1k-cycle lithium-sulfur battery could increase electric vehicle ranges

https://news.umich.edu/1000-cycle-lithium-sulfur-battery-could-quintuple-electric-vehicle-ranges/

by maeln • 4 years ago

79 192 4 years ago

news.umich.edu

m348e912• 4 years ago

As Elon would say. Send me a sample, then we'll talk.

hobs• 4 years ago

Pretty sure Elon has promised insanely more powerful batteries multiple times and not delivered.

shiftpgdn• 4 years ago

I’d like to see a citation for that claim.

mandmandam• 4 years ago

Musk just promised self driving cars next year for the ninth year in a row. - https://futurism.com/video-elon-musk-promising-self-driving-...

sliken5• 4 years ago

I'm aware of promises of improvements related to the 2170 cells, which were delivered first in model 3 allowing lower prices and range of 300+ miles. Then a rev to the model S/X allowed for range and performance increases. Before the 3 the competition claimed sure the model S is an amazing car, but can Tesla actually produce an under $50k car to reach the wider luxury market.

There's a pending 4680 improvements widely expect to ship in the Texas gigafactory model Y this quarter, time will tell. I believe this is generally on the announced schedule.

Am I missing something? Tesla batteries seem to be delivering on promises and experts in the area seem impressed with the Tesla battery reliability, performance, longevity, and kwh/$. Some to the point of calling Tesla a hugely successful battery company that includes various packaging for their batteries in the form of power walls, and model 3/y/x/s.

jcims• 4 years ago

in mice.

gameswithgo4• 4 years ago

It is promising that a 5x increase is even theoretically possible. If one day even a 3x improvement became mass produceable that would be enough to make electric vehicles viable for all the use cases it isn’t currently that I can think of. Long range towing, extreme cold, track days, road trips with bikes and luggage strapped to your car etc

codesnik• 4 years ago

and aviation beyond air-taxis

gameswithgo4• 4 years ago

right!

jqpabc1237• 4 years ago

So with a capacity of 1k cycles and recharging on weekdays only, the battery should last about 4 years?

Is that enough to make electric cars viable for all use cases? It depends on cost --- of the car initially and of a battery replacement. It would have to be less than the cost of current electric vehicles which have a much longer expected battery lifetime.

deergomoo• 4 years ago

You wouldn’t be charging from 0-100% every day though. For most people it would be more like 1-2 cycles per week, if not less.

gameswithgo4• 4 years ago

That isn’t usually how “cycles” works out, no, unless you deplete the battery completely every day.

DennisP• 4 years ago

The article says it's a ten-year lifespan. Which seems reasonable since ideally, if it's a thousand cycles and a thousand miles per cycle, that's a million mile battery.

maxwell868• 4 years ago

99% of commutes are less than 200 miles. Current car batteries support large numbers of charge cycles and have a capacity that's high enough for these trips.

However, many drivers do a bunch of 500+ miles drives per year; 1, 10, or 100, depends on the driver.

At 500+ miles, battery anxiety starts to kick in.

An electric car that combines current high-cycles-low-range batteries with a smaller low-cycle-very-large-range battery for those 10 500+ miles trips per year would be a killer product. We are talking here 1000+ miles without charging, which is kind of much farther than what most cars can get without re-fueling.

I do maybe one 500+ miles trip per month. That'd be ~24 cycles / year, such that these batteries would have a lifetime for my use of ~40+ years. That's more than enough for me.

There are a bunch of companies working on hybrid battery designs that combine different technologies to serve different purposes. Some of them are already hitting 800+ miles in real-world tests.

parkingrift• 4 years ago

That would depend on the definition of a "cycle." If these truly enable 5x energy density there would be cars on the market with 1,200 - 1,500 mile range. The average American drives 40 miles per day.

If I were an average American driving an average amount and I charged my car every night it would be topping the battery from 97% to 100%. Does that qualify as a cycle? I don't know, but I doubt it. Even if I recharged once per week that would be 80% to 100%, and I would also doubt that qualifies as a cycle.

The authors estimated 10 year lifespan but I'm not sure how they came up with that number, either. If these batteries really do offer 5x density I would likely charge my car 30-40 times per year.

