It seems there's news of a battery breakthrough every week. I've learned to temper expectations, because so many "breakthroughs" turn out to be dead ends. Because it's not enough for a battery to be incredibly light, or made of abundant materials, or last for ten thousand cycles. It needs to be good at many things and at least okay at most things.
E.g.—
• How much capacity per dollar?
• How much capacity per kilogram?
• How much capacity per litre?
• How quickly can it be charged?
• How quickly can it be discharged?
• How much energy is lost between charging and discharging?
• How predisposed is it to catching fire?
• How available are the materials needed to manufacture it?
• How available are the tools/skills required to manufacture it?
• How resilient is it to mechanical stress, e.g. vibration?
• How much does performance degrade per cycle?
• How much does performance degrade when stored at a high state of charge?
• How much does performance degrade when stored at a low state of charge?
• How much does performance drop at high temperatures?
• How much does performance drop at low temperatures?
• How well can it be recycled at end-of-life?
A sufficiently bad answer for any one of these could utterly exclude it from contention as an EV battery. A battery which scores well on everything except mechanical resilience is a non-starter, for example. Though it might be great for stationary storage.
I'm only a layperson and this list is what I came up with just a few minutes of layperson thought. I'm sure someone with more familiarity with battery technology could double the length of this list. But the point is, when you daydream about some hypothetical future battery tech, you need to appreciate just how well today's lithium chemistries score in so many areas.
> I'm sure someone with more familiarity with battery technology could double the length of this list.
Actually, not really. For one, no serious manufacturer currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't meet the most basic of the mentioned criteria.
Secondly, some of these, like storing at a low/high state of charge or high/low temperature performance are nowadays managed by the BMS - models that don't have that are already not competitive. The reason is that energy density already crossed the threshold at which some of the capacity can be spared for this purpose.
To me the more important question to ask than any of these is: is there a process in place to manufacture the batteries at scale?
That is what ultimately makes or breaks an emerging battery technology.
> Secondly, some of these, like storing at a low/high state of charge or high/low temperature performance are nowadays managed by the BMS - models that don't have that are already not competitive. The reason is that energy density already crossed the threshold at which some of the capacity can be spared for this purpose.
No - this is dishonesty by some battery/car manufacturers. They say "Our car can drive 300 miles", and "our car battery will last 10 years/100,000 miles", but the reality is that if you actually drive it 300 miles on each charge, you'll only be doing about 30,000 miles before it no longer meets your needs.
Instead car manufacturers say things like "only charge to 85% to prolong battery life" and "under 15% charge is for 'reserve capacity' use only".
An honest manufacturer would only advertise the amount of capacity you can actually use day to day, rather than the capacity that is there but you really shouldn't use unless you want your battery to die young.
> An honest manufacturer would only advertise the amount of capacity you can actually use day to day, rather than the capacity that is there but you really shouldn't use unless you want your battery to die young.
Toyota do this. In fact, all PHEV manufacturers seem to do this: they keep their batteries between 15% and 85% and only advertise this range.
Insofar as they advertise it at all: the battery size in eg a Prius prime is buried in a footnote, and the range - miles/km - is what’s advertised, and is real, and corresponds to the 15-85.
I guess it is more important in a PHEV to never fully charge not discharge their batteries: most cycle from full-ish to empty-ish much more than a BEV. And so it is more logical for them to publish their 15-85. But the honesty is refreshing; BEV numbers feel disingenuous to me.
I ignore all breathlessly excited battery “breakthrough” headlines, but I ignore any from Toyota less!
As a layperson when it comes to batteries, this whole 15-85% thing seems like a silly detail that should be handled by computers. Like, at 85% the readout should say “100%”, and at 15% it should say “0%”.
Is that something they do, or do they expect users to be aware of these thresholds?
Traditional hybrids hide all these details. Most plug in EV’s only show 15-85% as 0-100 because you have a fall back for range extension. Many EV show the close to full range because you might daily drive just fine on 15-85% while charging at home and want to take the occasional long trip or use 0-15% capacity if a charging station is down etc.
Also, charge cycles become less important as range increases an EV with a 220 mile range is noticeably worse at 180 mile range where a 440 mile EV sees 1/2 as many charge cycles and is still perfectly useable with a 360 mile range.
And then builds a level 2 driver assistance system that doesn’t meet any SAE criteria of “self driving”, and brags how other manufacturers can’t keep up.
The Silicon Valley style of “fake it till you make it” business is dishonest.
There is nothing more to say about the 'glorious Tesla driver assistance system'. It can't even do basic tasks with super slow speed, no moving objects and all time in the world.
