This will be neat if it works but really there isn't going to be a huge market for 500+ mile cars vs the cost savings of getting a 300-400 mile car. The exception might be road-trippers and people who do a lot of towing but I suspect that is a much smaller population than people tend to think.
Americans don't buy cars anymore, though; not really. They buy ludicrous gigantic heavy pickups and SUVs. So what we're really talking about is getting decent range into oversized pickups that their owners want to accelerate like sports cars and still have a nice air-conditioned interior even when it's 150 degrees on the pavement due to climate change.
Americans also buy a lot of small to medium CUVs
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2023-us-vehicle-sales-figures-by-model/ https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2023-us-vehicle-sales-figures-...
The top 5 on that list are Ford F-series trucks by a large margin, followed by a Toyota small SUV and a Honda small SUV, before you get to the Toyota Camry, an actual car, followed by a Toyota truck.
Americans just really like their F150's!
You can thank the EPA for that. The gov mandates that vehicles achieve a certain calculated efficiency, or there’s an extra fee/fine attached to the vehicle. Reasonable enough, right?
Unfortunately the way this is calculated is absolutely fucking retarded. Basically, the larger the wheelbase of vehicle, the lower fuel efficiency the vehicle can get away with.
This is why these fucking things keep ballooning in size, have a dogshit turning radius, and are causing an epidemic of frontovers and backover accidents killing or injuring thousands of children every year because there’s no up close visibility.
Video explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azI3nqrHEXM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azI3nqrHEXM
Old small trucks can actually command a premium because of this bullshit. Very few people actually like these huge stupid boats, but there’s just nothing else to buy when you need an actual work vehicle.
Please consider contacting your legislators and putting this on their radar, and keeping it there.
If it could only reduce the weight of current EVs that would be a win. Most electric vehicles weight 1000 lbs or more than their ICE counterparts, and in the extreme case of the Hummer, the total weight is over 9000 lbs.
Vehicles seem to be continuously ballooning in size, so whether that continues or eventual legislation forces more reasonable sizes, higher energy density would be very welcome.
Yes this is the real win. Lighter smaller batteries. Better efficiency and easier to design around for safety and maintenance.
If it allows a smaller and cheaper battery (hopefully in the longer term, less size = less expense) then it should make lower capacity small city EV runabouts more attractive. Right now the price floor is unattractive.
Many households have two cars, one for errands and one for work/travel, so if that's true it helps on both accounts.
When will this meme die? A Model 3 is very comparable in weight to an Audi S3. The Hyundai Ionic 5 is comparable weight and interior volume to a Toyota Rav 4.
The Hummer is a monster either way and is not a good sample.
Since it's a bit more than a doubling of energy density, it's less that you can get a 500+ mile car and more that you can drop the price & weight of a 300-400 mile car. Imagine cutting the weight of an EV battery by 500 pounds while maintaining its current capacity. All that weight savings will probably get you some additional range, and save you on cost of materials, meaning you could cut the battery down a bit more to save even more on materials while saving a bit more weight. All told, you could have the exact same EV, but manufacturing the battery just got ~50% cheaper! That's what's exciting about this as a possibility, not 500+ mile cars.
...provided the number of useful recharges is at least as high as Li-Ion, and preferably more like LiFePo or even better.
I doubt range is increased much by reduced weight. Only rolling resistance is reduced, but most resistance at speed is from air resistance. Since energy is reclaimed from braking, the extra mass for acceleration is balanced by the extra mass for stopping, so it doesn’t help much with stop start traffic.
That’s how I mentally model it anyhow.
It's true that it's not a huge savings, but there's some savings. The EPA estimates approximately 1% reduction in fuel economy for each 100lbs added, so you might get a few % from the the battery weight savings.
Sure, for fuel economy, presumably without regenerative braking. When you're not in smooth traffic, a whole bunch of energy is lost in braking, and that energy is directly proportional to mass.
Also people who don't do all their driving in the city. That 250-mile battery shrinks a lot when your whole trip is at 80mph.
People like having extra capacity even if they scarcely use that capacity. This is why the F150 is the best selling car in America. Not to mention its better in general to have extra battery capacity than you might reasonably need today, as it will degrade with age, or temperature.
It's also why the F150 lightning appears to be an absolute flop: Its range goes to crap when you're towing, and people who want F150's at least think of themselves as people who want to be able to tow. (Actual towing with F150's is likely low, but most people who buy one, want to have the option.)
I wouldn't be surprised if people had resale value in the back of their mind. Tacomas are another popular truck but the top trims with the largest engines certainly command a premium and hold their used value better than the perhaps more economical 2wd 4 cylinder tacomas.
I thought it was a flop because it was basically impossible to actually buy one due to availability?
> people who want F150's at least think of themselves as people who want to be able to tow
I've only found this to be true on the internet. In the real world, it is much less common.
Lots of people realize that their truck is just the commuter and home depot stuff hauler.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
-Henry Ford
This is analogous to how people thought nobody would need a 100 GB hard disk on their personal computer when 1 GB hard disks were the norm.
Agreed on the small market, what would move the needle is if it re-charged much more quickly than current batteries.
EV owners really only want 500+ miles because charging the battery takes so long. Charging infrastructure is already changing and becoming more available so charging speed will be the real quest
I think you'll find that for many people, EVs are a non-starter unless they can mimic the same travel timelines you can get from a combustion engine. 500 miles is very close to what they'd be looking for.
