Normal_gaussian 8y ago
    And electronic databases and forms. I have very very few pieces of paper in my life, but loads of webforms.
  - swish_bob 8y ago
    They'd have to be damned cheap. I give away printed bits of paper all the time ...
sandworm101 8y ago
Cpus were new tech, brand new tech. They have only been around now a few decades. Batteries have been studied for centuries. Even incremental improvements are much less likely, and much more expensive, when dealing with such mature technology.
jjoonathan 8y ago
Fun story: the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. Yesterday's miracle battery of tomorrow that never quite happened, right? Well, the big picture story is a bit different. It was invented shortly before the lead acid battery and US civil war. It accumulated a few refinements and fewer practical uses over the years, until the Apollo era when there was a huge breakthrough (polymer electrolyte membranes). Then it went back to slowly accumulating incremental advancements, and that's still the story today. Exploitation is exponential (the scale of each success determines the resources people are willing to bet on the next win), but exploration is a punctuated equilibrium, and it's a recipe for disappointment to assume that all progress should behave like the former rather than the latter.

village-idiot 8y ago

My big fear is weight. Road damage scales with the per-axle weight raised to the 4th power. EVs are quite heavy to compensate for the lower energy density of lithium ion batteries.

_ph_ 8y ago
Electric cars are not that much heavier than ICE cars. The Model 3 is pretty much on par with its gasoline competition. The real road killers are not passenger cars, but heavy trucks and semis. They have a multiple per-axle weight of any car.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  > Electric cars are not that much heavier than ICE cars. this isn't really true. a model 3 is about 400lbs heavier than a base a4 (~12%) and 300lbs heavier than a base 3 series (~8%). that's a pretty big difference for a midsize sedan. your overall point is valid, of course. any sedan is going to do negligible damage compared to a large truck.
  - _ph_ 8y ago
    The base models of the named cars have of course much less powerful engines than the Model 3, so the weight difference goes down as you equip the ICEs with larger engines. Yes, some weight differential is left, but a small one compared to trucks and semis.
    - leetcrew 8y ago
      the engines of the named cars are essentially on par with the lowest specced (and lightest) model 3 that's currently available. the only situation where the model 3 has a strong advantage is in sprints from 0-60, a number most people pay entirely too much attention to in my opinion. edit: I'm actually wrong, according to car and driver, the 0-60 numbers are really close on all three cars. I don't want to digress too far on the performance characteristics of the cars, as this starts to be a bit subjective.

sbradford26 8y ago

This is coming from a person who would like to buy an electric car. But lets say we get to batteries that can survive incredibly high charge rates, aka the 10 minute charge time. Some quick math: 100kWh battery needs 100 kW to charge in an hour. To charge in 10 minutes we need 100kW * 6 = 600kW. Now that is a bit of an over simplification but it gives the magnitude of instantaneous power needed. From a grid perspective charging a lot of cars slowly is not terribly difficult to handle because it appears mostly as base load, but if you have ton of cars starting and stopping charging at 600kW you will get massive fluctuations. Thankfully a lot of cars will just slow charge overnight most of the time. Then for a fast charging station they could have large batteries or super capacitors to help offset the fluctuations.

cmiller1 8y ago
Alternative solution: when technologies like resonant inductive coupling improve enough for efficient medium to long range wireless transfer of power we could just build cars with small batteries or capacitors that are almost always trickle charging.
UI_at_80x24 8y ago
Easy, just put a pebble-bed reactor every few blocks. /s We have come full circle Mr.Edison. Nikola would be spinning in his grave. (just attach magnets!)
arkh 8y ago
There is already a way to manage that: remove the petrol from petrol stations and add huge batteries / capacitors. Charge those at normal grid load when no one is using the station then unload like crazy.
- epanchin 8y ago
  This has the added advantage of levelling the grid load beyond just the charging, like V2G without the car.
jdietrich 8y ago
EVs make it easier to manage the grid - the challenges are in local distribution. The vast majority of EV charges are overnight, because that's when electricity is cheap, because that's when we have more supply than demand. Most generation sources can't be quickly switched on and off; renewables generate whenever the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. EVs help to balance the grid simply by sucking up lots of off-peak capacity. The next generation of cars and charging points are expected to support vehicle-to-grid technology; in exchange for a reduction in your cost of charging, you allow your car to be used as a grid storage battery when you're not using it. A few million cars with 40kWh batteries add up to a very big storage reserve, even if you only take a couple of percent from each car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rb808 8y ago

