The new CATL Qilin batteries are already producing cars at 140kwh delivering now, capable of 1000km or 621 miles [2]. A Tesla model S long range has 100kwh. This is with a Qilin battery at a density of 255 Wh/kg, but the expected density is 500Wh/kg [1] as they ramp up production and efficiency. This means we should expect around 1000 miles per charge over the next few years. There are other battery technologies on the 5 year horizon that bring another doubling. I would expect this translates into a few things: lighter cheaper cars with less batteries, cars that can travel long distances with faster charges (due to the battery being more depleted and not being charged fully on each charge), and long range trucks - and at the current thresholds electric aviation is practical and economical. Now we just need to create more electric potential!!
> There are other battery technologies on the 5 year horizon that bring another doubling.
I'm curious about these. Are you referring to silicon anodes, or metallic lithium anodes and solid ceramic electrolytes and "improved separators"? (I can't find much about the improvements.)
Or other improvements, say in cathodes, or cell design (say reducing the mass of anode and cathode contacts), packaging or pack design? I thought LG's wireless within-pack BMS comms was a clever way to reduce volume, weight, and copper requirements.
There are lots of incremental improvements possible, but getting from 500 to 1000 Wh/kg is a big ask.
> Now we just need to create more electric potential!!
The less-solved problem is essentially political: building more transmission grid. That involves landowners...
Limited range has been one of the biggest factors keeping EVs out of my hands.
I regularly have to drive a ~400 mile route. Usually a few times a month. In my 9 year old compact SUV, I am able to do that trip with ~1/4 of a tank left, even when it's packed full. I generally do it without stops.
I look forward to the day that EVs can get similar ranges to ICE vehicles. (And more so, truly self-driving cars, so I can do something better during that time! Unfortunately it's a route without any real public transportation and I often have a load.)
I was only a little concerned buying a Tesla Model Y with "300" mile range. I travel between Los Angel And San Diego frequently and there are a good number of charging stations to be sure. But even though the car tells you to keep between 20% and 80% charge, almost cutting the effective mileage in half, the extra stops just aren't that bad. What's true of lithium ion batteries is that the emptier the battery, the significantly faster the charging rate. So I can skip the stop on my route, but usually I just pull over when the percentage gets pretty low for maybe 20 to 30 minutes, and if I start pretty low, I'll easily get 30-40 percent charge increase. It's really not that painful, and at least in California, they put the charging locations near restaurants and coffee shops and malls so I can take a little break on those long trips. Sure, a car with 1000+ mile range sounds great. But driving a car that heavy with batteries sounds unnecessary and nearly all people are making far shorter trips to e.g. the grocery store 10 miles away and the little dinky trickle charger I use at home is more than adequate, I almost never have to do what ICE cars do on a regular basis, stopping at all the dirty gas stations, my car is usually more than charged over night.
When I first started doing it frequently, an extra 20-30 minutes wouldn’t have bothered me much. After doing it so many times so often, it’s become tedious and now I just want to get it done quickly and I am intentional about my fluid intake for the day to avoid stops.
My next vehicle might be a plug-in hybrid, something like the RAV4 Prime. Unless I can cut out the long trips or these long range EVs actually come out.
Very few people can drive 400 miles without stopping to go to the bathroom. A 10 minute bathroom break can add enough charge to let a 300 mile EV go 400 miles.
400 miles is only 5-6 hours (or less) of driving. I’ve done these long-haul routes many, many times with quite a varied set of passengers and there was almost never a bathroom break required. People use the bathroom when we stop for fuel.
You are aware that a single 20-30 minute stop for charging, stretching your legs, etc. with most modestly priced EVs would easily get you there, right? You get a car with e.g. 300 mile range. You top it up midway from 20% to 60-70% in something like half an hour and you arrive with plenty of range left to do whatever. Plug it in at night and drive back the next day. No big deal. The future is now.
You are paying a very steep price for not taking that break. And not just financially. From a road safety point of view; you should consider taking that break in any case. It's the decent thing to do for other people on the road. Stretch your legs, have a coffee, eat some stuff. Anyone driving that kind of distance non stop is going to be tired, unfocused, and generally not a safe driver. Also, it's not great for your body. There are many good reasons to take a break on such a long journey.