Keyframe• 4 years ago

True, but improvement on what? There's, let's say, doubling capacity (without doubling mass), doubling performance (discharge, without fire hazard), doubling how long it can hold a charge (without doubling thermals), doubling longevity (without doubling down on hazard materials)... Just of top of my head. Chemistry is hard, looks like it. What's the average doubling of any of these factors we've seen over the years? 10-20 years?

derriz• 4 years ago

Energy density has at least doubled in the last 20 years. See figure 8 in [1].

And it's easy to overlook the most important factor for general applications - price - where the declines are much more dramatic.

People complain about the lack of progress with batteries but we've observed that EV range has doubled in 8 years. I see no reason that range wouldn't double again in the next 8 years - and I see plenty of reasons for that to happen.

[1] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2021/ee/d0ee0268...

hashin• 4 years ago

An alternate line of thought - do we need Electric vehicles to do all that? If we could reliably transition mass of passenger transport and daily commute options to electricity, that alone could crack the deal. We needn't eliminate fossil fuel driven systems completely. It can still have some use cases, which on a planet scale could be made viable through a select oil extraction infrastructure across the globe. A scaled down fossil fuel economy with electric replacing mass of private and commercial vehicle use looks like the most likely scenario for the future, imho.

qeternity• 4 years ago

Absolutely the approach that is needed: net zero, not zero. We cannot completely decarbonize the long tail of fossil fuel uses - but we can create a mostly renewable energy mix. It is unlikely that air and space travel for instance will ever be decarbonized - but net emissions can be reduced or eliminated. The same goes for manufacturing processes and materials science. It's not an all or nothing proposition.

jliptzin2• 4 years ago

5x energy density (is that what this article is about? Kind of unclear to me) would mean a whole lot more than just longer range EVs. Thinking electric personal jetpacks, VTOL aircraft, etc.

kragen• 4 years ago

Kotov's lab has done a lot of brilliant stuff. It'll be interesting to see if this makes it to mass adoption; probably not this year or next, though. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-27861-w and seems to be open access cc-by.

If you asked me if organic polymers could resist the growth of metal dendrites, I probably would have said no, because plastics creep like crazy, and metal dendrites are hard and sharp, so over time they will inevitably win unless they stop growing. But lithium is soft like cheese, and Kevlar's creep resistance is comparable to steel's. Maybe this is why Wang and Emre are publishing groundbreaking material science in Nature Communications and I'm not.

JulianMorrison• 4 years ago

I wonder if this will improve prospects for battery-electric aviation? (It might not, if it's let down by energy density, for example.)

darksaints• 4 years ago

The theoretical limits of lithium sulfur batteries are about equivalent to methanol in terms of energy density, so if it is an application where methanol is out of the question (i.e. the vast majority of commercial aviation), then this is definitely too far away from practical. Looks like it could probably get close for commuter planes though.

mhandley2• 4 years ago

The comment about recycling the aramid fibres from bulletproof vests amuses me. Bulletproof vests seem several orders of magnitude rarer around where I live than electric cars. Doesn't really make me want to move to Michigan...

maxerickson2• 4 years ago

Kevlar is used for lots of things. Did they change the link to remove a statement about vests or did you read into the statement about kevlar?

mhandley2• 4 years ago

"Along with the higher capacity, lithium-sulfur batteries have sustainability advantages over other lithium-ion batteries. Sulfur is much more abundant than the cobalt of lithium-ion electrodes. In addition, the aramid fibers of the battery membrane can be recycled from old bulletproof vests."

et2o• 4 years ago

Look at the third-to-final paragraph where it explicitly mentions recycling Kevlar vests.

throwaway0a5e2• 4 years ago

Bullet proof vests, racing harnesses, etc, etc, all sorts of safety critical fiberous stuff like that ages out long before the fibers are degrading because the manufacturers make assumptions about the lifetime of the product in chemically harsh environments (for obvious ass covering reasons) and assign it an expiration date and users are not willing to say "well I use the product in a cool dry basement so I'm sure it's fine to go 2x the expiration" and accept the responsibility themselves so these products get replaced/recycled at a very high rate.

As others have stated, kevlar is also used in all sorts of other applications. The material can come from wherever.

llampx• 4 years ago

Police, security and army are probably most of the demand for bulletproof vests, and the supply of used ones.

1234letshaveatw2• 4 years ago

Not a big believer in climate change huh?

