9 ms·

BMW EV achieves 1000km in range using Dual-Chemistry batteries

71 points by ramboldio 3y ago

russfink 3y ago
How do the charging times compare? That’s the deal maker/breaker for long road trips greater than 500 miles, or shorter trips where you use all the accessories, encounter lots of hills, etc not possible on a dynamometer.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Well, I really think 500 miles is too high of a lower bound, but when you reach 1000 km, it stops mattering again. This is about how long you can travel before stopping to rest.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    At this kind of mileage in a day you just really need to question your decision making skills if you are living in a country with a decent railway network. However that is nice because it means you can do 3 300 miles trips and only charge at home when the price is right. That is the most relevant part to me. One thing is article doesn't mention is the average speed. I looked at a few EV in the constructors websites and most range in the spec were calculated at ~30kph. This is my average speed in the flat on a bicycle when not even riding hard! While it is pertinent in an urban context where average speed is not much higher it isn't when we are discussing long trips.
    - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      Have you lived in the Midwest or mountain United states? There won't be good rail there ever. The need for a 500-600 mile range (especially for the pickup truck drivers that tow) is far more apparent.but so will the routine nature of using the long range and dropping the lifetime of this battery scheme. Which is weird because I think these are the guys who did a Michigan demonstration of range last year, a classic Midwest long miles to drive state for any travel Also the notion that rail is cheaper over long haul for people transport might be incorrect. Self-driving (highway self driving is much easier than robo taxis) EVs, and roads are cheaper to build and more flexible than rail. Rail wins only on really high congestion or very large loads. Also, 18mph on a bike is hard for almost all people that aren't athletes. I'm a former Ironman triathlete and I know the range of performance for heavily trained athletes. But yeah, doing range calcs at those speeds is ridiculous, unless you are discussing a pure commuter car use case.
      - prmoustache 3y ago
        Looks like you missed the "if you are living in a country with a decent railway network."
        AtlasBarfed 3y ago
        A lot of times that is codewords for eyerolling about the US reluctance/, inability to build mass transit. So I'm underlining that in places like flyover country you can't do that.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  This would do that trip without a charge stop, so it doesn't really matter? Even if your trip is 1000 miles, surely you could find 30 minutes to stop along the way?
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  This. I've done 4 3000km road trips in an EV. I never went more than 200 miles between charging sessions because my family and I need to eat, sleep and toilet. So more range wouldn't have made the trip any quicker. Faster charging would have. Add a bit of margin and I believe that 300 miles is the point at which charging speed becomes more important than range.
  - dangus 3y ago
    But if you’re at something like 600 miles that’s basically the maximum most anyone is willing to (or should) drive in a day (10 hours at 60mph average), so that means you can use destination AC charging instead of DC fast charging because you now have 8+ hours of sleeping time instead of wanting to keep your break time under 20-30 minutes or so. This is why I want my first EV to have a range like that. I’ll be able to the next place I’m sleeping without having to worry about whether I am going to encounter a half-broken Electrify America station that’s going to keep me sitting in a Walmart parking lot for 45 minutes of my day.
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      Good point. But we didn't always have destination AC charging; sometimes we were charging overnight on 120V instead. If you're driving this theoretical 600 mile vehicle you can't charge it overnight on AC anyways. A level 2 charger is typically 10kW or 40amps. A 600 mile battery is likely at least 200kWh, a 20 hour charge at 10kW.
      - dangus 3y ago
        Still, a 10 hour AC charge would get you a sizable chunk of that total range and eliminate a stop that where must charge at for at least one day of your trip. Selfishly, I have family in this range where it would be nice to get all the way to their house without needing to charge. I would probably pay to have a decent AC charger installed in their house. Spend the weekend there and I’d leave with a full battery, and never touch a DC fast charger.
lallysingh 3y ago
This took a few reads to parse. There are two kinds of batteries: (1) a low-density LFP that has a great lifetime, (2) a simulated manganese using Nickel manganese cobalt that has a poor lifetime but great density. The former cycles frequently for short trips, and the latter recharges it during the long ones.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  That's pretty clever. It leverages the fact that most people make a large number of short trips, and a smaller number of long trips. Also if it's modular enough, this design could allow replacing one or the other battery if the user does lots of short trips, or lots of long trips. Also could let the manufacturer do market segmentation, e.g. a high performance model with no LFP, and both parts of the "high-performance" chemistry - and a base model that's 100% LFP.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    Reminds me of how some SSDs do wear levelling, where they treat cells like they're one bit while the drive's empty and go up to four bits per cell as it fills up, with a speed penalty.
  - callalex 3y ago
    Considering that you can’t even change the 12v lead-acid battery in a BMW vehicle (ICE nor EV) without paying the dealer for programming, or some extensive hacking, I don’t hold out much hope for modular replacement.
- keenmaster 3y ago
  You need more LFP to carry the weight of the manganese battery though (increasing cost), and all the extra weight can affect driving dynamics. Maybe both the cost and weight increase are minimal but that’s what came to mind. It’s a great idea though.
xnx 3y ago
> 1000km 621 miles
- cubefox 3y ago
  540 nautical miles
  - standeven 3y ago
    49710 chains
    - bestouff 3y ago
      About 200 leagues
      - flohofwoe 3y ago
        133 German miles.
        wongarsu 3y ago