I really thought a Volt like car would be the answer. Electric for most of the year, but a gas powered motor to go for those vacations away. I don't know why that wasn't more popular.

sbradford26 8y ago
So one of the major perks of electric cars are fewer moving parts. Once you add a gas engine to the car, you increase the weight, remove space for batteries, add cost, and finally add a lot more complexity and moving parts. Now the gas engine added convenience but personally it doesn't add enough to compensate for the downsides. But I would not rule out plug in hybrids, from what I have read GM stopped making it since it was a sedan which are not selling great for them. But also because the newer bolt platform is a better base for an EV or PHEV, since it was designed from the ground up to run on electric motors.
- petre 8y ago
  So add a small gas turbine range extender. Like the BMW i3’s range extender but use a small gas turbine instead of a scooter engine. Also make that optional. No need for a conventional ICE drivetrain.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Yeah, GM killing the Volt seems more a weird side effect of GM's manufacturing plant shell game than an intentional strategy. The Volt was original intended to be the "savior" of the venerable Hamtramck plant, as it was the future of what was to be built there. The original goal was to make more of the cars over time at Hamtramck resemble the Volt, which was closer to a cross-over in G1. The short-sighted decision for cost cutting in the G2 Volt was to push it more proper sedan-like to make it more like everything else that Hamtramck was producing. So the Volt shutting down was further short-sighted side effect of GM killing all sedans/Hamtramck. Obvious rumors are that GM is already in the works on a new cross-over PHEV. It's dumb that the sedan-ification of the Volt brand between G1 and G2 probably means that it will be yet another new brand instead of just the obvious Volt G3. (It's also a dumb shame that GM didn't actually save Hamtramck in what could have been a smart move of electrifying more of it and moving it all more cross-over-esque according to the original Volt plan.)

exabrial 8y ago

We neeed batteries that can charge at a rate faster than they can be discharged. And we also need continuing advances in conductors, magnets, and alternatives batteries such as fuel cells.

checker 8y ago
I would love to have such batteries but I'm not sure we need them. Doesn't hot-swapping effectively achieve net charge rates faster than discharge? I can see why people might be less interested in hot-swapping for personal vehicles, but why isn't hot-swap on the table for buses and cab fleets? Is it because few people are willing to invest in R&D and infrastructure when sufficient batteries seem to be just around the corner?
- exabrial 8y ago
  Tesla tried to do the hot swap, and it presented a few problems. First, the infrastructure cost is massive. You have to keep an inventory of expensive parts (the battery) on hand. Tesla tried to fix this by having you set an appointment, but that eliminated the whole point of hot swapping: convenience. It's also harder to put a warranty on a battery if you're swapping them all the time. What if you get a dud swapped into your vehicle?

yholio 8y ago

Maybe the solution is to have better business practices around the technology that we do have. Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so. I'm thinking of a modular battery that is hot swapable at the charge stations and where you only pay it's depreciation based on what you actually use. This would significantly lower ownership costs for light users and drastically increase efficiency and flexibility for heavy users who are no longer dependent on charge times. Since it's modular, you load the number of units you need, say one battery unit for a Leaf, two for a Model S or 10 units for a light truck, all in standardized format and with their own computing that tracks things like life span, charge cycles performed by the user himself for proper billing etc. I know Tesla experimented with and later abandoned battery swap, but that's predictable without the proper business structure in place, no one is going to leave the most expensive part of their car back at the charge station. If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.

