Current mass produced batteries, which tend to hover around 260-300 Wh/kg. Higher density (but still under 500) are available, but in far smaller quantities for a very high cost.
The exciting part of this announcement is that if anyone can scale manufacturing, it is them.
While this is true, a tiny start-up with big claims is different from the world's largest battery manufacturer (CATL) already spooling up production with the intent to scale.
Eh, not really. Most "battery breakthrough!" press releases are about some new exotic chemistry while most mass produced battery improvements in the last 20 years have come from incremental improvements to existing chemistries and better packaging.
Meh, the devil's in the details with a lot of those announcements. A surprising number of them are things like... it will be 50% better 5-10 years from now!
That's actually incremental improvement if you think about it in annual improvement terms.
It is, except for the fact that the future isn't guaranteed, so there could be unforeseen problems with scaling up, and that 50% improvement never gets delivered. As mentioned upthread though, CATL has expertise in that area, and "end of this year" is so a trackable claim, unlike the claims about gallium-based batteries.
Have they? Other than lithium based batteries getting cheaper per kilogram so that year by year, more battery use cases have switched over from inherently worse chemistries? Even just ten years ago, eneloop were still the hot thing for many applications outside of laptops, mobile phones and the odd Tesla (ten years ago was when Model S was still the fresh new successor to the converted Lotus)
Is eneloop not still very much a thing? Maybe not the brand, but the technology. The vast, vast majority of consumer devices using standardized battery sizes are AA or AAA, and that means NiMH. To go lithium means 18650, and I don't really see much of that happening outside flashlights and other niche products.
Sure, if a device uses the form factor, then eneloop or the same approach by a different brand are even more ahead of pre-eneloop NiMH than they used to be: all the high-current use cases that were the weak spot of eneloop have long migrated to lithium-based.
But AA and AAA are increasingly rare not only because of price but also because of the ubiquity of USB charging, and because of the way the powerbanks that USB charging enabled weakened the "carrying spares" argument for AA a lot.
In essence: yes, the vast majority of consumer devices using standardized battery sizes continue to be AA or AAA (if we can agree in ignoring the ubiquitous CR2032). But costumer devices that use interchangeable standard size batteries have become super niche, at least outside a few fields where you expect years on a set of batteries. To go lithium means going fixed battery (unless you identify with the performance flashlight subculture, again something I very much agree with)
There are many companies making rechargeable lithium batteries in AA and AAA form factors. I have a few dozen I use for my door lock and Xbox controllers.
Lithium mostly exists as pouch cells in consumer devices, standardized batteries in general are rare. AA/AAA is mostly used on extremely cheap stuff, or stuff that one expects to last 5 years or more so nobody cares about recharging.
I hope we eventually get a consumer friendly standard for lithium though. It could be so much better than cylindrical cells, we could have all our cheap gadgets using micro versions of the power tool slide on shoe concept or something. Kinda unbelievable the ISO isn't trying to standardize prismatic type cells.
Form factor smaller than 1865 with energy dense formula is rare. Chinese made LFP but only a handful of mfgs make them anymore. So size doesn't matter, but it basically matters :D
Nothing except flashlights and yard lights seem to use them either. Probably because they're not exactly safe enough for frequent swapping applications, consumers will drop them on their tin foil crack smoking rig and make a fire or something.
Cost is just one of the interesting dimensions. For various kinds of transport energy may be more important than cost. I would be prepared to pay significantly more for an EV if had range of 1000 km rather than 500.
What battery pack that I can buy right now is 300Wh/kg? Sincerely curious because that's 50Wh/kg above what people are using in some very expensive UAVs.
The design of a battery for a phone is nowhere near the capability of C rate and discharge amperage needed to power multi hundred watt load electric motors. Totally different thing.
Battery people keep comparing apples, and oranges.
Battery pack energy density, battery, single cell, cathode, and their rated, nominal, and absolute capacity are all different things.
A single cell will always have > absolute capacity than the capacity at which the safety limiter will cut-off charging, and that will be > than the capacity to which BMS will charge/discharge the cell in daily use.
It may well be possible for a cathode material to excel in a small pouch cell, but have terrible thermals preventing its use in larger cells.
Very expensive UAVs use lithium polymer battery packs with continuous discharge rates on the order of 80C and above. To get higher energy density, look for lithium ion battery packs or lipo packs that reduce discharge rates to trade off for long-term storage capacity.
Compare to the discharge rate vs. energy density tradeoffs of plug-in hybrid EVs versus battery-only EVs: A Chevy Volt PHeV has a 16 kWh pack and 87 kW motor, a Chevy Bolt has a 65 kWh pack and not a 65/16x87=350 kW motor but 149 kW.
UAVs also have higher current requirement, and that means more weight "wasted" for chonkier electrodes Car batteries aren't pulling 50C worth of current
Traditional ICE starter batteries are optimized for this cold-cranking power rating, but they only have to deliver this for a matter of seconds before being recharged. They are not designed to deliver this continuously nor to ever be operated at low states of charge.
Conversely, a BEV traction battery has to support a wider range of loads at any charge state between its minimum and maximum charge levels, in order to have decent driving range. Like a starter motor, the BEV is not going to sustain high power output for very long, since a car only takes seconds to accelerate to legal road speeds. After that, it requires continuous output at lower power levels to maintain a cruising speed.
Even with lead-acid batteries, there are regular starter batteries and then there are deep-cycle batteries which have far less cold cranking amps but more durability when depleted to low charge states before being recharged.
The low density of lead-acid batteries is what makes them unsuitable for mobile applications. They might have 30-50 Wh/kg while various lithium ions might be 100-300 Wh/kg. And now this announcement is talking about 500 Wh/kg so 10x the best lead-acid batteries...
Most batteries that run starters are not energy dense, they're typically standard lead acid batteries.
FWIW, to provide the 225 amps (for a V8 starter motor) a Tesla car battery would only need a discharge capability of 3C (1C being around 80 amps), which is within its rated capabilities. This is also for batteries which provide higher voltages, so I'm vastly overestimating the C rate required.
C is the unit for charge/discharge rates, and is based off the capacity of the battery.
No, it is referring to what the starter motor in an ICE vehicle does. It was most likely a misunderstanding, but it is more similar in that it pulls very high loads like a drone battery does.
This person seems to be getting downvoted but they aren't totally wrong, electric car batteries are massively paralleled so that the amperage draw per cell is kept to a reasonable figure. They are confused about cranking amps to turn over an ICE vs. batteries used in all-electric cars.
The 18650 Panasonic cells used in an older Tesla model S for instance are rated at only 10A draw per cell as their nominal 1S voltage (4.20V when full).
It'll take time (maybe significant) before these batteries are available for direct purchase. The problem is demand current outstrips supply. Every high capacity battery already claimed, in tesla's case for their cars and grid storage applications.
CATL pushing this sort of capacity, though, is great news. It certainly will accelerate availability.
Read what I wrote again, I said 300Wh/kg is 50Wh/kg above what's used in expensive UAVs. There are setups out there using high amperage Panasonic cells at 250Wh/kg for 12S systems. You build a pack with 12S strings of high amperage rated Panasonic 18650 or 20700 and then parallel multiple of those strings together for large capacity (such as for something the size of a freefly alta X).
