Isn’t this the company where some hedge fund published report on and they have a short position? Until there is no 3rd party testing and independent publications verifying their claims I am not buying anything. I know I sound skeptical but I’ve lost enough money on SPACs.
I’m in no position to review the legitimacy of their report on this company, but their review of IonQ’s technology, a field I have a recent PhD in, is pretty bad. They might be right about the SPAC nonsense and the business aspects— I don’t know. However, it’s clear they’re talking out their asses about the technology.
I know the first author on their uptime report pretty well. He is an honest person. Most of the stuff in this report seems like reasonable concerns (the CEO, Bacon, Preskill, buying from Honeywell) but comparing to Rigetti seems out of place. Quoting from IBM and Google people (some of whom I probably know) seemed a bit much too.
They are a serial short seller. That means they need to retain credibility with their reports to keep their business going. That, combined with general skepticism and a fully-disclosed short position, I think should make it quite easy to fairly evaluate their short-report.
That’s a very generous assessment. You could also consider them to be in the propaganda business, where the mere act of publishing a negative report is more important than the correctness of what’s inside. The latter doesn’t affect their outcomes if the market has already being influenced by the news.
As evidenced by the comment that originated this thread, and currently sits at #1 in this discussion.
You misunderstood parent's point. If you are a serial short seller, you can do "false propaganda" at most once. You can still get things wrong, but you are negatively incentivised to do so because of reputation effects.
I didn't say the report can be false. It just needs to be credible enough to raise the question, mainly to a journalist writing a short article on a 2-hour deadline. The report being challenged by the 1 in 10000 people who actually read it is mostly inconsequential after publishing, when talking about retail investors.
Any claims of correctness / moral righteousness when it comes to short-seller reports, in either direction, will always be fuzzy. It's impossible to avoid the inherent conflict of interest.
It seems to me you are conflating different types of investors that take short positions:
* What you are describing is a form of market manipulation where somebody will take a short position and then have somebody else publish a hit piece on a company. This type of 'investor' definitely exists, but it's relatively rare because it's fraudulent in essence. The timeframe for this type of scheme is short - often only a few hours or days at most.
* Then there are dedicated short funds. Think of them as the opposite of long funds: they don't believe in an increase in value but a devaluation over time (meaning weeks, months, or years). The "conflict of interest" is not different to a long fund, just in the opposite direction. There is a subtype here that focuses solely on what they perceive are fraudulent companies, think Wirecard, Sino-Forest, Nikola, etc.
* Last but not least every long fund will have some sort of short position, simply to hedge 'against the market'. Say you invest into a certain type of industry, then a typical hedge is to short what you perceive is the weakest company in the industry.
Maybe but that’s not where the big money is made. They’d go broke hoping for small movements off low effort journalism. If they got major pieces in the WSJ that could really move the market. But a total scam short seller won’t get that kind of press
I see it as a bit of a chicken and egg situation: you see a company you believe is overvalued, therefore you short it. The problem is that once you do that you become financially motivated to see them fail, even if that wasn't true when you originally shorted them.
I agree with the bias, still there isn't a chicken and egg problem in most cases: You do the research before you take the short position, you only publish the research afterwards. If you are a credible investor, the short position follows from the research, not the other way around.
FWIW last year's activist short presentation[0] dedicated a number of pages to VW, and it seemed that VW mostly wanted the publicity of them doing something sustainable under pressure from German stakeholders (although officially VW declined to comment, and all that info is said to come from employees).
The mainline autos have been praying for a tech jump to close the gap with Tesla.
Since BMW canned their CEO over EV strategy five years ago, all execs at mainline auto have been on notice and been actively pressured as to EV strategy by major investors.
A go-to strategy was to declare plans, but all the economic scaling of those vehicles seemed to come down to 1) solid state becoming viable and 2) OEM battery building supply.
Toyota has blown the solid state deadline a half dozen times already, even when they were pushing Hydrogen (another canary in the coal mine piece of bullshit from a clueless CEO).
So yes, I agree that solid state investment has just been "investor relations" and "CEO job maintenance" tasks, and nothing that really carries water.
I do think the Tesla battery advantage is in trouble now that the Chinese are ramping key LFP/Sodium Ion production with practical densities that will truly power the mainstream EV that will be far under the drivetrain cost of ICE.
I found it odd that they'd publish such a poor track record, so I checked the worst performing position ALLK (-97%). The stock was at 100-ish in December 2019 (their reference), and today it is at 3.22.
Consequently, it seems that the performance that they are reporting is that of the stock, not of their short.
It's highlighting just the opposite - that their short calls are prescient. You're seeing it's all negative because they are betting that those stocks will drop.
I didn’t follow that at all. That page shows the change in stock price for the companies, not the unrealized gain/loss from short positions. That doesn’t tell us how their portfolio has performed, but it suggests they have a good track record of calling losers. What am I missing?
Those aren't negative results on 'short positions', they're the underlying, i.e. taking the short position was a good call. '[Every] single short position is turning a profit'.
I'd agree that's confusing/ambiguous if it weren't for the S&P comparison. ('If we'd taken an equally valued long position in the S&P 500 instead' would be a weird thing to state.)
A few people involved in the industry called out a lot of things they said in that report.
The stock price was insane, but most of the criticism they made of the tech doesn't hold much water. You can find a good video about the report on youtube. See TheLimitingFactor detailed video on the report.
Why did you buy the SPACs? Was it because of the charisma of Chamath?
As for me, when Richard Brandson, a brave and crazy man had the idea of making money from space tourism for example, the whole thing just didn’t make sense: if I go to space, I want the spaceship done by an engineer who doesn’t risk his life, but prefers to automate everything first (SpaceX). I like the idea of perfecting rockets using cargo as a business and only _then_ using them for tourism. With that SPAC I got sceptical of all of them.
> By weight, it offers between 380-500 Wh/kg, as compared to 260 Wh/kg in packages currently used by Tesla.
That's pretty huge if the company's claims hold up. That's in the ballpark where doing an EV conversion on an existing ICE car becomes a lot easier because you could theoretically just replace the original gas tank with 100-200 pounds of batteries and have a good-enough range to be useful for short/medium trips. And the car might end up lighter than stock.
I wonder what the material inputs are? Does this battery use cobalt or nickel or anything else that's similarly expensive? Or can these things in theory be made super cheap once the manufacturing scales up?
It would. Liquid fuels would still have an enormous energy storage to weight ratio advantage, but electric aircraft might become good enough to be practically useful.
I'd imagine there could be military applications too, once the energy density is high enough to be useful. If you have, say, a bunch of tanks that can run off of diesel or batteries, then you can recharge them opportunistically whenever power is available (i.e. if you're defending a city that still has functioning utilities) and save the diesel for when you have to move long distances. Basically, it makes the fuel resupply logistics more flexible, and it reduces costs and climate impact in peacetime if exercises are conducted mainly on batteries.
Reliable utility electricity in a war zone seems unlikely. Though big 'ol power plants make pretty easy and tempting targets (especially if you know your opponent relies on it to drive their vehicles).
This would be a great use case for space-based microwave solar though (if it ever gets off the ground).
Odessa in Ukraine doesn't have gasoline or diesel. They do have electricity though and people with EVs are driving around just fine - even an electric Taxi.
Gasoline distribution points (gas stations) tend to also blow up in a pretty ball of fire when attacked.
An EV can be charged from any socket with working power.
Automated Transport Gliders: Have a blended Wing with Containers, a few of them Batterys, they circle up, fly toward their destination, Land, Replace with Recharged and Go back. Slow, but nearly no downtime and thus interesting.
Small two-seaters maybe. Or slightly bigger aircrafts doing short hops (e.g. island hopping). This is still nowhere near close anything that could be used on big commercial planes.
LFP will hit 260 wh/kg, with superior cell-to-pack density, no cobalt/nickel/manganese AFAIK. That is the 350-500 mile range cars and anything shorter.
