7 ms·

For U.S. companies, the race for the new EV battery is on

74 points by thread_id 4y ago

kumarvvr 4y ago
[flagged]
- alfor 4y ago
  The "company" at the time was not interested in mass production, it was mostly a prototype for fun. Without Musk it would have gone nowhere. Many people built prototypes and did conversion in small scale, no one was foolish enough to take on mass production.
  - cma 4y ago
    They already had a letter of intent from Lotus before he joined.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  I really don't understand why everyone does this, Elon has pointed out, he designed one of the original cars for Tesla. He was in fact a founding member of the company. One could say, since he was a founding Engineer, he was one of the real people to do some of the real work at Tesla. He also didn't exactly inherit Tesla in a successful time, he had to bring it up to where it is today, and every year people say its doing the worst it'll shut down, and this and that. I just don't get the hate he's gotten for decades. Does someone have some context? My understanding is when he took it over, it wasn't anywhere near where it was, and he has in fact placed it as a competing company that mass produces cars, and is a leader in its respective space in the industry.
  - MaximumYComb 4y ago
    They do it because his political views don't align with their own. It's a fairly simple thing to understand about human nature.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      Alternatively: Because he literally is not a founder and is often portrayed as one (such as in GP’s comment) But also yeah, generally he gets a lot of hate for a long and increasingly public track record of being a jerk. For example, big jerk move to announce he’s “switching parties” to try to frontrun a story about him sexually harassing an employee. Dragging 300MM people already in a lot of stress and cultural tension into your own sexual misconduct issues is really bad form IMO.
    - narrator 4y ago
      They do it because the narrative is that all good people are smart and all bad people are stupid. Everyone must do everything that good smart people say and ignore everything bad stupid people say. When Elon changed his political opinions, articles were generated to tell people he's stupid so he could then be called a bad person without violating the narrative.
      - myko 4y ago
        > When Elon changed his political opinions Has he changed his political opinions? His downfall to me started when he called an actual hero a pedo for no reason at all, except to salve his damaged ego.
        xeromal 4y ago
        Yeah, he's kind of went down the Q-anon route if you watch his increasingly deranged tweets. He's always been a troll but he's increasingly spouting dangerous thoughts. I knew something was up when my family from the southeast US started supporting him.
        perryizgr8 4y ago
        > dangerous thoughts It's getting awful tough to separate the serious from the satire nowadays.
        Phlarp 4y ago
  - deburo 4y ago
    Just look at what people said about Steve Jobs and Wozniak. There's no point in replying to these people, there are thousands of them and I don't think they care to be fair.
    - TheDong 4y ago
      > Just look at what people said about Steve Jobs and Wozniak People have said negative things about Jobs etc, yes. People also said negative things about Bernie Madoff, Hitler, and other people who inarguably were not changing the world for the better. Having "haters" is not proof of success or how right you are, it's a measure of fame, and is probably closer to value-neutral than a sign of good or bad.
      - ethanbond 4y ago
        This dynamic is also why it is worth continually pointing out the badness of bad people. It’s not good for our society if we allow people to build this idea that “negative feedback from everyone around you is a good thing, actually.” It’s very often not! It’s very often evidence that you’re an asshole, liar, or cheat!
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    > Elon has pointed out, he designed one of the original cars for Tesla. "he designed" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence.
  - Centigonal 4y ago
    Musk was definitely instrumental to Tesla's early success, but my understanding is that's mostly due to his deep pockets, his fundraising connections, and his ability to attract and motivate real engineering talent. his direct design and engineering contributions are marginal, and he continues to inflate his role in those areas as part of his decades-long project to portray himself as an engineer or designer (which he definitely isn't). Elon says he "led the design of the original Roadster"[1]. However, Elon is often loose with the truth - and even by his own admission in 2006[2], his role at Tesla mostly involved business and product strategy. Really, the visual design of the Roadster is a highly modified Lotus shell. It was designed by a group of people, notably Barney Hatt[3]. Musk had strong opinions about how the car should look, and participated in key meetings with designers. You can think of him as the product owner for the visual styling of the Tesla's shell (but not the designer). This is impressive on its own, as he was also running a fledgling SpaceX at the same time. Building a really nice version of the Lotus Elise shell is not what makes Tesla unique, though: their all-electric drivetrain and battery systems were revolutionary at the time, and they designed by a bunch of brilliant people like JB Straubel[4] -- not Elon Musk. Ze'ev Drori also deserves credit for bringing the Roadster from prototype to production and bringing the discipline needed to solve their early manufacturing issues. Tesla's incredible marketing, though? The thing that let them hire best-in-class engineering talent and inspire those folks to work for long hours on changing the auto industry? The thing that let them raise money from Google and eBay founders? The thing that continues to inflate their share price to massive P/Es, even today? That's all Musk. He's the best marketer in the world, bar none. It irks me that Musk is not satisfied with his incredible level of accomplishment and needs to also obscure the work of the people around him who made important contributions. It's been a successful strategy for him so far though, as evinced by the wide acceptance of his version of events and the resulting positive effect on the companies he's involved with. I'll write a blog post about this with more research if people are interested. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596862790408568836 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596862790408568836 [2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-between-you-and-me https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j... [3] https://www.tesla.com/blog/lotus-position https://www.tesla.com/blog/lotus-position [4] https://archive.ph/HK5uh https://archive.ph/HK5uh
    - 4y ago
- Zamicol 4y ago
  Why is it funny to say 174 words without mentioning Musk?
  - kumarvvr 4y ago
    Its funny because Elon is the poster boy for Tesla.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  seems off topic why would this article need to dive into any of that
- clouddrover 4y ago
  One founder was pushed out, the other founder left later: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/06/tesla-founders-martin-eberhard-marc-tarpenning-on-elon-musk.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/06/tesla-founders-martin-eberha... The whole interview is worth watching.
alfor 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
brightball 4y ago
Graphene Aluminum Ion is probably going to be the winner. Only option with higher density, lower cost and heat reduction to make rapid charge times feasible (which are the key to adoption IMO). At least from what I’ve seen.
- cantaloupe 4y ago
  Quick google search mostly shows low effort articles citing one paper from 2021. Here’s to hoping, but manufacturing has always been the main obstacle in the path to any graphene based technology.
  - brightball 4y ago
    There’s a group in Australia that looks promising.
- baybal2 4y ago
  [dead]
- lylejantzi3rd 4y ago
  How easily does it catch fire? There are two aspects of current battery tech that scare me: fire and high voltage. There's not much to be done about the second, but it would be nice if I didn't have to worry about my car burning my house down. edit: I'm aware of the statistics about gasoline vehicle fires, guys. edit2: does anybody have an answer to the question I asked?
  - sn_master 4y ago
    Gasoline cars can catch fire too, but the EV problem is that the fires do not go out using traditional techniques and the fire can re-ignite over and over even several days after being put off.
    - lylejantzi3rd 4y ago
      Gasoline cars don't catch themselves on fire overnight while you're sleeping. They do it while you're standing there, usually within reach of a fire extinguisher. And, yes, they're easier to put out.
thrdbndndn 4y ago
I'm surprised Indonesia has the leading nickel production volume. I always (uneducatedly) assume island nations would be poor in minerals.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Indonesia was a large landmass less than 20k years ago, so it’s not typical of many islands.
- canadiantim 4y ago
  Generally speaking the type of nickel Indonesia produces is not suitable for EV batteries. From my understanding they mainly have laterite deposits which do not produce class-1 nickel, which is the purity required for most EV batteries. For that you're generally looking for nickel sulphide deposits.
- roenxi 4y ago
  You're more right than wrong in that thinking. Usually land area correlates well to mineral wealth. But without a lot of knowledge of the situation, Indonesia's islands probably exist because of volcanism and plate tectonics and that makes a difference in having unusual geology.
rr808 4y ago
No mention of cold weather. Do any of the new batteries keep their charge better when below freezing?
pellucide 4y ago
So Elon Musk isn't the founder of Tesla?
- culi 4y ago
  Tesla was incorporated in 2003 after years of engineering research and experimentation. Musk first got involved in 2004 by becoming the largest shareholder. He became CEO in 2008 and in 2009 he settled a lawsuit that allowed him to be legally called a "cofounder" of the company and has liberally used the title ever since
  - judge2020 4y ago
    From what I remember of the early blog posts on the site, his side of the story is that when he invested in it, the only thing the company had was an electric motor design, and that the funding round was in an effort to turn the motor into an EV instead of selling off the surrounding IP and patents. Even if you don't take his word, it's tough to suggest that he isn't effectively responsible for all of Tesla's success, at least in terms of knowing when the technology was ready to be turned into serious cars and hiring the right people to achieve that, both in terms of design and getting the production lines to scale (which was the prerequisite for the 2018 stock bonus that is now responsible for a large portion of his stake in TSLA/net worth).
    - culi 4y ago
      Eh, idk I guess I'd like to see some sources for that. Even the Wikipedia's entry on the Roadster calls out that: > Elon Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations He was certainly the primary person keeping them afloat financially. By January of 2009 the company had raised $187 million and $70 million of that was Musk. That was just before Tesla finally caught it's big break in June of that same year when it got $465 million from the US DoE, by far its biggest investment But even on the financial side of things he's caused many headaches for the company. Like in 2016 when he made Tesla buy his cousins' (failing) solar company, SolarCity. Of course he neglected to mention to Tesla shareholders that it was failing