A small quadcopter that uses a gensace/Tattu 1200 mAh lipo pack is not an expensive uav. I think everyone who uses hobby size lipo knows their specs around 135-160Wh/kg.
I’m afraid these bans get systematically sabotaged by well funded ice lobby groups.
Just look at what happened to the EU’s ice ban for personal vehicles.
Spoiler: while new gasoline burning cars are technically banned after 2035 it will be completely legal to sell new gasoline burning cars by labelling them e-fuel only…
The timelines for ICE bans within a decade are ridiculous from a technology and market standpoint and terrible for the environment.
The best car technology is the one you don't use much. And we already have decades of cars in good enough condition to be driven weekly rather than daily.
EVs will barely scratch the surface of environmental issues with transportation. And they will create a new range of supply problems while also not solving traffic congestion issues that plague our cities.
It would be far more preferable to encourage people to use the same car for longer and especially to leave it in the garage when they can use other modes of transportation. Or, use car sharing rather than a personal car.
> You can continue to use the ICE vehicle you bought in 2034 in the EU until infinity.
Sure, if you can find fuel. By 2034 EVs will be enough of the market that gas stations are already closing (remember today new cars are 10 year old used cars, and there is every reason to think EVs will be half of all cars). There is still one on every corner, so you might not see this trend, but it will be in the statistics. By 2038 you will noticed it because many corners won't have a gas station at all. And of course the stations will already see this on the bottom line and will be less interested in replacing their pumps when the get old, and if they break they might just close that one island instead of fixing it. By 2045 fuel will be special order in most places.
Note that construction, freight, and other high energy use niches will still use a lot of fuel, so diesel will be available for a while longer. However those vehicles tend to use larger nozzles that won't fit in your diesel car. Gasoline will be hard to find - you can still make road trips, but you will need to plan your fuel stops like people plan EV charging today (on some roads you don't need to plan your EV charging, but there are others you must).
I live in a bedroom community of a major city. There are about 25,000 people in my town and there are 7 gas stations. There could be a single station in town and it would still not be inconvenient. Some basic math implies that this one station would be as viable a business as it is today even if only 14% of the vehicles on the road use gasoline. I would be shocked if there are fewer ICE powered cars on the road than that in 2035.
I pass multiple stations when I leave town to get to work. Where I work looks like here ( home ) from a station density point of view.
For longer trips, you may be right that you may have to plan. But there could be very few ICE cars on the road before one station every 400 km ceases to be profitable. And, unlike electric, nothing is stopping me from filling up a gas can before hitting a leg I am really worried about.
I cannot see “lack of stations” being a problem for ICE for a long time.
The cost of fuel could be a thing I guess but, if demand drops faster than supply, the economics of that do not really make sense.
Also, if I am somebody that uses a vehicle “once a week”, is this really the car I am going to take on a 1500 km trip through unpopulated areas? I cannot rent or borrow an EV for that trip?
What you are suggesting seems to be that ICE vehicles are going to end up being errand vehicles for farmers, or the old truck hooked up to the boat to go fishing once a month. Or that people that live and work locally need them for the occasional errand. For the latter use case, where I live at least, just the insurance cost would incent me to replace such a vehicle with a ride share subscription even now.
I think it is going to stay viable to run an ICE vehicle for a long time yet. I also expect fewer people will want to.
This announcement has the potential to push things like Teslas to 1000 km of range. What happens when it hits 2000 ikm ( over 1300 miles ). What are you going to want to head out of town in?
10 years from now, people that can afford it will have all gone EV. People who cannot will drive their ICE until it needs a major repair. And then they are going to go EV.
And the very remote areas that may have just 1 gas station are also least likely to have high EV penetration until the absolutely tail-end of the ICE-era.
I dont see how in 10 years most cars will be evs, when the ev sales percentage is 12% as of now.
Which equals to 9.5% of electric vehicles on the road today.
The increase in ev sales is in the low single digits per year, the math just doesnt check out.
EVs are not expected to have a constant growth curve. With the expected ban of ICE EV will be the majority in a few years, and by 2034 few ICEs will be sold.
I do expect ICEs will be just under 50% of total cars, you could argue they are more like 55% of all cars, but it won't be 75%.
I'm sure this will happen. But I think your timeline is way faster than it will happen.
I highly doubt gasoline will be hard to find in most places by 2045; I'd expect a lot fewer fueling stations, but I think even at 10% of the station count, gasoline will still be convenient and easy. And, if gasoline is less convenient, you can always use gas cans to extend your range. They're not too expensive, and not too inconvenient (epa 'anti-spill' nozzles that make it hard to fill without spilling not withstanding); long term storage is problematic, but if you're regularly using it, no big deal. Most gasoline powered vehicles have at least a 300 mile range, and it's not hard to find vehicles with a larger range.
They said something similar about radios and books quite a long time ago.
I'm afraid the problem of generating/transporting enough electrons to all places where cars, buses, trucks, need charging will not be solved completely within 10 years.
Turning gasoline into electrons is fairly straightforward. It doesn't make much sense for daily use, but for occasional corner cases (emergencies, backwoods, etc), it does. And corner cases are one of the big reasons people give against electric cars.
In my country (Poland) gas stations get more income from selling other things, mainly alcohol, because unlike other vendors they can stay open overnight. Margins on gasoline are extremely thin already. It makes sense for them to stay open regardless of the demand for actual gasoline.
This assumes future regulations will allow you to do this. There are already examples of commercial fuels today that sell fuel only to commercial customers at a different rate.
See "red diesel" in the UK - its just plain ole diesel taxed differently for commercial use, but illegal for use in privately owned personal vehicles. It's dyed red to allow its use in private vehicles to be discovered from the discoloration of engine parts etc.
Personally I expect rules on what can be pumped into what will be different by 2045 in a lot of places, and while it might still be possible it may not be so simple.
> See "red diesel" in the UK - its just plain ole diesel taxed differently for commercial use, but illegal for use in privately owned personal vehicles. It's dyed red to allow its use in private vehicles to be discovered from the discoloration of engine parts etc.
Maybe, but we're talking about the banning of ICE vehicles, not the banning of fuel.
I mean, "you won't find fuel because it will be illegal to possess it" is a substantially different argument from "you won't find fuel because no one will produce it anymore".
> Maybe, but we're talking about the banning of ICE vehicles, not the banning of fuel.
This is a bizarre point to make? Regulation of fuels and regulation or bans of ICE vehicles would obviously go hand in hand (it already does today!), if ICE vehicles were to be banned as discussed here. You can't have combustion without fuel... Controlling who can pump gas would be hugely important to the introduction of any hypothetical ICE ban.
My point also is not that fuel may be banned - it's that the regulations governing the pumps may be different than today, and that there is international precedent for this. If combustion really is largely relegated to commercial trucking by 2045, I'd be honestly shocked if the rules governing the pumps didn't change too in a lot of places.
look at the vast difference in fuel laws pretty much everywhere between today and the 1970s if inspiration required - remember we used to be able to buy leaded fuels?
