6 ms·

Manganese could be the secret behind truly mass-market EVs

71 points by WaitWaitWha 5y ago

rad_gruchalski 5y ago
> That battery, by far the largest ever shoehorned into an EV, also contributes 1,315 kilograms to the Hummer’s gargantuan 4,082-kg curb weight. Wow. 4 tonnes. The battery weighs more than a VW Golf 8 1.5 eTSI. These things are going to wreck havoc in the road infrastructure. 4 tonnes in 3 seconds to 60… good bye tarmac. At least we won’t see many of those in Europe. Standard B license in Europe has a limit of 3500 kg.
- jtc331 5y ago
  Frankly you won’t see many in the US either, just like you don’t see many ICE Hummers.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Tagbert 5y ago
  The Hummer EV is a halo car, meant to catch the attention of a segment of the market and will sell in very limited quantities. BTW The Ford F-350 starts at around 2.5 tons curb weight so this Hummer is not without precedent. This kind of vehicle is meant to look big and imposing to project a certain image. (Edit:as Kobe-systems mentioned, I mangled the conversion on the F-350 weight. Corrected)
  - mc32 5y ago
    F-350s, those have many uses, among them, tow trucks, utility trucks/service trucks, boat towing, etc. I suppose some people use them as their daily driver, but I doubt that's the majority of the fleet.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      > I suppose some people use them as their daily driver, but I doubt that's the majority of the fleet. I agree. There are, of course, a few people that drive an HD truck as a daily, but it's not the majority by any means. They make awful daily drivers. Very thirsty, bouncy, steers like an aircraft carrier, etc. But for towing, they're pretty great.
      - briffle 5y ago
        You would be surprised. My Ram 2500 has coil spring suspension, and rides better than most sedans. And gets better mileage than my early 2000’s midsize truck. But yeah, the Subaru is much cheaper per mile to drive.
  - numbsafari 5y ago
    In the case of the F-350, it’s about towing and load capacity. Sure, you want to project a certain image, but you might also need to tow Very Large Objects. This is definitely not the case for the Hummer, which has less tow capacity than an F-150.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - kube-system 5y ago
    The F-350 starts at a 5,677 lbs curb weight. [0] Which is ~2.8 US tons, or ~2.6 metric tons. The heaviest possible configuration is 8,587 lbs, which is still "only" 3895 kg, or 3.9 metric tons. [0]: https://www.ford.com/trucks/super-duty/models/f350-xlt/ https://www.ford.com/trucks/super-duty/models/f350-xlt/
    - Tagbert 5y ago
      Correct. I was looking at a source that put it just under 6000 pounds and did a goofball swap to tons. I do know that a ton is 2000 pounds but somehow it came out wrong.
  - yeetsfromhellL2 5y ago
    >This kind of vehicle is meant to look big and imposing to project a certain image. Actually modern trucks got so big to get around Obama-era fuel efficiency standards.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  I can't speak for Europe, but I see that container trucks are already a significant fraction of America's highways. I can't imagine a few electric Hummers will make much difference.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    18 wheels is the difference
  - kjkjadksj 5y ago
    The difference is a lot of trucks are only allowed on designated truck routes as they damage roads. Even then the most destroyed roads in my city are the ones where these heavy vehicles literally work ruts into the asphalt. Not to mention its the state that maintains a lot of highways vs local government for local roads, and one is more fit to regularly repair roads than the other.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Highways are one thing, but local city streets/roads are not built to the same integrity.
  - osrec 5y ago
    I imagine the pressure exerted by the smaller form factor vehicle will be significantly greater though...
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      On a pneumatic tire vehicle ground pressure is approximately tire pressure. The hummer will probably have some E-rated truck tire at like 50-60psi which is about what a panel van can be expected to have. Larger trucks are going to run higher pressures, 90-120 or so.
