Too bad you can't pump a battery down a pipeline.
Batteries still suck and are an environmental nightmare.
Flux Capacitors are the way to go.
Posted on 11/04/2023 12:19:12 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
Have batteries PEAKED? Of course not, but they’re awfully good.
How much BETTER can BATTERIES get? Considering that they’re already pretty good.
I have a youTube channel called “My Tesla Weekend” . . . I’m a tech analyst who happens to be on youTube. You may see me on shows like “Best in Tesla,” … Randy Kirk . . . a lot of them.
Electric cars were made a hundred years ago, but the battery chemistry just wasn’t there yet. They cost three times too much.
So then get to cars like the EV 1, where they just put car batteries in. So they just put lead acid batteries in. Those batteries were supposed to cycle 500 to 1000 times. They don’t - I don’t know where that number came from; that was just ridiculous. So this was discontinued in 2002. By 2003 they were all gone. And WHY?
In 2002 there was no battery in the whole world that you could possibly make an electric car out of. You know - laptop batteries hadn’t come along yet. Oh yeah, they had,. Laptop batteries were already lithium-ion, and they were already awfully good.
But there was a problem with them in that if you wanted to put them in a car, you needed to put thousands and thousands of them. So if you tried to put them in a car you needed about 6000 of them, and even if you got them for $10 apiece, that’s 60 grand. And it wasn’t $10 apiece it was more than that - even if you got them at volume. So you would have had to have been crazy to try and push forward with this good battery, THAT WORKED.
So - modern battery longevity - who’s making good batteries today?
LG. Panasonic. CATL. Samsung. SK. Everybody. Chevy had some problems with their LG battery; they got it sorted out. SK makes the battery that Ford uses - SK, out of Korea. They are one of the bigger players in the world . . .
Toyota doesn’t want to use batteries in EVs “because that’d give them too much reliance on China.” OK, you’ve got options. And all of them are good options.
Auto makers BY LAW are required to warrant their batteries for 8 years or 100,000 miles. At the end of that time, if you don’t have 70% of your original capacity, you get a new battery. That’s a win-win. Because if your battery fails, you get a newer, nicer one. And if your battery doesn’t fail - your battery didn’t fail.
. . .
How good are the batteries actually? [Shows a graph whose average battery capacity starts out at 10%, and tapers down to about 85% at 250,000 kilometers.] . . . A lot of these batteries didn’t have good battery management [of temperature] - and that’s most of what’s gonna save your battery, prolong its life.
. . .
So now we get to the lithium-iron-phosphate, which is the new, exciting one. And it’s not exciting, it’s very boring, and that’s what I want, I don’t want exciting, I want boring! It’s a little bit heavier, it’s not as fast - but it doesn’t wear out. And it doesn’t doesn’t some of the problems of earlier batteries. It doesn’t catch fire the way lithium-ion batteries do. It’s cheaper to make. It doesn’t have any cobalt or nickel, and it lasts a LONG time. Making it environmentally sustainable . . . I mean, they all are - but this one is especially so. . . . Four million mile battery is now a reality. Because LFP cycles like crazy. It doesn’t mind, it doesn’t wear out like traditional Li-ion does. So you get a whole lot of life out of it. And this isn’t lab, unproven, “miracle breakthrough,” this is stuff that exists. Four million miles? That means your battery is going to outlast your car.
So what’s next? Slightly better chemistry. Slightly better range. Slightly cheaper manufacturing. Whole new chemistries. Sodium ion is coming. We don’t know how good they’ll be, they’re in test vehicles in China right now. They have even less power per kilogram than LFP, so these may go into stationary storage, while the Li-ion goes into automotive.
So what’s NOT coming? If it’s miracle battery, it goes a thousand miles on a charge - THAT’S not how it works.
… Solid state. Toyota’s been telling us solid state is only two years away for eleven years. Please, just buy one more Toyota. And that’s not a great way to do business.
Big dumb myths: “Batteries die in ten years” - ever heard that one? . . . A lot of gas car companies spent a lot of money convincing people that that’s the truth. And now they’re realizing that they can’t sell electric cars because people believed them! The required warranty on batteries is enough to mean that there would be too much warranty replacement if the batteries were dying in ten years.
“Batteries can’t be recycled” A lot of people believe that. “We’re gonna be jammed full of worn-out Lithium batteries!” We’re not - because the CAN be recycled, and they’re NOT [being recycled] because they don’t wear out like we were told they would.
Those cars last a lot longer [than some predicted], and batteries often get a second life [as stationary storage, where their weight per watt-hour of capacity isn’t so important]. In Japan, they’re using old Leaf batteries to back up power in case another Tsunami hits.