It will be faster than you think, mostly because gas stations will be closing and so the inconvenience of fueling you car will cut that tail of - except for niches where EVs are particularly bad.
Spare parts and maintenance are likely going to be a problem first for ICE owners, rather than fuel availability. Who would be crazy enough now to invest in (and maintain) a factory for producing ICE-specific parts? Parts and skills for ICE will become scarcer and more expensive, making a new EV look economical to ICE owners in very short time. It has already been a few years now where it has been uneconomical not just to build a new fossil fuel power plant, but also to continue operating them due to maintenance costs. I'd suggest the same thing with ICE vehicles--it becomes easier/cheaper to run an EV rather than an old ICE quicker than people may usually assume.
The biggest cost of producing parts is making the tooling to mass produce them. Manufactures will retool to produce other stuff once they have enough of a given part, but if there's a shortage (or they think there will be one soon) they'll bring the old tooling out of storage and set up the line again. It's common for auto companies to supply new parts for decades after a car is made.
Heck, Mazda makes new parts for the original Miata.[1] While the first generation Miata is a recognizable car, it's not very popular. A total of 433,000 were produced. Maybe half are still on the road today. That may sound like a lot, but twice as many Ford F-150s are sold every year. If it's profitable to keep making parts for 200,000 vehicles, it's going to be a long time before most ICE cars run into shortages.
The investment in parts is already made. All they need to do is not scrap the tooling. Until the car the part went to is 15 years old that isn't worth doing as you will make more from selling parts than from the cost of storing the tooling. Common parts like filters will be around for much longer. Parts that rarely break will have the tools destroyed sooner, but with millions of ICE cars on the road there will be a lot of needs for parts even if the need is less than today.
It seems reasonable that most gas stations will add fast charging stations no? And then maybe add a coffee shop or quick food place that you can spend money at and be the real source of revenue for these locations.
Its not going to be a cheap or painless conversion, but there is absolutely a path forward for most gas stations I think.
some of them. I think most will drop fuel completely, some will turn into stores where local buy milk or something, but many will close completely as not needed since people charge at home.
In denser areas charging will move to mall like areas where people will get out of the car for longer. Gas stations are not generally not setup for people to hang out for 30 minutes, they don't have enough space for people to park that long. They are setup for use the bathroom, grab a snack and get out. Most people charging will want to get groceries or other supplies they are getting anyway (which is to say since they can't charge at their apartment they are going to look for places to shop where they can recharge)
In rural areas (truck stops) are more setup for spending more time. They often have small restaurants already so you can eat inside. They are more general purpose stores and often serve the locals as the place to buy things between trips to dollar general or the city. They have more parking (land is cheap so they will buy more if needed), so there is place to put in all the needed EV chargers. Plus they get a lot more customers who are on trip so long they couldn't charge at home.
It's an interesting problem. Aside from the toxic cleanup issue when decommissioning the underground fuel tanks or an attached service garage, the layout of a traditional gas station is also limiting. Unlike a modern truck stop off a major highway, the majority of urban stations have a small footprint optimized for road access and throughput, but not simultaneously lingering customers.
Even without the pump islands, there isn't much room for customer parking. These stations are often situated at corners with multiple driveways, small parking areas, and no adjacent street parking. Unless you can merge adjacent parcels for redevelopment, these small stations may only be able to support a convenience store, coffee shop, drive-through food stop, or some other quick turnaround. They don't have the right layout to support lots of simultaneous customers unless they are arriving on foot or by mass transit instead of personal vehicles.
Probably not, people charge at home or apartment and start everyday with 300 miles of range. No need to ever visit a charger unless you're on a long trip.
That combined with bigger stores like 7-Eleven, CVS, Walmart, etc.. adding their own charging stations will kill most gas stations.
By then people who need fuel will know to special order it. Because if you are the only one selling gas that means someone lives in a less dense area that can't get fuel at all. Either that or you have competition, they are just not across the street and so you have to keep prices low enough people won't drive the extra miles to your competition.
The urban greens in the previous Swedish government coalition wants to ban fossil-based petrol from being sold starting 2030 - which economically speaking is kind of the same thing.
Every ounce of oil coming out of the groud and getting burned ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. Banning that has nothing to do with ICEs.
You can run an ICE on synthetic fuels. It's not as energy-efficient but only half the efficiency from a renewable source is still better than "full" efficiency from a fossil source. If you _really_ must use an ICE, there will be a way. It won't be cheap, but it's your choice. There is no human right for cheap ICE fuel.
It’s more or less the same thing because if your fuel price doubles you’re going to scrap that car and buy an electric.
Nobody is forcing you to do so, it just doesn’t make much sense to keep driving that ICE. When everybody is making that decision parts and maintenance will be more expensive and harder to come by too - accelerating the transition.
"Half the efficiency" is highly optimistic. Afaik making synfuels loses about 70% of the energy and then you burn the stuff in an engine that is at best 40% efficient. Meanwhile EVs have >70% wind turbine to wheel motion efficiency.
I'm not disputing any of that. It's just that in an EV you currently drive around over half a ton of battery with you on your 20 miles a day commutes. That's highly inefficient as well. You need energy to drive it around, you need a bigger car to house it, better safety systems to prevent that solid fuel bomb from going off, you need to source its raw materials, manufacture it, recycle it.
Imagine saving all of that for a much smaller battery (say, 100 miles range) which is enough for 45+ weeks of the year, and then for the rare case of driving further than that you bring gasoline with you, with its vastly superior energy density and thus range. Only for those few trips. It can well be super expensive, but who cares, it's only for that rare trip to the grandparents or the skiing resort. And then you don't need to care much about the bad end-to-end efficiency. After all, you don't care about that when taking a plane to Hawaii either, do you?
Currently, plug-in hybrids tend to just be used as gasoline cars because people are lazy and don't charge every night. There are gas stations everywhere, fuel is cheap, and you are used to filling up gas anyway. But once gasoline prices spike to 3x-5x because it's synthetic fuels, the dynamic will change, fewer gas stations around, the reduced economies of scale lead to further price hikes and boom, everybody will use their plug-ins mainly as EVs. Which is what I'm describing above. Which could outperform pure EVs because you don't need a 500 miles EV range anymore, you can make do with 100 miles.
If you want the same car to run 100 miles on battery and have the option to fuel it with synfuels you need to lug around useless drivetrain most days. The better option is to just rent a car with sufficient range for the long trip you want to make.
Or build public transit for the commute and don't use a car at all.
I'm personally on board with rentals for the occasional long trip or using and building out public transit. But most people are not. Especially not in NA.
I understand the drivetrain argument. What about a simple generator to recharge the battery on the go? Like the original BMW i3 had. That one didn't take off, but likely in part because it was ugly, too small to be practical, and the gas prices still being very low.
Maybe the ban should have specifically stated that all ICE cars must be convertible to EV ten years before the expiry date. DIYers are doing it all the time but not with newer cars as they are too locked down and complicated.
It's particular ironic in China, where >50% of their domestic energy production is apparently from coal. That being said, it could improve metro air quality a large degree because I'm guessing coal power plants aren't built in downtown Beijing.