- thescriptkiddie 5y ago
  And damage to roads scales with the fourth power of axle-weight. The golf and the hummer have the same number of axles, so the hummer does ~106 times as much damage as the golf.
  - aperson_hello 5y ago
    And your standard UPS truck weighs twice as much again as the Hummer. So does 16x as much damage - and there are plenty more of those on the road than there ever will be hummers.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  The hybrid city bus that elicits much praise and no hand wringing from the same people who decry the electric hummer is far harsher on the roads. If the road can handle the bus it won't notice the hummer. The electric hummer is going to be in the same weight ballpark as a loaded plumber's van. It's really a non-issue. Even if the is only built to handle infrequent medium duty truck traffic (some very small rural back road) vehicles of 10k or less are of no consequence.
  - formerkrogemp 5y ago
    As long as the number of hummers is small, I don't think it's a problem. As more electric, heavy vehicles come on the road, road maintenance may not keep pace. A lot of county and rural roads have very low maintenance until heavy vehicles constantly drive up and down them. Regarding an electric bus, more people who might otherwise drive a shitty old car would ride in a bus if we're available. Each of those people isn't driving a 1-4 ton vehicle on the road. The net benefit of buses are greater than hummers. I doubt we'll adapt to electric cars fast enough anyways to avoid 3+ degrees of warming.
jeffbee 5y ago
Why would manganese be able to dodge the insincere environmental accusations that are aimed at lithium mines? Manganese is mostly produced using destructive open-cut pits in poor African nations. The number and size of said pits absolutely dwarfs all lithium mines put together. So why would it be OK to increase manganese production when there are organizations opposed to lithium production? Honestly, same question about iron. Why is lithium such a bogeyman when iron ore production is 1000s of times larger?
- mrpopo 5y ago
  Obviously, unless we manage to somehow get usable sea-water based batteries, any mass-market battery technology will have a tremendous impact on the environment. The problem is not manganese or lithium, it is the mass production and consumption, unregulated vehicle growth (in size and weight), all of this encouraged by pro-cars regulations, the US being the worst offender.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  > Why is lithium such a bogeyman when iron ore production is 1000s of times larger? Because the people making the argument aren't being genuine. They don't care. They want a "gotcha" and to feel like they "owned" the "libtard" driving the "eco-warrior-mobile." When the Toyota Prius came out two decades ago, people boo-hooed about the environmental impact of the battery - either the carbon impact or the environmental impacts of the mining. You could show them the numbers, tell them that the packs are highly recyclable and thus we're only pulling the ore out of the earth once and then get to re-use it numerous times...versus fossil fuels where they're useful once. Point to the huge gas and emissions reduction over the life of the vehicle. They don't care. Your facts get dismissed as Fake News. Same with solar panels. Doomsayers were predicting landfills full of panels and boo-hooing about the environmental cost. Part of the problem there is that people think "lifetime of 20 years" means "20 years and then phbbbtttt, dead" but reality is "20 years and now only 80% capacity." As solar gets more common, there will be more infrastructure It's also fascinating that "set up an entirely new distribution infrastructure around hydrogen" or "create nuclear-waste-recycling reactors" isn't a problem, but apparently "a used market for solar panels will crop up all on its own" is inconceivable. The same people would likely be stunned, stunned I tell you, that there are many shops out there rebuilding Prius battery packs and all manner of EV battery packs are valuable on the used market.