Sodium Ion will hit 160 wh/kg so that's the 200-300 mile city cars, and no need to even source Lithium. And grid storage.
I haven't done the napkin math, but the high-density LFP should also be the 100 mile range PHEV, which would solve the middle america / rural Africa/Siberia/etc range issues.
That Li-S paper that went through HN about a month ago will probably do those densities, so that would supplant SSB, and would probably (speculating here) drop into existing battery factories more seamlessly.
The drop-in conversions would be a huge boon though, I just don't think SSB will get there soon enough.
SSBs would probably still be able to rule mobile/laptops though, still a big market.
Totally agree. There aren't even completed pilot plants for SSBs. There is nearly 0% chance they will be a majority of the market by 2030. LFP batteries are being made today and even small yearly improvements to energy density will be enough nearly all cars by 2030. Sodium Ion is just coming to market and they look great for grid storage. For transportation CATL is proposing hybrid lithium ion and sodium ion packs to solve some energy density and voltage problems with sodium ion alone.
The increased density seems like it might create cooling, and hence lifetime issues, is lifetime on solid state batteries well known yet?
Also, as a resident of an area that gets very hot, does anyone do a good job at self cooling besides tesla packs? Last I heard the leaf lost capacity very quickly in places like Phoenix.
Essentially every other EV maker uses temperature regulation on batteries. Ex: BMW i3 uses A/C evaporator coils in the battery. Chevy Bolts run a coolant plate in the battery that is heated/cooled as appropriate. Nissan Ariyas have a coolant loop in the battery. Ford Mustang Mach-Es run a coolant plate in the battery (actually nigh identical to the Bolt). VW ID.4s use a coolant plate.
Battery don't just innovate on density. They also innovate on how much heat they produce and how they are cooled.
> is lifetime on solid state batteries well known yet?
We need to get away from the term 'solid state' battery. There is not one 'solid state' battery. Just as with Li-Ion there is a massive difference between different versions.
But for non of those batteries we have real live use in large uses-cases like cars.
QS in particular promises pretty good lifetime but they also don't report all the data many people would want to see.
Maybe... depends where weight is added and removed, and how much. Most cars aren't particularly prone to flip in the first place, and a few hundred pounds probably won't make a huge difference. (ICE cars vary in weight depending on whether the gas tank is full or empty, and it's generally not an issue.)
I've heard that having more than 50% of the weight on the rear wheels is dangerous because if you lose traction on a corner it's the rear wheels that would lose their grip first, which is hard to recover from, whereas if the front wheels slip first it's more self-correcting.
a.k.a it'll handle like garbage. You can also just put the appropriate springs in for the after-swap weight instead of adding a bunch of dead mass that will reduce range
My understanding is that QuantumScape are far from the only company working on solid-state lithium-ion batteries, and that they are widely expected to be ready for production at some point around 2023-2028. I don't think they're using especially exotic materials. The challenges seem to be in getting the manufacturing process right.
I wasn't being sarcastic, but I don't think the author is stupid and I don't need to beat it into the ground. The phrasing and logic was just weird to me, I don't think it's viable at all if you need to replace the entire insides of the car + paying somebody to do it. It will surely be in the same ballpark to just buy a new electric car.
Batteries are often the hardest part of a conversion, because you need to find a place to put them. The motor can be relatively straightforward, especially if you can just pull out the engine and replace it with a motor using the appropriate adapter and keep the rest of the drivetrain as-is. (CanEV makes bell-housing motor adapters and driveshaft-to-flywheel couplers for a wide range of vehicles.)
A lot of stuff you can just tear out, and that's pretty easy. Exhaust, gas tank, probably the radiator, and so on.
EV conversions don't make financial sense right now because it's usually about $20,000 worth of parts plus a lot of labor to design and build a one-of-a-kind thing. That could change, though. All it would take is some big manufacturer to produce a low-cost kit to convert a common vehicle to an EV, with proper integration into all the existing systems so you can just plug stuff in and have it work. If you don't have to do any structural modifications to the original car and it's just a matter of swapping parts, I could imagine something where a typical mechanic could do an EV conversion in a week or less. And that would be a huge shift. Maybe EV conversion could start to be an economically-sensible thing to do. Most people who want a new car would just buy a new car, but it would be good to have more options available.
Easy is relative. I recently bought a used bicycle whose owner switched to electric. He said he initially looked into a conversion, but the quote he got was in the 1500-2000 range which was pretty much the same cost of the same model just electric. So it was a no-brainer to get a new one. Now, you can get solid conversion kits for under a 1000, and it's a bike so it's much simpler than a car, and therefore actually kind of easy, but what the bike shop wanted was to make money for their time and they of course take the responsibility that it actually works correctly and all of this costs money. And you can do it yourself if you can, but most people wouldn't bother for a bike, let alone a car.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why I think this is not very realistic. But of course people can try and succeed if they want and are able to, no harm there.
I think if the parts were cheap and no special engineering was required, there would be a lot more people doing conversions. (And a lot of local shops that would do it for you if you paid them.) New EVs might outnumber converted EVs 100:1, but even that would be huge. Right now hardly anyone does it because it's super hard and pretty expensive. It just doesn't make financial sense.
(I'm currently in the process of converting a Mazda RX-8, using a Netgain Hyper9 in place of the original engine with the transmission kept as-is, and about 400 pounds or so of lithium iron phosphate batteries.)
You do need a battery and the rest of the electronics too. But it's only a matter of time when you start seeing 100% drop-in replacements for classic cars.
Phones lie about being at 95-100% charged, because it's bad to keep charging them when at 100%, it stops, waits for it to go down over hours, and charges again.
But then people complain it's not charged to 100% even though they left it charging all night, and because it's easier to lie to people than teach them stuff, they lie.
In old Android phones you could even get those additional 3% by unplugging at 100%, seeing the battery immediately go to 97% and then plugging again. My old Galaxy S4 Mini would even report 94% in such cases - I originally found out about this due to this discrepancy.
The iPhone gives you more of a "gas tank" indicator, as in that 1% charge left is actually closer to 10-15%. Same with 100% - hell knows how much it really is.
If you do that, it skews all of your figures for "kwh per kg" and "kwh per m3". I'd suggest that those are far more important figures of merit for design of electric aircraft and vehicles.
You may have meant this ironically/sarcastically, but it is entirely true. I'm a very happy owner of a fast-charging EV6. For longevity, slow overnight charging almost always just goes to 80%. I only need about 25% of the pack for my daily commute, and lithium battery degradation is dominated by time at high state-of-charge and temperature.
For road trips, the battery charges up to 80% capacity in about 18 minutes on a fast charger (with some caveats when its cold). Charging rate rapidly falls off with increasing state-of-charge, so you're almost always better off just hitting the road at that point. But since you don't actually discharge all the way down to zero, the fast charge cycle realistically only takes 12-15 minutes. The only times that I've taken it to 100% (125%!) were immediately prior to a road trip segment on the overnight slow charger, or for a quarterly balancing charge.
That's all with today's technology on a commercially available product. So this technology can only offer an incremental decrease in weight and/or increase in range.
For comparison, a Hyundai Ioniq 5 (or Kia EV6) charges from 10% to 80% in eighteen minutes on an 800v capable charger.
Other 800v cars are similarly fast: Audi e-Tron, Porsche Taycan, Lucid. Polestar has announced they're going 800v in 2024. GM's Ultium platform already uses 800v (currently just the Hummer, but expect them to rapidly release more truck and SUV models based on Ultium.)
Tesla has been snoozing for 3+ years on charging tech, and now their 400v architecture is inferior to what Hyundai, Kia, and GM offer. General Motors offers better charging tech than Tesla.
The world's largest automakers are (successfully) gunning for Tesla. Not a good time for Musk to be distracted, fucking around with a social media company...
Hyundai and Kia max out around 230kw, Taycan maxes out around 270kw but can't sustain it for very long, but Lucid is actually able to hit 300kw.