ds 4y ago
I remember a few years ago reading a article that promised a liquid 'fuel' that would recharge batteries. The idea being that you would pull into a gas station and expel your uncharged liquid and refill with charged liquid. The liquid stuff might be a pipe dream, but I think the goal should be for electric cars to have a 'instant' fill up option shortly. Having a network of such stations greatly aleviates issues of trying to squeeze every last watt hour out of every battery and lets range anxiety be less important. I dont really care as much if my car only gets 200 miles range if I can fill up in 2 minutes at any existing gas station. Filling up of course can mean anything from the liquid fuel meme idea above to a fast battery-swap to some megawatt based 'super fast' charger. It really doesnt matter
- throwaway892238 4y ago
  A hundred years ago, there were service stations that would swap out your electric car or truck's battery in a couple minutes so you could keep driving without recharging. Essential at the time because the range was far lower than today. Those companies lasted for about two decades. Eventually the price/performance of gas vehicles won out, and we know the story from there.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    This has been trialled in modern EVs, but hasn't caught on for three reasons: * There's no standard battery pack between makes and models. * It is one of the more expensive components of the car, so operating a business around taking in and giving out extremely expensive equipment is a massive hurdle from a capital investment standpoint, not to mention the equipment to remove and install the batteries - you basically need the equivalent of a mechanic shop or oil-change setup * Battery packs, as currently designed, are not always fully separable from the rest of the car- cooling systems etc. are not 100% self contained, but may pump heat elsewhere in the vehicle to be radiated off You're basically asking a company to take on the ownership aspect of the most expensive part of an EV, to accept strangers' batteries and to give out yours in exchange. To make this possible, major manufacturers would have to agree not only on a standard for their batteries, but also to make the batteries quickly removable. You're asking consumers to buy a car with a brand new battery in it, then after a few hours of driving to take that battery to a third party service station and give it away for some stranger's battery that may not perform as well. To be honest, I think if this were the present-day reality, it would eliminate pretty much all of the concerns of buying an electric car- you don't need to add a lot of time to long trips (no worries that super chargers aren't available or operating at peak efficiency), and you don't have to worry that the battery going dead due to a fault renders your vehicle worth less than the cost of a new battery- because the service station that swapped out the battery for you would be on the hook for the cost. However, I struggle to believe it would be cost effective- your customers can charge their own batteries at home for cheaper than they can exchange them, so they aren't going to be exchanging nearly as frequently as an ICE fills up at a gas station.
cavisne 4y ago
As always with the EV industry the non-Tesla entities are following such a weird strategy it almost seems like fraud. GM sells two EVs, one that spontaneously combusts (bolt) and one that is the least efficient EV sold (hummer). How about they fix their efficiency and reliability before trying to make a different battery chemistry work. Likewise the new EV credit prioritizes inefficient vehicles by having a higher limit for large suvs and trucks. We should just stick to technology that works, and focus on efficiency and scaling. Any new chemistry will still be a science experiment in 2030 (when allegedly gas vehicles will stop being produced)
- thefurdrake 4y ago
  > How about they fix their efficiency and reliability before trying to make a different battery chemistry work. It's possible to do more than one thing at a time for most people/organizations/entities.
didgetmaster 4y ago
> Democratic Republic of Congo produces more than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt... The article talks about where certain raw materials are currently being produced (cobalt, nickel, lithium, etc.) without discussing where those materials could be produced (reserves). There might be vast reserves of those same materials in areas where it is forbidden to mine or where things like permits and regulations make it unprofitable to refine. Does the DRC really have 70 percent of all cobalt on the Earth, or is it just cheap to mine there due to slave labor and lax environmental laws?
- judge2020 4y ago
  To add, this is the entire point of the EV tax credit that goes into effect this year, with a requirement for 50% of the raw battery material to come from North America, with it increasing 10% every year until it hits 80%.
  - ralph84 4y ago
    Only problem is the Biden admin decided to ignore Congress and say nah, forget about that requirement, we'll get to it later. And if you lease the car, just forget about it completely.
    - klooney 4y ago
      It's so weird that the USA keeps saying "yeah we need to reopen Mountain Pass" and then never does it for years and years. There's lots of places you could mine in the USA, it's a big country.
    - pkulak 4y ago
      Are you referring to how the credit temporarily applies to more vehicles for the next few months? It can take a bit to implement new laws, especially complicated ones. I don't see anyone "ignoring congress".
milleramp 4y ago
“The volume changes almost 300 percent if you’re doing it to its maximum capacity,” For silicon, really, is this correct?