ncmncm 5y ago
What happened to Goodenough's improvement some years back that was supposed to triple the capacity of batteries, per unit weight? I see them getting cheaper, but it doesn't seem like capacity of a cell has improved much.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Battery tech has been improving steadily on various fronts over the last decade. The changes are incremental but happen frequently and have added up a lot over the years. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years-away-no-batteries-are-improving-under-your-nose/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Obvs, and capacity per unit weight is one such front. But my question was specific: he said 3x, coming to market in 3 years, or by 2020. It has been longer, and capacity is up nowhere near 3x in places I watch. Is it still to come, or did it not pan out? Judging from the link in the other reply, it is not expected until well after 2026. Shame he (probably) won't get to see it.
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      Your question was answered by someone 29 minutes before you left this comment...
- sp332 5y ago
  That is for stationary, grid-scale batteries. Hydro Quebec is developing it. https://electrek.co/2020/04/23/work-on-goodenoughs-breakthrough-solid-state-ev-battery-moves-forward/ https://electrek.co/2020/04/23/work-on-goodenoughs-breakthro... They're also commercializing something with Mercedes-Benz, but I can't tell if it's the same tech. https://news.hydroquebec.com/en/press-releases/hq/1580/hydro-quebec-partners-with-mercedes-benz-on-development-of-solid-state-battery-technologies/ https://news.hydroquebec.com/en/press-releases/hq/1580/hydro...
jmyeet 5y ago
Oh JFC, does anyone expect any of these "could" battery breakthroughs to ever go anywhere? I honestly don't even want to hear about them. Let me know when you're shipping commercially. Until then, it's just a waste of time and an attempt to drum up research funding. That's it.
- TomVDB 5y ago
  The article was about way more than what the headline promised, and I learned a good deal about the different battery options. If you don’t like those headlines, don’t click on them? It’s that easy (and it’s your loss too.)
- fnordpiglet 5y ago
  I suspect you didn’t read the article. It was remarkably enlightening.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- DennisP 5y ago
  It's not some radical breakthrough. It's an improvement to lithium-ion, like lots of others that have in fact hit production over the past couple decades. We have half a dozen different cathode chemistries, we've improved energy density by an average of five percent per year, costs have dropped enormously. That's why electric cars are a lot more viable now than they were at the turn of the century. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years-away-no-batteries-are-improving-under-your-nose/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
- dylan604 5y ago
  I had the original knee jerk reaction, but then thought better about it before making a post like this. Think of these new battery tech write ups as a pitch from a startup looking to get funding. They will of course paint the concept in the rosiest of pictures even though there's no functioning tech yet. They need the funding to develop the concept into a viable working product. This forum is a place full of people interested in this kind of tech, so by being a reader of this forum, you'll see a lot of this kind of stuff. One day, one of these might actually work and if you see it here first and "get in on the ground floor" you might get "founder" rich too.
Cieplak 5y ago
Tangential, but manganese steel/mangalloy/Hadfield steel was the first steel to be patented [1]. It hardens in response to impacts and is renowned for it's work-hardening properties. > In addition to having the highest work-hardening properties, manganese steel is probably our toughest material. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalloy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalloy#History [2] T.B. Jefferson. Metals and How to Weld Them, 2nd Edition. page 255