China's CO2 intensity is about 550g/kWh currently (and falling rapidly). An EV takes about 15kWh/100km. That's less than 90g/km. About as much as a Prius.
I don't really see what CO2 has to do with the point I am making. It's massively better for air quality to have the coal burnt at a distant powerplant than to have a car burning coal (or fossil fuels) in downtown Beijing.
They will definitely get “sabotaged” if they turn out to not be even remotely realistic, for example if lithium production is nowhere near what it needs to be to replace all new automobile production.
While this is true in theory I don't see how it is relevant. The battery industry is in overdrive right now, new chemistries are being put to the test daily and multiple manufacturers are already working on productizing energy storage that doesn't use rare earths at all. Also, breakthroughs like the main post mema that you need less and less rare earths for the same bang.
It becomes increasingly certain that we won't need as much lithium as the fossil lobby would like us to believe.
The recent announcement (also from CATL!) of sodium ion batteries that are competitive with typical vehicle grade Lithium cells (LFP chemistry) means Lithium is unlikely to be the blocker people argue either. Lithium Ion is already potentially no longer the only viable battery chemistry at scale.
VERY few places are even thinking of banning ICE sales within 5 years - most timelines are 15 years - at which point, if you're looking at realistic projections - you won't even need to ban them. The sales will already be very low (in the places that are thinking about the bans).
The reality of these bans is that exception after exception is tacked on for a long time.
One of the cool things about this type of political maneuver is that it's a bit like the Fed Put. You can get the market to move in the direction you want without actually shooting your bazooka. Just by saying your thinking about banning ICE cars - you're going to get manufacturers and sellers preparing for that and shifting over as much sales as they can to non-ICE cars.
In the 10-year timeframe it probably doesn't matter. Ev drivetrain's and batteries are going to drop well under what ICE drivetrain cost will be simply because there's just so many less components and announcements like this and the sodium ions stuff really leads out a path to that economic super advantage
Well the FDP party which is in the coalition govt of Germany and torpedoed the EU ICE ban in the last minute and forced the inclusion of this e-fuel nonsense for the whole EU is run by a dude who likes to drive a Porsche and who is friends with the Porsche company. Porsche is the only major car producer in Germany that favors efuels. So uh, I think the FDP doesn’t like the ICE ban, because as a Laisser-faire party, they favor “open technology solutions” and want the “market” to decide on the best technological solutions for the climate problem.
> Why would anyone want to use e-fuel in 2035 instead of electricity
It will depend on their needs and if the device covers them. For example (as said already even here): long distance travel, practicality of refuelling (no, the need of some will not be fulfilled by leaving the car in charge nightly), decent technology (e.g. some will refuse to own an internet connected vehicle).
The very article you are responding to is touting energy densities that could lead to 1000 km in Teslas next year and the super chargers planned for the same time period would charge those cars in 15 mins. You do not even have to go out 5 years before “long distance travel, practicability of refueling” will favour EV owners. I just got back from a 2000 km EV road trip through the worlds second biggest country ( and one of the sparsest populated ). The longest leg between charging networks was about 300 km in the Rocky Mountains. The longest we sat at a charger was around 20 minutes. Most of that time was spent placing take-out dinner orders for the 5 of us in the car.
This is my first long trip in an EV vehicle but my wife drove about a 1000 miles through eastern Washington State a few weekends ago ( also mountains - even more remote ). She had to plan but there was certainly no risk of getting stranded. At least one of the hotels had overnight charging for free.
All this is today. These are going to be non-issues 5 years from now.
Long distance and refueling will be solved by 2035. They’re close now. I’m will to bet all new gas cars are going to be internet connect too, it’s already heading that way, and has little to do with EVs
> I’m will to bet all new gas cars ... little to do
Would you drive them? Would you own an internet connected door, vehicle, pacemaker? Some would rather find the keys out of the asylum.
You say «little to do», but the point was that we are informed of «gas cars» without wireless connection, whereas word is that for some reason all electric vehicles seem to be. We know that some «gas cars» are spared, but they say all electric ones will be bound to the wave of improper engineering, so this defines some hope or way out for the traditional making and rules out the new one.
A lot of gas stations have differently-sized nozzles for regular gasoline and diesel, and the fueling opening in the car is sized so that a diesel nozzle does not fit in a gasoline car. They should do something similar for e-fuel so people don't "accidentally" fuel them with classical fuel.
What you are forgetting is that diesel engines only work with diesel and gasoline ones only work with gasoline. This creates a natural incentive for the customers to not mix this up.
In the e-fuel vs trad-fuel story you do not have that incentive.
What you DO have, is an incentive to actually do the switch. Projections put e-fuel production costs at a 1500% premium over fossil fuels and wide spread availability is actually a hard scientific problem as even the announced global production capacity* of e-fuels is only enough for a few thousand vehicles.
* Apparently, to date, the biggest portion of announced e-fuel production misses either an energy provider or financial backing or both.
That was exactly my thinking actually..... I own an equestrian property as a hobby, I need a big diesel truck (1 ton) to haul horses, hay, tractor, etc... Sometimes for very long distances (>1000kms) for shows, etc... There are no viable options today, or in the near (10-15 years) future that offer viable alternatives in the form of an EV... at least not from traditional HD truck vendors.....
With Sodium batteries, range and infrastructure improvement and BYD showing they can make EV as cheap if not cheaper than ICE. I'm convinced a EV future in Eurasia is secured, how it will be handled in the west im not so sure given how they are Isolating themselves more and more becoming fortress NATO.
> I’m afraid these bans get systematically sabotaged by well funded ice lobby groups.
They'll be sabotaged by reality. Thinking ICE cars and gas stations will become a fading memory by 2035 is wishful thinking. Politicians get big headlines and praise for proposing ICE bans and such, but as the date draws closer the reality of "OK, maybe we're not quite there yet" sets in and the date will be pushed back again and again. There is a very long tail with ICE, and it's going to take a very, very long time to replace them. Wholesale upheavals of established technology are difficult.
For a noteworthy example in another domain, IPv4 has been on its last legs for how long now?
They're banning new ICE car sales in 2035: existing ones can continue to run. So the aim would be to mostly phase out ICE cars by something more like 2050-2060 (bearing in the mind the last generation of ICE cars will probably get a slightly extended lifetime to smooth the transition). That seems pretty realistic to me, perhaps with some exceptions for certain niche uses (which would probably be <5% of vehicles).
Sure, I’m mostly addressing the folks in this thread who are musing on whether there will be more than a few gas stations total in the country by 2035…
How is this related to IP? We are talking about legislature being written to force us to be more Eco friendly. No politician ever wrote or proposed legislation for IP versions.
It’s an analogous situation demonstrating how hard it is to unseat an incumbent, ubiquitous technology with another, and how long it takes, even if that alternative is superior.
> I’m afraid these bans get systematically sabotaged by well funded ice lobby groups.
Nonsense; it's just harsh reality landing on green wet-dreams.
They effectively propose a ban on cheap cars, and you expected ... what, exactly?
The only way they're replacing ICE vehicles is by making the EVs cheaper, and there is a limit to how high they can tax sales of ICE vehicles or fuels without a population revolt.