74 points by thread_id 4y ago

kumarvvr 4y ago

[flagged]

alfor 4y ago
The "company" at the time was not interested in mass production, it was mostly a prototype for fun. Without Musk it would have gone nowhere. Many people built prototypes and did conversion in small scale, no one was foolish enough to take on mass production.
- cma 4y ago
  They already had a letter of intent from Lotus before he joined.
giancarlostoro 4y ago
I really don't understand why everyone does this, Elon has pointed out, he designed one of the original cars for Tesla. He was in fact a founding member of the company. One could say, since he was a founding Engineer, he was one of the real people to do some of the real work at Tesla. He also didn't exactly inherit Tesla in a successful time, he had to bring it up to where it is today, and every year people say its doing the worst it'll shut down, and this and that. I just don't get the hate he's gotten for decades. Does someone have some context? My understanding is when he took it over, it wasn't anywhere near where it was, and he has in fact placed it as a competing company that mass produces cars, and is a leader in its respective space in the industry.
- MaximumYComb 4y ago
  They do it because his political views don't align with their own. It's a fairly simple thing to understand about human nature.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Alternatively: Because he literally is not a founder and is often portrayed as one (such as in GP’s comment) But also yeah, generally he gets a lot of hate for a long and increasingly public track record of being a jerk. For example, big jerk move to announce he’s “switching parties” to try to frontrun a story about him sexually harassing an employee. Dragging 300MM people already in a lot of stress and cultural tension into your own sexual misconduct issues is really bad form IMO.
  - narrator 4y ago
    They do it because the narrative is that all good people are smart and all bad people are stupid. Everyone must do everything that good smart people say and ignore everything bad stupid people say. When Elon changed his political opinions, articles were generated to tell people he's stupid so he could then be called a bad person without violating the narrative.
    - myko 4y ago
      > When Elon changed his political opinions Has he changed his political opinions? His downfall to me started when he called an actual hero a pedo for no reason at all, except to salve his damaged ego.
      - xeromal 4y ago
        Yeah, he's kind of went down the Q-anon route if you watch his increasingly deranged tweets. He's always been a troll but he's increasingly spouting dangerous thoughts. I knew something was up when my family from the southeast US started supporting him.
        perryizgr8 4y ago
        > dangerous thoughts It's getting awful tough to separate the serious from the satire nowadays.
      - Phlarp 4y ago
- deburo 4y ago
  Just look at what people said about Steve Jobs and Wozniak. There's no point in replying to these people, there are thousands of them and I don't think they care to be fair.
  - TheDong 4y ago
    > Just look at what people said about Steve Jobs and Wozniak People have said negative things about Jobs etc, yes. People also said negative things about Bernie Madoff, Hitler, and other people who inarguably were not changing the world for the better. Having "haters" is not proof of success or how right you are, it's a measure of fame, and is probably closer to value-neutral than a sign of good or bad.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      This dynamic is also why it is worth continually pointing out the badness of bad people. It’s not good for our society if we allow people to build this idea that “negative feedback from everyone around you is a good thing, actually.” It’s very often not! It’s very often evidence that you’re an asshole, liar, or cheat!