Saying what a Tesla can't do, or do well, doesn't really respond to the parent. There are people using Tesla to drive on city streets in traffic. It'd be fair to say it doesn't always work, and it isn't reliable, but are there other consumer cars that drive themselves through a town?
There aren't any consumer cars that drive themselves through a town. Tesla has a system that assists a human driver through town. This is an important distinction and hand-waving it away is exactly the dishonest and dangerous business practice I was referring to above. Industry academics and practitioners everywhere (including Tesla's rank and file) make the distinction.
Which criteria of the level 3 does FSD fail? I don’t understand since it seems perfectly capable of driving by itself under many, many circumstances, many towns being among those. I just looked at the graphic behind your link, and FSD fulfills all of the requirements, and frankly basic autopilot does as well. Many automakers offer level 3 currently, Tesla of course having been first, but you’re right in saying that none offer level 4.
To me, the distinction between level 4 and level 5 seems abysmally stupid as well - how could you leave out the pedals and steering wheel if the car can’t operate by itself under all conditions, meaning level 4 = level 5. Maybe I just don’t have the IQ to understand what the industry academics and practitioners are conveying here.
Tesla does not offer a level 3 system. When using Tesla FSD, the driver is still responsible for supervising the operation of the system at all times and must intervene when and if the system makes an incorrect input. See the second row in the above-linked graphic.
Also see Tesla's site (buried in the support pages, rather than the marketing copy):
> FSD Beta is an SAE Level 2 driver support feature that can provide steering and braking/acceleration support to the driver under certain operating limitations. With FSD Beta, as with all SAE Level 2 driver support features, the driver is responsible for operation of the vehicle whenever the feature is engaged and must constantly supervise the feature and intervene (e.g., steer, brake or accelerate) as needed to maintain safe operation of the vehicle.
> how could you leave out the pedals and steering wheel if the car can’t operate by itself under all conditions, meaning level 4 = level 5.
The graphic gives an example of how this can be offered: local driverless taxi. Waymo's Firefly is an example of this. It had no steering wheel or pedals. It would only operate when, where, and under the conditions where it was capable of doing so.
Where nominal and usable capacity is stated. Currently even Tesla includes a few kWh of buffer capacity.
State of charge in li-ion batteries isn't a straightforward thing anyway. 4.2V used to be considered 100%, but nowadays some chemistries allow for going up to 4.35V safely - doesn't sound like much, but it translates to ~15% more capacity.
No. The computer in the car will say you can drive 0km but you can actually drive another 50km. How well you can drive that remaining 50km will be a separate question: the battery most likely cannot discharge fast enough for highway driving.
> So I can die on the road with enough energy to drive another 50 km?
My gas car has a 42 litre tank, if i wait until the light has come on and the gauge is on (and then drive another 20km past that), I can only get 38.5 litres in.
I'll do you one better: mine has a 45 litre tank, light goes on at 5 litres left, gauge stops indicating at half of that, but there's an unmentioned anywhere buffer of 5 litres, which is there so that the fuel pump doesn't overheat or pick up any contaminants at the very bottom the tank.
I only know this because a motoring journalist filmed himself riding the same model dry.
> but the reality is that if you actually drive it 300 miles on each charge, you'll only be doing about 30,000 miles before it no longer meets your needs.
False. Nowadays manufacturers include a capacity buffer, so you're not actually fully charging/discharging. Teslas used to have no buffer whatsoever - exactly like smartphones - but they dropped the practice a few years ago.
Case in point: the battery in the Mercedes EQS 450+ has a nominal capacity of 120kWh, while usable is 107.8kWh - that's a 10% buffer - likely on the top end because that's where most of the wear happens.
You can reasonably expect 200,000 miles out of that before range degrades to 80% of the original figure. And no wonder - that's less than 600 cycles assuming highway driving. Consumer-grade batteries last this much, and the ones in EVs are anything but consumer-grade.
> An honest manufacturer would only advertise the amount of capacity you can actually use day to day
Why? It's not common to use your cars full range every day. Most people I know drive <100km on most days, and use the full range of their car maybe twice a year when they go on vacation.
Why would manufacturers advertise worst case numbers if they are not representative of the average consumers needs?
If they advertise their cars for business use, they probably should put some more detailed info somewhere. But if you advertise your car to commuters, it makes sense to use numbers that the average commuter can expect.
What's stopping them from advertising exactly that? Usable everyday range being 200km and occasional max range 500km for prolonged life of the battery pack?