Tesla is maxed out at 250kw for all models (3,Y,S,X) but they are working on increasing charging speeds on their V3 superchargers later this year: rumored to be 325kw. So I would say they are very much competitive with the rest of the industry and their better drive-train efficiency means you still get more added range per minute than all other EVs (except Lucid)
The only problem, at least here in Sweden, is the lack of fast chargers and the quality of those that exist. Most places have cheap to free 20KW chargers, 50KW are easy to find but 120KW and up requires you to travel a few kilometers or more and possibly stand in a queue.
Add to that the fact that those optimistic numbers are in perfect conditions, a preheated battery and the stars aligning perfectly in the sky that day- I rarely get even close to the advertised numbers.
A charging comparison between the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Audi e-tron GT (same platform as the Taycan), Audi e-tron 55, and a Tesla Model 3 Long Range: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gxcukAhIAU
Those non-Tesla speed numbers are only at certain rare chargers.
Remember Volkswagen Group hacking their own emissions tests? Reminds me of that.
Good luck traveling and finding those speeds. It’s more like “oh look we have an existence proof of a handful of fast chargers but none where you are going…” well, OK. I’d rather have a well built out network.
The finishing order was Porsche Taycan, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Tesla Model X, Tesla Model 3, Ford Mustang Mach-e.
As ever, your mileage may vary.
> I’d rather have a well built out network.
Then what you want is CCS chargers with all brands of EV being able to charge at all brands of charger. Europe's leading the way on this. Most EVs use CCS in Europe (even Tesla).
Tesla is yet to switch to CCS in North America. Maybe they will soon.
I would not trust that event to be a fair assessment.
The organizer does sponsorships with auto companies, and I can’t tell whether this was sponsored by Porsche, but, from his behavior, it seems like it was… seeing more and more of this on YouTube lately and it’s often not clearly disclosed.
The website mentions transparency, but I really don’t see any transparency here, although I will admit I have not been able to locate any fine print revealing the nature of the relationship with Porsche. The site basically just has a contact button and not much else. It looks not very transparent so I’d be wary.
And they had highly uncharacteristic issues with the Tesla superchargers during the trip, which possibly could have been known in advance, as part of the set up to tilt the board against Tesla by choosing this time to travel that route.
I stopped by a local Electrify America charger today just out of curiosity, and there was no 350 charger there, only 150. And usually there is only one 350 station if any. The nearby Supercharger in the same parking lot (though not open yet, still roped off) is 250 x 16 stations… kind of an overwhelming advantage there, one that can only be overcome by paid sponsored events that aim to plant false perceptions.
Even so, when we do get CCS for Tesla, that is yet another piece of good news for Tesla, because then we will have even more charging options over and above having the best Supercharger network, so the Porsche team will do well to get good at buying publicity.
Don’t be confused, I’m not saying all this to gloat, but more to say you should think twice before spending money on a competing car if you are relying on sketch events for data points.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not convinced you know what you're talking about either.
Tesla is already CCS in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, etc. The European Tesla charging stations are already opening to all brands of EV.
The US is behind but eventually it will catch up. It's just a function of the US EV market being one third the size of the European EV market. Money will go to the bigger markets first and then the smaller markets will follow.
All brands being on the same charging standard is a good thing. You can fuel any brand of ICE vehicle at any brand of fueling station and you should be able to charge any brand of EV at any brand of charging station. Anything less than that just makes EVs worse.
You make bizarre unfounded claims that there's some anti-Tesla, pro-Porsche conspiracy afoot purely because you can't handle the idea that two CCS cars out-road tripped two Teslas, and you think you know something? This thread has gone absolutely nowhere.
You don't need to bless my heart. You need to cultivate some perspective.
Musk's announced that Superchargers will have a CCS connector in some way (separate CCS cable or adapter that plugs onto the top of the Tesla connector).
I thought it was odd that you claimed those chargers are rare, turns out they are - in the US.
According to [0], there are only a few 350kW chargers in the US, mostly in the Northeast. If you look at the same map in Europe, they're pretty common on long-distance travel routes.
I wonder why this is? Is it related to US electrical infrastructure? I know in much of Europe it's common to have 3-phase electricity at home, for example.
I have a Porsche Taycan, and while it can charge 250kw/h, it only last for a few minutes. On average fast charging from 20% to 80% takes 30-45 minutes. This is with a heated battery and on Ionity network.
Hyundai/Kia Ioniq 5/EV6 can do 10%-80% in 18 mins now (with sustained peak charging 235kw between 10%-45%). I guess this is a small step forward, but certainly not a breakthrough.
"That which the large print giveth, the fine print taketh away." In this case however, the charging time details haven't altered my user experience in any way. Real-world charging stops really are in the 12-15 minute range for us.
Absolutely. I didn't mean to say "the charging is actually bad", just that I found it more nuanced than the headline number.
I really like the colourful chart they have showing different charging speeds between different charge points. Thanks to that I think I'll probably try to charge 20-80% most of the time.
I'm used to thinking about it like a phone, which is always charged to 100%, but I think with the car I'd rather keep it to 60% or so for day to day driving around town and only take it to 80% or 100% for longer trips.
I'm going to try doing these measurements for my own car though, since the article was based on a prototype.
Very curious about how much difference that 15m takes, and presumably there are at least some studies. A 15m charge to use the restroom, check Instagram, buy a coffee feels very doable in a way that 30m feels like a drag, and more than twice the effort.
These cars have ranges around 400 miles / 600 km, and EV owners normally charge them at home regularly.
Cold weather or non-economical driving may reduce that a bit, but you are unlikely to need to stop to charge in any given day before driving 200-300 miles (300-450km).
If you plan to go another 200+ miles, a 30 minute break may be welcome at that point. Or if you're caught just 50 miles or so from home, just charging 5-10 mins should let you reach your home charger.
Anyway, for normal commute driving, most people rarely need to charge away from home. These stations are for longer trips, that most people do only a handful of times per month.
Agreed but imho it's not just about how long it is for one person. If a significant amount of people start needing to charge we are going to need more throughput at charging stations.
Long congestion delays could occur trying to charge on long trips during holidays. Daily driving is less of a problem since most people can charge at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfUJCWRFjig
In Finland McDonalds has been installing 350kW chargers at their locations for a few years now.
It's pretty much the perfect ___location, the car usually charges faster than you can wolf down your Big Mac and fries.
The big super market chains are the other big player, they're taking customers from (overpriced) gas stations. It's usually a 5-10 minute detour to get to the local mega-mart and they have cafes and restaurants in there anyway - without the gas station markup.
> but they are hamstrung by a max grid connection of 350kW
And with good reason, there aren't many power grids particularly along long roads where you can simply plug in more than half a megawatt of consistent (!) load and everything continues to work as-is.
The sorry state of many power grids is keeping actually smart load management, EV, solar/wind/other renewable power generation and wildfire safety back so hard it hurts.
I'm not sure that is really a problem of 'sorry state of power grid'. Its more like 'rapidly changing requirements'.
5 years ago, most rural lines were supporting homes and businesses with 200amp panels (and oversubscribed, since not everyone pulls all those amps at the same time). Complaining the grid isn't ready is like putting a gas power plant in the middle of no-where, and complaining that the only nearby gas main between two towns is too small to run the 700MW power plant.
Tesla can work around this by larger battery banks, or solar arrays to help recharge the battery bank faster. (they own companies that produce both). And in spots where they often can't keep up with demand, work with the power companies to get more power delivered.
15 minutes still sounds like a very long time to me, compared to fueling a gasoline vehicle (I rarely use the restroom, check Instagram, or buy a coffee, or do anything else when I do this). I'm typically back on the road in under 5 minutes.
True, but 15 min still feels into the "small break, mild inconvenience" vs 30 min that feels like a real full stop and rest for the car to charge.
Potentially you could also just stop for 5 or 10 mins for a partial charge? 15 mins gets you to 80%, but arguably 5-10 mins might give you enough juice to very comfortably get where you need to go.
