Maybe the solution is to have better business practices around the technology that we do have. Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so.
I'm thinking of a modular battery that is hot swapable at the charge stations and where you only pay it's depreciation based on what you actually use. This would significantly lower ownership costs for light users and drastically increase efficiency and flexibility for heavy users who are no longer dependent on charge times. Since it's modular, you load the number of units you need, say one battery unit for a Leaf, two for a Model S or 10 units for a light truck, all in standardized format and with their own computing that tracks things like life span, charge cycles performed by the user himself for proper billing etc.
I know Tesla experimented with and later abandoned battery swap, but that's predictable without the proper business structure in place, no one is going to leave the most expensive part of their car back at the charge station. If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.
Actually, Tesla's batteries don't degrade that much (10% average after 160,000 miles [0]). Turns out, with proper thermals and not charging/discharging fully vastly decreases their degradation according to other hacker news people on the topic [1].
Same reason batteries in your phone or laptop are each a different shape and non-removable. They are an integral part of the design, a significant part of the weight & volume, with significant thermal concerns, etc... many electric cars today even use the battery as a "stressed member", aka the battery provides rigidity to the frame. How exactly will that be hotswappable in two minutes by John Doe?
Basically, the point is a standardized, easily removable, hotswappable widget makes a lot of sense when it's a minor item. But when it's half the weight, value, volume, and engineering challenge, you have to sacrifice all of those attributes to use the hotswap widget.
This originally made me think, if only we could pump fluid electrolyte in & out of the car, and let the battery take whatever form it likes. Then I realized that's called a flow battery, and then I realized that a hydrogen fuel cell is a type of flow battery.
Renault already offer battery leasing - you buy the car, but lease the battery based on your annual mileage. It has been reasonably popular, but it's far from a game changer.
«Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so.»
Cars overall depreciate on the scale of 10/15 years or so. Right now the depreciation rates are the same. It's an interesting artifact of ICE vehicles that people don't expect any car's drive train to last more than ~15 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers were skeptical of battery tech right up until they hit about that same magic lifetime number. It also shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers won't have a lot of incentive to push it past that magic lifetime number, because that would affect car replacement rates and that would affect the bottom line.
Mostly battery replacements look to keep the used car / secondary markets busy, and if we expect to see interesting innovations in battery replacements that's probably where we'll see them as more electric cars get resold to secondary and tertiary owners. (Just as we see the used car markets pushing innovations in after-market parts in general.)
You are right in that maybe leaves room for a disruption that someone might be interested in a "car for life" model where electric cars might be built far more sustainably with an ideal towards larger reuse of the vehicle over the owner's lifetime and a larger depreciation scale on the order of multiple decades.
That would be a huge game changer, and would potentially be great for the planet (less steel production alone, conceivably). It would also take a lot of work to make it happen, given the existing industry reliance on the current business model for most of a century now. It would also be one extremely huge disruption in so many downstream industries, secondary markets, etc, to the point where it may be more of a revolution (in the industrial sense, but also perhaps the war sense) than a "simple" disruption.
There was an Israeli battery/car tech startup that was built on that model, but it sadly went kaput. I still firmly believe that the hot-swap model is the winner long term.
> If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.
I wouldn't. Not to be a naysayer, just giving some context. The cars I buy are already in that price range, and I already pay "comparable gasoline prices" (via gas, hah), so in my area all I'd gain is a different type of gasoline when in city, and when I go camping/etc I'd be at risk due to being in slow adoption areas.
Don't get me wrong, I want electric, but due to the areas I drive I've already settled to likely being stuck with Hybrids for the next X years.
With that said, if the model you laid out still ended up cheaper than gasoline it would at least tip the balance towards its favor. I just can't handle a zero sum trade - and I imagine the same would be true for many around this large, slow to adapt land masses.
Cities will become much, much nicer though. Air quality alone. I look forward to it
Business practice seems to be shifting, at least that's what I see where I sit. DHL has started delivering parcels using electric vans and from what I've read today's batteries aren't a problem for that.
Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation, but private practice is moving too. The number of 25-year-olds with driving licenses is dropping, I've seen surveys that list the iphone above a BMW as a status symbol, and then there are phenomena like this: https://www.citymetric.com/transport/driving-london-has-been...
Buying the car and hot swapping the batteries (with an automated machine similar to going through a car wash, no less) was the vision of A Better Place, a short lived Israeli startup. That company failed, but I wouldn't say it's impossible by a long shot.
While your suggestion is good for the vast majority of driving situations, there is one kind of driving where it won't work:
Off road driving
Unless we get a battery that has - at a minimum - the same capabilities as a tank of gas, off roading is going to be relegated to strictly internal combustion, or maybe hybrid powered only.
Right now, even the tech in a Tesla would not get a decent off road rig (up-armored, lifted, accessories, large MT tires, etc) out to the trail, over/thru it, and back to civilization. What we have right now will generally get you over a decent trail - but you'll probably have to trailer the rig in and out of the area.
Even if solid-state batteries prove to be practical, it still might not be enough for any kind of serious off roading capability; that is, anything more than a "day trip", or where unplanned excursions off the route are involved.
Because you won't have any easy ways to recharge the battery while on the trail.
Right now, you can carry your own fuel with you, and refuel as needed or if there's an emergency or whatever. Other people when out with a group may also have fuel others can use - so the concept of universality comes into play.
It's not possible to bring a generator (and fuel) or a solar panel with you to charge the battery of a hypothetical off road vehicle, unless this new battery tech allows for short charge times at lower voltages/currents as well (which probably isn't on the table). And you likely can't bring along spare battery packs - the size and weight would be prohibitive (then again, some people bring along replacement axles); unless the weight and size of such solid-state batteries are less.
Yes, off roading is a small segment of the population, and so maybe it would be ok if that portion remained to use IC engines; presumably a battery swap system, or a solid-state battery pack might be the solution for the majority.
Battery technology, the management of charge/discharge/heat etc is the "secret sauce" that differentiates EVs. Anybody can stick an electric motor in a chassis. No carmaker is going to want to give that up for an industry standard one-size-fits-all generic battery.
This is an obvious idea hampered by the business model impossibilities of owning $20,000 battery packs which you can only improve in value by a few dollars every time you exchange them. The inventory / infrastructure / damage costs are too high to justify it.
Tesla batteries are already highly modular and easily swappable. Having them be swapped every reload just doesn't make any sense.
I bet in ten years having your battery swapped is about the same as having your belt and pump swapped. A couple hours mechanic fees plus the cost of a new battery minus the resale value of the old one. Done within a day, simple once every 250k kilometers to keep your car run as new.
A model 3 without a battery would still be 30k, and that's with Tesla on razor margins and with the much cheaper supercharger infrastructure.
What about the opposite ie the car structure should be the battery!
Carbon Fibre can be a very effective Anode at double the strength of steel - not v effective at it’s max strength of 10x Steel.
Not as energy dense as curent Tesla batteries, but at the system level, should in theory save 50% of weight for same capacity, which is huge!
Also lower energy density is naturaly safer, ie less likely to go up in flames.
Just guessing, but this might partly explain how the Tesla Semi Truck is getting the claimed 500 mile range, that most commentators say is impossible?
There is a pretty significant systems engineeing effort to integrate the battery performance with the motor and power electronics. Tesla does a fantastic job in this regard and that is likely responsible for their high efficiency. You lose a lot of ability to do the integration in an optimized way if you have to design around different batteries.
All that to say there is a lot to be gained by not doing a battery swap system.
Won't be surprised that Tesla jumping on the chance to cancel the battery swap program when the reported popularity was low was due to something else.
It could be that a quick hot swap is technologically complicated, especially given Tesla manufacturing tolerances. Also if the hot swap fails, you're stranded without a car.
No they don't, everything is already in place. In a few years the industry will catch up to Tesla and we'll see further price decreases across the board and mass EV adoption using current tech.
The battery will have to be reinvented for large planes to become electric, but that's a different discussion. Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech to start the electrification of that whole industry.
