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Tesla is shifting nothing. Tesla is consuming all batteries that are available and, after starting operations in China they gained access to CATL who heavily i

Tesla is shifting nothing. Tesla is consuming all batteries that are available and, after starting operations in China they gained access to CATL who heavily invested in iron phosphate. Thanks to high efficacy of Tesla drive train, base models can have decent range, around 250miles EPA, with iron phosphate battery packs. However, iron phosphate battery volumetric density, at this time, does not allow for cars with what I would consider minimum for a single car family, in locations with real winters: 330miles EPA.

LinuxBender 6y ago
For what it's worth, this is slowly changing. BattleBorn has certified their LifePo4 batteries to lower temperatures. Been a while since I watched this. [1] Just slower charge rates, but no longer unsafe due to charge controller changes. Previous versions would shut off the charge below 0C. So charging slowly over night may still be useful, but speed charging in cold weather would not. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywn-vBjKblI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywn-vBjKblI
- unixhero 6y ago
  -20C is not enough
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    Yeah, they are compensating with heating elements. This will of course use some of the capacity. Telsa is doing heating elements as well. Heating during overnight charging should be easier if you are on grid power. Charging batteries when they are cold can harm them. Discharging them when they are cold equates to more internal resistance, so you could lose up to 15% range without heating elements. No idea how much power the heating elements draw. I would bet that Tesla's battery acquisition Maxwell [1] could make some improvements in this area. [1] - https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/04/teslas-maxwell-acquisition-aims-to-gives-its-batteries-a-boost/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/04/teslas-maxwell-acquisition...
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      It’s not as if internal combustion engines work great in -20C temperatures either. Often they won’t even start, and diesels typically have an (plug-in electric!) engine block heater in such climates. So I just don’t see this as a problem. Also, what proportion of the world lives in climates where it makes sense to optimize for -20C weather? Northern Europe, parts of North America... and that’s pretty much it. So while Norway (which now buys mostly electric cars... and famously a LOT of Teslas) might use cold-optimized chemistries, it’s not a major consideration for electrifying the world.
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        Also, what proportion of the world lives in climates where it makes sense to optimize for -20C weather? Dismissing problems or desires that don't affect people you know is pretty shortsighted. Also, skiing.
        Robotbeat 6y ago
        It’s dissmissible if the comparable solution (internal combustion engines) already have to use the exact same intervention (engine block heater). I grew up in Minnesota (and visit regularly). If anything it affects me MORE than most people, and I’ve been stranded with a non-starting internal combustion engine car in the cold winter many times which is how I know the existing internal combustion engines already don’t do well. It is not uncommon for parking lots (especially in the Northern parts) to be equipped with outlets for this precise reason (and people often leave their engines running while they go into the store on particularly cold nights so they won’t be stranded). Makes electrification there actually easier in some ways as there’s already widespread infrastructure for trickle charging. Concerns which are not that well-informed are, indeed, dismissible.
        dogma1138 6y ago
        If you drive an ICE car bought in say California to where it gets to -20c and park it outside it won’t start either since most likely the dealership didn’t include a block heater in your package.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Diesels need plug-in electric engine block heaters at anything like those temperatures as well. This would be the same thing.
    - YarickR2 6y ago
      No they do not. They need winterized diesel fuel (kerosene added), but that's it. -30C was a "nothing special" for BMW N47 engine to start. -37C is a pour point of 0w40 engine oil, but higher temps are fine in terms of cold engine startups
  - thatfrenchguy 6y ago
    Not a lot of people live in climates where it goes under -20C. Folks in Eastern Canada seem to be doing fine with 250 mile EVs as well.
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