Gareth3218• 4 years ago

It's not such a problem right now thanks to the supply chain crunch, but there are a lot of us sitting on the sidelines waiting for EVs to achieve better mileage before making the move. Our family has only one car, and it needs to be able to do not just the daily commute (for which I acknowledge at least 90% of the kilometers on this car will be used), but also the road trips. I rented a Model 3 LR to test out how realistic these trips are in Europe, driving 1,200km to Austria for a ski trip.

1. The stated range goes down the toilet at motorway speeds. Expected range plummeted from 500km to 300km. Actual range was more like 250km, probably thanks to the cold temperatures. This was a *50%* reduction.

2. We had to plan the trip carefully around chargers. There were 10 minute detours to find chargers, traffic jams at the chargers, and slow charging speeds (probably due to said cold). We tried to charge from about 10% to 80%, but this was taking more than an hour, and shifted to 10% to 60%, which was around 40 mins. Each stop averaged 1+ hour, including the detour, waiting, and charging.

3. There were no chargers at the lodge, and this meant a final charge before ascending the mounting to near 100% to ensure that despite the extreme cold we could make it all the way up and back down. We also wanted to ensure we had extra power in case we got stuck on the road and had heat. This final stop was another hour.

All up, the EV added more than *eight hours* to our round trip. Some of this time might have been spent on toilet breaks and eating anyway, but nowhere near *eight hours.* Bear in mind this was all on a near new Tesla with a near new battery and presumably the fasted possible charge rate and some of the best range available in an EV right now. This is just a huge fail for road trips, and I'm so glad I rented one to find this out before buying.

I'm hopeful battery technology like this makes it into production ASAP. There is so much R&D pouring into batteries right now.

nicoburns4• 4 years ago

My understanding is that solid-state lithium ion batteries (which should roughly double capacity while also being much less fire prone) are likely to be the next big thing with pretty much all major car manufacturers working on bringing them to market and the estimated timeframe being 2025-2030.

jabl2• 4 years ago

From what I've understood LFP (also much less fire prone) is poised to be the next big thing. But maybe that's more in the short term and for "budget" models.

evandijk70• 4 years ago

My brother and I made a very similar road trip (Skiing holiday to Austria ~ 1000 km.)

I drove a 'normal' car and he drove a tesla Model 3. He left an hour earlier and arrived 30 minutes after me (with a relatively full battery to avoid the need of destination charging). He has the car for a little over a year so he probably optimized the charging schedule a bit better, but I still wonder why there was such a big difference between his and your experience (1.5 extra hours vs 4 extra hours for a single trip). He did not have to wait at the chargers, so that could account for some of it..

We only stopped for gas, toilet breaks, and took a 15 minute break for coffee and lunch.

IgorPartola• 4 years ago

The person you are replying to says they rented the Tesla and your brother owns one. I wonder if the rented vehicle was somehow abused or poorly maintained.

easton• 4 years ago

Maybe the temperatures on the drive were higher in your case? That seems to be a downside of EVs at the moment, low temperature means bad range.

Gareth3218• 4 years ago

I'm not sure but to speculate:

1. I drove fast on the Autobahn. I'm usually cruising at 160kph+, and did the same with the Tesla. Doing some homework, this kills efficiency fast. I imagine your brother was driving slower. Probably more within the high efficiency band.

2. Temperature delta. It was -5C + wind chill for most of our trip, and much colder up the mountain.

3. I kept a healthy battery reserve when seeking chargers (10%+) Tesla owners seem to encourage letting the battery drop below even 5% as this means an even faster charge to 60%. I am told there is an optimal cadence to charging which I suppose one perfects over time.

4. I did not conserve heating, as I'm told many EV owners do on longer trips. My wife likes our car to be subtropical.

5. Our Tesla might have been abused, though I recall it having <20,000km.

6. 1,000km is 17% shorter than my trip, further compounding (reducing) these differences.

7. Maybe my regenerative braking was set to low. I didn't think or know to check.

8. My route took me to at least a few regular chargers instead of superchargers. Maybe if I had been smarter and spent more time planning I could have used only super chargers.

9. Perhaps you stopped for a lot of breaks, reducing the relative advantage you might have had in your car.

10. Perhaps he left more than an hour earlier than you.

11. Perhaps my charging lines were longer than his.

I'm sure there are many other factors I'm not considering.

breytex4• 4 years ago

1.5 extra hours would be my expectation as well. If we consider a long trip for vacation 3 times a year, the 4.5hrs invested into charging is offset by less day-to-day charging stops with an EV (if you can charge at home), the reduced costs of electricity vs gas and the reduced costs of maintenance.