Last time I checked, the extraction process for lithium, which is needed for the batteries, still has a heavy impact on the environment. This article mentions a cost of 500,000 gallons (almost 2 million litres) of water for a tonne of lithium. [1] Considering that as of now the most lithium is produced in desert regions of Bolivia and Chile, using what little water exists there in the first place may be detrimental to the population of these regions.
Are there any news regarding new, more environment friendly mining processes?
In a few years the industry will catch up to Tesla and we'll see further price decreases across the board and mass EV adoption using current tech.
Can this catch up be quantified? There must have been a study of how entire industries ramp up infrastructure and develop economies of scale. This has happened in wartime many, many times, and well resourced countries had an interest in how fast these things could happen. (And how they could be prevented.)
I think batteries with high investment but low operations cost, as well as self driving tech (comprehensive all solid state radars and lidars and cameras with sensor fusion can get quite expensive) fit the "mobility as service" or taxi / uber business model much better.
The article begins by contradicting itself: "To deliver an electric vehicle that’s cheaper, safer and capable of traveling 500 miles on a single charge ..."
That's not a "car". A "car", as driven by a billion people every day, takes trips whose distances have a power-law distribution falling off from ~2 miles down to 150 miles, by which point you are looking at < 0.1% of trips. A large fraction of cars have never been driven on a 500 mile trip.
They'll probably never sell a 500mi EV just like they don't sell cars that go 500mi on a tank. EPA range on most cars will touch 400mi but that's about it. If anything, gas tanks are getting smaller as fuel efficiency goes up. Gas tanks take space, carry a heavy fuel that, in turn, reduces fuel economy, and so on. Batteries cost money. The only reason to make an EV with a greater range than most gas cars is if recharging is slow. The range then offsets charge time on the rare roadtrip. If you can charge your car quickly, suddenly there's not even a reason to have more than 200mi range. Already the 310mi range on our Tesla 3 seems a bit excessive when I've only had to supercharge it twice, and mostly I just get home and don't bother plugging it in because it doesn't NEED a charge every day.
I thought the same. I mean, you don't need vast technical advancements to build that anyway, though the battery would likely cost approximately $20,000 USD with current technology. It isn't necessarily obvious that really unconventional things would need to happen to get that down to ~$10k, and most uses would work with a much smaller battery than that.
> A large fraction of cars have never been driven on a 500 mile trip.
Consumers base buying decisions on the longest trip they expect to take.
Even if 360 days a year they commute for 10 miles, and then for 4th of July / Thanksgiving / winter holidays they take an extended 300+ mile road trip, they will consider a car capable of traveling 300+ miles.
It doesn't really matter what people actually need. What matters is what they think they need. Few people are coldly logical about big purchases like cars.
People are trying, Tesla is investing HEAVILY into battery technology and research.
CPUs 30 years ago were 8 bits and barely scratching 10s of mhz, we arrived at our modern era through incremental improvements, not by saying "we need to stop and wait for someone to invent something better!"
Fun story: the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. Yesterday's miracle battery of tomorrow that never quite happened, right? Well, the big picture story is a bit different. It was invented shortly before the lead acid battery and US civil war. It accumulated a few refinements and fewer practical uses over the years, until the Apollo era when there was a huge breakthrough (polymer electrolyte membranes). Then it went back to slowly accumulating incremental advancements, and that's still the story today.
Exploitation is exponential (the scale of each success determines the resources people are willing to bet on the next win), but exploration is a punctuated equilibrium, and it's a recipe for disappointment to assume that all progress should behave like the former rather than the latter.
I disagree with the premise of the question. How many people really need a 500 mile range? How often does the average person do a long road trip? Is it really such a hassle to stop and stretch your legs (and maybe eat) while charging in the middle of a once-annual road trip?
Hell, even if you're doing that drive weekly, you might still prefer the electric since it'd save you a lot on gas money, even though it enforces a mid-trip break.
I'm surprised there isn't a discussion of the Goodenough lithium glass battery [0]. The fact that I haven't read about replication or a failure to replicate is really weird to me given how world-changing such a technology would be if it were proven to be viable.
This is coming from a person who would like to buy an electric car. But lets say we get to batteries that can survive incredibly high charge rates, aka the 10 minute charge time.
Some quick math:
100kWh battery needs 100 kW to charge in an hour.