        3.3 light-milliseconds
        WirelessGigabit 3y ago
        3.240756e-11 parsec
        JoshTriplett 3y ago
        587262 smoots
        stoneman24 3y ago
        4968 furlongs. Some of us use the FFF (furlongs, firkin, fortnight) system.
natch 3y ago
BMW, build a charging network. That’s really the most consequential thing for drivers.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  But don't forget to make it app only, because we don't want to build charging network which would be actually useful.
  - Gravityloss 3y ago
    https://electrek.co/2023/07/11/europe-passes-two-big-laws-to-make-ev-charging-a-whole-lot-better/ https://electrek.co/2023/07/11/europe-passes-two-big-laws-to... > the new rules also mandate simpler charger payments. As-is, some networks require subscriptions or app downloads. But under these rules, customers must be able to pay with cards or contactless devices, and prices must be displayed to the customer.
    - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
      Five years late.
      - MostlyStable 3y ago
        I completely agree that chargers need to have simple payment methods, but doesn't the largest public network (Electrify America) already work this way? Yes they have an app, and you can get cheaper prices if you pay their subscription, but you don't need to use it. You can just pay with no account using the card swiper on every charge point, I'm pretty sure.
        natch 3y ago
        I’d rather not swipe a card or use an app.
        3y ago
numpad0 3y ago
How did they manage to mix powers from two batteries? The voltages to the bus bar usually has to be kept close for a battery pack to work, usually.
- 0_____0 3y ago
  TFA >The Gemini pack also includes a proprietary battery management system and DC-DC converter to enable the NMC cells to replenish the LFP cells as they get depleted.
MostlyStable 3y ago
I watched a youtube video on this recently, and I believe that they never mentioned battery lifetime in it. This article said that one of the chemistries only lasts a few hundred cycles, but, because of the use pattern of the dual chemistry is "expected to last the lifetime of the vehicle". I really hope this turns out well, but given the current lack of specificity, I'm going to guess that overall pack longevity is going to be the Achilles heel of this battery. Always happy to see people trying innovative new ideas though. Most of them won't work, but we can only find the ones that do if someone tries it. Hope this one turns out better than I fear.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tromp 3y ago
Mercedes achieved a 1000km range with a regular 100kWh battery by making an extremely efficient car with a drag coefficient of only 0.17 [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_Vision_EQXX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_Vision_EQXX
- kirse 3y ago
  The unfortunate thing with the whole drag-coefficient game is it ultimately results in fish-shaped cars and zero unique designs. Between EVs and crossovers we're suffocating in this current era of uninspired automotive design where it seems like mfgrs take a single car model, open it in Photoshop, resize by 50/70/110/130%, slap on new badge and call it a day. Audi & Subaru are some of the worst modern offenders here.
  - callalex 3y ago
    I would argue that the real suffering is caused by climate change displacing communities and killing people in frequent natural disasters.
  - tromp 3y ago
    > fish-shaped cars and zero unique designs While the EQXX and the Aptera EV [1] may both be fish shaped, they show quite a range of design variation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_(solar_electric_vehicle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_(solar_electric_vehicle...
- rasz 3y ago
  This is a one off concept with fake doors. Think Volkswagen XL1 but even more ridiculous.
nortonham 3y ago
uhhh, more public transport please!
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  Public transport can be powered by batteries too
acyou 3y ago
The LFP is also super cheap, and the NMC are expensive (C in NMC stands for Cobalt which is $$$). You can get 1000km in range with any chemistry, probably even lead-acid if you make it heavy enough. NMC life is fine, but it's just expensive/impossible to get. Tesla et al are trying to pass off LFP as acceptable, almost all Chinese EVs have LFP, but it's super heavy (F stands for Iron, which is heavy). Might be OK if it's flat where you live. When the sodium batteries come out, it will be a similar story, sodium having an atomic mass of 11 vs. lithium's 3. Anode-free is an interesting new direction, will be interesting to see if they can address the dendrite growth (dendrite growth causes short-circuit, thermal runaway and fires several months or years into service life and is notoriously hard to test for, because you might need to test for a decade under all sorts of conditions in order to see if dendrite growth occurs). If you have the cash, NMC is certainly the better tech. If you want a cost-effective EV, the Chinese have figured this out already (LFP). Mixing them, well, it's somewhere in the middle!
bwanab 3y ago
This seems like cool technology, but I can't help but to believe that people are concentrating on the wrong problem. Range is important up to a point, but the more important problems to solve are 1) a recharging infrastructure that makes it so that EVs don't need such huge batteries in the first place and 2) recharge speed needs to be at the level of plug-in, use the bathroom, un-plug and go.
- jaredhallen 3y ago
  Well I guess that depends on how long you stay in the bathroom. Joking aside, though, that's a tough problem. It's just an awful lot of current.
- thebruce87m 3y ago
  Recharge speed is there already. 20 mins is enough to get 2 - 3 hours worth of driving. We just need more of these fast chargers rather than lots of slow ones. Considering I charge at home I actually save time overall vs filling up my old diesel in daily driving so stopping every 2 - 3 hours is fine for occasional long trips. Also I spend about 1/5th per mile too. Most people coming from an ICE get hung up on the range however. They think they need something that does what they have already.
1970-01-01 3y ago
A 1000km EV range is not news. Aptera is winning the 'range war' with a 1000 mile (1600 km) EV. And recent battery news should be taken as 'new ice cream flavor discovered' announcements. What is the actual interesting bit of news here? Their proprietary BMS doing DC to DC seems somewhat trivial.
- jgalt212 3y ago
  Aptera hasn't delivered a car yet.
  - 1970-01-01 3y ago
    Neither has Our Next Energy. There is no news here.