I go on a road trip with my better half. Load car in the evening before. Walk up, make coffee, and leave.
Find out last gas station we can make it to.
Stop, I start to fill up. Better half goes to use the restroom.
She comes back, cleans the dead bugs of off the windshield while I go use the restroom.
I come back, she's behind the wheel ready to go.
Total time: ~7 minutes.
You know, current BEVs might not be the right solution for you right now, and that's OK. I love my Model X and wouldn't trade it for the world, however I realize that not everyone in the world has the same set of requirements that I do.
I really do feel that eventually, most of the world will see ICE vehicles for the terrible solution they are, and switch to something better. Just because we've used a technology for a long time doesn't mean its the best we can do.
Currently reasonable driving distances are limited largely by human endurance: you can only drive so far in a single day without needing bathroom breaks, food and eventually sleep, which is when the author of the story recharges their car.
If/when fully self-driving cars ever become practical, there's really nothing stopping the car from driving forever, and that's when fast chargers will again become essential.
What I actually _want_ is a range extended EV: that is
1. Capable of driving ~100km on a charge, with a fully electric drive train
2. A small (~20hp) internal combustion engine + generator able to charge the batteries while driving.
This would allow me to do 95%+ of my trips in full EV mode while keeping the battery quite small, and when I want to go long distance I still can.
Most plug in hybrids are designed with the internal combustion engine as an integral part of the drivetrain which isn't really what I'm after as it means even if you only use the car for short trips you will still sometimes start the engine.
EDIT: I should add to this, the Volt is definitely the closest to what I'm after but it's not available in my country (Australia) and probably never will be.
BMW i3 REx is pretty much exactly as described. It has a 38 hp twin cylinder motorcycle engine which is more than your ideal 20, but even that is known to slowly lose charge while climbing long hills since the engine can't output much power. The engine is not mechanically connected to the wheels.
Interesting oddity of incentives. California's zero emission vehicle rules state that range extended EVs count for more zero emission credit, but to qualify as range extended the gas range can't exceed the battery range. Since i3 had a pretty small battery and BMW didn't want to go to the expense of building a different, smaller tank for the US they shipped the i3 with a software locked portion of the gas tank. You can flash the firmware to unlock the full gas tank (which is still pretty small).
i3 wasn't a huge success. BMW made a bet battery prices would stay extremely high and weight would really matter in an EV. i3 and i8 were experiments to see if they could build cars from carbon fibre re-enforced plastic at scale economically. Spoiler alert: they couldn't. That meant i3 was shockingly expensive to buy and even minor collisions can write the entire car off since even hairline cracks in the CFRP shell can result in catastrophic failure.
Unfortunately for you I don't see any new vehicles being designed to fill that niche. Designing a ground up PHEV is far too expensive, so every manufacturer is just electrifying their existing gas designs and stuffing batteries anywhere they can find a spare bit of space. Since engines give off waste heat for free no one is going to bother making a full heating system just for the plug in version since it would drive the sticker price up on a plug-in even higher (and they are already a tough sell since they get up into full EV range). Combined with the charging network getting better very rapidly and PHEVs are a bit of an investment dead end. They will continue to exist (especially in the EU market), but everyone is putting the absolute barest possible engineering effort into them.
Excellent summary but i bought an i3 (pure electric) in the US in 2014 and it was not shockingly expensive to buy (roughly 1/2 tesla model S) and at 128,000km had only a single service for brake fluid flush.
It was awesome but couldn’t go far enough for an only car once we moved to where mountains were over half its range away.
i3's were $50,000+ dollar cars when the US average selling price was under $35,000. That's for a supermini car (but well packaged) with a pretty spartan interior. It was selling for the same price as extremely well equipped 3 series and lower end 5 series. I'd call that shocking. The depreciation curve on them was also extreme, since they were worth under 30k within just a couple of years.
Much more scary is the repair costs. Yours as the pure electric needed very little, but the REx repairs were expensive. You had to pay BMW dealer prices since it was a weird little engine you couldn't get parts for. And as I said, even minor collision damage was pretty catastrophic.