To charge in 10 minutes we need 100kW * 6 = 600kW.
Now that is a bit of an over simplification but it gives the magnitude of instantaneous power needed.
From a grid perspective charging a lot of cars slowly is not terribly difficult to handle because it appears mostly as base load, but if you have ton of cars starting and stopping charging at 600kW you will get massive fluctuations.
Thankfully a lot of cars will just slow charge overnight most of the time. Then for a fast charging station they could have large batteries or super capacitors to help offset the fluctuations.
Talk about moving the goal posts. Tesla's are way less flammable than gasoline cars and some have more range (my dad's Ford has like 250 miles of range)
I really thought a Volt like car would be the answer. Electric for most of the year, but a gas powered motor to go for those vacations away. I don't know why that wasn't more popular.
Now that's strange. Electric cars are working pretty well, and then this guy comes along and says we have to wait for a new technology that doesn't work yet. Who is "David Stringer", anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps? ("Stringer" in journalism is a freelance journalist paid by the article.) There's a minor Arizona politician by that name, but that's about all Google has to say.
For an electric car, here is my summary: For a car, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with.
E.g., the US is dotted with high density with gas stations, can fill a 20 gallon tank in just a few minutes, and at 20 MPG that tank will fuel the car for 400 miles.
For a battery, apparently so far the range is about 200 mile; for the readily available charging sources the charging time is much longer, maybe hours; and from a really powerful charging source the battery will get hot and need cooling (e.g., see the Jay Leno piece on the new, all electric Mercedes which does cool the battery while charging).
The weather is a significant issue: In hot weather, the battery needs more cooling. In cold weather, the battery loses lots of its power.
So I agree with the OP: For a good electric car, need a better battery. IIRC long ago a Ford executive stated "You build me a good battery, and I'll build you a good electric car."
Actually, all electric cars are not new but old and go way back to the first days of cars, e.g., before Ford's Model T. And as Leno mentioned, for all or nearly all the time since then, battery technology hasn't made much progress. Right: Battery technology is still based on basic chemistry, and that chemistry was understood well enough in 1900.
Of course, people saw all this 100+ years ago and for one solution tried hybrids where a gasoline engine charged a battery. Apparently, net, that meant that the car had two sources of power, gasoline and a battery, and could get by with just one, the gasoline, which is just what has been done since then. Still there is some hope for hybrids.
Yes, there are some uses for electric vehicles. Still:
Yup, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with.
The article is written as if solid-state battery designs are going to be the future. So my honest question is, is that really so? What about others, like Graphene batteries and supercapacitors [1][2]?
What we really need is a standardisation to cover for the improvements in the background. Kind of like a USB interface for batteries.
Imagine, you could buy a car, that has slots for you to attach standard batteries. You could leave the batteries charging at home, office, shops that lease you charged batteries(like gas stations) etc. It would also take care of "I live in an apartment and park my car by the side of the road, so no home charging.. problem".
Also, gets rid of the range anxiety if you know you could get batteries everywhere or at-least charge yours everywhere.
Now, when technology genuinely improves by a magnitude, replace the cells, but keep the interface for a decade or so.
Bonus if that standard catches on for other uses. Imagine same batteries being used for power tools at home, emergency power supply at home, camping stuff, plug those boxes into the edges of solar panels while they are not in the car etc.
Leave it to the competing business that are "battery suppliers" to figure out how to make them more efficient, cheaper, and do further R&D.
Car companies can stay at making cars that are essentially safe, aerodynamic shells with electric motors waiting to be powered up by customer supplied batteries.
This is a good article on solid state batteries. But I think it is all wrong in claiming that we will have to wait for them before BEV autos will take over.
The fact is that BEV's are already better than ICE's in many ways, and the best, Tesla's, are so good they are busy taking away market share. And lithium ion batteries are steadily improving in characteristics and also getting cheaper. Furthermore, China, the world's largest auto market, is putting a very big push behind BEV autos, and many other governments are also making efforts.
From what I have read a tipping point is coming around 2023-25 when consumers will start flooding to BEV's, and ICE sales will start dropping rapidly. And then in another half decade or so solid state batteries will be ready and the trend will accelerate.