I know when I forget to charge my phone before heading out, those 5-10 min charge I squeeze before heading out might mean the difference between having battery at the end of the day, or not.
When you primarily charge at home, I'd imagine the need to charge somewhere else most likely to happen after a couple hours of driving, in which case a 15 minute break sounds like a good idea anyway.
We did a road trip like this over spring break. Our last day included 700 miles of driving. Drive for 1.5-2 hours, charge for 12-15 minutes, driver swap, and go. It was easily the best road trip experience of my life. Looking back at the stupid exhausted crap I put myself through in my younger days I can only shake my head.
Same here, also UK. Yes stops at public charging stations are longer than stops at petrol stations, but then I pretty much never "fill up" outside of home. So I have already saved hours and hours that would have been spent on filling up a normal petrol car - if I now have to go and wait 30 minutes at a rapid charger, that's still an overall massive saving compared to an ICE.
Sure, and I'd argue that 15m can seem like more than 3x longer than 5m does for just this reason. I don't think the minutes and perceived convenience scale linearly
Think about it this way: with a gas vehicle you wait 5 minutes to refuel maybe once a week, so that's 4+ hours wasted per year. But with an electric vehicle that charges primarily at home you would recharge outside home maybe once every 2 months, so at 15 minutes per charge that's only 1.5 hours wasted per year.
You also are forced to go to the gas station regardless of whether you go on road trips, so it's probably a wash. Can't remember the last time I went to one.
You sound single. And oh so proud of how you have mastered pumping gas.
On a trip from San Jose to LA we stop once to charge for 10 minutes, arriving with plenty of charge to spare. I’m not too worried about the “extra” five minutes, which we can make good use of.
Yes, it can easily do this hundreds of times with minimal loss of capacity (e.g. 5%) so long as temperature is well controlled, but depth of discharge is not really 0% (fully discharged) and it's not really 80% (fully charged).
They're made of of many hundreds of cells at different charge points, but likely 10-20% is as discharged as you're likely to get (without leaving the vehicle sitting for weeks on end) and 80% is as charged as you'll get. They have traded power density for lifetime and "charging rate".
Hundreds of times for an appliance like a car that should last 20+ years is absolutely dreadful. Plenty of people go through a gas of tank a week. A single year is 52 full charges. 5 years already puts it well above 250 charges.
With typical EV workloads you'd only do this type of fast charging on a roadtrip or similar. The remaining time you'd be charging at home at much lower rates.
Not to say there aren't people who only charge at superchargers, but as L2 availability increases I imagine that will be less and less common.
Most people live in apartment buildings, with tens of cars around the same building. I doubt at-home charging will be easy to scale - at the very least this would require major grid redesigns in most cities.
people don't generally park their cars on the 8th floor. They park them in a parking lot, so that's where you would put the outlets. Power grids will have to expand to deal with the excess demand, but the transition to electric vehicles is happening slowly, so there's plenty of time to do so. Also, since electric vehichles are basically just giant batteries, they pair very well with solar and wind power. As solar power makes up a larger percentage of total power generation, it will become much cheaper to charge vehicles during the day when most of them are sitting in office parking lots. This will significantly reduce the "duck curve" problem, and make solar power even more effective than it currently is.
Most people probably wouldn’t require every charge to be fast this though. Many slow charging options, which do not put as much strain on the batteries, exist for the home and the workplace.
One tank of gas amounts to around 700km.
After 5 years it would amount to ~175.000km. This car will most likely not live for 20 years without mayor replacements and repairs.
Not sure which car you've been using but cars have been getting quite reliable.
I have a 2001 BMW 330i that's on around 363k miles (~580,000km) and still running the original factory drivetrain. The only parts replaced so far are wear parts in suspension and brakes (common with EVs) and some coolant pipes (probably also needed in EVs).
????? At 175 000 km, you're barely getting into the "old" territory. I've driven cars that had 350k and were still doing fine. The only major replacement you should have had by then is changing the timing belt. And even then, some cars have a timing chain that just straight up doesn't break.
Yeah... My priority would be to have a 10-20kwh (for 2-3) days of use battery at home (which needs to do 3000+ cycles) charged via solar and then recharge the car slowly overnight.
Time to charge to 80% is less important than time to charge to X kWh though. Given the storage to weight ratio of this battery is supposed to be much higher, even if it took the same time to charge to 80%, it would take less time to charge to a given range.
Well, the face value of a doubled range is that you may need only half of it. An eight minute charge to 47% instead of fifteen minutes to 80%. That's comparable to an ICE.
They do, but it their range still sounds daunting for someone who does not want multiple cars, and still wants the ability to do long range trips. Especially in places where charging infrastructure isn't great.
+80% range is probably a place where that argument is no longer relevant as it outranges most ICE cars.
An EV can probably cover 99,9% of trips made in densely populated areas. Very few trips are 350km roundtrip.
I’ve had EV’s for the past four years and we rent an ICE when we’re going on ski trips and such.
The continued saving on gas more than pays for it.
If renting a car wasn't such a PITA that would be somewhat tolerable.
You book a car, get to the rental place (only open 8am-5pm), and wait for 30 minutes while the one counter person working helps other people trying to pick up their cars. They get around to you, and they don't have the car you reserved. They try to upsell you on a larger car. You have to fool around with inspecting the car and noting any damage. If you miss anything, you fear they might try to charge you for it. You spend 15 minutes on other paperwork. They try to sell you all kinds of extra insurance. Finally, after about an hour, you're driving out in a car.
Sufficient for certain markets and applications, but less weight and volume is always better.
Less energy to accelerate, and smaller motors, lower powered drive electronics, and less demand on the battery (and the less current you draw from a battery, the lower the internal resistance losses, so weight really does matter.)
It's better for roads, for one; heavier vehicles, with higher ground pressure, chew up roads faster. More weight means longer stopping distances and less handling capability for the same amount of tire (and you can't just slap bigger, stickier tires on. Efficiency plummets) so this relates to safety. And mass mattes in a crash, too. Drivers are stunningly good at crashing into all manner of stationary objects. I suspect as EVs get more popular we're going to see much more serious car vs building crashes, for example.
The market for an EV eighteen wheeler explodes once you surpass the range a driver can legally drive in one day (you need more because otherwise there's a huge efficiency loss if the driver has to stop early in order to get a charge before running out of range, even if he's got the time logbook-wise. Ideally he's charging the rig while sleeping, though.)
Work trucks like the Sierra HD or F250/F350/F450's, etc. can't yet be replaced because giving them the equivalent battery capacity would result in a truck with a fraction of its normal cargo and towing capacity.
The livery industry can't really use EVs because charging stations are too far apart and too unreliable and too unavailable; while the range might be relatively close to a typical towncar's for a single tank of gas, obviously a towncar can be refilled in under 5 minutes from a fuel source almost anywhere along where it needs to go, with little wait for a free pump.
Performance car segment - right now EVs are only seen in GT class cars and sedans. Lots of people like lightweight, responsive vehicles (Miata, BR-Z, "hot hatches", etc) and you can't do that with current battery tech.
In vehicles made on platforms not fully committed to an EV powertrain, the battery ends up eating up passenger compartment space, cargo space, or ground clearance. Handling is more stable due to lower Cg, but less capable due to a pretty massive increase in weight. So: minivans, cargo vans, passenger cars...
Unsure why I'm downvoted. What I meant was: Yes, energy density would be nice to improve, but is not what is stopping people buying EVs currently.
Imagine if they halved in cost but kept the same energy density. Yes, driving 1 tonne of batteries sucks, but I'd gladly do it versus my current polluting ICE, if the appropriate vehicle was available at an appropriate price.
EVs have enough range but many get there with lots of batteries which are heavy. This reduces the eMPG of something like the bmw i4 or vw id4 to 80 (vs. 130 for Tesla model 3) which reduces their efficiency advantage over IC cars.