I believe they used the fuel flow monitor that cars have anyway to just shut the fuel pump off after 7.1L when there is actually 9L of fuel in the tank. It's a pressurized tank, so the extra fuel you can't reach takes way longer to go foul. Happily the software fix to remove the restriction is easy to find.
The good news is that this type of car has been around since at least 1900 with the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus [1] which had a version with a motor to top up the battery.
The bad news is that they haven't been that popular. You might be able to find a used BMW i3 REx in Australia, but it was discontinued in 2019.
That's basically a hybrid vehicle where the engine is not connected to driveshaft. The thing is -- it's more efficient to connect engine directly to the driveshaft when driving at a reasonable speed, as there's no extra conversion of gas to battery charge (generator losses + battery charging losses + battery discharging losses).
Sure, but you need a driveshaft and a gearbox for this to work.
It's worth it if you're using it all the time, but for something only used on rare occasions I'll take the _maybe_ 10% efficiency loss to not lug around the extra weight and have more things that can break.
Take a look at the 'hybrid synergy drive' model. It's a pretty streamlined gearbox. ICE output shaft connects to motor/generator 1, MG1 connects to MG2 via planetary gear, MG2 connects to wheels more or less. There's gears in there, but there's no gear selection. Depending on how you control the ICE and the motor/generators, you can any of the three movers power the wheels individually or in concert.
It's not much more complex than an ICE, a generator, and a motor for the wheels.
That's why I added "at reasonable speeds". At start-stop busy city driving it might be worse to use ICE engine (although it might combine both ICE power with electric engine power, to keep the ICE at its optimal range anyway).
> 1. Capable of driving ~100km on a charge, with a fully electric drive train
> 2. A small (~20hp) internal combustion engine + generator able to charge the batteries while driving.
I don't think a 20 hp engine is going to be big enough, unless you're talking a microcar.
PHEVs I'm aware of don't have the battery range you're looking for either. And I don't know what's available in Australia. My PHEV has an 'ev only' mode where it will rarely start the ICE unless you use up the battery, but it's slow to get up to highway speeds without the ICE (it will prompt you when accerator input calls for more than the battery and motor can deliver, and if you floor it, it will start the ICE without you accepting the prompt) and battery range drops sharply at highway speeds anyway. If the battery is charged enough, it already doesn't run the ICE that much at city street speeds, unless you've asked for the heater. In mine, EV only range is about 20 miles, and running in auto after a full charge is likely to use up the battery within 35 miles in auto mode.
20hp should be plenty, since the generator only has to output the average power rather than peak.
PHEVs don't have the range because they're really just ICE cars with batteries for low speed and energy regeneration under braking. For them, electric is still the secondary rather than the primary means of movement.
You would think there was a market for this, given that batteries are still a large part of the price tag for a BEV and a smaller and simpler generator should save on cost and packaging size relative to the duplicated drivetrain required for a true PHEV.
20hp is about 15kW. My EV consumes at least twice that at highway speeds. Adding that to my EV would let me drive as far as I wanted to in a day in the extreme case, but would be a nice range extender, and assuming it could run and charge while the car was parked, would let me take it on trips to places that are too far to round trip on a single charge and don’t have L3 chargers. I don’t know how many such places exist for most people, but there’s a few of them near me because I live in a very rural area.
Cheaper, lighter, smaller, safer higher capacity batteries charged using renewable energy in ubiquitous charging points or even electrified roads are a long term solution. But we don't have it yet.
However, we know how to make the kind of plug-in hybrids GP is talking about, we already did. For people who have the occasional long range / frequent short range pattern, unfortunately, today, a gas car is the better value proposition. A small electric-first plug-in hybrid could be a good alternative. Probably not in the future, but some people need a car today, and for most of them, it will be a gas car.
Sure. Whatever helps. People should be switching their cars to the lowest lifecycle emission cars they can. Battery-electric vehicles handily beat hybrids on this metric. (Perhaps your proposed hybrid ratio would close the gap more.) But as long as you're lowering this number as significantly as you can over your previous car each time you buy, you'll be doing your best. https://theicct.org/publication/ghg-benefits-incentives-ev-m...
FWIW, a ~300 mile EV like the ones on the market today are pretty much there for long distance travel. If you're going camping or something away from the charging network, you can still charge anywhere there is electricity, and quite fast if you find an RV campsite with hookups you can plug into.