The basic message is that the century-long dominance of ICE cars is coming to an end and in the not-so-distant future, it's just a matter of time.
It's fine now, but if anyone gets close to the mythical solid state battery it would change everything. Trucks, trains, and bigger vehicle have no chance without them they'd weigh to much.
[+] [-] yholio|7 years ago|reply
I'm thinking of a modular battery that is hot swapable at the charge stations and where you only pay it's depreciation based on what you actually use. This would significantly lower ownership costs for light users and drastically increase efficiency and flexibility for heavy users who are no longer dependent on charge times. Since it's modular, you load the number of units you need, say one battery unit for a Leaf, two for a Model S or 10 units for a light truck, all in standardized format and with their own computing that tracks things like life span, charge cycles performed by the user himself for proper billing etc.
I know Tesla experimented with and later abandoned battery swap, but that's predictable without the proper business structure in place, no one is going to leave the most expensive part of their car back at the charge station. If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.
[+] [-] mrep|7 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-ba...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15144315
[+] [-] ip26|7 years ago|reply
Basically, the point is a standardized, easily removable, hotswappable widget makes a lot of sense when it's a minor item. But when it's half the weight, value, volume, and engineering challenge, you have to sacrifice all of those attributes to use the hotswap widget.
This originally made me think, if only we could pump fluid electrolyte in & out of the car, and let the battery take whatever form it likes. Then I realized that's called a flow battery, and then I realized that a hydrogen fuel cell is a type of flow battery.
[+] [-] jdietrich|7 years ago|reply
https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finance/battery-hire.html
[+] [-] WorldMaker|7 years ago|reply
Cars overall depreciate on the scale of 10/15 years or so. Right now the depreciation rates are the same. It's an interesting artifact of ICE vehicles that people don't expect any car's drive train to last more than ~15 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers were skeptical of battery tech right up until they hit about that same magic lifetime number. It also shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers won't have a lot of incentive to push it past that magic lifetime number, because that would affect car replacement rates and that would affect the bottom line.
Mostly battery replacements look to keep the used car / secondary markets busy, and if we expect to see interesting innovations in battery replacements that's probably where we'll see them as more electric cars get resold to secondary and tertiary owners. (Just as we see the used car markets pushing innovations in after-market parts in general.)
You are right in that maybe leaves room for a disruption that someone might be interested in a "car for life" model where electric cars might be built far more sustainably with an ideal towards larger reuse of the vehicle over the owner's lifetime and a larger depreciation scale on the order of multiple decades.
That would be a huge game changer, and would potentially be great for the planet (less steel production alone, conceivably). It would also take a lot of work to make it happen, given the existing industry reliance on the current business model for most of a century now. It would also be one extremely huge disruption in so many downstream industries, secondary markets, etc, to the point where it may be more of a revolution (in the industrial sense, but also perhaps the war sense) than a "simple" disruption.
[+] [-] bitcurious|7 years ago|reply
There was an Israeli battery/car tech startup that was built on that model, but it sadly went kaput. I still firmly believe that the hot-swap model is the winner long term.
[+] [-] asdkhadsj|7 years ago|reply
I wouldn't. Not to be a naysayer, just giving some context. The cars I buy are already in that price range, and I already pay "comparable gasoline prices" (via gas, hah), so in my area all I'd gain is a different type of gasoline when in city, and when I go camping/etc I'd be at risk due to being in slow adoption areas.
Don't get me wrong, I want electric, but due to the areas I drive I've already settled to likely being stuck with Hybrids for the next X years.
With that said, if the model you laid out still ended up cheaper than gasoline it would at least tip the balance towards its favor. I just can't handle a zero sum trade - and I imagine the same would be true for many around this large, slow to adapt land masses.
Cities will become much, much nicer though. Air quality alone. I look forward to it
[+] [-] Arnt|7 years ago|reply
Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation, but private practice is moving too. The number of 25-year-olds with driving licenses is dropping, I've seen surveys that list the iphone above a BMW as a status symbol, and then there are phenomena like this: https://www.citymetric.com/transport/driving-london-has-been...