fallingknife 5y ago
The Tesla Model 3 has a base price of $47K. Tesla's gross margin was 33% in Q1 2022. So estimate of manufacturing cost is ~32K (probably somewhat higher as base model probably has lower margin). The battery is 50kwh. Price of a battery in 2021 was $132 / kwh (1). So the battery accounts for $6600 of that manufacturing cost. Even if they could get the batteries for free, and assuming the same gross margin that would drop the manufacturing cost to $25.5K and the price to $37K. So it seems like reducing battery cost is not going to get EV's to mass market. Am I missing something here? 1. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-battery-cell/ https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost...
- epgui 5y ago
  Yes: - Even without further improvements, the Model 3 economics are sufficient to get EVs to mass market, even assuming no further economies of scale. - Reducing the cost of a 6600$ part is an enormously high impact thing to do. Consider as well that reducing cost only a little bit expands your TAM quite a lot.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  In this hypothetical you’re taking Tesla’s profit as a constant. Most car companies don’t have a margin anywhere near Tesla’s. Less than 10% is common. Edit: Also, the average new car price is 47k in the US (https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-tops-47000/ https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-tops-4700...). Although, I guess the world average is probably a lot lower.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    You should be looking for the median new car price, not the mean. The mean can be greatly impacted by a few million dollar supercars.
- whazor 5y ago
  Tesla's are still very big cars with lots of expensive but unnecessary electronics and custom build parts. To really drive costs down you want a smaller, slightly more efficient car with yet a smaller battery. Basically an improved version of the Nissan leaf.
gorgoiler 5y ago
Is this a submarine* PR article sponsored by the deep-sea manganese-nodule-mining industrial-complex? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule *sorry
CRUDite 5y ago
There are trillions of dollars worth of manganese nodules from golf ball to basketball size just sat on ocean floors, many not far off from coast lines, many far deeper. Pumping them up has been an unsolved problem but Perhaps autonomous drone hoovers or shovelers could work. A usecase like this would spark enough interest / money spent on the problem to solve it. A ship that had a fleet of drones unloading to it 24/7 could pick up a lot of it. There is not just manganese in the nodules either.. I seem to remember most nations strategically banning collecting them a few hundred miles of their coasts should there be any.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  I wonder I wonder what horrific ecological damage we'll be creating once we start exploiting these.
  - Terry_Roll 5y ago
    Biologically its a fantastic Super Oxide Dismutase, but if it gets into a mammalian system without being bound in Metallothionein, you'll end up with Parkinson's like symptoms. Its possibly one of the reasons why some sea born mammals (whales) live for so long, considering its transported in much the same way as Iron. I sometimes think the Victorians with their sea bathing were onto a thing or two because for humans, their greatest environmental exposure to Manganese is bathing in the sea, the concentration of Manganese is highest in coastal regions, despite the fact you can find the Manganese nodules out to sea on the sea bed. Cant help but notice that Uranium can also be found in similar sized nodules in certain geographical environments. In terms of damage, this perhaps should be tackled like Oyster farming, so its a perfect case for using specialist drone equipment to do the harvesting, you cant deep sea dive farm these nodules.
- boffinAudio 5y ago
  There is also (theoretically) a near-infinite supply of it on 16 Psyche, an M-type asteroid that will, seemingly, radically alter the meaning of human wealth if we are able to harness its resources. Exciting times to be building Starships.