> I suspect that is a much smaller population than people tend to think.
Pickup truck owners will die on that hill.
500+ miles means I can just charge up on the weekend and not be bothered with it during the week. I'd pay for that convenience.
Given an innovation of this sort,
there is not a single area of application, extending the range of electric cars.
You could also make lighter weight electric cars. Which would have their merits.
Think of the whole spectrum of EVs, lighter weight e-bikes, scooters, skateboards, or long range e-bikes. Electric aircraft start to become feasible.
Much more flight time out of your toy drone, multi-day battery life for your phone or laptop.
Energy storage in off grid setups becomes simpler, or more capacity in the same space.
Etc. etc.
All that provided this new design could function as a more or less slot in replacement, or better, for current lithium batteries in terms of manufacturing, cost, and what not.
The additional capacity might be wanted in cold climates. The massive range drop when running the cabin heater plus slow charging in cold environments definitely makes me pause when considering an EV.
I’ve found that the range of my EV is overkill in summer and about right in winter. I live in Minnesota, USA where the winters tend to be cold.
Let's be real here.
If you live in any kind of cold-ish climate (below 10C) and want comfort, imagine a super common scenario:
- heating on
- air temperature below 10C
- highway speeds, so a steady speed of ~130kmph
- car costing less than €30k
Well, guess what, there are barely any EVs costing less than €30k in Europe, and even if there were, their range would be 200km or less under those conditions.
I believe that such additional capacity will also be very well received by the ongoing hybrid airplane projects.
Just people who go on road trips with 2 or more mountain bikes need this. This is not theoretical, a Model Y has its range ruined with 2 or more mountain bikes attached to the exterior. Like ~140 miles max on our trip with 4 mountain bikes. And then you tend to go to more remote areas so that makes it even worse.
So yes, our family is eagerly awaiting a 500 mile range ev
More energy doesn't mean longer range for me. It means I can pass other cars and drive the speed I want when I'm up in the mountains, instead of having to eke out every last mile. If I get 8MPG in my mustang because I'm enjoying my drive, there are gas stations every few miles, even in state parks. EVs burn "gas" just as quick if you drive them the same way, but there's no charger for 60 miles. The KIA EV6 GT just can't make use of its 580hp in the places I'd like to enjoy it because it only has 200 mile range to start with.
What are you on? Having battery with 3x battery capacity will be an absolute game changer. This will do a lot of good, if it gets into production. For one thing, it will make EVs competitive with diesel, which will be s huge win for getting us of oil.
? Range is how often you need to recharge. For people like in apartments without home charging, this is huge, especially since homes are so unaffordable now.
There are a lot of real world caveats that go into those range estimates. I just took my long range Tesla Model Y with an advertised 326 mile range on a multi-day road trip and I was stopping to charge about every 100 miles. I would love to get something with 3x the advertised range.
Trucks, buses, planes, boats (eg ferries), smaller lighter cars, bikes, drones. Everything can benefit from smaller and lighter, or longer charge.
Even if there is no demand for 500 mile range cars, solid state batteries are supposed to be twice the density of current batteries so a 3-400 mile car would still be something like 25% lighter than they would be with current batteries.
A gasoline car can charge from 0% to 100% of its range in 5 minutes.
It usually takes longer to take the slight detour and line the car up with the charge port than it does to fully charge the car.
Recharging this kind of car does not damage its most expensive part nor does its fuel tank shrink.
The newest electric cars take a half hour to do this (a non-trivial amount of time) and only go about 2/3rds as far (less on the highway), so if you actually want to go somewhere you're taking on about an extra hour of charging for 6 hours of driving.
Recharging this kind of car damages its most expensive part- the fuel tank- and it shrinks every time you charge it (whether quickly or slowly).
Now, if the car had 1600 miles of range, then a half-hour charge time and the slow shrinkage of its gas tank is more acceptable because you're getting approximately the same rate of recharge per minute (as it would be if the 200-mile range electric cars charged as fast as a gas car does). With a range or charge time like that, the other inherent disadvantages to electric cars are muted to a massive degree (a 20% range degradation isn't as big a deal for a car that can still go 1200 miles, and a 30% range reduction in cold months isn't as big a deal if the car could be charged in 3 minutes).
But neither of those things are currently true, and that's in large part why these kinds of cars don't really sell unless they're known to be rolling gimmicks or transformative in other ways (the electric trucks that let you run power tools off their batteries are the best example of this). Which is why Tesla's cars are the way that they are, and why every other major manufacturer who doesn't have a good idea of how to sell their inferior cars take the "look, we can do a massive screen in our car too just like Tesla" approach (and fail specifically because they aren't Tesla), or they just keep developing really good gas cars (an approach currently favored by the Japanese companies).
Real world usage is you only get to use ~70% of the stated range on a road trip, so we're really talking about 350 miles of range, which is, as you say, what most people actually want.
Why 70%? You obviously don't run the battery to zero, 10% is a common amount of buffer to leave. And then when you DC fast charge, the rate of charging drops dramatically around 80%, so people don't charge to full.
These are for ideal conditions, add in any sort of weather and the range drops again as you run a heater, etc.
Living in the Bay Area, driving to Tahoe in the winter without a mandatory recharge should be the gold standard.
It's not an unusual use case, "only" about 180 miles, and yet there aren't any EVs that can do it confidently because going uphill in the cold with aerodynamic-destroying ski rack is really hard.
A car with 500 miles of fair-weather range could probably do it?