      What are you talking about? It gets under -20C routinely each winter for a couple nights every year through the whole of the northeast; upstate New York, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Ontario, Quebec. Toronto is the 3rd/4th most populous city in North America (depending on how you count it). Almost every winter there's a -25C overnight. Not for days on end like where I grew up in Alberta, and not every year, but it definitely happens. There's 7 million people in the Greater Toronto / Hamilton corridor alone. 2 million people in the Montreal area. Almost a million in Quebec City, 1.4 millionish people in the Ottawa/Gatineau area. Not to mention Detroit, Windsor, Buffalo, Albany, Syracuse, Burlington, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and I'm seeing a mean minimum of -19C in Chicago for January, too, so throw in a few more million people there because that's close enough. "Not a lot indeed." Only maybe a couple dozen million people. EDIT: Oh yeah, I hear the US has a "midwest", too. I hear there's people there, too.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
    Here’s a map of the minimum yearly temperatures in the US: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/73h7eo/winter_low_temperature_map_of_the_usa_10800x7200/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/73h7eo/winter_low_... (note C vs F on the legend) As someone who lives in California, and likes snow sports, it looks like I could run into -20C conditions in the Sierras, and certainly the Rockies (although driving that far with an electric car would probably be too annoying to attempt). It’s probably not a concern for the average Bay Area family.
    - zeckalpha 6y ago
      Two weeks ago I had -32C in MN and it didn’t set any records.
      - dmoy 6y ago
        Also my family back there told me it didn't get above -20C for like a week or two in a row.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      I use a rough metric of 0°F as the lowest low to generally worry about (Fahrenheit is nice that the 0-100°F range is pretty close to the typical ambient temperature range in temperate zones). Despite living around the 5b/6a zone boundary (that's -10°F on the map), I have yet to see my car's temperature gauge report 0°F or below, so the conditions are a bit lower than I'd gauge as "lowest typical low." But that said, zones 6a/6b are definitely in the region of "yeah, I'd worry about 0°F overnight", and people in 7a will definitely worry about temperatures around 10°F if they're going to start their car. 6a-7a covers most of the population corridor in the NE US, about ⅓ the US population. Additionally, much of the Midwest is in the 0°F-is-possible territory, from St. Louis and Chicago straight through to Detroit and Pittsburgh. The general point is that starting in -20°C isn't some "well, sucks to live in Canada/Minnesota/North Dakota" concern, but rather "gee, a significant chunk of the US population has to do this on an annual basis."
elif 6y ago
Minimum single families drive 200 miles per day? Is 'minimum single family' a family of 12 average commuters?
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  Single-car family. As in, this has to serve the transportation needs of a family who relies on it as their only vehicle. That entails far more than their daily commute, and has to support a reasonable worst case, which is what his number represents. A car that only supports your average case is not very useful. And range is diminished in winter. In other words, if I’m living in Dallas and I have to choose 1 car to meet all of my use cases, I’m not going to pick one that precludes me from ever being able to take the wife and kids to visit relatives in Houston, even if I only make that trip occasionally.
  - et2o 6y ago
    Tesla has superchargers exactly for situations like this. Lots of people do this trip (or longer ones) all the time in Teslas. Anticipating your next complaint (“It takes so much longer to recharge!”) - You also save a lot of time by charging at home and never having to stop at a gas station. Overall, I think you save time because of this. It’s not exactly 1:1 equivalent because maybe long drive waits are more costly than frequent short gas stop visits and waits when you aren’t on a long road trip , but it’s really not the end of the world. Gives you some time to stretch your legs.
    - tshaddox 6y ago
      > Anticipating your next complaint (“It takes so much longer to recharge!”) - You also save a lot of time by charging at home and never having to stop at a gas station. This is not really a valid argument. The point isn't how much time you spend refueling over a lifetime, but rather how many miles you can travel in a reasonable day for a long road trip (and how flexible your route can be). If long road trips are important to you and you only have one vehicle, of course you probably don't want it to be an EV. In my view, EVs are incredible, but they're still a hard sell for most single-car households in America. But people should buy the car that matches their needs! No one is better off when fans of a particular type of car deliberately try to convince people to buy that type of car against their interests.