- kuhewa 4y ago
  > Elon has pointed out, he designed one of the original cars for Tesla. "he designed" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence.
- Centigonal 4y ago
  Musk was definitely instrumental to Tesla's early success, but my understanding is that's mostly due to his deep pockets, his fundraising connections, and his ability to attract and motivate real engineering talent. his direct design and engineering contributions are marginal, and he continues to inflate his role in those areas as part of his decades-long project to portray himself as an engineer or designer (which he definitely isn't). Elon says he "led the design of the original Roadster"[1]. However, Elon is often loose with the truth - and even by his own admission in 2006[2], his role at Tesla mostly involved business and product strategy. Really, the visual design of the Roadster is a highly modified Lotus shell. It was designed by a group of people, notably Barney Hatt[3]. Musk had strong opinions about how the car should look, and participated in key meetings with designers. You can think of him as the product owner for the visual styling of the Tesla's shell (but not the designer). This is impressive on its own, as he was also running a fledgling SpaceX at the same time. Building a really nice version of the Lotus Elise shell is not what makes Tesla unique, though: their all-electric drivetrain and battery systems were revolutionary at the time, and they designed by a bunch of brilliant people like JB Straubel[4] -- not Elon Musk. Ze'ev Drori also deserves credit for bringing the Roadster from prototype to production and bringing the discipline needed to solve their early manufacturing issues. Tesla's incredible marketing, though? The thing that let them hire best-in-class engineering talent and inspire those folks to work for long hours on changing the auto industry? The thing that let them raise money from Google and eBay founders? The thing that continues to inflate their share price to massive P/Es, even today? That's all Musk. He's the best marketer in the world, bar none. It irks me that Musk is not satisfied with his incredible level of accomplishment and needs to also obscure the work of the people around him who made important contributions. It's been a successful strategy for him so far though, as evinced by the wide acceptance of his version of events and the resulting positive effect on the companies he's involved with. I'll write a blog post about this with more research if people are interested. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596862790408568836 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596862790408568836 [2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-between-you-and-me https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j... [3] https://www.tesla.com/blog/lotus-position https://www.tesla.com/blog/lotus-position [4] https://archive.ph/HK5uh https://archive.ph/HK5uh
  - 4y ago
Zamicol 4y ago
Why is it funny to say 174 words without mentioning Musk?
- kumarvvr 4y ago
  Its funny because Elon is the poster boy for Tesla.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cokeandpepsi 4y ago
seems off topic why would this article need to dive into any of that
clouddrover 4y ago
One founder was pushed out, the other founder left later: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/06/tesla-founders-martin-eberhard-marc-tarpenning-on-elon-musk.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/06/tesla-founders-martin-eberha... The whole interview is worth watching.

alfor 4y ago

[flagged]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

brightball 4y ago

Graphene Aluminum Ion is probably going to be the winner. Only option with higher density, lower cost and heat reduction to make rapid charge times feasible (which are the key to adoption IMO). At least from what I’ve seen.