Yeah the long range EVs are certainly long enough range for me. My problem with them is that I'm paying for about 3x as much battery as I really want for 99% of my driving, and even though they're getting cheaper they're still a significant cost.
FYI they did sell the Volt in Australia as the Holden Volt between 2012 and 2015, they only sold 246 in that whole time though, so not a lot of choice out there on the second hand market.
The closest thing in a new car will probably be the Mazda MX30 R.EV hybrid coming to Australia in 2024, which is primarily electric drivetrain but uses a small petrol rotary engine to charger batteries as a range extender, but that is a very niche vehicle and the rotary engine isn't particularly fuel efficient on petrol use, but it is small and lightweight compared to a piston engine.
Nissans Qashqai and X-Trail hybrids also use a primarily electric drivetrain with the petrol motor only providing power to the electric drivetrain, similar but not quite the same thing as the motor is in use a lot of the time.
A most sensible idea, first one I see in EV context! The US and Australia are very different but for other places in the west I think fully electric driven for 100 km is to much. The combustion engine would grow along with the weight that grows along with the battery weight. Making the engine and fuel tank larger and would make them and the frame heavier which in turn would ask for a larger battery which asks for more hp again and so the circle continues.
The lower limit seems safety which depends on the other clunkers [allowed] on the road. Solar seems a good way to add weight and strengthen the structure.
Another sound idea is to swap the battery or parts of it. The bigger it is the harder that puzzle gets. I want to see swap while moving tech.
I was hoping there'd be a much smaller rotary creatively tucked away somewhere, but this is a fairly conventional car design & there's a big old engine bay with the rotary taking up a bunch of space.
This is close to what I'm after, though in a smaller car than the MX-30.
Rotaries are a good choice for this since they're very compact, but 74HP still seems excessive to me.
In addition to the BMW there is the Nissan Note e-Power and the Honda Fit/Jazz hybrid -- just off the top of my head. The Note is rated for 800km (500 mi) per tankful, IIRC. I believe the Jazz is no longer sold in AU but there are used imports from Japan, probably.
The thing you want is called a "series hybrid" design.
This the basic idea behind hydrogen fuel cell cars too, only with a fuel cell instead of an engine. The goal is 100% zero emissions with 100% the functionality of existing cars.
It is also why existing BEVs are almost certainly a fad. After all, why will innovation suddenly stop in transportation, and fundamental ideas like low weight and fast refueling suddenly became irrelevant? All signs point to BEVs being an idea from the mid-2000s, and for whatever reason had become stuck in our brain.
This is mad. Only BEVs can be refueled at home, and that is the absolute killer feature. People are obsessed with public chargers but most EV drivers never use them, or at least, only very rarely, on unusually long trips.
I can't put more hydrogen, or gasoline, into a vehicle without getting it from somewhere else.
> I can't put more hydrogen, or gasoline, into a vehicle without getting it from somewhere else.
Gasoline is not too hard to transport. I have two 20L gas gans at home that I generally keep full. For gas powered lawn things, and a portable genrator, but also for when I want to charge my cars at home.
That is wrong. You can make hydrogen at home. You only need water and electricity. People are simply imagining advantages of BEVs.
That said, there is not much need for home hydrogen production. It is better to have a more centralized refueling system. It is why gas stations replaces gas can deliveries.
You can make hydrogen at home, what you cannot do is compress it and put it into your car without tens off thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Oh and if anything goes wrong it's an explosion hazard.
Wrong again. With modern advancements, you can conceive of electromagnetic system that can do this at low cost and with no complex mechanisms. This is just another anti-hydrogen propaganda argument, and is based on willful ignorance of what is technologically possible.
The fundamental issue isn't technology, but lack of need; Home refueling is just unnecessary once you have refueling stations everywhere.
Have you seen your own comment history? Boy, I had no idea that hydrogen propaganda was a thing.
I know you wouldn't admit it if you were but I wonder if anyone gets paid for doing this. I know the oil industry has been dumping enormous amount of money into trying to paint BEVs as Bad and Wrong, but it's another thing to see someone put so much time into it.
