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One gemini battery nearly doubles Tesla Model S range
- brightball 5y agoStill waiting to hear results on prototype EV batteries from GMG and Bosch, which I believe are 2025-26 timeline as well. Supposed to be 1/3 weight, ~3x energy and 40-60x faster charging without heat concerns.
- olivermarks 5y ago'How does over 700 miles of range sound from a battery that fits where the stock one goes?' implausible until proven at scale over time Article reads like an advertorial
- heymijo 5y agoDouble the capacity, no exotic materials, same size as a regular battery pack and not much more weight. Tested in cold Michigan weather instead of more idyllic conditions adds credibility. This doesn't sound like vaporware. I wonder what barriers there might be to scaling this up to mass production.
- dognotdog 5y agoSo far, so good -- let's see what the pricing will be like :)
- cesaref 5y agoWe'll need to know how quickly it can be charged, how many charge cycles it takes, how it drains when not in use, etc etc, but you are right, it's a promising start, one to watch to see where it ends up.
- abracadaniel 5y agoPast a certain capacity, I wonder where the need for rapid charging begins to decrease. It might be an interesting trade off.
- pkulak 5y ago1C, which isn't fast charging, is already 200kW with this battery. So yeah, if you can make a battery with a massive capacity, but it can't fast charge, that could be a great tradeoff.
- MattRix 5y agoIn the article they state they charged it at 1C, which is 1 hour from 0% to fully charged (200kw for a 200kwh battery). Who knows what the final numbers will be, but very promising if true.
- pkulak 5y agoYeah, but maybe that was one of the 100 the battery can take before it's at 70% life. There are just so many sliders with a battery, and they all effect each other. Getting them all up at once is the grail.
- Wistar 5y agoNice analogy, the "sliders."
- karamanolev 5y ago1C is usually not 1hr from empty to fully charged, because of CC-CV charging. Most Li based chemistries charge at 1C until a certain threshold (when the needed voltage for 1C charging reaches a maximum predetermined level, usually the target max cell level, e.g. 4.2V). After that, you charge at constant voltage until you reach full charge. If the battery is significantly oversized, i.e. it treats 85% charge as 100% for the user, then 1C might be possible from 0 to 100%, but usually it's not.
- gpapilion 5y agoJust assume it takes twice as long to charge, since the circuit will be a factor if you double the capacity. Your 208 40amp circuit can only deliver so much power, and even dc fast chargers can only go as fast as they can consume power from there circuits.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoLFP charges pretty well since it is so much safer. The real mystery is the "non-LFP" battery cells they used.
- throwawayboise 5y agoExactly. It sounds good, but can it do this at least two or three times a month for 10 years?
- gruez 5y ago>Double the capacity How can it be double the capacity when the wikipedia article for LFP battery says it has "lower than that of other common lithium ion battery types such as Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC) and Nickel Cobalt Aluminum (NCA)"? What type of battery does the stock tesla battery pack use?
- oblio 5y agoThe general rule of thumb for such fundamental breakthroughs is that unfortunately for 99% of the really huge ones we'll only know they're revolutionary when the inventors get Nobel prizes 5-15 years after the fact. 99% of these articles are trash that never gets talked about again after 6 months. Maybe this one isn't, I can't tell. Time will tell, though.
- sschueller 5y agoMaybe they use the space for effectively that packing all those 18650 into the pack.
- bserge 5y ago
- leoedin 5y agoThe article says the battery is split, with an LFP traction battery and another undefined battery to make up the "range extender" - presumably the bulk of the capacity. So I suspect they've got some sort of novel high capacity low discharge battery which keeps the regular LFP battery topped up, which then drives the car.
- causality0 5y agoPersonally I wonder if it's going to lower prices. It takes a long time to use enough gas to make up the $10K difference between a cheap gas sedan and a cheap electric sedan.
- Game_Ender 5y agoProduction though is 4 years away in 2026. What capacity will stock manufacturer and Tesla packs be at then? Especially since Tesla is not sitting still and has new designs also under development.
- rootusrootus 5y agoNot bad, especially for LFP. Much lower fire risk as well.
- alamortsubite 5y agoThe irony to me is how we continue to discuss improvements in battery technology for EVs in terms of increased range, rather than decreased weight. I still have high hopes EVs will shift public consciousness about our environment and the way we live our lives, but true enthusiasm still seems to be for heavy vehicles people can spend more time in.
- enchiridion 5y agoGiven the large long roads in the US, there’s always going to be a preference for large vehicles. Especially since there is a strong link between weight/size and safety.