asdkhadsj 8y ago
> If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics. I wouldn't. Not to be a naysayer, just giving some context. The cars I buy are already in that price range, and I already pay "comparable gasoline prices" (via gas, hah), so in my area all I'd gain is a different type of gasoline when in city, and when I go camping/etc I'd be at risk due to being in slow adoption areas. Don't get me wrong, I want electric, but due to the areas I drive I've already settled to likely being stuck with Hybrids for the next X years. With that said, if the model you laid out still ended up cheaper than gasoline it would at least tip the balance towards its favor. I just can't handle a zero sum trade - and I imagine the same would be true for many around this large, slow to adapt land masses. Cities will become much, much nicer though. Air quality alone. I look forward to it
jdietrich 8y ago
Renault already offer battery leasing - you buy the car, but lease the battery based on your annual mileage. It has been reasonably popular, but it's far from a game changer. https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finance/battery-hire.html https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finance/battery-hire.html

alistproducer2 8y ago

I'm surprised there isn't a discussion of the Goodenough lithium glass battery [0]. The fact that I haven't read about replication or a failure to replicate is really weird to me given how world-changing such a technology would be if it were proven to be viable. 0: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/26/the-solid-state-lithium-ion-battery-has-john-goodenough-finally-done-it/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/26/the-solid-state-lithium...

spenrose 8y ago

The article begins by contradicting itself: "To deliver an electric vehicle that’s cheaper, safer and capable of traveling 500 miles on a single charge ..." That's not a "car". A "car", as driven by a billion people every day, takes trips whose distances have a power-law distribution falling off from ~2 miles down to 150 miles, by which point you are looking at < 0.1% of trips. A large fraction of cars have never been driven on a 500 mile trip.

lakeeffect 8y ago
I think there is an advantage of only having to charge your car once every couple weeks if you are a short distance trip taker.
- umeshunni 8y ago
  What's the advantage? Most people with EVs are charging overnight, not once a week.
  - macintux 8y ago
    Of course most people today with EVs do that, but for broader adoption it would be useful for that to not be a requirement. Many urban dwellers don’t have a garage to charge overnight.
    - ju-st 8y ago
      I think the future for urban dwellers is fast charging your EV while shopping. With large enough batteries it should only be necessary to charge the car once a week.
      - WorldMaker 8y ago
        Also, most streets and parking lots in urban settings are already by law required to be electrified for minimum lighting requirements and/or parking meters. Extending the electrification requirements to include car charging seems only a matter of time. (Potentially especially in the cases where it makes sense to push for Smart Grids at the same regulative time.) Some companies have already built interesting versions of street lamps and parking meters that double as car chargers (including at least one London company that was working to make sure that they could meet historic preservation standards of the street lamp design in London's core). Road-embeddable induction chargers could even be an option soon in urban environments (particularly large parking lots for instance) where there isn't such existing "furniture" to take advantage of.

CydeWeys 8y ago

I disagree with the premise of the question. How many people really need a 500 mile range? How often does the average person do a long road trip? Is it really such a hassle to stop and stretch your legs (and maybe eat) while charging in the middle of a once-annual road trip? Hell, even if you're doing that drive weekly, you might still prefer the electric since it'd save you a lot on gas money, even though it enforces a mid-trip break.

jdietrich 8y ago
Most new EVs have more range than the average human bladder. After four hours of driving, most people are going to need to pee. Current-generation EVs on 50kW fast-chargers can hit 80% charge in 30 minutes, which is only slightly longer than the average dwell time at a freeway service plaza. 150kW chargers are now commercially available, which (when connected to a vehicle with suitable battery cooling) cut the time to 80% charge to about 15 minutes. I'm sure that some people do drive for over four hours without taking a break, but I don't think that it's a safe or healthy thing to do. The technology is good enough already - we're just waiting for it to become widely distributed.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  30 minutes is close to the average? Wow. I don't think I've ever spent more than 10 minutes at a gas station.
  - mikestew 8y ago
    Ever time yourself? I'm not doubting your estimate, but I wonder how close your are. Out of idle curiosity (and for more purposeful reasons), I've timed myself on the motorcycle. Pay-at-the-pump, and don't get off the bike, and I'm out of there like a LeMans pit stop. But getting off, hitting the restroom, and grabbing/paying for drink took longer than I would have guessed. And as sibling comment points out, it all goes out the window if you have passengers.
  - harperlee 8y ago
    If you measure the time impact on the trip, and you count deceleration/accelaration, parking, etc. going above 20 minutes is super easy. That’s not useful for recharging, but a point to have in mind when discussing stop times with more people in order to avoid misunderstanding :)