cantaloupe 4y ago
Quick google search mostly shows low effort articles citing one paper from 2021. Here’s to hoping, but manufacturing has always been the main obstacle in the path to any graphene based technology.
- brightball 4y ago
  There’s a group in Australia that looks promising.
baybal2 4y ago
[dead]
lylejantzi3rd 4y ago
How easily does it catch fire? There are two aspects of current battery tech that scare me: fire and high voltage. There's not much to be done about the second, but it would be nice if I didn't have to worry about my car burning my house down. edit: I'm aware of the statistics about gasoline vehicle fires, guys. edit2: does anybody have an answer to the question I asked?
- sn_master 4y ago
  Gasoline cars can catch fire too, but the EV problem is that the fires do not go out using traditional techniques and the fire can re-ignite over and over even several days after being put off.
  - lylejantzi3rd 4y ago
    Gasoline cars don't catch themselves on fire overnight while you're sleeping. They do it while you're standing there, usually within reach of a fire extinguisher. And, yes, they're easier to put out.

thrdbndndn 4y ago

I'm surprised Indonesia has the leading nickel production volume. I always (uneducatedly) assume island nations would be poor in minerals.

Spooky23 4y ago
Indonesia was a large landmass less than 20k years ago, so it’s not typical of many islands.
canadiantim 4y ago
Generally speaking the type of nickel Indonesia produces is not suitable for EV batteries. From my understanding they mainly have laterite deposits which do not produce class-1 nickel, which is the purity required for most EV batteries. For that you're generally looking for nickel sulphide deposits.
roenxi 4y ago
You're more right than wrong in that thinking. Usually land area correlates well to mineral wealth. But without a lot of knowledge of the situation, Indonesia's islands probably exist because of volcanism and plate tectonics and that makes a difference in having unusual geology.

rr808 4y ago

No mention of cold weather. Do any of the new batteries keep their charge better when below freezing?

pellucide 4y ago

So Elon Musk isn't the founder of Tesla?

culi 4y ago
Tesla was incorporated in 2003 after years of engineering research and experimentation. Musk first got involved in 2004 by becoming the largest shareholder. He became CEO in 2008 and in 2009 he settled a lawsuit that allowed him to be legally called a "cofounder" of the company and has liberally used the title ever since
- judge2020 4y ago
  From what I remember of the early blog posts on the site, his side of the story is that when he invested in it, the only thing the company had was an electric motor design, and that the funding round was in an effort to turn the motor into an EV instead of selling off the surrounding IP and patents. Even if you don't take his word, it's tough to suggest that he isn't effectively responsible for all of Tesla's success, at least in terms of knowing when the technology was ready to be turned into serious cars and hiring the right people to achieve that, both in terms of design and getting the production lines to scale (which was the prerequisite for the 2018 stock bonus that is now responsible for a large portion of his stake in TSLA/net worth).
  - culi 4y ago
    Eh, idk I guess I'd like to see some sources for that. Even the Wikipedia's entry on the Roadster calls out that: > Elon Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations He was certainly the primary person keeping them afloat financially. By January of 2009 the company had raised $187 million and $70 million of that was Musk. That was just before Tesla finally caught it's big break in June of that same year when it got $465 million from the US DoE, by far its biggest investment But even on the financial side of things he's caused many headaches for the company. Like in 2016 when he made Tesla buy his cousins' (failing) solar company, SolarCity. Of course he neglected to mention to Tesla shareholders that it was failing

ds 4y ago

I remember a few years ago reading a article that promised a liquid 'fuel' that would recharge batteries. The idea being that you would pull into a gas station and expel your uncharged liquid and refill with charged liquid. The liquid stuff might be a pipe dream, but I think the goal should be for electric cars to have a 'instant' fill up option shortly. Having a network of such stations greatly aleviates issues of trying to squeeze every last watt hour out of every battery and lets range anxiety be less important. I dont really care as much if my car only gets 200 miles range if I can fill up in 2 minutes at any existing gas station. Filling up of course can mean anything from the liquid fuel meme idea above to a fast battery-swap to some megawatt based 'super fast' charger. It really doesnt matter