I would optimize the car choice for the 90% use of daily commute instead of optimizing for the 3-times-a-year vacation trips.

izacus4• 4 years ago

1. The stated range goes down the toilet at motorway speeds. Expected range plummeted from 500km to 300km. Actual range was more like 250km, probably thanks to the cold temperatures. This was a 50% reduction.

This, to me, is the worst part of buying an EV right now - the marketing does the Apple "30 hours of battery***" lie and it varies so horribly that it's hard to trust anything about it.

I guess it would be easy if you're just a daily commuter, but I regularly do 800km trips and all projections show that it'll prolong an already long trip for hours.

jaclaz• 4 years ago

The 30 hours of battery life lie can be worked around with a (common enough nowadays) external battery pack/power bank, it's a lot of time I wonder how there isn't a market for "power bank trailers" for EV's, something that you can rent for the times you need the extra range (or actually buy if you need it often).

Driving a car with a (low, not prone to lateral wind effects) trailer is inconvenient but doable when needed.

anovikov• 4 years ago

Absolutely so does the gas mileage of normal cars. Whatever number you see on the sticker (in Europe) is a laughable lie, real life mileage is about 1.5x worse, and no one makes a fuss about it - it's just one of life's lies everyone adapted to ignore.

Teknoman1175• 4 years ago

The commenter mentioned they were on the Autobahn at 160 kph/100 mph. The aerodynamic drag on your vehicle is 3 times higher going from 110 kph/70 mph to 160 kph/100 mph. No wonder the range went off the cliff.

smarx0073• 4 years ago

motorway speeds

Do you mean 110..130 km/h EU speeds or 150+ km/h Autobahn speeds?

dagw2• 4 years ago

Driving 130 km/h can knock ~30% off your range compared to driving 90 km/h according to various sources[1]. Add cold on top of that and losing 50% over advertised range seems reasonable.

If you want to optimize for range you should apparently aim for holding a constant 50-55 km/h.

[1] https://teslike.com/

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/07/15/tesla-range-plotted-rel...

Gareth3218• 4 years ago

I was doing 160km on (most of) the Autobahn from basically the top of Germany to the bottom.

Teknoman1175• 4 years ago

For your "average car", driving at 160 kph/100 mph requires 3x the energy as 110 kph/70 mph (due to aerodynamic drag), while only increasing velocity by 1.45x. Simply put, you're requiring 2x the energy per unit distance, which pretty neatly lines up with losing half the manufacturer rated range.

maxwell868• 4 years ago

You can’t drive in a German motorway at 110kph. You’d be in the truck lane at 80kph for your whole trip, having to over take every single truck, of which there are many. So 130kph+ is the minimum unless you are towing.

yholio2• 4 years ago

Charging rails alongside major roads is the obvious solution to this problem. It will enable much more than vacationing in urban EVs, also things like electric semis, long range buses etc.

Since it is a fixed capital expenditure, you need suficient EVs on the road for it to make economic sense, but from that point forwards it's a no-brainer compared to stuffing every vehicle chock-full of rare minerals for the unlikely case of a ski trip to Austria.

bmicraft• 4 years ago

At that point you should probably make use of the preexisting "charging rails" and take the train (in central europe)

elihu• 4 years ago

That's the approach I've been advocating. Electrified roads (even if it's only short, regularly spaced intervals on major highways) make so much more sense than expecting everyone who wants to drive more than an hour or two from home to haul 800 pounds of batteries with them. No having to stop to charge. Less wear on the roads (from reduced vehicle weight). No need for diesel long-haul trucks. EVs can be cheaper, with more cargo room. Less dependence on cobalt or nickel (or you could use LFP batteries to get away from that entirely). Energy usage is shifted to the daytime (when solar power is available) when most people drive rather than charging overnight.

I think the thing that's lacking right now (despite political will) is standards for electrified roads. I like the general approach that Sweden is using, with rails embedded in the road surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZNHZnyxCm8

bryanlarsen4• 4 years ago

As a counter-anecdote, we did a 3000km one-way trip this summer in a Tesla. We spend a grand total of 15 minutes waiting for a charger. In other words, significantly less than we would have waited for gas pumps.