The article is pretty ambiguous. They say the energy density is doubled vs Tesla, and then then they compare the charge rates. They never indicate the capacity of the 15 minute charge. What exactly are they comparing.
Okay, the battery needs to be heated significantly during use, so it's only applicable for larger vehicles. But still, seems to be further ahead in the product development cycle.
"We continue to target delivery of A-sample cells to at least one customer in 2022. The A sample is planned to have dozens of layers and is intended to demonstrate the core functionality of the battery cells." That's moderately encouraging. It's better than the usual "we got this new surface chemistry result, huge revolution real soon now."
As with too many battery articles, this is either a huge deal or total bullshit.
(Electrek should have a monthly column: "1, 5 and 10 years ago in battery press releases.")
> The QuantumScape battery charges at blazing speeds, allowing a 0-80% charge in 15 minutes. It can retain more than 80% of its capacity after 800 cycles, which would represent about 240,000 miles (386,000 km) traveled in an electric car.
Note that it is extremely carefully worded. It retains 80% capacity after 800 cycles, but those cycles are not 15 minutes cycles! I am not making this up, QuantumScape themselves say this. If you check their presentation, 80% capacity after 800 cycles was measured at 1 hour cycles. Of course they don't highlight it, but it's there. Inquiring minds want to know what happens after 800 cycles of 15 minutes.
1h so it's "fully charged" (which would be the normal best way to measure it in a standard way, full to deplete number of cycles) or 1h for that 80% capacity instead of those 15 min, effectively slow charging and not full cycles (which would def count as fudging the metrics or at least the headline on my book)?
Effectively slow charging. Extremely sketchy in my opinion. They may not be technically lying, but they certainly intend to lead you to wrong conclusion.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but what are the moving parts that make normal lithium ion batteries not solid state?
Phones and laptops don't make any noticeable movement sounds when they charge, but I have noticed that my Tesla will produce some random knocking sounds when supercharging. Are these the kinds of moving parts that solid state batteries would remove?
In this case solid state refers to replacing the electrolyte gel with a solid material. That gel can move out of the way as dendrites grow within the cell causing short circuits between the anode and cathode layers.
The sound your car makes when charging are temperature control stuff (fans, valves, cooling pumps etc). "solid state" for batteries isn't opposed to moving stuff, but liquid stuff.
* First, although they are claiming every aspect of this battery is quite a bit better, the key variable missing is price.
* Interesting that $1 billion investment, partially by Qatar Investment Authority. It seems the oil states may be realizing things are changing. It might also incentive them to get on board with electrification.
Oil states are investing in anything that isn’t oil since basically forever. They are very conscious their luck is finite and that they need to transform their huge capital into an income for when the day will come.
That’s why they invest in luxury tourism, sports, new technologies… in fact, they have basically no interest into investing into oil related things. Their interest is that /others/ invest in it.
Another issue is recycle-ability. For the current generation of battery technology there are tested methods for close to complete recycling of the whole battery and plans for scaling it up.
For solid state there's not even a theoretical solution for how to recycle.
The price is set by the market, not by the manufacturer.
This means that they won't really know the price until they find somebody willing to buy it. Before that it is just guesswork. If it costs more to produce then people are willing to spend then it won't last very long.
Which means "First commercially viable" part of the title is a bit of marketing propaganda wank. It might be or might not be commercially viable. This isn't something that gets to be decided by the manufacturer.
This is incorrect. The manufacturer can set a high price and target a high margin part of the market in exchange for lower demand.
It is not in the best interests of any business outside of a commodities producer to produce at absolute top volume and keep lowering price until demand absorbs it all.
>Which means "First commercially viable" part of the title is a bit of marketing propaganda wank.
Not necessarily. If they are confident they can build it in volume at a cost equal to or less than existing batteries, then by definition they are justified in calling it commercially viable.
I think one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is actually being able to make produce a product. Because as many many have said before, prototypes are easy, mad production is where the problems lie.
They don't tell anything how fast were those 800 charges. No info on the weight (energy density) or the discharge rate, or if it has exotic materials used. No info on the capacity degradation (it won't be linear), either.
One fishy quote: They also increase unwanted reactions between the ==electrolyte== and the lithium, speeding up battery failure. How is that solid state, or it's just general info
The QuantumScape battery charges at blazing speeds, allowing a 0-80% charge in 15 minutes. It can retain more than 80% of its capacity after 800 cycles, which would represent about 240,000 miles (386,000 km) traveled in an electric car.
This is the quote. If it's one hour charge, i.e. 1C, lifepo4 batteries do that already.
> (And don't show them to me or tell me what they are, 'cause then it's triple damages.)
I'm not sure that's an accurate description of the law. The patent laws authorize a court to increase the damages in patent infringement lawsuits up to
three times the amount found or assessed. This is known as the “treble damages” award. A decision to increase damages is discretionary with the court, but is usually exercised only in cases of willful and wanton infringement or bad faith litigation. Fortunately, an increase in damages is inappropriate when an infringer mounts a good faith and substantial challenge to the validity of the patent or the existence of infringement.
Can you show me the case that made you feel the triple damages were unfair?
I kind of feel like you're trying to say X or Y battery patent is not fair or justified. But without specifics, I fear that's far too broad. If someone spent billions on lithium chemistry research, then I'd say they should have the monopoly right to monetize their achievements/discoveries (if any) for a reasonable period. If there's no payoff, then nobody will gamble on it and we'll all be worse off with a stagnant battery industry.
> I'm not sure that's an accurate description of the law.
When I worked at Microsoft we were explicitly forbidden from looking at any software patents, Just To Be Safe.
Kind of defeated the entire idea of patents being published to help improve innovation. Basically other company's patents were treated like poison that were to be avoided looked at at all cost.
If you read the history of patents during the industrial revolution, inventors would come up with incremental improvement after incremental improvement over existing patents. The system worked as designed.
That feedback cycle is non-existent with software patents.
> I kind of feel like you're trying to say X or Y battery patent is not fair or justified.
Actually no - I'm more concerned about who owns the patents to the pre-existing technologies that the batteries depend on.
'Commercially Viable' to me means that the technology can be mass produced within acceptable bounds of fault tolerance at a price that will allow the final product to sell at profitable margins.
What it does not say is that the company isn't going to get sued by some patent hoarding snake in the grass.
It was flippant (and damned near off-topic), but it stems from my dismissive notion of the very idea of wilful infringement.
What other legitimate form of infringement could there be?
Accidental plagarism certainly exists, but I'd imagine that a fairer punishment there would be either an injunction of sale and distribution, or a fair and reasonable licensing fee.
Not being sued into oblivion for something that at most caused minimal damage.
But beyond that - I imagine rare case - the vast majority of non wilful infringements are the result of the independent derivation of ideas.
And I simply don't see how a patent system can justify prohibiting someone from using their own ideas - regardless of whether or not someone else had them first.
Yet another revolutionary new battery. Graphene batteries, liquid salt batteries, etc etc.
My dad has a popular mechanics do it yourself encyclopedia from the 1950s and it has several articles of new battery technologies in the works that will be available in a few months, just you wait and see.
For my entire life, new batteries have been just around the corner to replace lithium ion, every 12 to 18 months, one of these articles come out.
At this point, I will believe them when I see them on store shelves and not one second before.
You may be a little overly cynical. The first commercial lithium ion battery only went into production in 1991, we actually have made a hell of a lot of progress since the 1950’s.
You must be very young, I remember when mobile phones had Ni-Cd batteries and it was very bad (you could even casually destroy your battery by charging it incorrectly!).
Li-Ion felt like a huge revolution, and the improvements it had since its introduction on the smartphone market are incredible too.
My slim and lightweight pocket supercomputer has a battery comparable to a huge power bank I had 10 years ago. If that's not revolutionary, I don't know what is.
It's about the size of a VHS cassette and holds 95Wh (Maximum for airplane travel). This thing could power a dumbphone for months and it's half the size of the ye olde luggable phones.
