Electric car batteries with five-minute charging times produced

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/19/electric-car-batteries-race-ahead-with-five-minute-charging-times

by laktak • 6 years ago

45 55 6 years ago

lukeitup• 6 years ago

Electric cars for the vast majority is not too far away. Petrol cars will still exist, but just as super sports car for enthusiasts.

FooHentai• 6 years ago

Widespread adoption for small and medium family car duties is looking really good right now - They're almost a no-brainer for any 2-car family already, but somewhat held back by the 'new and unfamiliar' hump. There is still some way to go for any one-car household that wants to be able to make longer trips a few times a year (and is not willing to rent for those occasions, which although possible is an option I doubt many will opt for).

Large family vehicles on the other hand, there are a few hybrids that fit the bill but none of them are stand-out and the additional mechanical complexity is (rightfully) giving folks pause. The early prius for example got it right and was quite reliable, later iterations unfortunately have not lived up to the reputation it built. But then there's also rural car ownership where fewer, longer-range trips are the norm. Not much adoption to be seen there for very good reasons, neither the cars nor the charging infrastructure is suitable.

Depreciation is a kicker, also. Early adopters are finding that with the rapid progress on range/features and manufacturers chasing lower RRPs to get more adoption, when they come to trade up to something newer the value of their early purchases is lower than a similarly-aged ICE.

All of this is still good progress, but I think we're at least a decade if not several away from ICE being pushed into a niche. Plus without some breakthroughs in battery tech, there's only so far into the market things can go. Fortunately some promising stuff seems to be on the horizon i.e. solid state.

bryanlarsen3• 6 years ago

Every Tesla owner I know was a 2 car family reassured by the fact that their other car was ICE that they could use for long trips. Once they got the Tesla it became the vehicle used for all long trips. There are very few destinations that aren't within 250 miles of a supercharger and do not have at least a 115V plug available to recharge the car while you're at the destination.

And as far as I'm concerned a Y is a large family vehicle. It's no Escalade, but it's larger than our small minivan. If you disagree, there are some large trucks and SUV's coming in 2021/2022.

Depreciation is a kicker all right, but in the other direction. All actively cooled electric cars (IOW everything except the Leaf) depreciate a lot slower than a gas car. And that's just going to accelerate. Imagine trying to sell a 2020 ICE car in 2030. 98% of 2020 cars are ICE, but in 2030 the majority of new car purchases are going to be electric. Buyers of used cars want basically the same thing as buyers of electric cars, so the small number of available electrics are going to be in high demand.

olau• 6 years ago

I think the super sports cars are actually turning electric faster than their cheap counterparts?

londons_explore6• 6 years ago

My favourite interview question for engineering grads:

* Someone has just invented a 1 minute charge time car battery. They want you to design the cable for the user to plug the car into the charge station. Can you sketch some design ideas and point out the pros and cons of each?

It's a great question because it's almost impossible... Any cable that can deliver the tens of megawatts needs a ton of copper and a ton of cooling, and usually ends up too heavy for grandma to move. Then high voltages are investigated, leading to insulators which can't do high temperatures, are stupidly thick themselves, or are non-flexible... Sometimes candidates suggest superconductors, but then they need to come up with an answer to cooling, keeping it flexible, and stopping the user getting frostbite.

As an interviewer, it shows me how quickly a candidate can guess the magnitude of each parameter in their design and iterate designs to get everything reasonable. That ability tends to match an engineer who can make a prototype of something in a few days.

numlock862• 6 years ago

I've seen prototype "cables" designed to handle up to 800 volts at 100 amps for EV DC charging. In fact I had to carry a sample (just the cable and plug on the EV side, other end was open) a few meters and oh boy, I can still feel my shoulder and back just thinking about that. No idea how any regular everyday consumer is supposed to handle that. And that was even without any cooling liquid pumped inside which you'd probably have in the live application.

londons_explore6• 6 years ago

That's 80 kilowatts. To 'charge' a big gasoline truck, you'd put in say 20 gallons, which if done via electricity in 1 minute would be 57 megawatts, nearly 1000x more.

techdragon• 6 years ago

These cables continue to surprise me, I remember prototypes for robotic “hands off” fuel pumps for petrol/gas that were being built in the 90s. With the rise of the standards around charging electric cars, it seems like a no brainer to standardise on robotics to handle the hook up as we go to higher power levels.