71 points by ramboldio 3y ago

How do the charging times compare? That’s the deal maker/breaker for long road trips greater than 500 miles, or shorter trips where you use all the accessories, encounter lots of hills, etc not possible on a dynamometer.

marcosdumay 3y ago
Well, I really think 500 miles is too high of a lower bound, but when you reach 1000 km, it stops mattering again. This is about how long you can travel before stopping to rest.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  At this kind of mileage in a day you just really need to question your decision making skills if you are living in a country with a decent railway network. However that is nice because it means you can do 3 300 miles trips and only charge at home when the price is right. That is the most relevant part to me. One thing is article doesn't mention is the average speed. I looked at a few EV in the constructors websites and most range in the spec were calculated at ~30kph. This is my average speed in the flat on a bicycle when not even riding hard! While it is pertinent in an urban context where average speed is not much higher it isn't when we are discussing long trips.
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    Have you lived in the Midwest or mountain United states? There won't be good rail there ever. The need for a 500-600 mile range (especially for the pickup truck drivers that tow) is far more apparent.but so will the routine nature of using the long range and dropping the lifetime of this battery scheme. Which is weird because I think these are the guys who did a Michigan demonstration of range last year, a classic Midwest long miles to drive state for any travel Also the notion that rail is cheaper over long haul for people transport might be incorrect. Self-driving (highway self driving is much easier than robo taxis) EVs, and roads are cheaper to build and more flexible than rail. Rail wins only on really high congestion or very large loads. Also, 18mph on a bike is hard for almost all people that aren't athletes. I'm a former Ironman triathlete and I know the range of performance for heavily trained athletes. But yeah, doing range calcs at those speeds is ridiculous, unless you are discussing a pure commuter car use case.
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      Looks like you missed the "if you are living in a country with a decent railway network."
      - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
        A lot of times that is codewords for eyerolling about the US reluctance/, inability to build mass transit. So I'm underlining that in places like flyover country you can't do that.
_ea1k 3y ago
This would do that trip without a charge stop, so it doesn't really matter? Even if your trip is 1000 miles, surely you could find 30 minutes to stop along the way?
bryanlarsen 3y ago
This. I've done 4 3000km road trips in an EV. I never went more than 200 miles between charging sessions because my family and I need to eat, sleep and toilet. So more range wouldn't have made the trip any quicker. Faster charging would have. Add a bit of margin and I believe that 300 miles is the point at which charging speed becomes more important than range.
- dangus 3y ago
  But if you’re at something like 600 miles that’s basically the maximum most anyone is willing to (or should) drive in a day (10 hours at 60mph average), so that means you can use destination AC charging instead of DC fast charging because you now have 8+ hours of sleeping time instead of wanting to keep your break time under 20-30 minutes or so. This is why I want my first EV to have a range like that. I’ll be able to the next place I’m sleeping without having to worry about whether I am going to encounter a half-broken Electrify America station that’s going to keep me sitting in a Walmart parking lot for 45 minutes of my day.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    Good point. But we didn't always have destination AC charging; sometimes we were charging overnight on 120V instead. If you're driving this theoretical 600 mile vehicle you can't charge it overnight on AC anyways. A level 2 charger is typically 10kW or 40amps. A 600 mile battery is likely at least 200kWh, a 20 hour charge at 10kW.
    - dangus 3y ago
      Still, a 10 hour AC charge would get you a sizable chunk of that total range and eliminate a stop that where must charge at for at least one day of your trip. Selfishly, I have family in this range where it would be nice to get all the way to their house without needing to charge. I would probably pay to have a decent AC charger installed in their house. Spend the weekend there and I’d leave with a full battery, and never touch a DC fast charger.