71 points by WaitWaitWha 5y ago

> That battery, by far the largest ever shoehorned into an EV, also contributes 1,315 kilograms to the Hummer’s gargantuan 4,082-kg curb weight. Wow. 4 tonnes. The battery weighs more than a VW Golf 8 1.5 eTSI. These things are going to wreck havoc in the road infrastructure. 4 tonnes in 3 seconds to 60… good bye tarmac. At least we won’t see many of those in Europe. Standard B license in Europe has a limit of 3500 kg.

jtc331 5y ago
Frankly you won’t see many in the US either, just like you don’t see many ICE Hummers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Tagbert 5y ago
The Hummer EV is a halo car, meant to catch the attention of a segment of the market and will sell in very limited quantities. BTW The Ford F-350 starts at around 2.5 tons curb weight so this Hummer is not without precedent. This kind of vehicle is meant to look big and imposing to project a certain image. (Edit:as Kobe-systems mentioned, I mangled the conversion on the F-350 weight. Corrected)
- mc32 5y ago
  F-350s, those have many uses, among them, tow trucks, utility trucks/service trucks, boat towing, etc. I suppose some people use them as their daily driver, but I doubt that's the majority of the fleet.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > I suppose some people use them as their daily driver, but I doubt that's the majority of the fleet. I agree. There are, of course, a few people that drive an HD truck as a daily, but it's not the majority by any means. They make awful daily drivers. Very thirsty, bouncy, steers like an aircraft carrier, etc. But for towing, they're pretty great.
    - briffle 5y ago
      You would be surprised. My Ram 2500 has coil spring suspension, and rides better than most sedans. And gets better mileage than my early 2000’s midsize truck. But yeah, the Subaru is much cheaper per mile to drive.
- numbsafari 5y ago
  In the case of the F-350, it’s about towing and load capacity. Sure, you want to project a certain image, but you might also need to tow Very Large Objects. This is definitely not the case for the Hummer, which has less tow capacity than an F-150.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- kube-system 5y ago
  The F-350 starts at a 5,677 lbs curb weight. [0] Which is ~2.8 US tons, or ~2.6 metric tons. The heaviest possible configuration is 8,587 lbs, which is still "only" 3895 kg, or 3.9 metric tons. [0]: https://www.ford.com/trucks/super-duty/models/f350-xlt/ https://www.ford.com/trucks/super-duty/models/f350-xlt/
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    Correct. I was looking at a source that put it just under 6000 pounds and did a goofball swap to tons. I do know that a ton is 2000 pounds but somehow it came out wrong.
- yeetsfromhellL2 5y ago
  >This kind of vehicle is meant to look big and imposing to project a certain image. Actually modern trucks got so big to get around Obama-era fuel efficiency standards.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
I can't speak for Europe, but I see that container trucks are already a significant fraction of America's highways. I can't imagine a few electric Hummers will make much difference.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  18 wheels is the difference
- kjkjadksj 5y ago
  The difference is a lot of trucks are only allowed on designated truck routes as they damage roads. Even then the most destroyed roads in my city are the ones where these heavy vehicles literally work ruts into the asphalt. Not to mention its the state that maintains a lot of highways vs local government for local roads, and one is more fit to regularly repair roads than the other.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Highways are one thing, but local city streets/roads are not built to the same integrity.
- osrec 5y ago
  I imagine the pressure exerted by the smaller form factor vehicle will be significantly greater though...
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    On a pneumatic tire vehicle ground pressure is approximately tire pressure. The hummer will probably have some E-rated truck tire at like 50-60psi which is about what a panel van can be expected to have. Larger trucks are going to run higher pressures, 90-120 or so.
thescriptkiddie 5y ago
And damage to roads scales with the fourth power of axle-weight. The golf and the hummer have the same number of axles, so the hummer does ~106 times as much damage as the golf.
- aperson_hello 5y ago
  And your standard UPS truck weighs twice as much again as the Hummer. So does 16x as much damage - and there are plenty more of those on the road than there ever will be hummers.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
The hybrid city bus that elicits much praise and no hand wringing from the same people who decry the electric hummer is far harsher on the roads. If the road can handle the bus it won't notice the hummer. The electric hummer is going to be in the same weight ballpark as a loaded plumber's van. It's really a non-issue. Even if the is only built to handle infrequent medium duty truck traffic (some very small rural back road) vehicles of 10k or less are of no consequence.
- formerkrogemp 5y ago
  As long as the number of hummers is small, I don't think it's a problem. As more electric, heavy vehicles come on the road, road maintenance may not keep pace. A lot of county and rural roads have very low maintenance until heavy vehicles constantly drive up and down them. Regarding an electric bus, more people who might otherwise drive a shitty old car would ride in a bus if we're available. Each of those people isn't driving a 1-4 ton vehicle on the road. The net benefit of buses are greater than hummers. I doubt we'll adapt to electric cars fast enough anyways to avoid 3+ degrees of warming.

jeffbee 5y ago

Why would manganese be able to dodge the insincere environmental accusations that are aimed at lithium mines? Manganese is mostly produced using destructive open-cut pits in poor African nations. The number and size of said pits absolutely dwarfs all lithium mines put together. So why would it be OK to increase manganese production when there are organizations opposed to lithium production? Honestly, same question about iron. Why is lithium such a bogeyman when iron ore production is 1000s of times larger?