"The only way they're replacing ICE vehicles is by making the EVs cheaper"
Even if electric cars would be cheaper, faster and longer running - some people would rather die, than give up their ICE cars and motorcycles.
The strong lobby in germany against banning aren't the poor, but the rich who want to drive their roaring Porsche till eternity. They literally say that.
I can somewhat understand the appeal of an loud engine, the feel of the road etc., but personally I will indeed celebrate the day, all those loud polluting machines are gone from the cities and one other bright day also from the mountains.
But I am not sure if I will see that day, as cars have allmost a religious meaning to quite some people, especially here in germany, but not only here. But yes, the bigger problem in the short run will be economics. Otherwise all the old cars just will get sold to africa and go on running there. But china is mass producing cheap electric cars for example, so things are scaling up.
> Even if electric cars would be cheaper, faster and longer running - some people would rather die, than give up their ICE cars and motorcycles.
Well lets stop calling this the reason for unbanning until EVs get cheaper, faster and longer running.
I mean, sure, some people are like that, but we won't know how many there are until EVs are cheaper, faster and longer running. Painting the opposition to ICE bans as "they will argue the same even when EVs are cheaper, faster and longer running" is irrational.
If it’s really only about the rich, then just tax the heck out of the cars, or better yet the gasoline. If the price of gas includes the full cost of carbon sequestration then sure, why not? It’s still not a great look from the perspective of income inequality, of course.
That would force all the poor Joe Schmoes to switch from fossil fuel-driven vehicles to electric ones, but the billionaires (and probably many [most?] of the multi-millionaires) would still be able to afford burning fuel. All the billionaires and even the single-millionaires could of course also afford to switch to electric vehicles... but the poor Joe Schmoes can't.
So what you're proposing is basically "Let's make using cars (even more than it already is) something for the rich only!"
It's like people have forgotten that ICEVs started without any of that infrastructure in place. Even if we can't buy petrol from pharmacies, methanol and ethanol engines are a mature technology and the fuel is both cheap and easy to get. The practical reality is that lack of fuel stations is a pain in the ass, but the strength of ICEs is that they can be modified to run on different fuels. And fueling them is easy.
I live in Edinburgh, and there's regular complaints about flaring from the Mossmorran refinery, which lights up the night sky, produces smoke, and is incredibly loud.
People live on the other side of that highway, so I guess it's possible, but I used to drive through that area on a regular basis and the smell hard to forget.
Apart from that such facilities need to be large to be cost-effective.
It makes orders of magnitude more sense to have one centralized large refinery and then many dispersed holding tanks to distribute fuel. This model may sound familiar.
This gets thrown out quite a bit but I don't really buy it. If it is not designed for alcohol, it probably isn't going to work. Alcohol has too many weird interactions with stuff like aluminum.
Which was why I didn't say "all" or anything like that. But basically a lot of engines from Ford and Volvo can run on ethanol. Any old iron block can if you replace pipes and hoses. And so on.
Which is why I said converted. The wrong kind of rubber will get brittle from ethanol. But for an iron block, it's not rocket science. Any shade tree mechanic could do it.
most gasoline available in the eastern USA is E10. I go out of my way to get E0 for a vintage high-performance vehicle I drive on occasion, it's noticeably happier without the ethanol, even if it can drive on E10 without damage.
Close enough. E10 is enough to see most of the issues you will see with pure Ethanol. Most engines just need to run is different fuel maps. ideally you would make other changes (increase the compression ratio), but they are expensive.
I think at some point, the cost of operating gas stations will fall below a threshold that it doesn't justify keeping them open, even if there is still _some_ demand.
E.g. imagine if demand were cut in half -- I think more than half of the gas stations would shut down.
It will happen, but I reckon it'll be more like 2045 than 2035 (and even then they'll still be some gas stations, just far fewer and you might have to start keeping emergency supplies with you).
Here in the UK, we call them petrol stations. But "gas" is still appropriate, because 15 years ago LPG conversions were all the rage, and every petrol station had gas too.
Nowadays I can only think offhand of a single local retail fuel establishment that will sell you both US and UK "gas".
How much more generation do we actually need. For one, charging typically does not happen when the grid is at peak load, so a lot of spare capacity is available. Second, it takes approximately the same amount of energy to refine a tank of gasoline as it does to completely charge an EV, so it'll be a wash.
They're unlikely to succeed because if the massive tax on poor people (ICE bans) actually gets implemented, all of the poor people who are forced to buy an unaffordable EV will vote for populists promising to unwind the bans.
At least in the U.S., poor people buy used cars, while existing and proposed ICE bans effect new car sales. Any real economic effect will be delayed until after the ban, and in any event they'll still be buying used cars. I suppose used EVs might end up costing more, but they might end up costing less. Also, the immediate effect of bans might actually be to create a glut of cheap, used ICE cars.
None of that implies less risk of a populist backlash, though; not for any class of 'mericans, rich or poor.
They’re only banning sales of new EVs in the short term, and poor people don’t buy new cars anyway. By the time they are buying EVs, they’ll be much cheaper.
Manufacturers are also pushing this for ICE cars, so that’s not really a differentiation point between ICEs and electric. Hopefully we will get legislation to tame this trend for cars and other goods.
I doubt that. They are trying the subscription model, but used car drivers are more price sensitive and are likely to not fall for it. If the car doesn't have a lifetime subscription included used car drivers will soon get the word out don't buy that car. Car manufactures depend on their cars having a good resale value - people who buy new cars tend to trade them in every 3 years, and that only works out because the car has value to someone else.
It will take time for this to work out in the market. BMW is small enough to trick people, but the large car makers are not.
When I bought my used EV there were 2 options: Leaf or Zoe. As a high percentage of Zoe's had rented batteries, and the websites didn't have a filter for that, I didn't even bother test driving one.
You missed out - they’re giving away the batteries for almost nothing now to get rid of the lease. Mine was manufactured in 2011 (!) and is still at 93% of its original 22 kWh rated capacity after doing 90.000km, which is amazing compared to a Leaf.
The cheap EVs aren't here yet, but the technology has the potential to eventually become cheaper than ICE. 30% of EV cost is currently in the battery, and this will drop.
This! I mean, we saw the same with computing: the first PCs cost thousands of dollars, but by the start of the nineties they were much more affordable already. Mostly because of technology advances and mass production, but of course also because of moving chip/board production to cheaper countries. Same with mobile phones, smartphones, laptops etc. etc.
People interested in AI/machine learning are a small niche. Your AI/machine learning computer is about as interesting to most people as large agriculture sprayer is to your average car buyer.
Nah, a GTX 1060 6GB for $100 + any 10-year old i5/i7 is still surprisingly capable for messing about with ML. It's not fast but it gets the job done. Also, getting free compute for messing around in, say, Google Cloud is still pretty easy. If you get to the point where those 2 options become a bottleneck, you're probably informed enough to find work in the field and afford something nicer.
In much of the world, owning a car at all puts you above "poor people". While owning a car is sadly needed in some parts of the world to get to work or even the stores (US..), it's a massive financial burden for most people. If you care for poor people, thinking about how people can go about their daily lives without spending thousands of dollars each year on owning a car would be the way to go.