reacharavindh 8y ago

What we really need is a standardisation to cover for the improvements in the background. Kind of like a USB interface for batteries. Imagine, you could buy a car, that has slots for you to attach standard batteries. You could leave the batteries charging at home, office, shops that lease you charged batteries(like gas stations) etc. It would also take care of "I live in an apartment and park my car by the side of the road, so no home charging.. problem". Also, gets rid of the range anxiety if you know you could get batteries everywhere or at-least charge yours everywhere. Now, when technology genuinely improves by a magnitude, replace the cells, but keep the interface for a decade or so. Bonus if that standard catches on for other uses. Imagine same batteries being used for power tools at home, emergency power supply at home, camping stuff, plug those boxes into the edges of solar panels while they are not in the car etc. Leave it to the competing business that are "battery suppliers" to figure out how to make them more efficient, cheaper, and do further R&D. Car companies can stay at making cars that are essentially safe, aerodynamic shells with electric motors waiting to be powered up by customer supplied batteries.

nradov 8y ago
The batteries are too heavy and bulky for most people to physically carry and install. The only way regular battery replacement can work is with a large automated system, which means it would have to be in a dedicated service station rather than an apartment complex.

solidr53 8y ago

It may be an unpopular opinion, but what about radioisotope thermoelectric generator? (Nuclear)

ackfoo 8y ago
Limited in the amount of current it can generate. Doesn’t respond well to changing power requirements. Horrendously toxic if the casing is breached traumatically.
cpcallen 8y ago
Also: extremely limited availability of the require isotopes. Even NASA has had to redesign missions to use solar instead because their supply was running out.

mrep 8y ago

Talk about moving the goal posts. Tesla's are way less flammable than gasoline cars and some have more range (my dad's Ford has like 250 miles of range)

clouddrover 8y ago
Why settle for mediocre batteries? EV battery packs are still catching on fire in scenarios where they shouldn't have: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-model-s-catches-fire-twice-after-flat-tire-report-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-model-s-catches-fire-t... We can do better on batteries and solid-state batteries are clearly safer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>Tesla's are way less flammable than gasoline cars This is false. Talk to any tow truck driver. A breached battery is almost a guaranteed fire. A breached gas tank is nothing of the sort. A battery pack provides its own ignition source. Gasoline needs external ignition. While external ignition sources are available on cars they don't seem to ignite with nearly the same frequency. In theory the EV can be less flammable. In practice they seem to be about the same (Volt, Leaf, etc) or worse (Model S) than your average ICE car. It all comes down to the design. Pinto < Tesla < average ICE car.
- jungturk 8y ago
  These FEMA stats suggest that only 1.6% of car fires are related to the fuel tank or lines https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v19i2.pdf https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v19i2.pdf "Mechanical failure or malfunction was the leading contributing factor of highway vehicle fires (45 percent). These mechanical failures include a leak or break in a component of the vehicle, automatic or manual control failures, or the use of an improper type of fuel. An electrical failure or malfunction, such as a short circuit, was a contributing factor in 21 percent of highway vehicle fires. The misuse of a material or product, such as spilling flammable liquid or gas too close to the vehicle, was the third leading factor contributing to the ignition of the fires (13 percent)." That same document goes into lots of detail about what heat source initiates those fires and what materials are actually catching fire. "Where the necessary data were available, the leading category of items first ignited in fatal highway vehicle fires was “liquids, piping, filters” (65 percent). Flammable liquids and gases in general were, by far, the most deadly (67 percent of deaths). Specifically, fuel in or from the engine area was the second leading item first ignited in all highway vehicle fires (18 percent) but was, by far, the leading item in both fatal fires (43 percent) and deaths (45 percent). Additionally, insulation around electrical wiring or cables was responsible for 29 percent of all highway vehicle fires, but only 2 percent of fatal fires and 2 percent of deaths."

devy 8y ago

The article is written as if solid-state battery designs are going to be the future. So my honest question is, is that really so? What about others, like Graphene batteries and supercapacitors [1][2]? [1]: https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-batteries https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-batteries [2]: https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-supercapacitors https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-supercapacitors