lallysingh 3y ago

This took a few reads to parse. There are two kinds of batteries: (1) a low-density LFP that has a great lifetime, (2) a simulated manganese using Nickel manganese cobalt that has a poor lifetime but great density. The former cycles frequently for short trips, and the latter recharges it during the long ones.

HPsquared 3y ago
That's pretty clever. It leverages the fact that most people make a large number of short trips, and a smaller number of long trips. Also if it's modular enough, this design could allow replacing one or the other battery if the user does lots of short trips, or lots of long trips. Also could let the manufacturer do market segmentation, e.g. a high performance model with no LFP, and both parts of the "high-performance" chemistry - and a base model that's 100% LFP.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  Reminds me of how some SSDs do wear levelling, where they treat cells like they're one bit while the drive's empty and go up to four bits per cell as it fills up, with a speed penalty.
- callalex 3y ago
  Considering that you can’t even change the 12v lead-acid battery in a BMW vehicle (ICE nor EV) without paying the dealer for programming, or some extensive hacking, I don’t hold out much hope for modular replacement.
keenmaster 3y ago
You need more LFP to carry the weight of the manganese battery though (increasing cost), and all the extra weight can affect driving dynamics. Maybe both the cost and weight increase are minimal but that’s what came to mind. It’s a great idea though.

xnx 3y ago

> 1000km 621 miles

cubefox 3y ago
540 nautical miles
- standeven 3y ago
  49710 chains
  - bestouff 3y ago
    About 200 leagues
    - flohofwoe 3y ago
      133 German miles.
      - wongarsu 3y ago
        3.3 light-milliseconds
        WirelessGigabit 3y ago
        3.240756e-11 parsec
        JoshTriplett 3y ago
        587262 smoots
        stoneman24 3y ago
        4968 furlongs. Some of us use the FFF (furlongs, firkin, fortnight) system.

natch 3y ago

BMW, build a charging network. That’s really the most consequential thing for drivers.

TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
But don't forget to make it app only, because we don't want to build charging network which would be actually useful.
- Gravityloss 3y ago
  https://electrek.co/2023/07/11/europe-passes-two-big-laws-to-make-ev-charging-a-whole-lot-better/ https://electrek.co/2023/07/11/europe-passes-two-big-laws-to... > the new rules also mandate simpler charger payments. As-is, some networks require subscriptions or app downloads. But under these rules, customers must be able to pay with cards or contactless devices, and prices must be displayed to the customer.
  - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    Five years late.
    - MostlyStable 3y ago
      I completely agree that chargers need to have simple payment methods, but doesn't the largest public network (Electrify America) already work this way? Yes they have an app, and you can get cheaper prices if you pay their subscription, but you don't need to use it. You can just pay with no account using the card swiper on every charge point, I'm pretty sure.
      - natch 3y ago
        I’d rather not swipe a card or use an app.
        3y ago

numpad0 3y ago

How did they manage to mix powers from two batteries? The voltages to the bus bar usually has to be kept close for a battery pack to work, usually.