You are the same type of person who goes around and asks why pro-nuclear people are so unwilling to change their minds. The answer is simple: They are not unwilling change to their minds. The problem is that their opponents are simply wrong. There is nothing change their minds about. Their opponents are the ones that are ones that are unwilling to change their minds.
This is the same thing. There isn't even a debate anymore. If there is any desire to reach zero emissions, than vast amounts of resources need to be invested in hydrogen. It is completely unavoidable and non-negotiable. No one, not even Tesla, believes that we can avoiding investing billions into green hydrogen production. Even BEVs require hydrogen as a form of energy storage before they can reach zero emissions, making them nearly redundant as ideas. Nevermind the vast need for hydrogen in industry.
Long story short, you are simply brainwashed by outdated BEV propaganda. You are basically spreading a conspiracy theory, and are profoundly ignorant of the entire problem. What I am doing is simply pushing back against that ignorance. In reality, hydrogen is fundamental to green energy, and batteries are not. BEV fanatics fundamental need to wake and stop believing in delusion. Hydrogen is almost certain the future of transportation, and BEV are almost certainly a transitional idea. If anything, BEV fanatics are trapped in a mid-2000s idea, and have failed to move on. It is an idea already obsolete, and they are doing more to block climate change solutions than anything else.
The killer feature of BEVs is that you never actually have to take them somewhere to charge if you're charging them at home. It's only on long trips that you need to stop.
If you're doing hundreds of km multiple days per week then Hydrogen might make sense, but I'd say that's a vanishingly small percentage of the population. Given that Hydrogen is also _always_ going to cost more than direct electricity, I don't think it's ever going to be mainstream.
And if you don't have a home with a garage to charge your car? How do apartment dwellers charge their car?
And the rest of your post is bullshit. You want a centralized system that can meet all refueling needs by itself. And as we make hydrogen from excess green electricity, it will drop to nearly nothing in terms of cost. Anti-hydrogen rhetoric is a repeat of anti-wind and anti-solar rhetoric of the past.
The cost of generating the hydrogen is only one part of it.
We need the electricity grid anyway, and bolstering it is already a necessary part of a 100% green grid. If we want to use Hydrogen for vehicles then that means constructing an entire second distribution system. Even if you use trucks, we will need to build thousands of trucks with Hydrogen tanks (which are much harder to make than regular pressure vessels, by the way) in order to distribute it.
All this, and you think adding chargers to apartment complexes is too hard?
We will need hydrogen anyways too. Not unless you think all of industry doesn't need to exist. Hydrogen can be delivered via pipeline just like natural gas. It is actually cheaper to move hydrogen around than electricity this way.
Except this can largely be handled by building industry which requires Hydrogen near to where the Hydrogen is generated. It can be done in large central facilities and requires _minimal_ movement of the Hydrogen itself.
It's really not the same thing as a distribution system that needs to go essentially everywhere.
Except you wouldn't build it like that. Even "on the spot" production will still significant hydrogen storage and distribution. It's not like you can place a giant tank right next to each piece of machinery. This are still going to be miles of piping.
And it is cheaper to move hydrogen than electricity. People have an inverted understanding of the problem.
It is far cheaper to move fuel via pipelines than electrical wires.
Your entire argument is just based on BEV propaganda. It is going to be systematically cheaper to go with hydrogen infrastructure than an all-electricity solution.
The same rules apply for smaller pipelines. It's highly likely that it is cheaper to build hydrogen stations fed by pipelines than high-power cables for DC fast charging. Trucks can work as last-mile distribution too. This is not nearly as big as a problem as critics think, since those trucks only move short distances.
Well then, I encourage you to rip out all the copper cables from your house and replace them with hydrogen safe alloy pipes. Put a hydrogen generator and compressor on the curb to feed the whole thing and replace each wall socket with a fuel cell to generate electricity to run your appliances.
That might eventually happen. There's a reason why we have natural gas piping in millions of homes. With hydrogen this even replaces the need for the grid. Many ideas that were originally laughed at end up being the winning solution.
The engine would only need to run at a constant speed/load, etc, so this might be where some alternative engine designs, some very compact, could be effective.
