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> I'm sure someone with more familiarity with battery technology could double the length of this list. Actually, not really. For one, no serious manufacturer c

• Beached 3y ago
  most battery tech dies at the "can it be manufactured en mass" stage.
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    Next you're going to tell me you don't believe in the carbon nanotube fairy. :)
• panick21_ 3y ago
  > like storing at a low/high state of charge or high/low temperature performance are nowadays managed by the BMS What a BMS can do, depends on what the underlying cell alows or doesn't.
• simondotau 3y ago
  > For one, no serious manufacturer currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't meet the most basic of the mentioned criteria. I don't think Toyota would qualify as a serious manufacturer of battery cells. Has Toyota ever manufactured battery cells before? Not battery packs, but battery cells.
  • fomine3 3y ago
    Toyota group company started making Ni-MH since 2021 https://www.toyota-industries.com/news/2022/08/30/005417/ https://www.toyota-industries.com/news/2022/08/30/005417/ https://www.toyota-industries.com/products/automobile/batteries/ https://www.toyota-industries.com/products/automobile/batter...
  • semi-extrinsic 3y ago
    AFAIU Toyota is the main owner of Primergy EV Energy, together with Panasonic. They have been manufacturing both battery cells and packs for the Prius and other hybrids. They used to mainly make NiMH cells, but I think nowadays mostly Li-ion. This new battery tech is done in another subsidiary that is also co-owned by Toyota and Panasonic.
    • panick21_ 3y ago
      This is the mostly the same kind of partnership as Tesla and Panasonic and people never stopped saying Panasonic is actually making the cells. The actual cell technology is Panasonic and the partnership is about manufacturing. For Toyota to build up its own end to end manufacturing of battery cells is something quite different. Its doable, as Tesla has shown, but its not easy. Specially with a new technology.
• sigmoid10 3y ago
  There's an even bigger issue that noone seems to get apart from Tesla: Is there actually a market for such a battery? Today's EVs can already be used for normal daily commutes without even thinking at all about range anxiety. That covers 95% of all drives for normal people. And the remaining 5% can be covered with some slightly more sophisticated route-planning. Tesla has already come out and said they could make cars that drive twice as far, but there is no real market for that. And since battery resources are a limiting factor that pretty much grow linearly with range, they rather make twice as many cars.
  • silverpepsi 3y ago
    Pretending you can logically deduce what the market most desires based on facts about their lives is a theory that is really far out there 1. Do you have any memory of when SUVs went mainstream? Who'd have thought single women would want to pay the vehicle and fuel premium to commute so inefficiently. Of course men as well. 2. Americans are addicted to options that remove limitations out of anxiety over those limitations, even when the extra cost is very low ROI. Look at data plan, buffet, etc. preferences
    • simondotau 3y ago
      You know what's extremely cheap to manufacture? A larger fuel tank. How many mainstream passenger cars are being sold with a >80L (>20 gal) fuel tank because prospective car buyers "are addicted to options that remove limitations out of anxiety"? Americans are addicted to features, lifestyle and luxury (actual or perceived).
      • Twirrim 3y ago
        > You know what's extremely cheap to manufacture? A larger fuel tank. How many mainstream passenger cars are being sold with a >80L (>20 gal) fuel tank because prospective car buyers "are addicted to options that remove limitations out of anxiety"? It takes mere minutes to refill a tank, and there are gas stations everywhere throughout the country. It's quick, and incredibly easy. Far faster than EVs, and far more common that EV charging stations. As a result, there's really no value in tanks that are that much larger, there's no range anxiety because even going long distance cross-country you're never that far away from a place to refuel.
• londons_explore 3y ago
  > Secondly, some of these, like storing at a low/high state of charge or high/low temperature performance are nowadays managed by the BMS - models that don't have that are already not competitive. The reason is that energy density already crossed the threshold at which some of the capacity can be spared for this purpose. No - this is dishonesty by some battery/car manufacturers. They say "Our car can drive 300 miles", and "our car battery will last 10 years/100,000 miles", but the reality is that if you actually drive it 300 miles on each charge, you'll only be doing about 30,000 miles before it no longer meets your needs. Instead car manufacturers say things like "only charge to 85% to prolong battery life" and "under 15% charge is for 'reserve capacity' use only". An honest manufacturer would only advertise the amount of capacity you can actually use day to day, rather than the capacity that is there but you really shouldn't use unless you want your battery to die young.