0_____0 3y ago
TFA >The Gemini pack also includes a proprietary battery management system and DC-DC converter to enable the NMC cells to replenish the LFP cells as they get depleted.

MostlyStable 3y ago

I watched a youtube video on this recently, and I believe that they never mentioned battery lifetime in it. This article said that one of the chemistries only lasts a few hundred cycles, but, because of the use pattern of the dual chemistry is "expected to last the lifetime of the vehicle". I really hope this turns out well, but given the current lack of specificity, I'm going to guess that overall pack longevity is going to be the Achilles heel of this battery. Always happy to see people trying innovative new ideas though. Most of them won't work, but we can only find the ones that do if someone tries it. Hope this one turns out better than I fear.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tromp 3y ago

Mercedes achieved a 1000km range with a regular 100kWh battery by making an extremely efficient car with a drag coefficient of only 0.17 [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_Vision_EQXX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_Vision_EQXX

kirse 3y ago
The unfortunate thing with the whole drag-coefficient game is it ultimately results in fish-shaped cars and zero unique designs. Between EVs and crossovers we're suffocating in this current era of uninspired automotive design where it seems like mfgrs take a single car model, open it in Photoshop, resize by 50/70/110/130%, slap on new badge and call it a day. Audi & Subaru are some of the worst modern offenders here.
- callalex 3y ago
  I would argue that the real suffering is caused by climate change displacing communities and killing people in frequent natural disasters.
- tromp 3y ago
  > fish-shaped cars and zero unique designs While the EQXX and the Aptera EV [1] may both be fish shaped, they show quite a range of design variation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_(solar_electric_vehicle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_(solar_electric_vehicle...
rasz 3y ago
This is a one off concept with fake doors. Think Volkswagen XL1 but even more ridiculous.

nortonham 3y ago

uhhh, more public transport please!

thebruce87m 3y ago
Public transport can be powered by batteries too

acyou 3y ago

The LFP is also super cheap, and the NMC are expensive (C in NMC stands for Cobalt which is $$$). You can get 1000km in range with any chemistry, probably even lead-acid if you make it heavy enough. NMC life is fine, but it's just expensive/impossible to get. Tesla et al are trying to pass off LFP as acceptable, almost all Chinese EVs have LFP, but it's super heavy (F stands for Iron, which is heavy). Might be OK if it's flat where you live. When the sodium batteries come out, it will be a similar story, sodium having an atomic mass of 11 vs. lithium's 3. Anode-free is an interesting new direction, will be interesting to see if they can address the dendrite growth (dendrite growth causes short-circuit, thermal runaway and fires several months or years into service life and is notoriously hard to test for, because you might need to test for a decade under all sorts of conditions in order to see if dendrite growth occurs). If you have the cash, NMC is certainly the better tech. If you want a cost-effective EV, the Chinese have figured this out already (LFP). Mixing them, well, it's somewhere in the middle!

bwanab 3y ago

This seems like cool technology, but I can't help but to believe that people are concentrating on the wrong problem. Range is important up to a point, but the more important problems to solve are 1) a recharging infrastructure that makes it so that EVs don't need such huge batteries in the first place and 2) recharge speed needs to be at the level of plug-in, use the bathroom, un-plug and go.

jaredhallen 3y ago
Well I guess that depends on how long you stay in the bathroom. Joking aside, though, that's a tough problem. It's just an awful lot of current.
thebruce87m 3y ago
Recharge speed is there already. 20 mins is enough to get 2 - 3 hours worth of driving. We just need more of these fast chargers rather than lots of slow ones. Considering I charge at home I actually save time overall vs filling up my old diesel in daily driving so stopping every 2 - 3 hours is fine for occasional long trips. Also I spend about 1/5th per mile too. Most people coming from an ICE get hung up on the range however. They think they need something that does what they have already.

1970-01-01 3y ago

A 1000km EV range is not news. Aptera is winning the 'range war' with a 1000 mile (1600 km) EV. And recent battery news should be taken as 'new ice cream flavor discovered' announcements. What is the actual interesting bit of news here? Their proprietary BMS doing DC to DC seems somewhat trivial.

jgalt212 3y ago
Aptera hasn't delivered a car yet.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago
  Neither has Our Next Energy. There is no news here.