- jMyles 5y agoBe reminded that many of us are out here on bikes every day, and that our lives are at risk by the strange proclivities to engineer car-first roads and to drive oversized, heavy, fast vehicles on them (regardless of their means of propulsion). Many municipalities (I'll use my current location of St. Petersburg, FL as an example) are working to make the roads safer in all that ways that you (I assert, incorrectly) presume will never happen.
- alamortsubite 5y ago> Given the large long roads in the US, there’s always going to be a preference for large vehicles. Are you sure you don't have that relationship backwards? Similarly, > Especially since there is a strong link between weight/size and safety. Solely for the given vehicle's occupants, and to the detriment of everyone else around them.
- jmspring 5y agoI have a sprinter van for business and a Tacoma for a normal driver. I drive more than some due to distance, not frequency. I also explore remote back/off roads. The sprinter is more susceptible to wind and driving surface variation.
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- hackerlytest 5y agoThis is one technology that I will regret in my later life that it didn't come soon enough.
- V__ 5y agoWhat I often see omitted and think is just as important long term: recyclability, cycle life and cost. These will impact the resale value and the lifetime costs of the car. The second-hand market will be crucial when it comes to widespread EV adoption.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoAt the moment second-hand values seem to be holding up well, even for old Leafs. I suspect the problem is going to be the opposite, a lack of cheap cars for people with a tight budget. Right now I could buy a cheap car for £1000 and although it might be a bit grotty it would get me to and from a job. That end of the market might disappear completely.
- V__ 5y agoMy hope is that public transport and bike infrastructure will catch up by that point. However, this might help in Europe, but I could see a real problem with the market vanishing in the U.S.
- oblio 5y agoI appreciate your optimism, but if you look at a Youtube channel such as Not Just Bikes, you'll see that the scale of the problem is humongous. Most people in North America doesn't even realize that car infrastructure is a problem. First you need people to understand, then to accept the necessary changes and then you need the money and time to perform those changes. Even the Netherlands, the bike capital of the world, has a thriving car market, and North America is probably 30+ years behind the Netherlands, in the best US biking locations.
- markvdb 5y agoFrom what I've seen of the US, the lag is more like 50 years and increasing because of "interesting" spatial planning. Look at Flanders (northern Belgium) and Germany for areas 30+ years behind the Netherlands.
- sfjailbird 5y ago> What mileage would be enough for these naysayers? I live in the city. There are a fair amount of chargers, but not enough (and probably never will be). So 'enough', for me, is when it can compete with a regular ICE car: Charge it for about 5-10 minutes, and then not have to worry about it again for at least a couple of weeks. We're almost there, but not quite.
- pokot0 5y agoIn a usual commute scenario being able to charge you car like your phone saves you the trip and the time to refuel every week (if you add the time to actually get to a gas station is way more than 5-10m). This is why I will switch to EV at some point.
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- nicbou 5y agoIf you have the charger at hand. This isn't the case for us street-parking city dwellers, to say nothing of travellers.
- pokot0 5y agoYes, I forgot about my past life when I sold my car because I didn't have a parking spot available at home. Hopefully the industrial revolution lifestyle will slowly fade over time :)
- turtlebits 5y agoIf you don’t have no way to charge an EV on your own, I would recommend against purchasing one. Fast charging stations are unreliable and expensive, and with all the new EVs out there, harder to find open spots in general.
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- imglorp 5y agoNobody's talking about compatibility, which falls into right to repair territory. This is not your father's Die Hard battery, there's intelligence and protocols that need to be integrated. How does one drop in a replacement without Tesla's blessing and support? example: https://insideevs.com/news/459830/video-inside-tesla-model-3-battery/ https://insideevs.com/news/459830/video-inside-tesla-model-3...
- sschueller 5y agoYou warranty is void if using a 3rd part battery pack...
- wffurr 5y agoWhat does news like this do to current year EV sales? We needed to start transitioning the vehicle fleet around the world to EVs and alternate transportation modes years and years ago to make a dent on climate change. But now if EVs are going to have triple the range and be cheaper in a few years' time, why spend money on a 300 mile range EV now? Surely the resale value will plunge and current buyers will lose their shirts on them. I suppose that's good news for buyers in the secondhand market hoping to pick up cheaper vehicles, but it's a disincentive for new buyers.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoThe Osborne Effect keeps on giving, though in this case, it's industrywide instead of just one company.
- wffurr 5y agoThanks for the phrase that describes exactly what I was imagining. Looking that up led to an interesting and concerning article on the economic impact of the transition to BEVs: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/25/the-osborne-effect-on-the-auto-industry/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/25/the-osborne-effect-on-t...
- digikata 5y agoManufacturers could alleviate that by planning for battery pack upgrades. Offer customers an upgrade path, transition the old batteries to utility storage until the end of their life and then recycle them.
