Chinese battery developer unveils new tech with 1,300-mile range that could revolutionize EVs: 'An important piece of the puzzle'
Chinese battery developer unveils new tech with 1,300-mile range that could revolutionize EVs: 'An important piece of the puzzle'
Never to be heard about again
If the company is able to scale this technology large enough for consumer vehicles while keeping prices down, it could easily double the range of the farthest-driving EVs on the road today.
That's a big IF. TL;DR: They haven't developed a means of making this scalable and able to be mass manufactured. Until they do, this is another "revolutionary" battery tech that may or may not actually be used due to cost of production. Most likely in the "not" category.
If you want to make EVs more popular, make them with Sodium-Ion batteries that are cheaper than ICE vehicles. They'll sell better as a result.
Hardly anybody needs an EV with more than 200 miles of range if they're plugging in each night. Most people's commute is round-trip sub-50 miles. "Range anxiety" is 95%+ of the time a "problem" that stupid people have for their theoretical future that never actually happens. Most people are impractical idiots.
Range anxiety isn't about your daily commute, it's about the few times a year road trip you make across multiple states to see family on holidays. Having to stop and charge every 150 miles (as I wouldn't trust letting it go below 50) sucks if you're trying to go 500+ miles. Owning a gas car taking up space in your garage and costing you taxes and registration just to use a handful of times a year is wasteful. Renting a car is an option, but it's cumbersome and if you plan to stay a while, expensive. I would not want an EV with less than 300 miles range. You have to factor in worst case scenarios as well, sometimes it gets dreadfully cold and windy in the winter. When it's -10F and the wind is howling you're cranking the (usually resistive) heat and driving head first into the wind kills your efficiency. These are real scenarios I have had to drive in my current car (Volt, so plug in hybrid) and my battery range can be halved (from 35+ miles under 20) in these worst case scenarios, but at least I can fall back on gas. I want to go EV for my next car but if I can't reliably make it to and from my parents' house 300 miles away on a bad winter's Christmas break then it's just not a feasible option yet, even if my drive to work is maybe 15 miles round trip. Also, charging station density is an issue. I would need to go half way to their house, 150 miles, to reach a charging station. You can't just stop anywhere to recharge if you have a low range EV.
id argue that renting a car might be less expensive. your argument doesnt consider the cost it takes to replace your tires often (the heavier your vehicle, the more often you have to replace the tires), which for some EVs already, is a pretty significant cost.
buying something for something youll use less than 1% of the time is a terrible monetary decision. its like the people who buy big trucks with high torque, when more than 60% of these truck buyers have never towed something.
These are real scenarios I have had to drive in my current car (Volt, so plug in hybrid) and my battery range can be halved (from 35+ miles under 20)
this is a problem specific to lithium ion batteries. salt ion batteries and some other batteries that are being considered do not have that problem.
Hardly anybody needs an EV with more than 200 miles of range if they're plugging in each night.
Speaking of big IFs. Not everybody lives where a charger is convenient or can have one installed in their residence.
Most people have the option of plugging in where they live and/or work. The only argument would be for apartment complexes. Townhouses, single family homes, etc. are easy to switch to electric.
Range anxiety is in the what if scenario, can I go from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on one charge, batteries need to last longer and be cheaper or charge quicker. being universal and swappable wouldalso work.
Or you could just get a Plug-in Hybrid, if that's a concern.
Lol, thatâs only 500km, there are many EVs capable to drive this in one sitting, but to be honest, a 15min charge and eat break would be great for every driver in a 4h ride.
We're considering a new car (current car is an old econobox that's been to the moon), and range anxiety does factor in for the "weekend adventure" use case. We live in CA, and something like a trip to Yosemite or Tahoe requires refuelling/charging. But these places can get inundated with weekend warriors (like us!), who are all on the same schedule. We've had friends who have had stressful incidents e.g. charging in Yosemite valley, or on the way back from Tahoe. Add a toddler in the mix and it gets even less fun.
Not insurmountable, but infrastructure and timing are still not as good as for dinosaur blood.
For 95% of the time though yeah --- commuting, single-day adventures, or bopping around the city would be no problem at all.
Exactly. Give me something with 150 miles range and a relatively inexpensive battery (like $3k?) and I'll replace my commuter.
I need 500 miles range to replace our family car though since we do road trips with it, and frequently go 400 miles between stops.
Takes deep breath
MmmmmmBULLSHIII
Ha, why was this downvoted? Sketchy website "reports" proprietary Chinese research firm's accomplishment by rehashing the firm's press release about an unbelievable claim with no other evidence. This got more red flags than the beach before a hurricane.
At best, this is something they actually did approximate in some kind of lab setting that might be years and years away from being some kind of marketable product.