mchusma 6y ago
Difference of opinion, I think 200 miles is plenty of range even for most 1 car families. That is basically 1 stop from LA to vegas, and 1-2 stops from LA to San Francisco. I'd like to see focus on lowering the base cost of Teslas, and the lower the range target the easier to get there.
- dmoy 6y ago
  200 miles is not 200 miles in real winter though.
  - cogman10 6y ago
    It's now closer than you might think (except in extreme conditions). The main driver of range loss for earlier tesla's was the fact that they used an resistivity heater for the cabin/battery. That changed fairly recently to a heat pump. The range loss now is far less than it used to be. Extreme temps will render the heat pumps useless, but that's not the common case. You've got to be in northern Candida and Alaska before you are starting to talk about a useless heatpump.
    - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
      I think the recent experience in Texas shows that you have to plan for the worst case even if you don't think it will be necessary. Anecdotally, I know the manager of a car dealership here in Utah (we get real winters, at least sometimes and in parts of the state) who says he gets a lot of Tesla owners trading in their cars, and he implied it had to do with range issues.
      - cogman10 6y ago
        Texas's winter was extreme for Texas, not extreme for what a heat pump will do. I live in Idaho and get "real" winters. Range hasn't been a problem for me with my 2018 Tesla (Even though it has the resistivity heater). I've even visited Utah a couple of times in the winter. And, no offense, but I don't really trust the manager of a car dealership to give me accurate information about what's going on with tesla trade ins. You wouldn't ask a Chevy dealer about a Ford.
audunw 6y ago
> does not allow for cars with what I would consider minimum for a single car family, in locations with real winters: 330miles EPA. * in the USA Our EV (our only car) has 100-150km real-world range (60-90miles). We have real winters. We can get everywhere we want to for daily driving. My grandparents has a cabin 2 hours away that we visit regularly in winter. We can get there one one fast-charge that takes less time than we use to buy groceries for the trip (fast-charger we use is next to a super-market). I've borrowed my moms ICE car and a friends Tesla Model S for a road-trip across the country a couple of times though. But Northern Europe does not have the same problem with suburban sprawl and lack of public transportation, people don't usually drive as far regularly, speed limits are lower (higher efficiency) and now there's fast-chargers everywhere.
- generalizations 6y ago
  I think this is a fundamental difference between European and North American perspectives: everything is so much closer in Europe, and so much farther away in NA.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    That’s certainly been my experience when I’ve visited the USA (I’m British and live in Berlin, have visited central and north CA, Nevada, Salt Lake City, NYC/Newark, Rhode Island and the Cambridge/Boston area).
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Well, the saying is that Europeans think 100 miles is a long way and Americans think 100 years is a long time.
- mr_cyborg 6y ago
  For a point of comparison, in the state I live in in the US, you’re looking at 2-4 hours to a lot of vacation destinations. Many of which don’t have fast chargers along the way. In a normal pre-Covid year, I’ve driven upwards of 8-15 hours one way to go places, multiple times a year. Public transportation is available but far less convenient, and charging stations would add possibly hours on trips that length.
arcticbull 6y ago
To be fair, Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries (LiFePO4) are really good technology. Incredibly safe - they don't catch fire in the same way that standard Lithium Ion batteries do - they're better for the environment, have crazy discharge rates, etc. The only thing they're worse at is energy density. They don't perform badly in winters, I characterized the cold-weather relative performance of LiFePO4 vs LiIon batteries for an aerospace engineering project I did in college. Frankly I thought those characteristics would outweigh density in automotive applications, but I was mistaken.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I believe they are significantly better for cycle lifetime as well.