YMMV, but what enabled this:

- it takes a bunch of time to shuffle kids through bathrooms

- overnight hotel charging

- we didn't eat in the car

With a gas pump, you need to stay with the car while it's filling. With an electric, you can eat/bathroom/sleep. If you're doing a long trip with a family and want to stay sane, you need to budget time for that stuff anyways.

buran772• 4 years ago

With a gas pump, you need to stay with the car while it's charging.

Is that a realistic concern for anyone? The "charging" process at a gas pump takes around 1 minute (in Europe gas pumps have ~50 l/min flow rate, in the US it's 10 gal/min). At best you can get a battery recharge in 20min but more realistically today over 30min for 80% charge if the charging station hasn't reached peak charging capacity and starts lowering charging speeds for everyone.

Usually the longest wait is during holiday season where at the middle of the highway everyone needs to fill up around the same time/place and queues form. This is not something EV tech can help with intrinsically, if you don't wait today it's because there aren't enough EVs on the road.

Once most cars on the road are EVs wouldn't you have the exact same issue with queuing at busy charging station in holiday season? This will be exacerbated by the fact that charging takes longer than 1min, and too many cars charging at the same time would most likely lead to a drop in the overall charging rate of all cars in the station (it's unlikely charging station will support high-speed on all chargers simultaneously).

The way we drive and refuel now revolve around the concept of the quick refill gas pump. We need to adjust our expectations, driving style/planning/habits, and technology - induction charging roads, "third rails", things that address any shortcomings of EVs, not just adapting old solutions to new problems.

jjav• 4 years ago

With a gas pump, you need to stay with the car while it's filling.
With an electric, you can eat/bathroom/sleep.

With an electric, you can eat/bathroom/sleep because it takes so long that those things become possible. Yes, you can't sleep in the three minutes it takes to fill the gas car.

I don't stay with the car during fillups on road trips though, I start the fill and run into the convenience store to stock up on snacks and by the time I'm back 2-3 minutes later the tank is full and I can be back on the road.

vlangber• 4 years ago

Very strange. The Norwegian version of AAA just tested lots of different EVs in winter conditions. Most cars lost 10-25%.The link below is in Norwegian, but the results table should be easy to understand:

https://www.motor.no/aktuelt/motors-store-vintertest-av-rekk...

Gareth3218• 4 years ago

There is a lot of potential variation between their tests and my use.

* Norway doesn't have speed limits which go anywhere near 160kph. I was on the Autobahn for most of my trip. How fast were they driving? 50-80kph appears to be a lot more efficient than 160kph.

* Did they drive to maximise efficiency of power or time? I have a heavy foot accelerating.

* Were they using the heater liberally? We were. I'm told this uses a lot of power, especially on models which don't have a heat pump.

* Was brake regen high or low?

For the record, I'm not arguing that the Model 3 can achieve better efficiency than I achieved. I was simply explaining that in my case, it was poor.

isoprophlex• 4 years ago

Isn't it true that in most of Norway you'd be hard pressed to find places where you can drive faster than 80-90 km/h?

Meanwhile, in germany, you have the autobahn...

1234letshaveatw2• 4 years ago

You can buy an EV for commuting and swap it with a friend for road trips. My experience has been that non-EV drivers are very excited for the opportunity to borrow one

Gareth3218• 4 years ago

A cool idea but I'm the kind of person who would lose my cool if I found a scratch on my Tesla after friends borrowed it for a couple weeks. I would also feel decidedly uncool asking them to pay to fix it. We also have a strange law here in Denmark where if my friend is caught exceeding the speed limit by a significant margin, or driving dangerously, I lose the car.

breytex4• 4 years ago

Did the exact same trip with a Model 3 2021, 1200km ski trip from Germany to Austria. Came back yesterday. I experienced it way differently.

- We were able to make 300km with 90% to 10% battery (to not hurt the battery longevity too much)

- Outside temp was -4 to +2 °C

- Inside temp set to 20°C, seat heating 2/3 for two passengers

- So a we made a charging break every 300km, so approx every 2-3 hours

- Recharging those 80% at a supercharger takes about 30-50min depending on the Supercharger-version.

- We had 0 traffic/wait times at the super chargers (we drove both directions on a sunday)

- We would do a 10-15min break anyway every 2-3 hours to grab a coffee or do magic pee, so the extension of the charging breaks over our normal breaks aren't event that long

- All superchargers had a <5min detour from the Autobahn

Overall we spent approx. 2hrs more on breaks as we would have with a conventional car. I think thats a fair trade-off for 2-3 vacation trips a year, figuring in the time saved for normal refilling stops with a non-EV cars during commutes (when you are able to charge your EV at home).