Park car roughly in the correct place, and wait. No more issues using any cable technology that’s appropriate like coolants or the sheer cable mass in terms of copper. The robot can be built to match , and every charging port makes a nice standard looking target for vision tracking and alignment to drive the robot to the right place every time.

magicalhippo• 6 years ago

We got a BMW i3, it has a battery capacity of 33 kWh. Fully charging it in 5 minutes, as the article claims, would thus require a 400kW charger, assuming an unrealistic constant charging condition. With a nominal battery voltage of 360V that would be 1.1kA, which seems quite a challenge.

And that's a fairly tiny battery as far as electric cars go. A Tesla 3 with the new 82kWh battery pack would require over 1MW.

On a related note there was an article[1] in the news here just yesterday about how building the charging infrastructure is challenged by the fact that the cost of expanding local transformer stations has to be shared by those wanting the extra power, like say a gas station wanting to add EV charging stations. This cost can be quite high due to the power requirements.

[1] https://www.nrk.no/norge/ma-ut-med-mer-enn-25-millioner-for-...

simonebrunozzi• 6 years ago

Among other issues, I think that you would melt/fry the battery, unless you could charge it inside a freezer or something like that.

Cthulhu_• 6 years ago

Not an engineer so this is just me spitballing / getting nerdsniped, but for that kind of use case I can imagine a charging station that you have to drive the car over, with a solid chunky connector sticking up into the car. Any cabling would be underground, and it could be combined with providing cooling for both the cable and the battery itself.

That would be the fast charging option, for at home charging you'd have to use the regular slow plug.

gambiting5• 6 years ago

For a 100kWh battery, you're taking 6MW of power to charge the battery to full in a minute. 6MW is a small nuclear reactor or a medium sized hydroelectric dam. I cannot imagine a charging station wired for that kind of power being drawn when charging, nor can I imagine a connector that would safely carry this power. It can be done "safely" in the million volt range, but you're not going to charge a battery(typically 400-800V) with that. Just for a "fun" calculation, 6MW at 800V is 7500 amps - the cable for it would be bigger and heavier than the car, if it's even possible at all. And then finally, I can't believe there really exists a battery that just wouldn't boil at those rates, nor that we could effectively cool it.

nojokes3• 6 years ago

Not an electrical engineer.

Why not inductive charging or any other wireless technology? Also it does not require a single entry point - do it in parallel.

Also when 1 minute is not possible, how about increasing the time?

Edit: in addition, charging entry does not have to be on the side, it can be on top or on bottom - we do not need any gravity assist.

gambiting5• 6 years ago

Wireless charging doesn't solve anything - you would still need to deliver 100kWh(for a large car battery) into the charging pad within a minute. And then you need to receive it on the other end - you don't have a plug, but obviously your receiver now has the same issue. You just moved where the problem is. I'd argue that having such an incredibly strong inductive field is a problem as well, but yeah, you're not even going to get that far.

Parallel charging is potentially the answer - but even with 10 cables, for a 100kWh battery, you're still talking.....600kW per cable? CCS goes only up to 200kW(and those are THICK cables), so if you increase the charging speed to 3 minutes then yes, you could do it with 10 cables. 6 minutes with 5 cables, 30 minutes with one cable.....and we're(almost) back to what existing technology already allows?

bryanlarsen3• 6 years ago

Inductive chargers are ~80% efficient, compared to cables which are well over 99% efficient. Even though super efficient and despite electrical conductors being good heat conductors, the cable still needs active cooling to dump waste heat. Your inductive charger and the attached vehicle are going to have dump tens of kWh of heat in a few minutes, and will have to do it through air, without barbecuing the humans inside.

bryanlarsen3• 6 years ago

Parallel charging is the current answer.

https://insideevs.com/photo/5439695/mine-smart-ferry-fast-ch...

akvadrako3• 6 years ago

What about using very high voltage like 100kV? All the heavy parts could be in the vehicle and the charging station.

I did find this using 13 kV: https://www.energytrend.com/news/20180904-12449.html

londons_explore6• 6 years ago

What material will you make the insulators from? Will the insulation itself not be too heavy?

kgc• 6 years ago

This technology claims 100 miles in 5 minutes. As of 2019, a Tesla can charge 100 miles in 7 minutes using the v3 supercharger. https://electrek.co/2019/07/02/tesla-supercharger-v3-range-m...

chinathrow• 6 years ago

This technology claims 100 miles in 5 minutes.