throwaway892238 4y ago
A hundred years ago, there were service stations that would swap out your electric car or truck's battery in a couple minutes so you could keep driving without recharging. Essential at the time because the range was far lower than today. Those companies lasted for about two decades. Eventually the price/performance of gas vehicles won out, and we know the story from there.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  This has been trialled in modern EVs, but hasn't caught on for three reasons: * There's no standard battery pack between makes and models. * It is one of the more expensive components of the car, so operating a business around taking in and giving out extremely expensive equipment is a massive hurdle from a capital investment standpoint, not to mention the equipment to remove and install the batteries - you basically need the equivalent of a mechanic shop or oil-change setup * Battery packs, as currently designed, are not always fully separable from the rest of the car- cooling systems etc. are not 100% self contained, but may pump heat elsewhere in the vehicle to be radiated off You're basically asking a company to take on the ownership aspect of the most expensive part of an EV, to accept strangers' batteries and to give out yours in exchange. To make this possible, major manufacturers would have to agree not only on a standard for their batteries, but also to make the batteries quickly removable. You're asking consumers to buy a car with a brand new battery in it, then after a few hours of driving to take that battery to a third party service station and give it away for some stranger's battery that may not perform as well. To be honest, I think if this were the present-day reality, it would eliminate pretty much all of the concerns of buying an electric car- you don't need to add a lot of time to long trips (no worries that super chargers aren't available or operating at peak efficiency), and you don't have to worry that the battery going dead due to a fault renders your vehicle worth less than the cost of a new battery- because the service station that swapped out the battery for you would be on the hook for the cost. However, I struggle to believe it would be cost effective- your customers can charge their own batteries at home for cheaper than they can exchange them, so they aren't going to be exchanging nearly as frequently as an ICE fills up at a gas station.

cavisne 4y ago

As always with the EV industry the non-Tesla entities are following such a weird strategy it almost seems like fraud. GM sells two EVs, one that spontaneously combusts (bolt) and one that is the least efficient EV sold (hummer). How about they fix their efficiency and reliability before trying to make a different battery chemistry work. Likewise the new EV credit prioritizes inefficient vehicles by having a higher limit for large suvs and trucks. We should just stick to technology that works, and focus on efficiency and scaling. Any new chemistry will still be a science experiment in 2030 (when allegedly gas vehicles will stop being produced)

thefurdrake 4y ago
> How about they fix their efficiency and reliability before trying to make a different battery chemistry work. It's possible to do more than one thing at a time for most people/organizations/entities.

didgetmaster 4y ago

> Democratic Republic of Congo produces more than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt... The article talks about where certain raw materials are currently being produced (cobalt, nickel, lithium, etc.) without discussing where those materials could be produced (reserves). There might be vast reserves of those same materials in areas where it is forbidden to mine or where things like permits and regulations make it unprofitable to refine. Does the DRC really have 70 percent of all cobalt on the Earth, or is it just cheap to mine there due to slave labor and lax environmental laws?

judge2020 4y ago
To add, this is the entire point of the EV tax credit that goes into effect this year, with a requirement for 50% of the raw battery material to come from North America, with it increasing 10% every year until it hits 80%.
- ralph84 4y ago
  Only problem is the Biden admin decided to ignore Congress and say nah, forget about that requirement, we'll get to it later. And if you lease the car, just forget about it completely.
  - klooney 4y ago
    It's so weird that the USA keeps saying "yeah we need to reopen Mountain Pass" and then never does it for years and years. There's lots of places you could mine in the USA, it's a big country.
  - pkulak 4y ago
    Are you referring to how the credit temporarily applies to more vehicles for the next few months? It can take a bit to implement new laws, especially complicated ones. I don't see anyone "ignoring congress".

milleramp 4y ago

“The volume changes almost 300 percent if you’re doing it to its maximum capacity,” For silicon, really, is this correct?