To me, the future of "driving into holiday fully electric" is already possible with a Tesla LR model. With other EVs without Supercharger-Access/smaller battery/slower charging speeds probably not so much.

You can even save more time by using tools like ABRP[0]. This even gives you better charge-planning with shorter, time-optimized stops also figuring in detour times.

[0] https://abetterrouteplanner.com/

Gareth3218• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing your experience. If I may ask, how long was each leg of the trip in total?

kraftman• 4 years ago

What's a magic pee?

Yaggo• 4 years ago

I do ~900 km trips with 2019 Model 3 SR+ multiple times per year in Scandinavia. -20°C winter temperatures are not unusual. Travelling with my family, including young kids. No problems. 2-3 hours driving, then 30-50 min charging. I actually like how EV forces you to have more breaks.

hughrr• 4 years ago

The thing that gets me with the success stories is the issue with risks and planning for success only.

When you’re driving in the colder parts of Europe it’s generally advisable to keep your tank at least 50% full all the time. If the shit hits the fan, like it did for me in Switzerland once, and you’re stranded for 4 hours due to a crash out of your control, your car becomes a fairly important life support system until the road is cleared. There is no recovery option when there are a few hundred cars in the same shit.

So you’re 3 miles from a supercharger with 15% battery left and your car is a frozen brick in under an hour. You can’t deliver more fuel to it and your efficient route plan is a liability and there’s a queue of bricked EVs waiting for flatbed recovery.

I’m not criticising the concept but the current execution and the perception of it.

jhoechtl4• 4 years ago

- So a we made a charging break every 300km, so approx every 2-3 hours
- Recharging those 80% at a supercharger takes about 30-50min depending on the Supercharger-version.

How is this so totally different to the above commenter? I also need brakes during my rides and after a three hour ride a break sounds totally reasonable. But nowhere between 30 to 50 minutes?

maxwell868• 4 years ago

I did a similar trip earlier in January. 1100 km from Germany to the alps (550km per way).

I had to stop once for the full 1100km trip to refuel (before leaving Austria on the way back cause it’s cheap to tank there, not because we actually needed to refuel).

It was ~4:30 per way. Nobody in the car had to pee, etc.

I think doing 15 min break per way would have been ok. But doing 1h per way or more if breaks is really not great. Particularly with kids in the car (we leave really early put them as sleep, they woke up for the last 2:30 h or so and that was borderline).

sandworm1012• 4 years ago

> Expected range plummeted from 500km to 300km. Actual range was more like 250km, probably thanks to the cold temperatures.

It is currently -17c where I am. Expected to go down to -28c in the next couple days. A 250km range in winter is simply unacceptable in my area (northernish canada). That is only a couple hours at highway speeds. But the real killer remains the absolute temperature limits on the batteries. If it cannot handle -45c without invalidating some warranty, then it just isn't useable. I cannot afford to spend that sort of money on something that I cannot park outside.

xxpor2• 4 years ago

Where it can get that cold, are outlets near parking spots common for block heaters?

nhoughto• 4 years ago

I don't have an EV but is in my future, and we do a long trip (500km) regularly, not sure how practical this is but i've always thought, is it worth buying a car for 100% of your needs? or get something for 90% and solve the 10% differently by renting?

Buy and use an EV for all the easy daily stuff, then rent something more suitable for the yearly/less frequent long trip. Other than range we have a similar problem with space, for big trips we end up with tons of stuff and more space is useful but day to day less so. So the 90% EV could be smaller as well and still solve the problem.

I do see the attraction of having one thing that solves 100% of the uses though.

foxyv• 4 years ago

I'm mostly waiting for the total cost of ownership to come down. Most TOC calculations are showing best case EVs against worst case ICE vehicles. With the difficulty to repair Teslas and with simple issues costing $15000+ to fix, I don't really feel comfortable spending an extra $20-40k.

If Tesla wants to get people who are more budget conscious or who will depend on their vehicle as a single car family then they need to really up their parts and repair game. I don't want to buy a John Deer EV that spends most of it's time at the dealer getting fixed until the warranty runs out.

markvdb2• 4 years ago

If this also entails a 5x improvement in weight, let's see if that potentially enables hand luggable car batteries.