“There’s not enough Lithium.” There is - maybe not as cheap as we’d like, but . . .
Most of the batteries in new cars worldwide are Lithium-Iron-Phosphate, but there’s been a problem with a patent issue which has prevented their being used in America. LFP batteries are nominally less energetic per kilogram than more traditional Li-ion, but as a practical matter the traditional ones are more sensitive to deep cycling than LSP - so it’s recommended that they not be charged above 80% routinely. Meaning, for routine use LSP batteries are as good or better on ACTUAL energy per kilogram.
Same. I have a theory on that one. Modern cars have all kinds of gadgets now that draw power all the time, turned off or not. Standard car batteries just weren’t meant to deal with that.
TSLA was a good buy at $20 per share, and will be again.
Or it’s also fun and games until you go on a long trip and end up waiting an hour for a charger and then taking an hour to charge and the repeating this several times OR when you’ve decided you’ve had enough inconvenience and go to trade it in discover the trade in value is about 15% of what you paid.
On batteries how much better can they get? The answer is not much because they’re close to the limits of chemistry and physics now, BUT lithium batteries have an energy density of 0.3 kWh/kg. Gasoline has an energy density of 12.2 kWh/kg. That’s 40 times as much energy per unit weight as a lithium battery. So a 20 gallon gas tank has about 63 kg of gas in it. A lithium battery to match this would have to weigh about 2520 kg or 5,562 lb.
Modern internal combustion cars with all their electronics and multiplicity of features drain electrical power at much greater rates than simpler, older cars. Auto manufacturers won’t admit this, but car batteries are now almost overmatched from mile 1. Not sure how the designed-in interchange with modern alternators (they must be putting out much greater charge/current during normal engine operation) tends to ameliorate this problem, but 12 volt battery technology and performance certainly hasn’t kept pace.
What SS said!
-OGINJ
I’m all for EVs - IF they are not subsidized by government and if ICE vehicles did not have all kinds of onerous mandates on then and gas was not taxed to high-heaven.
Its in no way a “free-market” for these vehicles.
I know a guy who sells tires. He explained that every car tire in its lifetime puts about 20 lbs of synthetic rubber into the air, land, and water just by normal wear/friction while driving.
An EV tire puts out about 3X that amount
Get an Ariel atom just exactly what you specified for a mere $85,000
As long as those of us who have no interest in driving a rolling smart phone are allowed to keep, maintain and operate their low-tech ICE vehicles, I guess the EV fanboys can cheerlead away. Check out Eric Peters Autos for come counterpoint on the EV issue . . .
Too bad you can't pump a battery down a pipeline.
Batteries still suck and are an environmental nightmare.
Flux Capacitors are the way to go.
Being a Luddite never ages well.
I am not going to wade further into the topic right now, but here is a very good safety tip for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) in your home (you have them) or in the homes of those you love and care about.
IF you have batteries in your garage of any size (EV, battery storage system, tools, etc) I would STRONGLY recommend that you put a CO detector in the garage that you can hear inside the house. As any lithium battery enters thermal runaway it will often vent a nasty vapor cloud prior to flaming combustion and during active fire and this contains more than enough CO to trigger a detector giving you a head start on reacting to what is happening. This alarm will even occur prior to most smoke detectors activating IF the fire starts in a LIB.
Even small devices such as RC car batteries will do the same if you have those in your house. Some of them are capable of venting the gases from the bad cell and some may not even ignite so the CO detector in our homes is a MUST (I use multiple).
You might get some false alarms if you idle your car too long in the garage (or mower, etc) but who cares, safety first. Don’t tie it into your home alarm if you have one because you will get some idling or start-up activations.
Thank me later.....
Uh, you didn’t read the article, did you? It’s about newer, better batteries like Lithium-Ferrous Ion batteries which DON’T catch on fire.
Most definitely the latter. In fact, he’s saying it’s here already, but there are some (unspecified) legal issues with the U.S. market.
>> The grid is maxed out so it early doesn’t matter. <<
You say that as if it’s impossible to expand the grid.
tesla-model-s-catches-fire-at-tesla-service-center-in-marietta-georgia-
What a disjointed, incoherent, mess of an article. Mr. White really needs a good editor to fix up his slap-dash writing.
It’s not being a luddite. There is only so close you can push electrons together, to store power, before you have a bomb on your hands. The limitations of batteries is physics bound. It’s not going to get better by much, if at all.
And infernal combustion engines scare the horses!
Man was not meant to go so fast!
Man was not meant to fly.
Electricity will kill us all.
Cell phones will kill us all.
Batteries are a bomb? How is 25 gallons of gasoline in a semi-closed container not a bomb?
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