I would say the big difference now is incentive. Lithium Ion batteries are the biggest bottleneck to mass EV adoption. With every car company going Electric, it's a very pertinent problem to solve. You can't really get "Gen2" Electric Vehicles without this tech.
Since the 1950s battery energy density has improved by orders of magnitude, it has been happening and is still happening. Hasn’t stopped these incessant cynical takes though.
very importantly, this mentions it's a "encouraging proof of concept", the original article made it seem as if this was going to hit the shelves next month.
It's a Problem I see with a lot of blogspam articles - when it comes to battery tech, cures for $disease, discovery of "earth-like" planets, etc - they all make it look like they're about to hit shelves. But more often than not it's only in laboratory conditions, it's extrapolating a "what if" from a scientific paper, commercially unviable, or even straight up grifts trying to sell a patent or trying to get bought out by a big company like Tesla.
I wish I could filter these very hypothetical links from HN somehow. At least the comments will point out the shared links are not the source and will link to better resources.
That's why I generally don't trust any news on these topics unless very thoroughly verified.
@ everyone on these topics: Curb your enthusiasm. It's probably not going to happen. All of these "breakthroughs" have so far had one or more deal breaking down sides.
I think we will be seeing more of this sort of news, I wondered how some university bods have got on since their last expose in the media with their endeavours because they had solved the fast charging heat problem which turns batteries into plastic explosives. Last I heard they were trying to get the process commercialised in a factory setting.
So I think we will be seeing more of this type of news now, which is good because who doesn't like the acceleration of electric motors in vehicles if the weight can be kept down?
I've been following Quantumscape for a while. The reason they come up in conversations about solid state batteries a lot is because they regularly report on where they are as a company and because they are quite a bit further than a proof of concept. That's what they had a few years ago. At this point they are scaling the engineering of increasingly more complex battery samples and testing the hell out of those.
Basically, they've been ramping up sample production for some time and have shipped battery samples to customers like Volkswagen who have independently verified their claims and are a major investor. In the last year they've upped the ambition level in terms of the number of layers in the battery, the number of charging cycles under conditions that would stress any battery, etc. They've been reporting steady progress every few months more or less on the previously announced schedule that they were planning to do so.
Their near future plans involve a small test factory that is due to come online next year with small numbers of vehicles on the road by 2024/2025 time frame. Realistically volume production of this would not kick off until closer to the end of this decade. They've actually done a great job of managing expectations around what they do.
Full disclosure: I bought some stock last year in this company and it dropped about 50% in value since then. So, not great. I'm holding onto the shares because I believe they are actually under valued currently. To me it looks like they have a high chance of getting to the market first with a working product that should deliver impressive safety, energy density, and charging speeds. I don't know of other solid state battery companies that are that close to having a market ready product. They have customers lining up (several major car brands). A healthy amount of liquidity to build factories and do more testing. And there's going to be a market for their batteries if they manage to ship working products. So far, everything I've heard about this company suggests that things are proceeding more or less as planned and that they remain on track to do hit their targets over the next few years. But I may have to wait a few years before that translates into the massive share price increase I'm expecting. It's a gamble and I don't recommend others to gamble. But I feel good about this one.
Sandy Munro interviewed the CEO a few months ago on his Youtube channel. Worth a watch.
I can be proven wrong, but I suspect that solid state won't be price viable for a long time.
LFP and sodium ion chemistries are improving to an economic sweet spot that solid state may not be able to compete in without a lot of scaling and risk.
LFP at 230-260 wh/kg will probably be able to handle all the Tesla ranges of 300-400 mile packs, especially given their reduced need for heat management so their cell-to-pack densities are higher.
Sodium Ion at 150-200 wh/kg will be even cheaper than LFP, and can probably handle the 200-300 mile range EV, which will probably handle 90% of consumer transport in high density cities in China, India, Europe, Latin America, and other places.
Solid State will then be competing for high-end applications (well, there is still semis/heavy transport, but LFP may be good enough for that too). I don't think it is good enough for air transport. Li-S may beat it out economically as well.
But options are always good, and there will be lots of room for different flavors of batteries.
Thank you both for this detailed summary and declaration of your bias.
"Near future plans involving a small test factory" means they're about 10 steps further along than most articles about new battery tech. There's still another 10 steps to go before it affects my life though (one measure of "volume production").
Seems like you have been 'scamed' by the 'solid state' hype.
What matters is what the price is for most applications. And when you are actually competing on specs, silicon additives to current anodes batteries can achieve many of the same specs.
And silicon additives can easily be added to existing giga-factories. While QS will need to invest 10s of billions if they want to match that.
In my opinion by 2028 existing battery factories will spit out batteries with the specs QS claims at a lower price.
Whenever a stock goes 10x, it starts with a lot of people that say that will never happen. Including most of the stock market. Hence the low valuation and the potential for that to change. At the same time, investors like Volkswagen that know a thing or two about the market seem to be happy to poor in lots of money to Quantumscape. The market and VW can't both be right. One of them is probably very wrong.
My bet last year was that the stock will go up and I don't think I'm being completely irrational. But I'll readily admit to this being somewhat of a gamble.
Your analysis merely shows that you don't see the value of a battery with roughly 2x the energy density, 2x the charging times, that is also a bit safer to use. I don't think it's going to be that easy for other companies to simply catch up without a lot of R&D. They'll want to but it's not exactly easy. Also, I think 2x is a really conservative lower bound. People have been talking higher factors for some of the solutions in this space. 2x is a nice starting point though. But that might turn into a 3x or a 4x over time.
Existing battery factories won't magically turn into factories for entirely different batteries. That's not how it works generally. Certainly not by 2028. Most of the battery factories currently being built will be producing the batteries that they are being built for, for years to come. Battery factories are a big capital expense and you don't just retire them. There won't be any shortage of demand and they'll want to get some return on their investments.
Most electrical cars produced by the end of this decade will be built in factories that don't exist yet. The projected growth is more or less exponentially and that production capacity simply does not exist yet. There will likely be more capacity added in the last two years of this decade than exists now, in total.
Production volumes will likely quadruple or quintuple in that timespan. About 2x every few years. That's the opportunity for Quantumscape. They might be involved with building a lot of those new factories long term. If they have something competitive by 2024 and get some of the companies they currently have agreements with to actually commit to using their tech, things could get lucrative. To hit mass production by 2030, the tech needed needs to be feasible a few years ahead of that time. So, 2024 is a good time for Quantumscape to hit the market early with a working battery. It will be interesting to see how much real competition they will have by then. My guess is that it will be too early for most others.
VW invested before they went public and they likely got in a much lower cost and later added on top but received not just stock but also partnership agreements. And the investment for a company like VW isn't that big. A company the size of VW can take such risks.
VW has invested far more and far more aggressively in Northvolt for example.
> Your analysis merely shows that you don't see the value of a battery with roughly 2x the energy density, 2x the charging times
No I question that when they can produce these batteries in relevant volume that their advantage will be nearly as big.
And far more important is actually price. Manufactures are INCREDIBLY price sensitive. There might be some premium for extra performance but they are far smaller then most people imagine.
> I don't think it's going to be that easy for other companies to simply catch up without a lot of R&D.
What I am telling you that there is MASSIVE amounts of R&D going into silicon. Like 10x more then Lithium anodes.
Both on individual company level and huge amounts of startups as well.
> Existing battery factories won't magically turn into factories for entirely different batteries.
Actually, yes they will depending on your definition of 'new'. There are 30+ year old battery factories still operating with newer chemistry.
Most silicon startups and processes are design according to specification to be valid feed stock for typical Li-Ion production.
It is totally viable for existing factories to switch to very, very different anodes and cathodes.
Actually, yes they will depending on your definition of 'new'. There are 30+ year old battery factories still operating with newer chemistry.
This is not universally true. Tesla for example is doing its own thing for example with dry electrodes, and are far less compatible.