mrpopo 5y ago
Obviously, unless we manage to somehow get usable sea-water based batteries, any mass-market battery technology will have a tremendous impact on the environment. The problem is not manganese or lithium, it is the mass production and consumption, unregulated vehicle growth (in size and weight), all of this encouraged by pro-cars regulations, the US being the worst offender.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
> Why is lithium such a bogeyman when iron ore production is 1000s of times larger? Because the people making the argument aren't being genuine. They don't care. They want a "gotcha" and to feel like they "owned" the "libtard" driving the "eco-warrior-mobile." When the Toyota Prius came out two decades ago, people boo-hooed about the environmental impact of the battery - either the carbon impact or the environmental impacts of the mining. You could show them the numbers, tell them that the packs are highly recyclable and thus we're only pulling the ore out of the earth once and then get to re-use it numerous times...versus fossil fuels where they're useful once. Point to the huge gas and emissions reduction over the life of the vehicle. They don't care. Your facts get dismissed as Fake News. Same with solar panels. Doomsayers were predicting landfills full of panels and boo-hooing about the environmental cost. Part of the problem there is that people think "lifetime of 20 years" means "20 years and then phbbbtttt, dead" but reality is "20 years and now only 80% capacity." As solar gets more common, there will be more infrastructure It's also fascinating that "set up an entirely new distribution infrastructure around hydrogen" or "create nuclear-waste-recycling reactors" isn't a problem, but apparently "a used market for solar panels will crop up all on its own" is inconceivable. The same people would likely be stunned, stunned I tell you, that there are many shops out there rebuilding Prius battery packs and all manner of EV battery packs are valuable on the used market.

ncmncm 5y ago

What happened to Goodenough's improvement some years back that was supposed to triple the capacity of batteries, per unit weight? I see them getting cheaper, but it doesn't seem like capacity of a cell has improved much.

Tagbert 5y ago
Battery tech has been improving steadily on various fronts over the last decade. The changes are incremental but happen frequently and have added up a lot over the years. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years-away-no-batteries-are-improving-under-your-nose/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Obvs, and capacity per unit weight is one such front. But my question was specific: he said 3x, coming to market in 3 years, or by 2020. It has been longer, and capacity is up nowhere near 3x in places I watch. Is it still to come, or did it not pan out? Judging from the link in the other reply, it is not expected until well after 2026. Shame he (probably) won't get to see it.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Your question was answered by someone 29 minutes before you left this comment...
sp332 5y ago
That is for stationary, grid-scale batteries. Hydro Quebec is developing it. https://electrek.co/2020/04/23/work-on-goodenoughs-breakthrough-solid-state-ev-battery-moves-forward/ https://electrek.co/2020/04/23/work-on-goodenoughs-breakthro... They're also commercializing something with Mercedes-Benz, but I can't tell if it's the same tech. https://news.hydroquebec.com/en/press-releases/hq/1580/hydro-quebec-partners-with-mercedes-benz-on-development-of-solid-state-battery-technologies/ https://news.hydroquebec.com/en/press-releases/hq/1580/hydro...

jmyeet 5y ago

Oh JFC, does anyone expect any of these "could" battery breakthroughs to ever go anywhere? I honestly don't even want to hear about them. Let me know when you're shipping commercially. Until then, it's just a waste of time and an attempt to drum up research funding. That's it.

TomVDB 5y ago
The article was about way more than what the headline promised, and I learned a good deal about the different battery options. If you don’t like those headlines, don’t click on them? It’s that easy (and it’s your loss too.)
fnordpiglet 5y ago
I suspect you didn’t read the article. It was remarkably enlightening.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
DennisP 5y ago
It's not some radical breakthrough. It's an improvement to lithium-ion, like lots of others that have in fact hit production over the past couple decades. We have half a dozen different cathode chemistries, we've improved energy density by an average of five percent per year, costs have dropped enormously. That's why electric cars are a lot more viable now than they were at the turn of the century. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years-away-no-batteries-are-improving-under-your-nose/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
dylan604 5y ago
I had the original knee jerk reaction, but then thought better about it before making a post like this. Think of these new battery tech write ups as a pitch from a startup looking to get funding. They will of course paint the concept in the rosiest of pictures even though there's no functioning tech yet. They need the funding to develop the concept into a viable working product. This forum is a place full of people interested in this kind of tech, so by being a reader of this forum, you'll see a lot of this kind of stuff. One day, one of these might actually work and if you see it here first and "get in on the ground floor" you might get "founder" rich too.