Am I the only one who only cares a little bit about range beyond 300kms and doesn't care about range at all beyond ~600 kms? My biggest problem with electric is there is a 15-20k price premium in my market right now over equivalent gas vehicles and I tend to buy vehicles and drive them into the ground over 15-20 years so if I buy electric I am 100% getting stuck with a fairly expensive battery replacement way before I usually get hit with an engine or transmission or other large problem in a gas vehicle, so life expectancy is way lower for my lower yearly kms spread over a long time period use case.
When are the sodium ion batteries (or some other tech) that is both dramatically cheaper and likely durable enough to take battery replacement off the table as a risk for 15+ years of the vehicle's life?
Isn't those batteries the unfamous silicon anode batteries going into mass production? (rumors said they did work around the "significant size increase" issue at mass production scale).
If they can get enough energy density, we can start to begin thinking about distance/weight trade-offs. Currently electrics exceed the mass of ICE vehicles and that means more tire wear and road wear, plus more damage in accidents to less massive cars and vehicles.
Nope; provably false. Most ICE SUVs are about as big and heavy as their electrical equivalents. Electrifying existing ICE vehicles, which is a popular thing to do with many classical cars, typically barely increases their weight while vastly enhancing their performance and torque.
I live in Canada and ordered a Toyota Sienna hybrid Oct-2022 and its estimated delivery date is spring 2025. If battery advancements are coming quick then by the time it arrives the Sienna’s batteries will be low-tech bricks.
I ask this genuinely, how polluting is it to build a battery (mining, etc)? Is it worth it? How that compares with hydrogen produced by renewable and/or nuclear?
There are a lot of assumptions that people would have to make in answering that question.
What is the assumed life of the battery vs the hydrogen electrolyzer and storage/distribution network? What are the maintenance requirements over that life? Are you assuming best-practice mine management or worst practice? What fraction of each battery can be recycled, and what fraction of batteries will in fact be recycled? How much leakage of hydrogen will there be and how many fires will happen, with the pollution that attends them? And so on and on.
The simple answer is that both of them are way less bad than what we have now (fossil fuels), and commercially the world has chosen batteries.
A lot less than it is to burn lots of fuel. Basically manufacturing related emissions and damage is basically offset within the first year or so of driving a EV. After that first year they are basically cleaner than an ICE vehicle on every dimension that matters. And that's just current state of the art.
Hydrogen for road transport simply makes no economical sense. It's been tried and it failed hard in the market. Even Toyota, who have been trying to convince world+dog that hydrogen was the future has failed to convince people to buy their hydrogen cars to the point that they are already making vastly more EVs than they've ever produced hydrogen cars. And that's them dragging their heels and barely trying to produce EVs.
Hydrogen fueling infrastructure is a big obstacle. It's not happening. The handful of fueling stations that actually exist are barely being used and some are actually being shut down. If you are at all range anxious, hydrogen would be your nightmare fuel. Most of the world is well out of range from any hydrogen fuel station. You can't go anywhere if you have a hydrogen car. EVs on the other hand can go anywhere there are wall sockets.
As far as I'm concerned, everything that's out now is just early adopter tech demo stuff. Eventually the batteries will have more energy and no lithium, and by then the charging stations will be everywhere, and then EVs will probably quickly take over.
Business people like things they can directly observe with steady progress and milestones, so I doubt they'd go for "Hey let's build charging stations nobody will use for 20 years, then switch to EVs all at once as soon as the tech is actually ready".
I wonder how things would be different if commerical projects were more waterfall-y and less gradual?
The “battery” of the future will be something akin to hydrogen fuel cells. You eliminate all significant raw material requirements while still having an EV. The problem is that it is highly disruptive to the current trend of BEVs with giant batteries.
It's still not ideal because there's more than just Co2 coming from exhaust, but even if that was solved, is there actually enough waste to meet current demand?
Some low effort googling shows there's over 100bn gallons of gas a year used in the US, 320 million tons of crop waste, and it takes 26lbs of corn to make 1 gallon of ethanol.
Actually collecting and converting all the waste doesn't seem like an easy task or we'd presumably be doing it already, maybe it's cheaper to do EVs?
1 https://electriccarsreport.com/2023/05/zeekr-starts-delivery...
2 https://www.catl.com/en/news/6015.html