If you can afford a car you are not poor. In the US (and Europe) there are almost no poor people. What we call poor are still middle class by world standards.
I'm not sure I agree with this. In many parts of the US or Europe, you could easily be in a position where you can afford a car (and need one for work), but cannot afford housing. It's true that you might well still be well off by world standards (a car roof is still a roof), but I think I'd require "food, clean water, clothing and reliable shelter" to be a bare minimum for "not poor".
This is getting away from the relevant definition of poor. The person above was talking about how people will vote, so what matters here is whether they're poor relative to other voters within their own country.
This might be true in USA where society have built itself to be almost fully dependent on cars. As a non-american: I have not owned a car in 10 years. You are not forced to have to own a car by some force of nature.
You don't state where you live, but odds are good your country is mostly car dependent. Sure transit is useful for a few (10%) of people who live in the city, but if you look at the numbers in almost every country cars are the vast majority of transport if the country is rich enough to afford them. If the country isn't that rich you will see other things, but as they become richer they become car dependent.
For what it's worth, you might find this list handy the next time you find yourself in a discussion about car dependence and how it varies across the world.
The poorest folks I know are driving used Bolts. Money talks. Aside from the recent pandemic-fueled car price bubble, compliance EVs were really cheap on the used market.
It's less populist and more a talking point.
It's the perfect cover.
"We can't stop allowing the rich to destroy the climate because we care so much about poor people."
In '35 it's doubtful ICE will be cheaper than EV anyway (look at price development over last decade...)
Banning ICE will speed up this development.
Climate change will disproportionately affect people who are already vulnerable.
Tax carbon emissions and use the money to provide good affordable alternatives (public transportation) for people who don't afford an EV today.
ICE prices will continue to drop. SSD hard drives (the newer, more efficient and faster technology) prices have plummeted in the last 10 years, however spinning rust prices have also plummeted, making spinning rust the only choice if capacity-per-dollar is your metric.
You also mention climate change, but I don't see how an extra average degree of weather (if that materializes) will be worse than stripping poor people of transportation and condemning them to never having a job (since most lower rung jobs require a car).
Certainly, these poor people will absolutely eviscerate you at the polls if you level them with this massive poor tax.
As for public transportation, the US is incapable of building new rail infrastructure. California's $150,000,000,000 LA-to-SF train is an unmitigated disaster, Chicago's rolling stock is extremely old and falling apart and New York City takes 12 years to build 4 miles of new lines, at a cost that is quadruple what France would spend for identical infrastructure.
You're in a dream world. The same people who claim that a poor people tax helps them also support cash pits known as modern rail infrastructure in the US (it's more like grift and fraud, though).
The US is fundamentally incapable of building public transportation? Ludicrous. What's required is political will.
ICE prices will not drop faster than EV. It's much more mature technology.
If forbidding new ICE cars (in 7+ years) "strips people of transportation" we clearly need som kind of subsidies to alleviate that.
Climate change is a threat. It's not just something people talk about because it's fun. The current estimates predict 3 degrees of warming until the end of the century. That's assuming we stop burning fossile fuels some time this century. The disruption this would cause to agriculture and living conditions around the world are just staggering. If nothing else, consider the costs of 2 meeters sea level rise until 2100...
Preventing climate change is a cost saving measure.
You know how I know you aren't poor? You think anyone in the bottom quartile will buy a new car. This is hardly a regressive policy. It directly targets the wealthier populations.
That said, in the interest of honest debate, it will shift the used car market prices significantly initially until supply of used EVs spins up. Although this is very secondary.
Partly the use market exists in ICE because there isn't really a cheap new ICE, but with stuff like sodium ions and the fundamental simplicity of the EV drivetrain, what I think is going to happen is that you're going to get a much wider range of electric cars that will suit a lot more modes of transportation and people won't have to use old ICE Used cars to get around.
I think it's going to happen is essentially you're going to get like a $10,000 new EV you can buy that's going to be cheaper to use energywise/ fuel-wise than a clunker ice.
I think the driver this will be the Chinese / India markets where you have basically two to three billion people that will want cars at that price point and that stuff will eventually make its way into the US
It won't happen in USA until a majority of chips and EV batteries required can be reliably produced and sourced domestically. Until that point the continued production and sale of new ICEs will still be required as a matter of national security.
No, not for another ~15 years and then I'll still be able to buy ICE car.
EVs in current state are not so good and what's even worse new ICE cars are becoming shittier and shittier because of restrictions imposing on them
As an EV owner, I'm not sure what problems you're referring to.
Sure the infrastructure has a bit to catch up, but even without infrastructure, we're completely fine to use our EV for 90% of our commute (and our ICE car the other 10%).
But if density -- thus range -- were to double, infrastructure becomes even less of a dependency.
It's the main problem, as far as I can tell. I guess charging / "pump" time is an issue for cross-country road trips, but my personal needs would be entirely met by home charging.
Anyone with a house and an EV can do it. I don't have an EV yet but some friends just stayed for a week with a rented Tesla, and charging it up in the garage every night worked great, even with just a regular 120V outlet available.
So how many people is that? Don't estimate house ownership or house rents on your circle of friends.
What about cities, apartments with no means to install chargers? World is not urban sprawl where houses have garage and power available for charging cars.
I'm not going to keep googling this for everywhere but in developed countries at least, it doesn't appear that "home charging isn't a thing for vast majority of car owners."
I would say it depends on the country. Russia is still a major exporter of petroleum goods and can make the price very appealing to it's neighbors (but yeah, after they started the war, the situation is not so strightforward)
Not really because some amount of a barrel of oil is gasoline. The other uses of oil will still want their fraction and be willing to pay. The refineries will need to get rid of the parts of the crude that doesn't have a market to sell to the market they have.
There will of course be much less refineries. The other uses of oil are small niches, and so the world needs one-two small refinery to supply their needs. So there will be price shocks as the large refineries close.
The reverse scaling will be the problem more than the commodity price. As gas stations close, finding a refueling place will similar to what early adopters of EVs faced, but without the ability to do >90% of fueling at home or anywhere else the electrical grid reaches. Although maybe it'll become a thing for some people to store tanks of gasoline at their home. At that point I'd trade for a diesel vehicle, though, if I had a hard requirement of an ICE.
Farmers already keep tanks around to refuel at home. As do several of the other niches that I see as more likely to keep a gasoline car. If you live in the city you won't have a place to store fuel - but also won't need to since an EV is more likely to meet your needs.
Average car age in US and EU is somewhere around 12 years. EVs are still a minority (growing, but less than 50 % and it will stay that way for a few years).
Most of the ICE cars sold now will be on the roads in 15 years.
You should buy what works best for you. But if you really believe an EV is not better than an ICE car in nearly all objective metrics, you are doing yourself a disservice.
We do have a choice because, on paper, we do have a choice in choosing those countries’ politicians. I know I’ll never give my vote to a politician keen on banning gasoline cars.
It’s sadly also true that the technocrats actually taking those decisions are a lot less directly accountable, but nothing that a second “yellow vests” movement won’t be able to fix.
I on the other hand, I applaud the politicians who had the guts to push the ICE car sales ban against the push-back of the established cars manufacturers.
