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> It'd just be nice if the manufacturers would establish some vendor-neutral standards already, paving the way for this future. I don’t think we’ll ever see th

> It'd just be nice if the manufacturers would establish some vendor-neutral standards already, paving the way for this future. I don’t think we’ll ever see this happen. Being able to tweak battery chemistry to suite different vehicles is just too valuable. I imagine at some point different manufacturers will start touting their specific magic battery sauce as being a reason to buy their cars over a competitor. Not to mention the onward march of incrementally better battery chemistries. But equally the fundamentals of the battery chemistry don’t change that much, and in a recycling scenario where you don’t need to squeeze every last electron into, or out of the battery. You can probably throw a very generic battery management circuit over the top and call it a day. As for the physical form factor. Again I suspect this will always be different for different cars. But equally, if you can find the positive contact and the negative contact, then the physical form factor doesn’t matter much. So at the end of day, we probably won’t see much standardisation. But equally it’s probably not that important if you’re recycling. Fundamentally all the batteries will be electrically similar enough it won’t really matter.

IgorPartola 6y ago
None of that prevents them from establishing a standard size and connector type and a standard format for communicating properties of the batteries. NiCd batteries come in all kinds of minor configurations but as long as you know the basic chemistry and voltage you can use a cheap charger to charge them. Even if we hit a period of explosive experimentation with geometry (conical batteries, sheet batteries, string batteries, string batteries wound into comical coils made into slabs), we will eventually have a few specific form factors and that matters more to reusing these than the exact chemical composition. Imagine if you had to buy Ford branded gasoline because that was slightly more efficient in Ford vehicles and therefore couldn’t be used in Toyotas. That’s effectively what you are advocating.
- avianlyric 6y ago
  I think in a recycling scenario you’re gonna be stripping these batteries down to their cells anyway, so their physical format is kinda irrelevant. As for their properties, you’re almost certainly better of just measuring them, rather than relying on some sort of digital spec sheet. You’ll have no idea what life these batteries have led, and thus no idea how much they’ve drifted from their spec sheet. The battery chemistry pretty much determines all their important characteristics such as voltage, and charge/discharge pattens. There’s a very limited number of fundamental battery chemistries to pick from, and you can almost certainly ignore the secret source car manufactures are using. You just end up running the batteries slightly less efficiently, but again their at the end of their automotive life, which is the bit when people actually care about peak efficiency. As for you analogy, it’s a bit more like wheels and tires on a car. There are hundreds of different tire treads, and plenty of different wheel sizes. But if you’re recycling a wheel or tire, you almost certainly don’t care much about either it’s size or tire tread, because it’s trivial to build a recycling process that can handle almost any type of wheel or tire.

IgorPartola 6y ago

None of that prevents them from establishing a standard size and connector type and a standard format for communicating properties of the batteries. NiCd batteries come in all kinds of minor configurations but as long as you know the basic chemistry and voltage you can use a cheap charger to charge them. Even if we hit a period of explosive experimentation with geometry (conical batteries, sheet batteries, string batteries, string batteries wound into comical coils made into slabs), we will eventually have a few specific form factors and that matters more to reusing these than the exact chemical composition. Imagine if you had to buy Ford branded gasoline because that was slightly more efficient in Ford vehicles and therefore couldn’t be used in Toyotas. That’s effectively what you are advocating.

avianlyric 6y ago
I think in a recycling scenario you’re gonna be stripping these batteries down to their cells anyway, so their physical format is kinda irrelevant. As for their properties, you’re almost certainly better of just measuring them, rather than relying on some sort of digital spec sheet. You’ll have no idea what life these batteries have led, and thus no idea how much they’ve drifted from their spec sheet. The battery chemistry pretty much determines all their important characteristics such as voltage, and charge/discharge pattens. There’s a very limited number of fundamental battery chemistries to pick from, and you can almost certainly ignore the secret source car manufactures are using. You just end up running the batteries slightly less efficiently, but again their at the end of their automotive life, which is the bit when people actually care about peak efficiency. As for you analogy, it’s a bit more like wheels and tires on a car. There are hundreds of different tire treads, and plenty of different wheel sizes. But if you’re recycling a wheel or tire, you almost certainly don’t care much about either it’s size or tire tread, because it’s trivial to build a recycling process that can handle almost any type of wheel or tire.