[+] [-] perkee|7 years ago|reply
https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...
[+] [-] cr0sh|7 years ago|reply
Off road driving
Unless we get a battery that has - at a minimum - the same capabilities as a tank of gas, off roading is going to be relegated to strictly internal combustion, or maybe hybrid powered only.
Right now, even the tech in a Tesla would not get a decent off road rig (up-armored, lifted, accessories, large MT tires, etc) out to the trail, over/thru it, and back to civilization. What we have right now will generally get you over a decent trail - but you'll probably have to trailer the rig in and out of the area.
Even if solid-state batteries prove to be practical, it still might not be enough for any kind of serious off roading capability; that is, anything more than a "day trip", or where unplanned excursions off the route are involved.
Because you won't have any easy ways to recharge the battery while on the trail.
Right now, you can carry your own fuel with you, and refuel as needed or if there's an emergency or whatever. Other people when out with a group may also have fuel others can use - so the concept of universality comes into play.
It's not possible to bring a generator (and fuel) or a solar panel with you to charge the battery of a hypothetical off road vehicle, unless this new battery tech allows for short charge times at lower voltages/currents as well (which probably isn't on the table). And you likely can't bring along spare battery packs - the size and weight would be prohibitive (then again, some people bring along replacement axles); unless the weight and size of such solid-state batteries are less.
Yes, off roading is a small segment of the population, and so maybe it would be ok if that portion remained to use IC engines; presumably a battery swap system, or a solid-state battery pack might be the solution for the majority.
[+] [-] ams6110|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fipple|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinco|7 years ago|reply
I bet in ten years having your battery swapped is about the same as having your belt and pump swapped. A couple hours mechanic fees plus the cost of a new battery minus the resale value of the old one. Done within a day, simple once every 250k kilometers to keep your car run as new.
A model 3 without a battery would still be 30k, and that's with Tesla on razor margins and with the much cheaper supercharger infrastructure.
[+] [-] garyclarke27|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] torpfactory|7 years ago|reply
All that to say there is a lot to be gained by not doing a battery swap system.
[+] [-] benj111|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voqv|7 years ago|reply
It could be that a quick hot swap is technologically complicated, especially given Tesla manufacturing tolerances. Also if the hot swap fails, you're stranded without a car.
[+] [-] amelius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ken|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martythemaniak|7 years ago|reply
The battery will have to be reinvented for large planes to become electric, but that's a different discussion. Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech to start the electrification of that whole industry.
[+] [-] Nimelrian|7 years ago|reply
Are there any news regarding new, more environment friendly mining processes?
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|7 years ago|reply
Can this catch up be quantified? There must have been a study of how entire industries ramp up infrastructure and develop economies of scale. This has happened in wartime many, many times, and well resourced countries had an interest in how fast these things could happen. (And how they could be prevented.)
[+] [-] Gravityloss|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eptcyka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0bby_tabl3s|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] spenrose|7 years ago|reply
That's not a "car". A "car", as driven by a billion people every day, takes trips whose distances have a power-law distribution falling off from ~2 miles down to 150 miles, by which point you are looking at < 0.1% of trips. A large fraction of cars have never been driven on a 500 mile trip.
[+] [-] rconti|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ea1k|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prostoalex|7 years ago|reply
Consumers base buying decisions on the longest trip they expect to take.
Even if 360 days a year they commute for 10 miles, and then for 4th of July / Thanksgiving / winter holidays they take an extended 300+ mile road trip, they will consider a car capable of traveling 300+ miles.
[+] [-] ams6110|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lakeeffect|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmiller1|7 years ago|reply
CPUs 30 years ago were 8 bits and barely scratching 10s of mhz, we arrived at our modern era through incremental improvements, not by saying "we need to stop and wait for someone to invent something better!"
[+] [-] jjoonathan|7 years ago|reply
Exploitation is exponential (the scale of each success determines the resources people are willing to bet on the next win), but exploration is a punctuated equilibrium, and it's a recipe for disappointment to assume that all progress should behave like the former rather than the latter.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|7 years ago|reply
Hell, even if you're doing that drive weekly, you might still prefer the electric since it'd save you a lot on gas money, even though it enforces a mid-trip break.