...in 2025 (from the article).

Skinney• 6 years ago

But probably only when the battery is in the 10-20% capacity range, right?

It doesn't say in the article, but I wonder if these batteries can charge 100 miles per 5 minutes for a larger range than current vehicles. I'd happily charge at 150kw instead of 300kw, if that meant that I could do so from 10-80 instead of 10-20.

threeseed• 6 years ago

Taycan can add 60 miles in 4 minutes using 800V, 350kW and not just from zero initial charge.

Which makes this a ~25% improvement.

2rsf• 6 years ago

That's cool but still limiting, the infrastructure is going to be expensive and not easily available in remote places.

Batteries that could be charged by "refueling" [1], or fuel cells that require hydrogen are a much more feasible solution and environmentally safe for the long term

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/battery-recharges-...

pedrocr• 6 years ago

This is a common objection by people that haven't lived with an EV. In reality convenient very slow charging is what you really want. Cars spend 90%+ of their time parked. Connecting them to a common outlet at those times is more than enough for charging to be something you stop thinking about. Going to a gas station becomes a strange inconvenience you used to have to do. In a few cases you then go on a road trip and use a fast charger. What we actually have to build out is all that slow and simple infrastructure in city parking and other convenient places. The grid is already everywhere.

Losing all that convenience, 2/3 of your energy, and having to build out a completely new fueling infrastructure to use hydrogen fuel cells just makes no sense.

deergomoo• 6 years ago

In reality convenient very slow charging is what you really want

Which can also be an obstacle of its own—something like 60% of homes in the UK only have on-street parking, making overnight charging difficult to say the least.

paul_f• 6 years ago

I live in a suburban neighborhood Florida and less than half of the all cars here live inside of a garage. Many people who live in apartments or condominiums do not have a garage at all. I don't think slow overnight charging is feasible for even half of the cars here, and we're not even in a dense location.

gambiting5• 6 years ago

>fuel cells that require hydrogen are a much more feasible solution and environmentally safe for the long term

I honestly, hand on heart, don't understand how anyone still believes this. Honestly. Hydrogen is a PAIN to work with. We don't have any elemental hydrogen on earth. Nearly 100% of hydrogen available in commercial supply comes from fossil fuel production and while it could still be produced by electrolysis it's a stupidly inefficient process, especially since the resulting gas then has to be compressed for transport. And most importantly, no one has answered a simple question - with hydrogen being the smallest element of all, it leaks out of any container you put it in, making it brittle as it does so. 70kg lead bottles only store 1L of hydrogen, and all of it naturally evaporates through the metal within few weeks. Woven carbon fibre tanks are better at this, but it still evaporates with time and the tanks are incredibly expensive to manufacture.

I'd argue it's not feasible at all. It's a pipe dream that people keep bringing up for some reason because it looks great on paper. In practice the production and transportation and then safe usage of hydrogen are significant obstacles, where batteries have none of them - the only advantage is the fueling speed, but even then I'm not so sure - have you seen videos of any commercial fueling stations for hydrogen? The Toyota Mirai with its tiny tank takes about 10 minutes to refuel since the process has to be done so carefully. Yes it's faster than electric charging, but the speeds we're seeing on some cars(Porsche Taycan, Tesla Model 3) are already crazy, like 60 miles of range added in 5 minutes crazy.

Hypx2• 6 years ago

Considering that we run thousands of hydrogen powered vehicles every day, this is increasingly a viewpoint that is out of touch. If anything, we know that it will work without much fuss. Most of the issues you describe no longer exist anymore.

60 miles in 5 minutes is far slower than 400 miles in 5 minutes. Even better, you can consistently go from 0-100% and not 10-80% or whatever. It also scales to larger vehicles, something that simply won't work with batteries. Not unless you're consider elaborate solutions like overhead catenaries.

codecamper• 6 years ago

How to destroy your battery fast. This whole "fast charging" concept is people trying to 100% mimic the gas powered car. EVs are different. You can fill them up overnight. Or with excess solar on the grid.