ICE cars are such a nuisance in cities by polluting the air. I look forward to a time when my children will be able to enjoy clean air in the cities.
I call this egoism. Modern ecologism just aims to make a nice walled garden around their voters, they don't care what is happening outside this garden.
In the reality, other parts of the country/earth is getting polluted to produce the goods.
I much prefer the older ways with polluting factory in the city, at least everyone could see what it takes to provide each good, and share its cost. The current way of doing things is to ban everything, which force manufacturers to produce elsewhere in the world and import it. Plus we are loosing knowledge in the process.
The thing is producing a product for the entire world in one place has massive economies of scale vs producing things locally in every other city or even 1 factory per country. While going back to Victorian-era local production would turn cities back into the garbage dumps they once were, I highly doubt it would end up lowering emissions.
> I on the other hand, I applaud the politicians who had the guts to push the ICE car sales ban against the push-back
I can't agree, because forceful bans are not the best way to accomplish change.
Simply keep improving battery technology to bring prices down and range up and it'll take a natural course once buying an EV becomes cheaper than an ICE car. Implementing bans makes it political and builds resentment which is counterproductive. Building a better product and letting the market decide works so much better.
Could you help us understand why you would like to keep buying gasoline cars?
(Edit: I see that you are being down voted. Perhaps elaborating on your desire to continue to be able to buy gasoline cars might help clarify your position better)
Some people like freedom of choice, I guess. Like in a democracy, where you can vote whatever candidate you like, except here is with your wallet. Others like dictatures.
Oh, I am no fan of ICE engines, at all. Hate them, personally.
But I know how harmful heavy handed-mandates can be. I have seen the damage such mandates have already made in other instances with voters being then easily recruited and radicalized by populist politicians.
This is a delicate issue, already highly politicized and deeply hypocritical for both sides. Completely curtailing people’s freedoms is not the way to approach it, if you want to change anything.
It's wild to imagine that people would widely violently protest against such a change. Like, I find it pretty amusing to look back at the old news broadcasts of people objecting to allowing women in bars or disallowing drunk driving or requiring cars to come with seatbelts, but those all just feel like they're from a completely different time. If people in this day will espouse similarly intelligent positions, it'll be so interesting.
I guess the problem is electric cars aren't cheap, even in SH market and public transport in some parts of europe and us just sucks. For example I can totally see banning selling ice cars in netherlands, sweeden, norway, israel and other regions with good transportation and richer people, but banning them in us, italy, greece, romania and other similar states (either because they're poor or public transport is bad) is a hard sell
They will become cheap though. As manufacturers move downmarket and the used Ev market grows. Maybe even cheaper than gas in the end - simpler, more reliable etc
One of the most popular cars in Romania (and a lot of EU)is 10k euro Dacia, it has a nice range and can be repaired pretty cheap. if you say electric cars with a somewhat similar range will get that cheap, even sh, well, I hope we'll get that future) For now we have a 12k euro dacia spring, that is heavily subsidized(18k normal price) and with a real range of 100-150km depending on weather and speed, so we have some way to go
Yes and no - the incoming ban will force investment in downmarket EVs, helping make them cheap. If it works as planned then it won’t actually need to be enforced by the time the clock runs out, because EVs will be better all round.
Funny little incentive paradox
If it was cheaper now for people to buy EV over ICE upfront (externalities be damned because "loin des yeux loin du couer" [not like most people buying EV now give a damn about the supply chain for the minerals that go into the batteries...]), there would be very little push back. It's really not that difficult to understand.
First of all, the poster was writing about the legal elimination of an option, which is does not fit such reduction.
Some people value the qualities that the current (pun happened) alternatives do not offer: they are inadequate for some use cases. This includes long travel and refuelling in minutes.
Furthermore, since societies are now suffering an epidemic of lunacy, electric cars can be extreme noise pollutants, because insane manufacturers and users have turned them into a loud cacophonic concert - I have seen them. They can be unbearable.
They also seem to be internet connected in a staggering amount of cases, and many refuse to drive "a smartphone with wheels", or more explicitly a madness with uselessly installed security holes and privacy compromisers. This is especially relevant for The Car, the device that was built for deliverance - "our way to escape", as Karl Kraus said.
> Furthermore, since societies are now suffering an epidemic of lunacy, electric cars can be extreme noise pollutants, because insane manufacturers and users have turned them into a loud cacophonic concert - I have seen them. They can be unbearable.
Well, isn't it then peoples choice to do that? Or do you instead argue for a ban of EVs? I don't get this point.
I've never heard an electric car making more noise than the road noise. Which of course is annoying in itself going at high speeds, but still less than an ICE. What you're describing is absolutely not something of the ordinary. ICEs revving their engine in residential streets, however...
No, you cannot have any freedom to be uselessly bothersome. That is basic in social rules. If you are missing that evidence, it is because societies have become extremely lax (especially in practical and mental effort. It's called a downfall).
> making more noise than the road noise
The topical noise is that which comes from the additional, artificial noises that are placed to warn the surrounding beings of the traffic, as a consequence of the fact that the vehicle would be less noisy because of the absence of the engine.
In a normal car you have the "natural" mechanical noises (hopefully muffled), whereas the lunatics have placed in a number of models a broadcast background sound that you could - if you never heard it - be assimilated to the starting sounds of operating systems in the nineties. Only, permanent during the running of the vehicle. The new noise is not "grey" as it was, but textured, like a chord of synthetic strings.
So, the prospect is of having streets full of running loudspeakers shouting their own unnatural chords. Which also means that even if you decided to live in an isolated spot of land you should not remain less then a few miles away from any street, if legislation and good un-common sense will not intervene.
> I've never heard
I have heard the scream from least two models from stellantis (probably from the same project); I am informed that the Bayern and others have researched sound textures of their own to promote the brand. I also have information that producers have contacted agencies to produce ringtones for their brand. Moreover, I have seen some implement beeps during parking operations - so your city will sound like a giant construction site.
--
Update: some passed by and left a silent note. Confirming the root point! The downfall is restricting people's freedom practically and creates a problem with freedom deontically.
Solutions are chosen for the balance in cost, risks and benefits. Noisy but useful, within boundaries, ok. (Note: some of us are bothered already by motorways miles away when in otherwise isolated woodlands - but we are aware that traffic somehow must flow, and know that we have to select more distant places.)
Electric cars are becoming a massive threat in terms of noise pollution because people have become dumb and passive - cannot perceive and cannot react. The issue is not intrinsic in the technology, but it is part of reality: opportunity for madness + latent madness → disaster.
> not ICE cars
You do not seem to understand: the noise some fools put into electric vehicles is completely different. As in, "not a hum but brass" - where "hum" can be annoying and "brass" will surely be. See my other post nearby.
Important also to consider the degree to which we choose (while improving our own environment) to get others to pollute on our behalf and suffer the consequences - as in the extensive environmental damage caused by lithium and cobalt mining. This is not an argument against EV or renewables by any means but let's ensure we maintain a realistic assessment of all pros and cons. Up to 70% of cobalt is produced in the Congo where up to 200,000 people work for around $3 a day. This is a good wage locally which conveniently translates to an excellent price for us in the West to enjoy clean air cities.