The (translated) press release even has a stench all on its own:
It is expected to fundamentally solve the battery life and safety anxiety of traditional lithium-ion batteries.
Because America bad, don't you see?
FYI thecooldown.com is a solid site with consistently good info.
I haven't dug into this particular story though.
There are plenty of petrobots here ready to cast shade.
Powered by the cold fusion process they unveiled last year.
For some reason this reminds me of a cheap Chinese knockoff rotary tool I got from Amazon which the instructions said: âuse until loud bang and smoke. Then replace.â
Most I use don't give any warning at all, so that's a step up.
Our weekly "miracle battery that can insert absurdly high claim here" give us today.
Take EVs out of the equation and the ramifications of this tech (or Toyota's) is huge, if true.
Imagine an electric wheelchair you only had to charge monthly, or that could run on one charge effectively forever.
First they need Toyota to test their chemistry and develop their battery production system....it's part of the way Chinese companies develop technology.
If Toyota can do it, China will too! A win-win!
Instead of this we need EVs that aren't fucking massive.
China makes those, too.
Could they send some smallish, sodium-ion based cars here? I'd buy one if it had 150 miles range and a cheap to replace battery.
Need battery space also SUVs/crossove s hold more people. And EV busses will be great as well.
Why do you need it to hold more people when most trips are with one or two people? Also, most families tend to have two cars, so they don't need both to be big.
Also, most SUVs hold the same as a sedan: 5 people. And they don't hold more stuff, generally speaking, because they lose so much space being higher up. If you want to carry more people, look at minivans.
People buy SUVs because they're higher up, not because they're better at much of anything.
Every day a new revolutionary battery. Where in reality
If we just attached a generator to the battery industry, all these revolutions would solve our energy needs!
It seems like this vehicle comes with (as far as I know) the first solid state battery in a commercial vehicle which is HUGE news if true! I'm slightly skeptical because of this claim coming from the Chinese government, but who knows, it would be a huge boon for all of humanity if they've figured out solid state batteries.
The huge benefits we'll all see are increased capacity so batteries last longer, and INSANELY fast charge times. You could recharge your car to 100% in the same time as it takes to fill it up with gas currently.
Toyota is promising 700-800 miles range soonish (3 years?), and I believe them a lot more than the CCP.
I don't believe either though, but I do think Toyota is more trustworthy in general. I'll wait until I see an actual product with independent reviews.
A couple of years ago I saw an article on Toyota inventing something called solid state battery's... Never heard anything about that again.
So I went to my search engine of choice, typed in solid state battery, set the time range to 1 month, went to the news tab, and this is the first link. 2 days old.
Just because no one went out of their way to remind you that researchers are continuing their research doesn't mean they stopped doing it. And when the bar is this low to satisfy your curiosity, it really is on you. It would have taken less time to get the highlights than it would to post your comment.
You went on google and found an article indicating LG is still trying to develop solid state batteries.
Here an article I googled about a cure for cancer.
Congratulations on your ability to find things to confirm your bias on google. You've just entered the same arena creationists and flat earthers plow around in.
Not to mention the article you provided was nothing more than "LG is researching solid state batteries" with no supplementary information and feels like it was generated by an AI.
It's the internet doofus. People generate articles about anything and everything as long as someone will click on it. Just make sure you also click on the ads as well.
Yet another?
No
The more energy you put in a box, the more explosive it is. EV fires are already a problem so fire depmts are going to have to evolve, and quickly
That's technically true but also true for a very wasteful combustion reaction with all the energy gasoline has in it(it's amazing how much energy we lose as waste heat for internal combustion engines, I think efficiency is only like 20 percent). It's not quite that simple, as the potential energy for, say, lithium oxidation is much higher than you'd get from charging and discharging a battery.
The energy stored is only part of the equation.
The fun part of lithium is it will use water as it's oxidizer when it's on fire, so you can't smother it with hoses like you can with hydrocarbons.
i wonder if/how the EU and US would trust China not to remotely turn massive fleets of electric smart cars into suicide bonbers.
Has China done that before? How does a battery seize control of a parent device when it is only connected by power wires?
china doesnt just make batteries of course.
How does a battery seize control of a parent device when it is only connected by power wires?
It does not need to. Just set the battery on fire. Now set 100.000 batteries on fire, simultaneously, in a city, at night.
Why would they do that? They're going for an economic victory, not military.
slapping a large fuel tank full of petroleum
Good thing we're playing it safe.
Its kind of insane that EV manufacturers are making battery packs out of a lot of individual cells, rather than one integrated unit like this.
That's how battery chemistry works. Even this, if it is real, is a bunch of individual cells in a bank. There is no alternative; you can't have sufficient reactivity between dissimilar materials to generate the types of voltages required in a single cell. You need multiples of them in series to hit 200 volts, 400, 600, whatever is required by the vehicle's drive hardware.