- Nissan Leaf 62 kWh battery: 410 kg= 6.61 kg/kWh

- order of magnitude for this type of battery: 1.32 kg/kWh

- power consumption: @15 kWh/100 km

- 100 km requires 15 kWh, or ~19.80 kg

If something like this in order of magnitude comes true, hand luggable batteries will be able to cover non-trivial distances. Some potential consequences:

- I imagine something like this could help enable a low-end, more maintainable second hand market in a not-so-distance future.

- For inhabitants of terraced town houses, this could enable them to charge their batteries at home too. Hand luggable batteries could simplify _a lot_ in terms of charging infrastructure.

- Exceptionally far trip? Throw in a few extra modules.

zemvpferreira• 4 years ago

That would make swapping batteries at a (previously-) gas station much more imaginable as well, and comparable to filling up a tank.

alias_neo2• 4 years ago

This was the electric car future I always envisioned. Some sort of twist-lock cylinder that one fits into one of several slots in the vehicle depending on the range they require.

I'm not your how safe that would be, nor would I really want to be charging a 15kWh+ battery inside my home if I lived in a terraced house as GP suggests.

chris_overseas• 4 years ago

There's an Australian company called Li-S Energy[0] that claims to have solved the same problem a different way, using boron nanotubes. They state the theoretical limit for a lithium-sulphur battery is 2,567Wh/kg, which is around 5x that of a standard lithium-ion.

[0] https://www.lis.energy

reacharavindh• 4 years ago

Range anxiety is probably the only limiting factor for EVs to fully win over the oil guzzling cars. If we could use an EV with a range of about 200 KM as a daily driver with the ability to easily add on extra battery packs for the long trips, it should solve the problem nicely. Cheaper, and lighter daily driver with the flexibility to add juice when necessary.

If such new battery tech makes it possible to deliver high capacity batteries with smaller lifecycles, they'd make great add on batteries. Imagine if there was a standard way to say place an extra battery pack in the trunk or the front trunk for the long trips to give an additional 400 KM range!

For now, if I buy an electric car, I should simply account to pay for a rental gas car for those road trips for the sake of convenience. I'm sure many people do road trips with 45 min breaks every three hours or so, and not be anxious about availability of charging slots or even a functional charging point, but it is not for everyone.

have_faith2• 4 years ago

range anxiety is probably the only limiting factor for EVs to fully win over the oil guzzling cars

For myself it's living in a 1st floor apartment, with price being secondary, and maybe concerns over the charging network in the UK at the fringes being third. I don't think range would be a big concern.

jfk13• 4 years ago

Imagine if there was a standard way to say place an extra battery pack in the trunk or the front trunk for the long trips to give an additional 400 KM range

Unfortunately, the long trips are often the trips where you really want the full luggage capacity.

foobarbecue• 4 years ago

I'm surprised that 1K cycles is seen as a lot.

rthomas6• 4 years ago

Well, if the range of the vehicle is 300 miles per charge, that's 300,000 miles before needing to replace the battery.

have_faith2• 4 years ago

Don't most people plug it in at home regardless of what battery is left? no one wants to leave the house on 40% battery just to run it down a "cycle". How does that effect the math?

fallingknife• 4 years ago

300 miles per charge * 1000 cycles is 300k miles.

rootusrootus• 4 years ago

I won't lie, I'm looking forward to greater range. I've had a Model 3 (Performance trim, though, for which range is not a feature to brag about). My wife drives a Bolt. Neither car is/was capable of making a trip to grandma's house and back without a stop at a DC fast charging station. It's a day trip for us, 315 miles round trip, and setting aside 45-60 minutes for a pit stop has a significant impact.

I want an EV that can pull off this 315 mile trip without dipping into reserves, even in the winter. I expect we'll get there in a few years, and I'm willing to pay a bit extra for that battery.

sliken5• 4 years ago

Can't plug in for a few hours are Grandama's? Even 3-4 hours @ 4mph (120v) can make a difference.

Do you set a departure time so the car and batteries are at the optimal temperature?

If you charge under 25% I'd expect to charge at 550 miles per hour at a supercharger (again nav there so the car knows to arrive at optimal temperatures), so if you charge around 275 miles I'd expect another 100 miles in 10-11 minutes. If it's bitterly cold I'd expect another 10 minutes or so.

Shouldn't take anywhere near 45-60 minutes unless something is seriously wrong.

1k-cycle lithium-sulfur battery could increase electric vehicle ranges

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