4 ms·
Sure, it works, but their point is that the savings would be near exponential. Eg, a battery with similar characteristics but double the density might allow you
by shortcake27 4y ago
Sure, it works, but their point is that the savings would be near exponential. Eg, a battery with similar characteristics but double the density might allow you to reduce the size of the battery by something like 70% while keeping the same amount of range. So the amount of resources required is greatly reduced. Considering it's only a matter of years before ICEs are flat out banned in most countries, figuring out more efficient ways to use resources for vehicles is pretty important.
- magnuspaaske 4y agoWith electric cars you're mostly looking at a cost curve at this point. The cars have proven they're competitive in a range of market segments and that advantage will be built out in the coming years, either from optimising the current battery tech or inventing new stuff. This is true for most overland transportation as we're also seeing batteries in trucks, trains, busses and trams. This is not true for planes and helicopters yet. We're still not at the point where the planes carrying the bulk of passengers (100-200 seats, 1000-4000 km) can be electrified, even with no budget constraints. We're starting to see concepts for smaller planes and that's obviously a good start but there's still some ways to go – better batteries could make a big difference here as it might allow electrification of planes that wouldn't previously been possible. After that we obviously still need to get the costs down, but that generally comes with scaling.