GuB-42• 6 years ago

Fast charging is here to address a major shortcoming of current electric cars in general: range is short and there is no easy way of recharging en route.

The "charge overnight" model is ideal for commutes within the EV range, but not for long road trips. This is a problem and we need solutions.

Solutions include:

- Fast charging: Yes, it is mimicking gas cars, but gas cars are great at that, so it is not a bad thing

- Huge batteries: The idea is to have enough range not to need en route recharging. Problem is, batteries are heavy and expensive

- An internal combustion engine: Purists don't like it, but it can be a good compromise for many people

- Battery swapping: it has been suggested, Tesla even did a demo, but it doesn't seem practical

If you don't consider it a problem because "EVs are different", then EVs will never replace gas cars. And replacing gas cars with EVs as much as possible is exactly what we want.

nojokes3• 6 years ago

Actually when I am driving long range, I will do a break in every 4 hours (top). What is needed is actually a tense infrastructure of charging stations. These do not have to be like gas stations - big and manned, so more can be added.

somedude895• 6 years ago

I've driven my 75kwh Model S all over Europe, and it works just fine. With a dense fast-charging network, you make a 30 minute stop every 2.5 hours. Stretch your legs, go to the bathroom and have a cup of coffee. Sure, if you're in a hurry, you'll be at your destination slightly quicker in a gas powered car, but that's normally not the case on a 1'000 km trip.

Hypx2• 6 years ago

The idea of the fuel cell car tends to loom large in such conversations. It solves all problems in one package, without having to resort to problematic ideas like battery swapping.

imtringued3• 6 years ago

If someone takes a 1000 mile trip every week I don't blame them for going with a gas car (although I still reserve the right to say that traveling 1000 miles every week is inefficient unless there is an economical reason for that).

The problem is that most people use their car to commute and they also use that car for maybe 4 car trips per year. Somehow waiting 2 hours more per trip is completely unacceptable but causing pollution that makes people ill even when it is completely unnecessary is somehow very acceptable.

People will imagine impossible technology to save those 8 hours per year and then pretend that they deserve this impossible technology. Think about how impossible it is to solve climate change with CO2 polluting cars. Meanwhile waiting for your EV to charge up 4 times a year is the worst and climate change is considered the lesser evil.

zed88• 6 years ago

This is not scalable with the current grid infrastructure and will destroy grid equipments via the accentuated grid harmonics.

https://evreporter.com/harmonic-pollution-and-ev-charging/

londons_explore6• 6 years ago

The person who designs the firmware of the charger has full control over the harmonics it produces.

They aren't a tricky engineering problem to solve - but nobody is too worried about solving them right now because the people who maintain the grid and who have to deal with harmonic losses aren't the same people as those who design the charger.

imtringued3• 6 years ago

Did you read the article? The conclusion is a good charger design can the problem. If that's all it takes then the problem is trivial. You just need to regulate EV chargers.

It's not as bad as you might think because replacing old chargers is easier than replacing all EVs.

jmcnulty• 6 years ago

My ideal would a combo package with a 100-mile battery range for my weekly commute plus a 200-mile hydrogen fuel cell to back it up. Most of my usual monthly travel would be on battery and the recharge time for something that small wouldn't be an inconvenience. The hydrogen would only get used a couple of times a month, but if I needed to travel much longer distances, I'd have the freedom to do so without any range anxiety.

LinuxBender• 6 years ago

So this is likely off topic, but if speed is the primary concern, then perhaps the solution would be to not own the batteries and instead have a modular system under the vehicle that permits speed-swapping multiple battery modules. more than one module, so that if contacts wear out, you dont lose 100% available power Think cordless drill. Pop it out, pop it in, on your way. The charging station would need to verify the condition of each module, but charging time would be less critical. How to augment gas stations for this? Build a portal ramp system that drivers pull up onto, robot arm swaps modules, manual method fallback in case of robot failure. I bet Elon could even make a station that does not require a robot, just design the battery so that as you drive over, one module is swapped at a time. The swapping station itself could be modular, much like Elon's tesla factories. Disadvantage, gas station needs to rent or buy this portable station. Advantages, anyone can rent or buy one. You could have a gas station anywhere there is electricity. Not technically being a gas station might change zoning requirements. Also as battery tech evolves, you car automatically benefits. Thoughts?

Electric car batteries with five-minute charging times produced

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