[+] [-] alistproducer2|7 years ago|reply
0: https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/26/the-solid-state-lithium...
[+] [-] sbradford26|7 years ago|reply
Some quick math: 100kWh battery needs 100 kW to charge in an hour. To charge in 10 minutes we need 100kW * 6 = 600kW.
Now that is a bit of an over simplification but it gives the magnitude of instantaneous power needed.
From a grid perspective charging a lot of cars slowly is not terribly difficult to handle because it appears mostly as base load, but if you have ton of cars starting and stopping charging at 600kW you will get massive fluctuations.
Thankfully a lot of cars will just slow charge overnight most of the time. Then for a fast charging station they could have large batteries or super capacitors to help offset the fluctuations.
[+] [-] jpm_sd|7 years ago|reply
https://electrek.co/2018/12/11/daimler-billion-battery-cells...
[+] [-] mrep|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rb808|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graycat|7 years ago|reply
E.g., the US is dotted with high density with gas stations, can fill a 20 gallon tank in just a few minutes, and at 20 MPG that tank will fuel the car for 400 miles.
For a battery, apparently so far the range is about 200 mile; for the readily available charging sources the charging time is much longer, maybe hours; and from a really powerful charging source the battery will get hot and need cooling (e.g., see the Jay Leno piece on the new, all electric Mercedes which does cool the battery while charging).
The weather is a significant issue: In hot weather, the battery needs more cooling. In cold weather, the battery loses lots of its power.
So I agree with the OP: For a good electric car, need a better battery. IIRC long ago a Ford executive stated "You build me a good battery, and I'll build you a good electric car."
Actually, all electric cars are not new but old and go way back to the first days of cars, e.g., before Ford's Model T. And as Leno mentioned, for all or nearly all the time since then, battery technology hasn't made much progress. Right: Battery technology is still based on basic chemistry, and that chemistry was understood well enough in 1900.
Of course, people saw all this 100+ years ago and for one solution tried hybrids where a gasoline engine charged a battery. Apparently, net, that meant that the car had two sources of power, gasoline and a battery, and could get by with just one, the gasoline, which is just what has been done since then. Still there is some hope for hybrids.
Yes, there are some uses for electric vehicles. Still:
Yup, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with.
[+] [-] devy|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-batteries
[2]: https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-supercapacitors
[+] [-] reacharavindh|7 years ago|reply
Imagine, you could buy a car, that has slots for you to attach standard batteries. You could leave the batteries charging at home, office, shops that lease you charged batteries(like gas stations) etc. It would also take care of "I live in an apartment and park my car by the side of the road, so no home charging.. problem".
Also, gets rid of the range anxiety if you know you could get batteries everywhere or at-least charge yours everywhere.
Now, when technology genuinely improves by a magnitude, replace the cells, but keep the interface for a decade or so.
Bonus if that standard catches on for other uses. Imagine same batteries being used for power tools at home, emergency power supply at home, camping stuff, plug those boxes into the edges of solar panels while they are not in the car etc.
Leave it to the competing business that are "battery suppliers" to figure out how to make them more efficient, cheaper, and do further R&D.
Car companies can stay at making cars that are essentially safe, aerodynamic shells with electric motors waiting to be powered up by customer supplied batteries.
[+] [-] woodandsteel|7 years ago|reply
The fact is that BEV's are already better than ICE's in many ways, and the best, Tesla's, are so good they are busy taking away market share. And lithium ion batteries are steadily improving in characteristics and also getting cheaper. Furthermore, China, the world's largest auto market, is putting a very big push behind BEV autos, and many other governments are also making efforts.
From what I have read a tipping point is coming around 2023-25 when consumers will start flooding to BEV's, and ICE sales will start dropping rapidly. And then in another half decade or so solid state batteries will be ready and the trend will accelerate.
The basic message is that the century-long dominance of ICE cars is coming to an end and in the not-so-distant future, it's just a matter of time.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] all2|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1jusadHkmM
This is only one example of what he's done.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kabouseng|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q
[+] [-] DeonPenny|7 years ago|reply