Then explain how polluting and making lots of noise is freedom? Is speed limits imposing on your freedom to drive as fast as you want? Seat belt laws imposing on your freedom to have your kids unsecured in the car? I seriously don't understand this mindset.
Even if we get this high energy density, I'm skeptical about its utility/impact. Right now we are barely able to mine enough lithium for our current batteries, which are used for phones and a few (percent-wise) EVs. As far as I know, and please correct me, we need to increase production by at least 8x for 5-10 rare earth elements in order for everyone to use EVs. Where are these extra rare minerals going to come from?
lifepo4 doesn't require any fancy materials but lithium, less energy dense at the moment, but also doesn't degrade as fast. Panasonic is currently producing ~260Wh/kg batteries for Tesla, so much of the mass market EVs will likely end up with those types of batteries. Looks like lithium production needs to go about 3x at current demand growth, but if cell density goes up, maybe less? Unfortunately this article does seem to be about the li-ion battery tech, but at leas you will need less materials for the same energy.
EDIT: this is for nuclear fuel enriched to 3% in a normal (not breeder) reactor 35000 MJ per 10g pellet
https://whatisnuclear.com/energy-density.html Only a tiny fraction of the total energy is actually used
Iron-air batteries (1,200 Wh/kg), and in general metal-air [1], might bring a surprise after 2024: December 2022, "Form Energy will site first American iron-air battery manufacturing plant in Weirton, West Virginia" [2].
[1] 2017, Yanguang Li, Jun Lu, Metal–Air Batteries: Will They Be the Future Electrochemical Energy Storage Device of Choice?https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00119 Betteridge's law of headlines answers "no", but good overview.
The various "-air" batteries tend to have major downsides...
They tend to get heavier as they discharge. They usually aren't rechargeable (or if they are, only a few times or with much lower energy densities). They tend to self-discharge within a few weeks of non-use.
Yes, there are downsides, as always in engineering, it's a matter of managing the compromises for the current implementation and researching better solutions for the next iteration.
its worse actually for ICE because you are probably only accounting for engine efficiency but there are also transmission losses to the wheel. Further all the 3000 or so component of ICE weight fair bit too. I have not seen any analysis on combine energy to the wheel/Kg comparison between ICE & EVs but I'd bet it gets significantly worse for IC cars even at 500wh/Kg.
Doesn't gasoline habe to (typically) go through carnot efficiency limits though when it combusts?
IIRC, EV motors are 90% efficient with battery power --> road power conversion. A typical ICE engine is, what, 30% efficient and maybe a bit more with good turbo design. So practically gasoline is about 4000 Wh/kg?
Not sure what over 250 Wh/kg means. Wikipedia mentions Specific energy 100–265 Wh/kg and Energy density 250–693 Wh/L quoting papers from 2010/1 and 2016/7 [1]. Other sources mention similar numbers (100-265 Wh/kg or 250-670 Wh/L) [2], although the research is ongoing: "Tesla’s new 4680 cells have an energy density of 272-296 Wh/kg and which is considered very high by current standards" [3].
Thanks for the sources, as said this shows the article is highly suspect if your "maximum theoretical energy density" figure already is beaten by in-the-market devices.
Yes, it would seem preferable to reuse the same energy storage over and over again, as opposed to digging it out of the ground at huge expense, shipping it across the world, and then spreading it out into the environment as a cloud of toxic particles after one use.
You're forgetting to take into account that an electric drivetrain (power electronics and electric motor) is several times more efficient than a gasoline drivetrain (ICE motor and gearbox). It also weighs less.
You do have to lug the battery around even when depleted but electric motors are ~3 times more efficient than combustion engines, so if you got to energy density parity you would still have a much lighter car, all the time.
>This is a little under 2x the density of [the best] current batteries.
[brackets mine]
But the best batteries contain unacceptably high levels of cobalt. Practical EV batteries are made with nickel or iron, maybe vanadium someday, and have lower density than pure LiCoO2.
>CATL is already producing a ton of batteries, lending them some credibility.
A couple of years ago CATL claimed that they had figured out how to make durable sodium-ion batteries with a ferricyanide cathode, to be released in 2023. The press cheered about the end of lithium dependence.
Yesterday, not long before this announcement, it was revealed that CATL's "sodium-ion" battery contains lithium:
"CATL and BYD's sodium-ion batteries to be put into mass production will both be a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries, according to local media."
While I agree that the blurb you quote strongly implies that the sodium-ion batteries contain lithium, I don't think the article itself really says that.
> CATL and BYD's sodium-ion batteries will both be carried in mass-produced vehicles within the year, and they [the vehicle battery packs] will both be a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries, according to a report by local media 36kr today.
By my reading of that, and the rest of the article, it's saying that the vehicle battery will be assembled from of a mix of sodium-ion and lithium-ion battery cells, not that the sodium-ion cells contain lithium.
> With its pioneering AB battery system integration technology, CATL has achieved a mix of sodium ion and lithium ion, allowing them to complement each other and thus increase the energy density of the battery system, Huang said at the time.
Basically, a "battery system" using only sodium-ion cells does not yet have enough energy density to support their range targets, so they are using a mix of cell types to improve the energy density and increase the vehicle range.
Cobalt is practical if you want to make low millions of cars. It ceases to be practical if you want to make a billion cars. There just isn't enough of it readily available to scale.
Your EV probably has the usual NMC or NCA chemistries which have around 10-20% cobalt. I don't know of any car that uses a 100% LiCoO2 cathode — it's just not practical.
Yes, I'm always skeptical whenever battery breakthroughs are announced because it's easy to make a breakthrough in the lab, but almost impossible to transition it into mass production.
This has a lot of potential coming from CATL. However, there is no mention of price. I'm betting this is going to be very expensive.
This is why I generally skip over any "breakthrough" science/tech stories on HN.
News articles on breakthrough discoveries are mostly bullshit and even when they aren't, most of the time they don't affect my life in the slightest because the tech is impractical or expensive.
It may be interesting to read about science discoveries, but I don't want to take the time to sort out the bullshit from what's real just to find out that the breakthrough is irrelevant to me and society at large.
what is your time horizon? not commercialized today == bullshit?
i like these sorts of stories because they have prepared me a bit for some of amazing technology changes i have seen over past decades. by the time i can by an iphone i was at least expecting it. when email hacking stories started appearing in politics, i already knew the details. the first time i bought an electric car was not the first time i had thought about the issues of range and charge speed and so on.
surely not everything that looks promising becomes popular, but that is also useful information, to me, a person whose job is building/helping to build novel systems.
There's also kind of a grey zone in there of "no, I can't buy it, but if I was a major car manufacturer I could." I wish we had access to all the good stuff as retail customers, but that's just not how it is.
(This is especially frustrating on the EV conversion front, since the best parts are usually unobtainable except from salvage vehicles. The products specifically made for EV conversion are usually rather underwhelming compared to what the OEMs can get.)
This is a lot more credible than most of the battery stories, because CATL is already producing a ton of batteries, lending them some credibility.
This is a little under 2x the density of current batteries.