LinuxBender 6y ago

For what it's worth, this is slowly changing. BattleBorn has certified their LifePo4 batteries to lower temperatures. Been a while since I watched this. [1] Just slower charge rates, but no longer unsafe due to charge controller changes. Previous versions would shut off the charge below 0C. So charging slowly over night may still be useful, but speed charging in cold weather would not. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywn-vBjKblI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywn-vBjKblI

unixhero 6y ago
-20C is not enough
- LinuxBender 6y ago
  Yeah, they are compensating with heating elements. This will of course use some of the capacity. Telsa is doing heating elements as well. Heating during overnight charging should be easier if you are on grid power. Charging batteries when they are cold can harm them. Discharging them when they are cold equates to more internal resistance, so you could lose up to 15% range without heating elements. No idea how much power the heating elements draw. I would bet that Tesla's battery acquisition Maxwell [1] could make some improvements in this area. [1] - https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/04/teslas-maxwell-acquisition-aims-to-gives-its-batteries-a-boost/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/04/teslas-maxwell-acquisition...
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    It’s not as if internal combustion engines work great in -20C temperatures either. Often they won’t even start, and diesels typically have an (plug-in electric!) engine block heater in such climates. So I just don’t see this as a problem. Also, what proportion of the world lives in climates where it makes sense to optimize for -20C weather? Northern Europe, parts of North America... and that’s pretty much it. So while Norway (which now buys mostly electric cars... and famously a LOT of Teslas) might use cold-optimized chemistries, it’s not a major consideration for electrifying the world.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Also, what proportion of the world lives in climates where it makes sense to optimize for -20C weather? Dismissing problems or desires that don't affect people you know is pretty shortsighted. Also, skiing.
      - Robotbeat 6y ago
        It’s dissmissible if the comparable solution (internal combustion engines) already have to use the exact same intervention (engine block heater). I grew up in Minnesota (and visit regularly). If anything it affects me MORE than most people, and I’ve been stranded with a non-starting internal combustion engine car in the cold winter many times which is how I know the existing internal combustion engines already don’t do well. It is not uncommon for parking lots (especially in the Northern parts) to be equipped with outlets for this precise reason (and people often leave their engines running while they go into the store on particularly cold nights so they won’t be stranded). Makes electrification there actually easier in some ways as there’s already widespread infrastructure for trickle charging. Concerns which are not that well-informed are, indeed, dismissible.
      - dogma1138 6y ago
        If you drive an ICE car bought in say California to where it gets to -20c and park it outside it won’t start either since most likely the dealership didn’t include a block heater in your package.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Diesels need plug-in electric engine block heaters at anything like those temperatures as well. This would be the same thing.
  - YarickR2 6y ago
    No they do not. They need winterized diesel fuel (kerosene added), but that's it. -30C was a "nothing special" for BMW N47 engine to start. -37C is a pour point of 0w40 engine oil, but higher temps are fine in terms of cold engine startups
- thatfrenchguy 6y ago
  Not a lot of people live in climates where it goes under -20C. Folks in Eastern Canada seem to be doing fine with 250 mile EVs as well.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    What are you talking about? It gets under -20C routinely each winter for a couple nights every year through the whole of the northeast; upstate New York, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Ontario, Quebec. Toronto is the 3rd/4th most populous city in North America (depending on how you count it). Almost every winter there's a -25C overnight. Not for days on end like where I grew up in Alberta, and not every year, but it definitely happens. There's 7 million people in the Greater Toronto / Hamilton corridor alone. 2 million people in the Montreal area. Almost a million in Quebec City, 1.4 millionish people in the Ottawa/Gatineau area. Not to mention Detroit, Windsor, Buffalo, Albany, Syracuse, Burlington, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and I'm seeing a mean minimum of -19C in Chicago for January, too, so throw in a few more million people there because that's close enough. "Not a lot indeed." Only maybe a couple dozen million people. EDIT: Oh yeah, I hear the US has a "midwest", too. I hear there's people there, too.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
  Here’s a map of the minimum yearly temperatures in the US: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/73h7eo/winter_low_temperature_map_of_the_usa_10800x7200/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/73h7eo/winter_low_... (note C vs F on the legend) As someone who lives in California, and likes snow sports, it looks like I could run into -20C conditions in the Sierras, and certainly the Rockies (although driving that far with an electric car would probably be too annoying to attempt). It’s probably not a concern for the average Bay Area family.
  - zeckalpha 6y ago
    Two weeks ago I had -32C in MN and it didn’t set any records.
    - dmoy 6y ago
      Also my family back there told me it didn't get above -20C for like a week or two in a row.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    I use a rough metric of 0°F as the lowest low to generally worry about (Fahrenheit is nice that the 0-100°F range is pretty close to the typical ambient temperature range in temperate zones). Despite living around the 5b/6a zone boundary (that's -10°F on the map), I have yet to see my car's temperature gauge report 0°F or below, so the conditions are a bit lower than I'd gauge as "lowest typical low." But that said, zones 6a/6b are definitely in the region of "yeah, I'd worry about 0°F overnight", and people in 7a will definitely worry about temperatures around 10°F if they're going to start their car. 6a-7a covers most of the population corridor in the NE US, about ⅓ the US population. Additionally, much of the Midwest is in the 0°F-is-possible territory, from St. Louis and Chicago straight through to Detroit and Pittsburgh. The general point is that starting in -20°C isn't some "well, sucks to live in Canada/Minnesota/North Dakota" concern, but rather "gee, a significant chunk of the US population has to do this on an annual basis."

elif 6y ago

Minimum single families drive 200 miles per day? Is 'minimum single family' a family of 12 average commuters?