> Most electrical cars produced by the end of this decade will be built in factories that don't exist yet.
Most EV will produced in factories that are currently in advanced planning, literally 99% of those will not be lithium metal anode factories.
> That's the opportunity for Quantumscape.
I'm not denying that they have an opportunity. But company with huge tech, market risk and price risk is a very risky investment. They have not made profit and wont make it for many more years.
Their valuation now is of course far more reasonable then when I originally made this argument, but its still rather high for me. But I would have to spend more time on analyzing to say what I think they are worth.
I like to ask, how many years of highly successful execution is required to for the company be a solid self standing company. For QS this is likely about 8-10 years.
> If they have something competitive by 2024
They wont. By then they are in sample production of a tiny factory. You massively underestimate how much time and effort it will require to build a real modern mass production facility that can directly compete to go into modern car production line.
If they are lucky by 2025 one of their partners will make some sample luxury cars with their batteries in them. Maybe in 2026-2027 some new luxury car will actually go into series production with these.
Yes. But there are literally 50-100 currently in advanced planning stages. All those factories, say 5 years back and in the next 7 years will add up to 100-200 billion in investment and these factories will likely continue to run for decades. Every single one of those factories is build for current Li-Ion batteries.
Feeding these hungry factories with improving cathode and anode materials over time is the primary vector for industry wide density improvement the next 15+ years.
QS will plan to build a gaga-factory going forward, but what they have currently planned is still very small compared to the truly insane traditional factories that are now in planning. Companies are planning single factories that can drop 100GWh per year.
QS in the late 2020s hope to sell a very niche high end product that requires gigantic investment to scale and has massive competition.
What do you mean with 'this'? You mean silicon anodes ad additives?
Just to start with, silicon has almost the a very high theoretical potential for an anode. Almost as high as lithium metal.
Its not new, current a standard Tesla likely already have 5% silicon oxide in the anode. But to compete with what QS is planning you will needed higher % and likely a different form of silicon.
Every large battery is working on silicon, it makes the battery cheaper and increases density. There are also a huge number of silicon startups.
One example that is comparable to QS is Sila Nanotechnology. silanano.com
Tesla is investing massively in silicon as well. They bought a number startups and doing a lot of development.
I would suggest this playlist (just the silicon parts if you want):
On the same channel you can also find videos on QuantumScape that are very well researched.
But just to be clear, I don't think its a 'scam'. I just think their valuation went insane for a company many years away from actually selling anything and huge investments to be made with large tech risk.
Feel similarly abt QS, lot of potential, but not yet actualized, and valuation ahead of itself - and, damn, I want to get my hands on some of their solid state batteries at 500Wh/kg!
A 50 kWh car battery charging to 80% in 15 minutes would be a 160 kW average load. That's going to need high voltage or a thick cable. Is that going to be practical?
Also I wonder what the power connection to a busy all electric refueling station/convenience store by the highway would look like if it wanted to have 16 of these. At least there would be no fumes so it could be more enclosed than a gasoline pump, and presumably no safety reason why you'd need to pay attention to the refueling.
The newer Tesla superchargers can peak at 300 kW, but to your point I’ve been wondering how on earth the grid will handle one order of magnitude more EVs charging during peak hours.
Just do what many stations already do. Use a battery to spread the load. LFP is super cheap and perfect for this.
I just don’t think this will be any harder than the advent of air conditioners was. We used to double electricity demand every decade. In a way, it helps the grid by providing a lot more revenue (demand has been largely stagnant, which has really caused the grid to struggle).
1) Yeah, it is. Like $80/kWh and if properly managed can last over 10,000 cycles, potentially giving a cost per kWh cycle of as low as 1¢. 2) Not true. Supply increases in response to demand.
3) Not that much. 4) Yes, they have, but this is a temporary result due to supply constraints and a huge demand increase outstripping the forecasted demand. This is like saying the world is forever running out of toilet paper in 2020. In the medium term (ie the context of increasing number of EVs by an order of magnitude), this is solved by just increasing lithium production. I think people do not realize just how plentiful of an element lithium is. It’s everywhere and at current prices you could probably profitably extract it from seawater, even though there are so many better sources of it (geothermal brine, even old sources like hard rock), which will soon come online bringing the price down before your seawater extraction could turn a profit.
On a system level its far more then that. And again, its a question of how profitable that is compared to putting them in cars.
> 2) Not true. Supply increases in response to demand.
While this is nice in theory, in practice with an industry as small and specialized as lithium. Scaling is actually a huge problem. Until just 1-2 years ago the industry was massively under-invested and opening new mines takes a huge amount of time.
Every industry forecast predicts massive shortfalls and likely prices not going down. Compare the amount of planned battery factory to the amount of planned capacity added by the lithium companies.
> 3) Not that much
LFP prices are now no longer much cheaper then low-nickel NCMs. Look at VW an Tesla presentation for example, both are investing in high Manganese cells as well.
> I think people do not realize just how plentiful of an element lithium is.
I know exactly how plentiful it is. What you don't seem to know is how complex open up new mining is.
This is not the copper industry with gigantic mining companies with massive pipelines and so on. And lithium has a very complex chemical process to be battery grade. Looking at the history of lithium startup shows that almost all of them so far have failed to actual make a viable certified product.
I'm not saying this will be the case forever but for this decade it will be an issue and many of the car companies will likely miss their targets because of this.
The guy who makes the podcast has been in the industry for 30 years and has interviews with the CEO of pretty much every lithium startup and established company.
I bet they will price the power different throughout the day so, just like in my house, power is 3 times more expensive from 7am till 10pm.
Although now that I think about it, There will be a big dip right in the middle of the day when the solar is blasting the grid. Might be cheapest of all at 2pm, and really expensive on cloudy days.
Where I live, overnight charging at home cost $0.01 per kwh. During peak hours, the cost is $0.20 per kwh. That 20X difference should be enough to get most users to schedule most of their charging overnight, or at least during mid-peak, which is $0.07 per kwh.
It’s true, but no manufacturer publishes exact numbers on this, so people end up not caring too much. With batteries that last a million miles anyway (and an 8 year guarantee on that), it’s easy to tell yourself that you’ll never drive as much anyway.
Energy price OTOH is the biggest motivator for many to charge at home. I think the higher price on fast charging will be important for flattening peak energy draws. Stations will need to purchase buffer batteries anyway to keep their own prices down (surge pricing is a thing for them too), which should keep fast charging expensive for a while.
Or is that a best-case spec using slow overnight charging and no surge loads from rapid acceleration?
Has to be a Tesla by now out there with a million miles, did it last on the original pack? They must know what happens every quarter million miles since Tesla phones-home with every detail.
As I wrote, nobody publishes exact numbers on this. There’s reasonable room for error though because most people never go beyond 300-400k during the lifetime of a car. Packs generally go longer than anticipated a few years back, such that a broken pack is no longer a real concern for most cars starting, say, 2020. There was a lifetime issue with the original Leaf, but they seemed to have fixed that in later versions.
It’s also somewhat moot to worry about this - if you need to charge en route, you’ll fast charge. If you’re at home, you’ll charge slow. You won’t go out of your way to fast charge since it’s expensive. Except if you don’t have a charger at home, at which point you don’t have a choice anyway.
Most cars are parked >20 hours and driven less than 100km a day. Fast charging will likely become something you only do rarely. All we need is a kW or two available at almost every parking spot. Eventually we'll want cars to communicate with the grid to preferentially charge when it's particularly windy or sunny.
We'll just need a lot more grid capacity and power generation. We probably won't be seeing those superchargers installed very often in regular houses, so it's not like the last mile has to support ridiculously high peak loads, but we will need a lot of infrastructure upgrades generally as average electricity consumption goes up.
The transition to EVs won't be instantaneous (cars last a long time), so utilities will have a good long while to adapt to changes in power demand.