Just inform the customer instead of doing the advertising mumbo-jumbo.
50% of the time I use my car, I drive more than 150 miles on a trip.
However, I do not commute with my car. And most people should press their local authorities to develop infrastructure so that they don't have to either :)
The convenient truth of the matter is that you don't want to drain your battery "to 0" regardless of whether or not it increases wear and tear on the battery, because you don't want to be stranded. As such giving lifetime aspects under that assumption that people won't do that regularly is fairly reasonable.
On the flip side, I agree that the "100%" mark should be the mark that people regularly charge to, people don't leave empty space in the tank for fun.
Except for the Nissan Leaf, most EV car batteries do great at managing heat even in adverse conditions (high heat, fast charging, etc).
I have a 5 year old EV which is always charged to 100% and it’s lost maybe 5% of its range capacity so far. Perhaps it was over provisioned (undersold the actual capacity) but it’s unlikely as it’s a cheap compliance car (that I still love to drive).
an honest manufacturer would advertise the fuel economy you can expect day to day, rather than the fuel economy of a perfect test scenario.
car manufacturers have been overstating range/fuel economy since the dawn of time. people are tuned to look at those numbers and think "in perfect lab conditions." and no one expects these numbers to be their day to day numbers
> For one, no serious manufacturer currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't meet the most basic of the mentioned criteria.
I don't think Toyota would qualify as a serious manufacturer of battery cells. Has Toyota ever manufactured battery cells before? Not battery packs, but battery cells.
AFAIU Toyota is the main owner of Primergy EV Energy, together with Panasonic. They have been manufacturing both battery cells and packs for the Prius and other hybrids. They used to mainly make NiMH cells, but I think nowadays mostly Li-ion.
This new battery tech is done in another subsidiary that is also co-owned by Toyota and Panasonic.
This is the mostly the same kind of partnership as Tesla and Panasonic and people never stopped saying Panasonic is actually making the cells. The actual cell technology is Panasonic and the partnership is about manufacturing.
For Toyota to build up its own end to end manufacturing of battery cells is something quite different.
Its doable, as Tesla has shown, but its not easy. Specially with a new technology.
It is this manufacturing question that Toyota is claiming to have a solution to here, but afaik we don’t have details yet so it’s hard to say. But they claim to be able to mass produce these and bring them to market within ~4 years.
> Actually, not really. For one, no serious manufacturer currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't meet the most basic of the mentioned criteria.
Until you realize that Toyota is peddling hydrogen as the future which makes about the least sense of anything you could choose.
Hydrogen could have made sense in an alternate timeline where government and industry cooperated on standardizing form factors for fast tank-swapping... but then, that would have made even more sense for batteries, and it didn't happen. People would whine about not "owning" their hydrogen tanks, just as they do when someone brings up the advantages of swappable batteries.
There is no world where hydrogen would ever work for cars.
It takes 50% more energy to generate hydrogen than to just use electricity itself. It takes million dollar facilities to generate that hydrogen and turn it into electricity.
Then, it has to be stored at a very high pressure in your car, which has a number of risks. Then, if you have an accident and it doesn't completely blow you up, there can be a fire, in which case you are now on fire but people just think you are a crazy person running around because hydrogen has an invisible flame.
You are repeating pure FUD. This is pretty much what BEV companies want people to believe so that they never consider any alternatives.
In reality, fuel cell cars are literally just EVs, no different than BEVs. There are no fundamental downsides. But since FCEVs don't have the huge need for raw materials that BEVs do, they will be a far cheaper solution. Once you understand the unsustainable nature of BEVs, you'll realize that nearly all cars will have to switch to hydrogen eventually.
And hydrogen is safer than gasoline. This is just more FUD, and is of the fearmongering variety.
Car makers like BEVs because (a) no new infrastructure other than electricity which is available almost anywhere already and (b) none of that energy lost to compression or fancy cryogenic compression tanks to keep the hydrogen in the car or at the gas station. Lastly, most people don't want to go from $5/gallon gas to $10/gallon hydrogen.
> Hydrogen will eventually be nearly free. It is just going to be made from excess wind and solar energy and will follow the same cost reduction curve.
How is that different from charging a battery at a super charger? Because it can be delivered via more expensive pipeline or trucks rather than cheaper wires? Heck, it doesn't even store well, you need to keep those tanks cold so the hydrogen stays compressed, you are going to be using more electricity for that.
Because you can't always have electricity available at super chargers. How do you power your car if the wind is not blowing and it is not daytime? You will need energy storage, something hydrogen provides in spades. That ensures hydrogen will be needed and be very cheap since it is made from wind, solar and water alone.