MentallyRetired 8y ago
No mention of graphene in the article and this is the only mention of it here. We can't have the battery discussion without graphene. It's the future, imo. Soon as we learn how to charge it and maintain stability while doing so.

xte 8y ago

Oh, someone start to understand that... Many in the industrial sectors have understood it well only in the sixties...........

jpm_sd 8y ago

This is ridiculous. Good-enough solutions are here already. Daimler just issued purchase contracts for $20 BILLION worth of battery components! https://electrek.co/2018/12/11/daimler-billion-battery-cells-electric-vehicle/ https://electrek.co/2018/12/11/daimler-billion-battery-cells...

DeonPenny 8y ago

It's fine now, but if anyone gets close to the mythical solid state battery it would change everything. Trucks, trains, and bigger vehicle have no chance without them they'd weigh to much.

NoNameHaveI 8y ago

Really? This is a problem? How is a battery any different from any other auto part? Radiator, water pump, alternator, etc. Yours goes bad? You go to the auto parts store and get a new one with a "core" fee. You return your broken radiator, water pump, etc. and get your fee back and the re-manufacturer rebuilds yours for someone else to use. We don't NEED to have the same mileage as ICE vehicles. 80% of drivers are just fine on 100 miles a day. We don't NEED just ONE battery pack for all vehicles. Just get er dun, and get me my electric pickup!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

modzu 8y ago

um, no, it sure looks like the electric car is already taking over...

Animats 8y ago

Now that's strange. Electric cars are working pretty well, and then this guy comes along and says we have to wait for a new technology that doesn't work yet. Who is "David Stringer", anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps? ("Stringer" in journalism is a freelance journalist paid by the article.) There's a minor Arizona politician by that name, but that's about all Google has to say.

jws 8y ago
He writes or cowrites a couple of articles a week for Bloomberg since 2013 in the mining and metals areas. https://au.linkedin.com/in/david-stringer-2096652b https://au.linkedin.com/in/david-stringer-2096652b
clouddrover 8y ago
> Electric cars are working pretty well They could work better, be cheaper, be safer, charge faster, have better range, and have longer cycle life for the battery, don't you think? Better batteries are needed. Solid-state batteries have the potential to outperform conventional batteries. We'll see who commercializes them first. ICE cars are still more practical than EVs today. ICE cars are cheaper to buy with better range and faster refuelling. If I want the most car for the least dollars then I'm buying a sensible Toyota, not a Tesla. We're at the beginning of the end of the ICE car. EVs with fast charging, energy dense, highly durable solid-state batteries represent the genuine end of ICE cars. > Who is "David Stringer", anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps? That's an odd criticism coming from "Animats". Who is "Animats" anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps? > There's a minor Arizona politician by that name, but that's about all Google has to say. DuckDuckGo says David Stringer is a senior reporter at Bloomberg: https://twitter.com/david_stringer https://twitter.com/david_stringer https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARMqcSMt218/david-stringer https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARMqcSMt218/david-stringer
- Animats 8y ago
  I hold "ANIMATS" as a US registered trademark. I own "animats.com". I'm not anonymous. When I originally signed up for HN, I tried to use my own name, but it was taken.

graycat 8y ago

For an electric car, here is my summary: For a car, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with. E.g., the US is dotted with high density with gas stations, can fill a 20 gallon tank in just a few minutes, and at 20 MPG that tank will fuel the car for 400 miles. For a battery, apparently so far the range is about 200 mile; for the readily available charging sources the charging time is much longer, maybe hours; and from a really powerful charging source the battery will get hot and need cooling (e.g., see the Jay Leno piece on the new, all electric Mercedes which does cool the battery while charging). The weather is a significant issue: In hot weather, the battery needs more cooling. In cold weather, the battery loses lots of its power. So I agree with the OP: For a good electric car, need a better battery. IIRC long ago a Ford executive stated "You build me a good battery, and I'll build you a good electric car." Actually, all electric cars are not new but old and go way back to the first days of cars, e.g., before Ford's Model T. And as Leno mentioned, for all or nearly all the time since then, battery technology hasn't made much progress. Right: Battery technology is still based on basic chemistry, and that chemistry was understood well enough in 1900. Of course, people saw all this 100+ years ago and for one solution tried hybrids where a gasoline engine charged a battery. Apparently, net, that meant that the car had two sources of power, gasoline and a battery, and could get by with just one, the gasoline, which is just what has been done since then. Still there is some hope for hybrids. Yes, there are some uses for electric vehicles. Still: Yup, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with.