lawnchair_larry 6y ago
Single-car family. As in, this has to serve the transportation needs of a family who relies on it as their only vehicle. That entails far more than their daily commute, and has to support a reasonable worst case, which is what his number represents. A car that only supports your average case is not very useful. And range is diminished in winter. In other words, if I’m living in Dallas and I have to choose 1 car to meet all of my use cases, I’m not going to pick one that precludes me from ever being able to take the wife and kids to visit relatives in Houston, even if I only make that trip occasionally.
- et2o 6y ago
  Tesla has superchargers exactly for situations like this. Lots of people do this trip (or longer ones) all the time in Teslas. Anticipating your next complaint (“It takes so much longer to recharge!”) - You also save a lot of time by charging at home and never having to stop at a gas station. Overall, I think you save time because of this. It’s not exactly 1:1 equivalent because maybe long drive waits are more costly than frequent short gas stop visits and waits when you aren’t on a long road trip , but it’s really not the end of the world. Gives you some time to stretch your legs.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    > Anticipating your next complaint (“It takes so much longer to recharge!”) - You also save a lot of time by charging at home and never having to stop at a gas station. This is not really a valid argument. The point isn't how much time you spend refueling over a lifetime, but rather how many miles you can travel in a reasonable day for a long road trip (and how flexible your route can be). If long road trips are important to you and you only have one vehicle, of course you probably don't want it to be an EV. In my view, EVs are incredible, but they're still a hard sell for most single-car households in America. But people should buy the car that matches their needs! No one is better off when fans of a particular type of car deliberately try to convince people to buy that type of car against their interests.

mchusma 6y ago

Difference of opinion, I think 200 miles is plenty of range even for most 1 car families. That is basically 1 stop from LA to vegas, and 1-2 stops from LA to San Francisco. I'd like to see focus on lowering the base cost of Teslas, and the lower the range target the easier to get there.

dmoy 6y ago
200 miles is not 200 miles in real winter though.
- cogman10 6y ago
  It's now closer than you might think (except in extreme conditions). The main driver of range loss for earlier tesla's was the fact that they used an resistivity heater for the cabin/battery. That changed fairly recently to a heat pump. The range loss now is far less than it used to be. Extreme temps will render the heat pumps useless, but that's not the common case. You've got to be in northern Candida and Alaska before you are starting to talk about a useless heatpump.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    I think the recent experience in Texas shows that you have to plan for the worst case even if you don't think it will be necessary. Anecdotally, I know the manager of a car dealership here in Utah (we get real winters, at least sometimes and in parts of the state) who says he gets a lot of Tesla owners trading in their cars, and he implied it had to do with range issues.
    - cogman10 6y ago
      Texas's winter was extreme for Texas, not extreme for what a heat pump will do. I live in Idaho and get "real" winters. Range hasn't been a problem for me with my 2018 Tesla (Even though it has the resistivity heater). I've even visited Utah a couple of times in the winter. And, no offense, but I don't really trust the manager of a car dealership to give me accurate information about what's going on with tesla trade ins. You wouldn't ask a Chevy dealer about a Ford.

audunw 6y ago

> does not allow for cars with what I would consider minimum for a single car family, in locations with real winters: 330miles EPA. * in the USA Our EV (our only car) has 100-150km real-world range (60-90miles). We have real winters. We can get everywhere we want to for daily driving. My grandparents has a cabin 2 hours away that we visit regularly in winter. We can get there one one fast-charge that takes less time than we use to buy groceries for the trip (fast-charger we use is next to a super-market). I've borrowed my moms ICE car and a friends Tesla Model S for a road-trip across the country a couple of times though. But Northern Europe does not have the same problem with suburban sprawl and lack of public transportation, people don't usually drive as far regularly, speed limits are lower (higher efficiency) and now there's fast-chargers everywhere.

generalizations 6y ago
I think this is a fundamental difference between European and North American perspectives: everything is so much closer in Europe, and so much farther away in NA.
- ben_w 6y ago
  That’s certainly been my experience when I’ve visited the USA (I’m British and live in Berlin, have visited central and north CA, Nevada, Salt Lake City, NYC/Newark, Rhode Island and the Cambridge/Boston area).
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Well, the saying is that Europeans think 100 miles is a long way and Americans think 100 years is a long time.
mr_cyborg 6y ago
For a point of comparison, in the state I live in in the US, you’re looking at 2-4 hours to a lot of vacation destinations. Many of which don’t have fast chargers along the way. In a normal pre-Covid year, I’ve driven upwards of 8-15 hours one way to go places, multiple times a year. Public transportation is available but far less convenient, and charging stations would add possibly hours on trips that length.

arcticbull 6y ago

To be fair, Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries (LiFePO4) are really good technology. Incredibly safe - they don't catch fire in the same way that standard Lithium Ion batteries do - they're better for the environment, have crazy discharge rates, etc. The only thing they're worse at is energy density. They don't perform badly in winters, I characterized the cold-weather relative performance of LiFePO4 vs LiIon batteries for an aerospace engineering project I did in college. Frankly I thought those characteristics would outweigh density in automotive applications, but I was mistaken.

jjeaff 6y ago
I believe they are significantly better for cycle lifetime as well.