A pipeline is cheaper than a wire at moving energy around. About 10x cheaper in fact. This is just another example of BEV FUD. BEV companies just make shit up to demonization the competition, and often times the exact opposite is true.
I’d love to see a peer reviewed paper or even a report on a project that’s already been built showing that a hydrogen pipeline is cheaper to run per kWh final electricity, much less 10x cheaper.
It's bad form to accuse people of being shills on here, but you do seem rather... well, religious about hydrogen tech at the consumer level, including making some downright-silly arguments. Either you're being paid or you really do see a serious technical injustice in the trend toward BEV adoption.
In the latter case I sympathize; I feel the same about the failure of swappable-battery tech, which would have given us the best of both worlds. Charge at the point of generation or at least at a point of efficient distribution, deploy instantly at the point of use.
And either way, I envy your ability to generate an enormous quantity of posts without getting rate-limited.
He literally thinks I’m a new account, which is wrong.
And FYI, the anti-hydrogen argument is a generic anti-green, anti—progress viewpoint. It is easily described as outright Ludditism. It’s pretty obvious the critics are totally wrong, and likely just Tesla fanboys or investors.
The hydrogen cells in production and used in motorsport are literally bulletproof. The type of accident that results in your tank exploding would have to be so severe you would be dead before the gas had time to ignite.
Hydrogen refuels just like gasoline cars. It is the most logical replacement for current cars. It probably will just happen via natural progress without any external desire for CO₂ emissions reduction.
It isn’t the the one with fewest infrastructure changes (that would be biodiesel).
And it is the result of stuck about things in terms of the past: we used to power cars by pumping molecules into it, therefore we need another molecule.
Most of our green electricity will start as electricity. So it makes more sense to keep it as that and pump it directly into the car.
Given the choice, why would people still want to have to take their car to a pump when they can simply charge it at home or at work as much as possible?
If my cellphone lasted 5 days without a charge but needed me to go to a special charging station, I would never buy it. I just charge it overnight, or at work, and forget about it.
The problem with electricity is that you can't easily store it. And the only way to do so at large scale will be converting it to molecules. That implies hydrogen.
As a result, green electricity just means a nearly infinite supply of green hydrogen at the same level of cost. That implies nearly free hydrogen for any purpose.
Economically, that all leads to the hydrogen car as the future. You avoid both the weaknesses of ICE cars and BEVs.
This sounds logical, until you find out that the only viable way (make H2 from electrolysis) is wildly inefficient (75% efficiënt), then compressing/chilling it for transport is only (90%) efficiënt, then converting it to electricity with a fuel cell (max 60% efficiënt), followed by powering an electric motor (95% efficiency).
This adds up to:
0.750.90.6*0.95=38% efficiency.
With an electric battery car.
Its about 75-80% efficiënt in the whole chain. That means you need twice as many wind turbines to run the same amount of vehicle miles. The math just doesnt hold up.
So unless we cannot produce enough batteries or cannot make the grid stronger. Which both are possibilities. Hydrogen cars will probably be a dream. At this point it just doesnt make sense.
Electrolysis is theoretically up to 100% efficient. So are fuel cells. The whole process is an electrochemical system not much different than what batteries are.
You're reading too much pro-BEV propaganda. They're just spreading FUD and trying to stop people from realizing there are alternatives.
That’s great, but in the real world we care about the actual efficiency.
It is not FUD or propaganda to say that the fuel cell cars you can buy today (or in the next 10 years) are not even close to 100% efficient. Nor is their round trip efficiency better than BEV. Nor or either of those numbers likely to change over that period.
If you cared about actual efficiency, you'd be skeptical of BEVs today. There's no straightforward of powering them directly with renewable energy. You will need vast amounts of energy storage to make that work. That will not be all that efficient. And that's after you accept the huge upfront cost of the batteries and all the problems they entail.
Meanwhile, no one is looking at compromise solutions. Something like a PHEV or even a plug-in FCEV would solve a lot of these complaints right away. There are ways around these issues even in the real world.
Finally, it's not like 10 years is that long in the car industry. If FCEVs end up matching BEVs in efficiency in 10 years, that's means we're pretty much at the verge of FCEVs taking over.
Don't try to argue with this guy. He is in every thread about battery claiming hydrogen is the best thing of all time. He has fully bought in to the hydrogen propaganda and doesn't care that the real world doesn't agree with him.