frogpelt 8y ago
This page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density) has a chart on energy density shows that gasoline contains roughyl 36 MegaJoules per Liter and 46 MJ per kg of energy density while a lithium-ion battery has less than 3 by both measures.
- graycat 8y ago
  WOW. Good way to put it. Also, as I've done a few times, can take your 36 megaJoules per liter and ...: Let's see, a Watt is a Joule per second. So the energy in 36 megaJoules would be a million Watts for 36 seconds. A liter is ballpark a quart, and a gallon is 4 quarts, so 20 gallons is 80 quarts or ballpark 80 liters, and even with a megaWatt power source we're talking charging time 36 times 80 seconds, a bit over 40 minutes. So, drive up to a gas station, convenience store, plug in the mega Watt power source, get some lunch, check the air in the tires, clean the floor mats, put in a DVD for a movie, .... Before you connect that megaWatt cable, let me step back about 50 feet and look in a different direction. Let's see: My house has 100 A at 240 V, that is 24,000 Watts. So a mega Watt is ballpark 40 times that much. If use only half that power to charge the car battery, a mega Watt is 80 times that much. So the 40 minutes becomes 3200 minutes, something over 50 hours, two days. "Sorry, Boss, I'll be charging my battery on Monday and Tuesday and will be in on Wednesday. Since my commute is 100 miles a day, I'll need to do this two day charge once for each four working days. Or, I'll be okay Wednesday through Friday, drive another 100 miles on the weekend, and will charge again Monday and Tuesday of next week, too." Right, he could charge at work. Each day at work will need about six hours of charging at the full 100 A at 240 V. Uh, at 10 cents per KWh, the 40 minutes at one megaWatt would cost: A megaWatt hour would be 1000 times a KWh and cost 1000 times 10 cents or $100. The 40 minutes would be 2/3rds of that or $66 or the same as gas at $3.30 a gallon. Not a bargain. And that $3.30 per gallon applies wherever have to pay 10 per KWh, at a charging station, at home, at work, at a restaurant, etc. People don't give away gasoline and won't give away electric power for charging. In particular, a full charge like 20 gallons of gas at home, at 10 cents per KWh, will still cost the $66. Right, the gasoline burns with maybe only 30% efficiency, but there are efficiency losses from heat when charging the battery and again when driving the car. Yup, for powering a private car used as they commonly are, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with. For an electric, range is too short and charging time is too long. With electric power at 10 cents per KWh and gas at $2.75 a gallon, the cost will be ballpark much the same, no big savings either way. Ah, maybe it's just me: I want a Corvette or Dodge with 700 HP! :-)

all2 8y ago

There is no mention of Robert Murray Smith here, so I will add him as someone who has already reinvented the battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1jusadHkmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1jusadHkmM This is only one example of what he's done.

elsonrodriguez 8y ago

The information in the article is good, but the premise is just a bunch of goalpost moving.

woodandsteel 8y ago

This is a good article on solid state batteries. But I think it is all wrong in claiming that we will have to wait for them before BEV autos will take over. The fact is that BEV's are already better than ICE's in many ways, and the best, Tesla's, are so good they are busy taking away market share. And lithium ion batteries are steadily improving in characteristics and also getting cheaper. Furthermore, China, the world's largest auto market, is putting a very big push behind BEV autos, and many other governments are also making efforts. From what I have read a tipping point is coming around 2023-25 when consumers will start flooding to BEV's, and ICE sales will start dropping rapidly. And then in another half decade or so solid state batteries will be ready and the trend will accelerate. The basic message is that the century-long dominance of ICE cars is coming to an end and in the not-so-distant future, it's just a matter of time.