- didgeoridoo 5y agoElectric cars won’t “make a dent” in carbon emissions until most of our electricity comes from renewables and nuclear. At least in the USA, we are many years away from this. BEV uptake is unfortunately not the rate-limiting step.
- d12bb 5y agoAnd even if we had 100% renewables tomorrow, cars would still be incredibly inefficient (2 ton car for most times only 80 kg load (aka one human)), loud, dangerous for everyone not in a car, expensive for owner and state, etc…
- supperburg 5y ago
- jacquesm 5y agoThis could well be a game changer. What I don't understand from the article: they claim they have just done a trip with that battery and then in the same breath they say they will have a production sample by 2023. How can those be reconciled, if they already have one isn't that sample enough? Or is this a prototype of sorts? And if so has someone inspected that vehicle to make sure that it isn't a trick? Because if a factor of 2 in battery life works for EVs it works for everything and that would be pretty big news utterly unrelated to Tesla.
- londons_explore 5y agoI have a theory that the 'trick' here is that the battery isn't rechargeable... Not yet at least... For a PR stunt, they put lithium–manganese dioxide or some similar chemistry into a tesla. They're not rechargable, but they have a very high energy capacity. They'll obviously have a lab furiously working on trying to make a rechargeable version... But for now, this demo is great for getting investment.
- jacquesm 5y agoI'll believe it when they allow independent inspection of the test vehicle pack. Until then, skeptical. Too many fake-it-until-you-make-it schemes and this could easily be one.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago"range extender cells" == shorter recharge lifetime cells that are only supposed to be used in 1% of trips (long ones). I wonder if these are just experimental low-cycle cobalt/nickel or some other battery that normally isn't up to the cycle endurance of a consumer car. LFP for an everyday usage (200 miles in a day), which are high-endurance, good temperature range, safer, etc. I think this mixed mode is an excellent example of how "good enough"-density (200 wh/kg) LFP (and possibly even cheaper sodium) will be utilized. All these different cell chemistries can each be combined in heterogeneous packs for different use cases. So even if a cell can't do 1000 cycles, it might be usable for the rare trips. Or maybe make that high-density module more replaceable, and the long-endurance LFP/Sodium does Cell-to-Pack and that type of stuff. I think a typical consumer car in a few years will use a sodium or LFP for about 2/3 the cells (by weight/space) and 200 miles of range, and another higher density SSB or modern cobalt/nickel high-density cell for another 200 miles of range. So the question is, what was the mix in this car? That's the big question.
- twobitshifter 5y agoWhat improvements did they make to the design to double the capacity? Nanotechnology? Better battery controls? The article is light on what the underlying tech is.
- jacquesm 5y agoThere might not be any underlying tech.
- gen220 5y agoQuestion for the more EV knowledgeable people out there. Is there anybody pursuing the idea of charging stations where one swaps your EV’s battery for a fully charged one, and pays a fee proportional to how expensive it was to charge that battery at the local electricity rate? Specifically, what are the barriers? Legal? Technical? Patent-related? Capital? Or is it not worth investing in this vision, because there’s reason to believe we’ll reach ubiquitous availability of charge stations with <5 minute charge times for a 350 mile range (i.e. equivalent to a full tank fill-up at a gas station) in the not distant future? To understand the use case better, we own a car and only use it to “get away” (i.e. 200-600 miles over the course of a day into somewhat remote locales). We’d love to have an EV, but the idea of pausing to take a long charging break in the middle of an already long drive is very unappealing.
- aaronblohowiak 5y agoDriving 200 miles is doable today. 600, I definitely need to stop, stretch legs and eat. Sfbay to az and and I stopped more frequently than “required” just to get a break from the road. I’m middle aged though so ymmv
- dghlsakjg 5y agoWhen I was in college, and much more willing to suffer, it was 335 miles from home to school, and took 5.5 hours driving. I could do that without stopping, though normally would stop at least once for snacks/bathroom. Now I’m more likely to stop two or three times on a trip that long. Even now on a mountain west traffic-free interstate I don’t really count on going more than 500 miles in a day. And that includes a meal break. Both of these use cases sound like they would be very minimally disrupted by planning my stops around a charging break. I think that range anxiety is largely overblown for a huge majority of use cases.
- a9dhalaan 5y agoThe battery is probably the singular most expensive component in an EV Vehicle. And batteries degrade with time and are in different states. If someone comes in with a batter that's only half working, then swaps it for a fully working one? or One that comes to the station with a fully working one and swaps it for a half working one? Batteries would need to be a communal resource - with them being expensive i don't see it happening. Batteries need to be cheap for companies and people to take the risk of swapping their battery with a random one.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoI feel that charging an electric vehicle will always be a sore point. Because it takes so darn long. No amount of range improvement makes it less painful to recharge. There will always be complaints.