Cieplak 5y ago

Tangential, but manganese steel/mangalloy/Hadfield steel was the first steel to be patented [1]. It hardens in response to impacts and is renowned for it's work-hardening properties. > In addition to having the highest work-hardening properties, manganese steel is probably our toughest material. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalloy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalloy#History [2] T.B. Jefferson. Metals and How to Weld Them, 2nd Edition. page 255

fallingknife 5y ago

The Tesla Model 3 has a base price of $47K. Tesla's gross margin was 33% in Q1 2022. So estimate of manufacturing cost is ~32K (probably somewhat higher as base model probably has lower margin). The battery is 50kwh. Price of a battery in 2021 was $132 / kwh (1). So the battery accounts for $6600 of that manufacturing cost. Even if they could get the batteries for free, and assuming the same gross margin that would drop the manufacturing cost to $25.5K and the price to $37K. So it seems like reducing battery cost is not going to get EV's to mass market. Am I missing something here? 1. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-an-ev-battery-cell/ https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost...

epgui 5y ago
Yes: - Even without further improvements, the Model 3 economics are sufficient to get EVs to mass market, even assuming no further economies of scale. - Reducing the cost of a 6600$ part is an enormously high impact thing to do. Consider as well that reducing cost only a little bit expands your TAM quite a lot.
fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
In this hypothetical you’re taking Tesla’s profit as a constant. Most car companies don’t have a margin anywhere near Tesla’s. Less than 10% is common. Edit: Also, the average new car price is 47k in the US (https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-tops-47000/ https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-tops-4700...). Although, I guess the world average is probably a lot lower.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  You should be looking for the median new car price, not the mean. The mean can be greatly impacted by a few million dollar supercars.
whazor 5y ago
Tesla's are still very big cars with lots of expensive but unnecessary electronics and custom build parts. To really drive costs down you want a smaller, slightly more efficient car with yet a smaller battery. Basically an improved version of the Nissan leaf.

gorgoiler 5y ago

Is this a submarine* PR article sponsored by the deep-sea manganese-nodule-mining industrial-complex? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule *sorry

CRUDite 5y ago

There are trillions of dollars worth of manganese nodules from golf ball to basketball size just sat on ocean floors, many not far off from coast lines, many far deeper. Pumping them up has been an unsolved problem but Perhaps autonomous drone hoovers or shovelers could work. A usecase like this would spark enough interest / money spent on the problem to solve it. A ship that had a fleet of drones unloading to it 24/7 could pick up a lot of it. There is not just manganese in the nodules either.. I seem to remember most nations strategically banning collecting them a few hundred miles of their coasts should there be any.

DocTomoe 5y ago
I wonder I wonder what horrific ecological damage we'll be creating once we start exploiting these.
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
  Biologically its a fantastic Super Oxide Dismutase, but if it gets into a mammalian system without being bound in Metallothionein, you'll end up with Parkinson's like symptoms. Its possibly one of the reasons why some sea born mammals (whales) live for so long, considering its transported in much the same way as Iron. I sometimes think the Victorians with their sea bathing were onto a thing or two because for humans, their greatest environmental exposure to Manganese is bathing in the sea, the concentration of Manganese is highest in coastal regions, despite the fact you can find the Manganese nodules out to sea on the sea bed. Cant help but notice that Uranium can also be found in similar sized nodules in certain geographical environments. In terms of damage, this perhaps should be tackled like Oyster farming, so its a perfect case for using specialist drone equipment to do the harvesting, you cant deep sea dive farm these nodules.
boffinAudio 5y ago
There is also (theoretically) a near-infinite supply of it on 16 Psyche, an M-type asteroid that will, seemingly, radically alter the meaning of human wealth if we are able to harness its resources. Exciting times to be building Starships.