I like the idea of electrifying our major highways so that cars can recharge without stopping. One of the benefits of that is that it shifts power usage from overnight charging to daytime charging (when people do most of their driving), which means that electrified roads are more compatible with being able to take advantage of solar power.
I think one idea is that when charging EV at station becomes problematic, you stop charging EV at home. EV home charging is almost ideally suited to demand response.
If that doesn't work out, you would need to build lots of pumped storage hydro.
Depends on when most of the recharging is done. If people are charging at home overnight then we might actually see a smoother load over 24h compared to today, when peak times are during the day to early evening.
Asked and answered. Ubiquitous rooftop solar with onsite battery storage. Sure this does not cover all scenarios or latitudes but it covers a majority of the inhabited world so that grids can handle the rest.
150 kW DC fast chargers are already pretty common, although not all electric cars can utilise such high current. They negotiate the voltage and current with the car - yes, it's high voltage, it can be up to 950V for Tritium's PKM150. There are already chargers up to 350 kW.
You know all of those substations where the high power transmissions lines get knocked down to distribution line voltage? Now imagine one of those with cars parked around the perimiter =)
The amount of lethal ice car fires is way higher than the amount of battery fires. Both in absolute and relative terms.
Not surprising of course that vehicles carrying large amounts of combustable fluids sometimes combust. Apparently it's one of the most common reasons for calling in fire trucks. People die in ice car fires too. If you genuinely worry about vehicle fires rather than spreading alarmist nonsense, you might want to rethink where you park your ice car. Especially older ones with fuel leaks, cooling problems, etc. More a question of when than if these things start breaking.
The relative safety of batteries to dirty, dangerous, inefficient, etc. ice cars is actually a strong argument for them. How is there no outrage against ice vehicle fires killing people on a regular basis? It happens so often that it isn't even news when it happens.
And of course the point of solid state batteries is none or at least a lot less flammable electrolytes.
> How is there no outrage against ice vehicle fires killing people on a regular basis?
This ignores the fact that there is a genuinely novel risk with Lithium-Ion batteries, which is that they contain large amounts of "stranded energy" which can trigger new fires. See the linked video above for examples of car fires being extinguished, only to have the car then taken to a tow yard where the battery spontaneously started another fire 5 days later due to the massive amount of energy in a non-discoverable state and the very unstable nature of it. With a gas tank, you at least have a reliable way to drain it, and it's not so volatile as to just spark up by itself. Given the current situation, I wouldn't be surprised to see tow companies that refuse to accept EVs due to the unpredictable nature of them in wrecked form.
With a gas tank, if it's on fire and you are close enough to drain it, I'd advise you to run like hell. That's how people die in ice fires: they are not quick enough moving away from the exploding gallons of fuel. Quite often the problem is that the car is engulfed in flames before the people inside even have a chance to leave the vehicle.
EV fires are more of a slow burn. Annoying if it happens to your car but you are very likely to have lots of opportunity to walk away from it. Just material damage. And again, the incidence rate of this happening is comparatively low to lethal ice car fires. Like by at least an order of magnitude; probably several.
The number of car fires in the US per year is in the hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of people killed. Loads of property destroyed. They catch fire while driving, when parked, when involved in accidents, etc. Occasionally they are set on fire intentionally (which is pretty easy and a popular action movie plot point). Making a petrol car go boom is stupidly easy. Happens all the time.
I would be very surprised to see tow companies decline what will soon be the majority of their business as ice vehicles become like the fossilized dinosaurs they burn: extinct. Towing electrical cars will be the only business they have long term. Of course, it's a free country and somebody else will happily take their business if some tow truck driver gets a bit irrational and anxious. Of course the tow trucks themselves will become electric as well at some point.
A vehicle cargo ship recently sunk off the Azures due to an out of control multiple EV fire. It is quite possible that ocean freight will require fully discharged batteries before transport in future.
An ICE car is a known risk. People know where the fire prone parts are, many carry extinguishers ( small, but still), and fire departments know how to quell such fires.
A Li-Ion fire cannot be stopped once it starts, it has to burn to the end. Recently there was a string of electric bus fires in Paris, and having unstoppable fires with thick black clouds in a dense urban city is not great. Solutions need to be found because it can become a real problem.
And yet, hundreds of people die in ICE vehicle fires and you just shrug it off as "such is life". How can you be worried about one thing and shrug off the other? The solution to that major risk is everybody switching to EVs. You'd save hundreds of lives that way. Every year.
The risk profile of a EV fire is mainly damaged property. You get to walk away from an EV fire almost every time because unlike petrol fires, such fires are not explosive. The random incident you mentioned (again, hundreds of thousands of ICE car fires in the US, every year) is a good example. This was a vehicle that burned for days on end. Super annoying but sounds more like it was smouldering and people probably got to walk away and watch from a safe distance. Petrol burns up quite quickly once it gets going. Extinguishing a petrol fire is not a thing. Mostly it's gone by the time the fire trucks get to the scene.
Extinguishing an EV fire is like every other fire, take oxygen out of the equation and cool the situation to below the point where it stops burning. The main challenge with batteries is that a shorted battery might heat up again to the point where it starts burning. Annoying but something fire men can be trained to deal with. A lot less dramatic than "unstoppable" fires of course. Most EV fires are complete non events. No drama with explosions. No casualties. A thing burned/smouldered, firemen showed up and took care of it, end of story. And they are rare to begin with.
One of the things I'm noisy about is mechanical door locks in BEVs. A thermal runaway event in an EV is equivalent to immediate arc welding temperatures where a gasoline fire burns a great deal cooler and unless the fuel tank gets super heated there is time to get out. In disasters like the Houston doctor tragedy...
...Having electric door locks that no longer work is catastrophic in these types of situations. A great deal more needs to be done on BEVs to create better fire walls and battery protection if they ever become mainstream transport.
I posted the link to the spectacular exploding Paris bus earlier. Here it is again.
I gotta say, electric door opening is one of the big reasons I'll never own a Tesla. In an emergency, you can't waste time trying to remember where to find and how to use the mechanical override.
As a side note, how many Tesla owners here train their passengers on how to get out in an emergency before giving them a ride?
@jillesvangurp unfortunately your comment is typical of the lack of understanding around fire risk in vehicles. Gasoline vapor burns relatively cool in comparison to a trapped energy runaway thermal battery event. A fully charged battery contains an immense amount of trapped energy which once compromised has to escape. Gasoline doesn't burn unless super heated, while diesel doesn't catch fire at all which is one of the many reasons it is used in commercial vehicles.
The NFSA video I linked to goes into BEV realities in some detail.
Tell that to the hundreds of people that die in ice car vehicle fires every year. It's not a minor risk if hundreds of people die. Versus almost none in EV related fires.
The reality is that people die every day in ice vehicle fires (petrol and diesel). It's not a hypothetical thing where you get to chin stroke and muse about the risks of petrol or diesel catching fire. It's happening. Every day. It's one of the most common reasons the fire trucks have to go somewhere actually.
A combustion engine is a wonderful thing where things get compressed, heated, etc. intentionally in order to combust the fuel. Diesel has a higher ignition temperature. That's all. The famous let's throw a match into the fuel works less well and is indeed a nice party trick. But it burns just fine once it gets going. Happens all the time. Just google for truck and bus fires.
The reality with EV fires is that:
1) they are rare compared to ice car vehicle fires (it's not even close; think orders of magnitude)
2) they burn quite slowly instead of explosively.
3) most of the incidents don't involve casualties and mainly involve property damage instead
Luckily the other big benefit of solid-state batteries is they don't tend to catch fire (even when physically destructed). The flammable part of lithium-ion batteries is usually the liquid electrolyte, but solid-state batteries don't have a liquid electrolyte.
I think the idea is that the state batteries are less prone to fires during charging and can therefore be charged faster. Not sure if that makes any difference if the damage is from impact i.e. car crash.
'short-circuited all-solid-state batteries can reach temperatures significantly higher than conventional Li-ion, which could lead to fire through flammable packaging and/or nearby materials.'