- tppiotrowski 5y agoI think when the amount of time you can drive on a battery equals the amount of time humans can stay awake, we'll have reached a good equilibrium.
- amelius 5y agoWith self-driving cars, you don't need to stay awake.
- hansel_der 5y agounless replaceable batteries get standardized
- gwbas1c 5y agoJust "splash and dash." Usually I just plug my Tesla into a supercharger, go to the bathroom, and then I have enough charge to make it where I'm going.
- Bud 5y agoCould we be more careful about getting the capitalization right in headlines like this? "One gemini" not only reads different from "ONE Gemini" in English; it actually means something different. Just copy and paste the headline.
- detaro 5y agoThe "ONE" is auto-"corrected" by HN software, so you need to actually go back in and edit it after posting when submitting such titles.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago---------------------------------------------------------------- Dear battery technology claimant, Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology is is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because: [ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale. [ ] it will be too expensive for users. [ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles. [ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels. [ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures. [ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable. [ ] it has too short of a lifetime. [ ] its charge rate is too slow. [ ] its materials are too toxic. [ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode. [ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care. [ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then. [ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it. [ ] your claims are lies. ----------------------------------------------------------------
- Animats 5y ago"The production intent Gemini battery will be LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate)" But the demo battery is not. It's something else. What? Why do these people think they can get that kind of energy density from lithium iron phosphate when nobody else can? BYD, which really likes that technology, has pushed the energy density per unit volume up by about 2X, but the resulting battery is denser and thus heavier. No problem for fixed installations, but mediocre for vehicle range. There's a lot to be said for using lithium iron phosphate chemistry. The batteries don't blow up. They don't have the negative temperature coefficient which causes thermal runaway. They survive the "nail test". As electric cars go mainstream, and we have tens of millions of under-maintained cars on the road, we need all that. So, is this for real, or a demo only?
- jacquesm 5y agoYes, that was exactly what I thought. If they have twice the energy density that applies to much more than just vehicles. For now I'm chalking this up to a fake, let's see if they get their 'production sample' up and running. I would not put money on it.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> Why do these people think they can get that kind of energy density from lithium iron phosphate when nobody else can? Other people can, but not within the same safety, regulatory, longevity, cooling, weight, and manufacturability constraints. Which is why this demo is useless. It's easy to make one-off prototypes that accomplish something impressive as long as it only has to work a couple times, doesn't have to comply with safety regulations, and you have a massive budget to hand-build a couple of them. It's a different story entirely to try to ship it.
- jacquesm 5y agoEven that isn't all that easy. The energy density constraints are fairly hard on these. I suspect that they are doing something a lot more directly nasty than that: not rechargeable, or, entirely different chemistry.
- fwipsy 5y ago
- drewg123 5y agoI'll probably get down-voted, but I really think best way to improve BEV range for road trips is towing a diesel or gas powered electric generator. Your car becomes like a plugin hybrid, except you don't have to deal with the weight, mess and complexity of an ICE drivetrain on a daily basis. I can imagine an infrastructure where you rent one of these towed generators at a national chain when you depart, and drop it off at your destination. Similar to renting a U-Haul trailer. I have a Tesla with a 100Khw battery and ~290mi of range. The only time I need more than 100mi of range in a day is when I'm taking a trip, which is not a daily thing. If such trailers were rentable for a trip, BEVs could have much smaller and lighter batteries. Eg, my car could be substantially cheaper and lighter. I wish Tesla and other BEV cars would allow charging while driving.
- Crosseye_Jack 5y ago> towing a diesel or gas powered electric generator. Your car becomes like a plugin hybrid The Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust used this method. OK, it had the generator in the back so you were always carrying it about, but you know, baby steps and all that.
- motoboi 5y agoWell, why not form road trains with a truck sized generator. You just schedule your route and an app shows you where to dock with the roadtrain. You can also carry your meat body into an actual train, but I think this is not the point here.
- drewg123 5y agoThat's an interesting concept, but the towed generator model also allows you to go "off grid" to rural areas without fast charging. Such areas would be unlikely to be a common enough destination for a roadtrain..
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- dhc02 5y agoHow about a trailer that contains a battery pack big enough to last your whole trip? Going 600 miles? 100kWh trailer. 1000 miles? 250kWh trailer. Drop it off at uHaul when you get there, and pick up another one for the return trip. Of course, a 250kWh battery pack would be a lot more expensive than a diesel generator, but it would involve much less maintenance and wouldn't risk disastrous user error.
- jcims 5y agoTo the extent this is legit it would be great news for electric aviation as well. Range would still be very limited vs. current aircraft but it starts to get more viable for short-haul applications.