  • benj111 3y ago
    Is it dishonest when an IC car manufacturer advertises a range, but the fuel light comes on before that? If you use a tank full of petrol each day, your car may not last 10 years. If you only do 1 mile a day, every day, it may not last 100k miles. All mechanical things have usage patterns that are worse than others. You just get used to the tradeoffs.
  • Beached 3y ago
    an honest manufacturer would advertise the fuel economy you can expect day to day, rather than the fuel economy of a perfect test scenario. car manufacturers have been overstating range/fuel economy since the dawn of time. people are tuned to look at those numbers and think "in perfect lab conditions." and no one expects these numbers to be their day to day numbers
  • mcbishop 3y ago
    Deception in marketing doesn't mean that there haven't been significant improvements in battery management systems.
  • Tade0 3y ago
    > but the reality is that if you actually drive it 300 miles on each charge, you'll only be doing about 30,000 miles before it no longer meets your needs. False. Nowadays manufacturers include a capacity buffer, so you're not actually fully charging/discharging. Teslas used to have no buffer whatsoever - exactly like smartphones - but they dropped the practice a few years ago. Case in point: the battery in the Mercedes EQS 450+ has a nominal capacity of 120kWh, while usable is 107.8kWh - that's a 10% buffer - likely on the top end because that's where most of the wear happens. You can reasonably expect 200,000 miles out of that before range degrades to 80% of the original figure. And no wonder - that's less than 600 cycles assuming highway driving. Consumer-grade batteries last this much, and the ones in EVs are anything but consumer-grade.
• jrsj 3y ago
  It is this manufacturing question that Toyota is claiming to have a solution to here, but afaik we don’t have details yet so it’s hard to say. But they claim to be able to mass produce these and bring them to market within ~4 years.
  • panick21_ 3y ago
    The problem is that 'within ~4 years' the avg improvement that everybody else has at that time makes these claims much less interesting.
• DoesntMatter22 3y ago
  > Actually, not really. For one, no serious manufacturer currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't meet the most basic of the mentioned criteria. Until you realize that Toyota is peddling hydrogen as the future which makes about the least sense of anything you could choose.
  • CamperBob2 3y ago
    Hydrogen could have made sense in an alternate timeline where government and industry cooperated on standardizing form factors for fast tank-swapping... but then, that would have made even more sense for batteries, and it didn't happen. People would whine about not "owning" their hydrogen tanks, just as they do when someone brings up the advantages of swappable batteries.
    • _hypx 3y ago
      Hydrogen refuels just like gasoline cars. It is the most logical replacement for current cars. It probably will just happen via natural progress without any external desire for CO₂ emissions reduction.
      • _aavaa_ 3y ago
        It is not the most logical replacement. It isn’t the the one with fewest infrastructure changes (that would be biodiesel). And it is the result of stuck about things in terms of the past: we used to power cars by pumping molecules into it, therefore we need another molecule. Most of our green electricity will start as electricity. So it makes more sense to keep it as that and pump it directly into the car. Given the choice, why would people still want to have to take their car to a pump when they can simply charge it at home or at work as much as possible? If my cellphone lasted 5 days without a charge but needed me to go to a special charging station, I would never buy it. I just charge it overnight, or at work, and forget about it.
        • _hypx 3y ago
          Biofuels aren't really a solution. The problem with electricity is that you can't easily store it. And the only way to do so at large scale will be converting it to molecules. That implies hydrogen. As a result, green electricity just means a nearly infinite supply of green hydrogen at the same level of cost. That implies nearly free hydrogen for any purpose. Economically, that all leads to the hydrogen car as the future. You avoid both the weaknesses of ICE cars and BEVs.
• fwungy 3y ago
  There has been so much money and time spent on battery research. We are in the incremental phase of battery evolution. There will not likely be any major leap in battery cost or performance. A battery is a box of minerals with electrochemical reactivity, i.e. it can catch on fire if something goes wrong. More energy from the battery means more minerals, which means higher cost. More reactive chemistries can reduce mineral inputs, but tend to be more expensive or less stable. Tldr; there are no quantum leaps available for batteries. If Toyota has a giant range EV it's either really expensive or it's a research vehicle staying far away from consumers.
  • panick21_ 3y ago
    > More energy from the battery means more minerals, which means higher cost. This is a fundamentally false understanding of battery innovation. > More reactive chemistries can reduce mineral inputs, but tend to be more expensive or less stable. Less stable, sometimes but not more expensive.