Batteries, being containers for chemical reactions, are subject to the core concepts of chemistry. Namely, that increased surface area increases the speed of the reaction. You could make one enormous battery instead of multiple smaller cells, but you'd never get it to discharge fast enough to make it functionally useful.
Not a battery expert, but I think there are safety implications.
Not a China expert, but I'm pretty sure that's not a serious consideration there...
Do you want to drive wit 3.7v? 𤣠even the smallest EV have over 3000W, so you would need a bit less than 1000A which would require giant cables
YMMD
Like the other responses, the battery chemistry and design voltage are the major reasons for cell sizes, but also, smaller cells means they can be isolated if necessary.
In a Tesla battery pack for instance, each cell is connected by a single small wire that also doubles as a fuse. If there is an issue with the cell the wire will heat up and break. opening the circuit and separating that battery cell from the rest of the pack. This also means that a failed cell doesn't take out a significant portion of battery capacity. Other manufacturers do this as well, but not all, and some implement similar capability in other ways. This method functions as a sort of "passive" option since it doesn't require the BMS to make a decision to remove those bad batteries from the pack, physics just does it and the BMS adjusts to compensate when the cell no longer is connected.
Good battery management systems that handle things like charge leveling individual cells, can mean the difference between batteries degrading noticeably in a few years and the pack as a whole lasting a decade before that noticeable degradation. There are a lot of poor battery management systems on the market, EVs are no exception and if anything they make this issue more noticeable because of the increased usage.
This horseshit again? Physical product available for independent analysis, or it didn't happen.
It's not like the Chinese are famous for lying about the specs on things they manufacture or anything. Every week we hear about some Chinese company poised to "revolutionize" the EV with pie-in-the-sky range figures and yet the market continues to remain resolutely un-revolutionized.
And as usual, this article harps on "range" as if that's not an easily fudged figure. The real numbers we need to see are watts per volume, or watts per mass. And number of charge cycles tolerated, and how many before it loses what percentage of capacity. Any idiot can claim to make a 1,300 mile, 2,000 mile, 5,000 mile, 1,000,000 mile battery pack -- just make the pack bigger, or the vehicle lighter, or both. That tells us nothing meaningful whatsoever about the battery chemistry itself. Advertising us what hypothetical ranges someone thinks a pack made of these "could" build is meaningless. We could build a 1300 mile battery pack right now with LiFePo cells if we wanted to, via the simple expedient of filling a dump truck with the things.
My guess is it's just a car with a battery 5 times bigger than their comparison vehicle, can't do over 30, go up a hill, or pass any safety standards.
Or it's fictional.
Well, Toyota seems to be promising something around 700-800 miles range with solid state lithium battery tech, but as you say, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding isn't ready yet.
Not Toyotas first time either Toyota has said their solid state batteries are just around the corner.
http://www.electric-vehiclenews.com/2010/12/toyota-announces-4-layer-all-solid.html?m=1
Shit I already have one up on the Chinese. I have invented an all electric rocket capable of boosting humans into LEO.
Thank you for typing out my brain squiggles.
You have to chase it down, following the link to electrek.co, but then it says: "the prototype cells house an energy density of 720 Wh/kg"
(of course, I'm just stating what is claimed, no idea how true)
Chase it down? It says 720 Wh/kg in the thumbnail image.
If that's true, 1300 mile range isn't the big deal. Going much over 400mi is pointless if we build proper charging infrastructure. Use wh/kg advancements to reduce weight, nor increase range.
The big thing is that we can build fully electric airplanes with that kind of wh/kg.
Big if, though. Batteries have been improving by 5-8% per year, and while we're not close to theoretical limits yet, this would represent an unprecedented leap all at once. That claim needs more to back it up than a press release.
Battery density has been improving steadily for the last three decades.
...
What's more, the Chinese market is both the leading producer and consumer of battery technology. So its weird to reflexively doubt that a Chinese firm would release a new higher-efficiency battery design.
Given that this is a prototype, its entirely unclear if the model is cost-efficient to mass manufacture or efficiently scalable based on available resources. But I'm hard pressed to discount the claim on its face simply because its got "China" in the headline.
Exactly. Itâs like an article I saw about some new internet tech that was âX times faster than broadbandâ. Broadband is a type of transmission using multiple frequency carrier waves to transmit data. It ainât a speed.
Wh/kg or yes maybe volume Wh/cm^3âŚ
The only other thing Iâd care about it charge speed. Maybe it doesnât last as long but I can fully charge in 10 seconds? Yeah Iâm interested. Hell Iâve never had a car yet get the estimated miles per gallon on the sticker. Itâs all bistromathics as far as Iâm concerned.
I wish more forms of travel were based solely on bistromathics.