It's a simple extrapolation of the cost reduction in wind and solar energy. If you have an issue with that, then you are basically denying that wind and solar energy have become very cheap.
Then the future is ICE cars because it makes sense to "actual costumers." But that isn't the topic at hand. It is what will make sense, and that can only be hydrogen cars in the long run.
ICE market is getting smaller fast and EV market is growing fast. This is a reality. Of course it doesn't happen in a year, but the trend is clear.
Just like the trend with hydrogen, where things are going absolutely no where and the waste majority of car makers who just 5 years ago were still betting on hydrogen have systematically dropped it.
Even the most hydrogen crazy Toyota expects its global hydrogen sales to be about Tesla production in a month in 2030. And those are optimistic numbers.
But don't let the real world prevent you from believing in easy to produce 100% efficient cars that can be fueled for free. Just keep living in a fantasy world, just stop spreading the lies in HN.
EVs are still a tiny niche. The resource requirements will mean it will be a long time before than can grow beyond that.
Note that BEVs were selling in the thousands only about a decade ago. FCEVs could easily reach the level of sales of BEVs in a short period of time.
The other point is that FCEVs don’t have the resource limitations of BEVs. They can easily exceed current levels of BEVs without serious trouble.
Your problem is that you are closed-minded and stuck in the past. You think that EVs are the future, but that it can only be one type of it. That the world will shift towards a 100% BEV monopoly and that no other type of EV can sell in any number. You can’t even make a coherent argument why this even is. If you want see an example of a person brainwashed by propaganda, that is it.
There has been so much money and time spent on battery research. We are in the incremental phase of battery evolution. There will not likely be any major leap in battery cost or performance.
A battery is a box of minerals with electrochemical reactivity, i.e. it can catch on fire if something goes wrong. More energy from the battery means more minerals, which means higher cost. More reactive chemistries can reduce mineral inputs, but tend to be more expensive or less stable.
Tldr; there are no quantum leaps available for batteries. If Toyota has a giant range EV it's either really expensive or it's a research vehicle staying far away from consumers.
There's an even bigger issue that noone seems to get apart from Tesla: Is there actually a market for such a battery? Today's EVs can already be used for normal daily commutes without even thinking at all about range anxiety. That covers 95% of all drives for normal people. And the remaining 5% can be covered with some slightly more sophisticated route-planning. Tesla has already come out and said they could make cars that drive twice as far, but there is no real market for that. And since battery resources are a limiting factor that pretty much grow linearly with range, they rather make twice as many cars.
Places like Australia has some seriously large distances, with some of the most isolated populations on earth.
Sure it's a small market (most Australians live in their state's capital city), but there needs to be some consideration for those that need serious range. The issue is frequently mentioned when talking about banning ICE vehicles.
Toyota Landcruiser's with auxiliary fuel tanks (over 240 litres) are the workhorses in outback Australia.
Stuff like this is always brought up. And while it is true in principle, it doesn't change the above statement. Almost 90% of Australians live in cities and average distance driven per day by Australians is 30-40km. There will always be a small, single digit percentage market for long haul transport that needs alternatives. But the mass market doesn't need better EVs. That's why range has stagnated over the past years. Noone is willing to pay twice as much for slightly less inconvenience once every 6 months. Sure, if we had a working breakthrough battery that could deliver twice the performance for the same price it would be great, but in reality it would only be great for about 5% of personal traffic.
Yeah, more importantly: until cities are 100% EV, I wouldn't worry about rural. Realistically, we can probably just never worry about it: there are far more cars used in cities then in the country.
In a case where you're trying to get emitted CO2 to zero, you'd probably prefer to just subsidize ethanol and renewable diesel to manage super-long haul to get their - too many tractors and other equipment we also need to run.
In Mexico and Singapore, Nissan introduced the Epower technology which is a hybrid in which the combustion part only serves as generator. All the driving machinery is electrical, and both the mpg and range are great.
In hindsight I think it's an obvious technooogy: the conplexity of the combustion generator is pretty low, doesn't need gearbox, pistols, cylinders and whatnot. And the fuel tank still gives good range NY recharging the battery.
Got a Kicks with this tech, and so far it has been pretty good for both city and the road (5 hr drives to the beach!)
Every other manufacturer calls this a series hybrid or electric with range-extender.
They have cost challenges - because if you want to drive one at a constant 80 mph on the freeway, you need at least ~50 horsepower of gasoline generator, ~50 horsepower of generator ~ 50 horsepower of generator inverter, ~50 horsepower of motor, ~50 horsepower of motor inverter.
Turns out all of that costs and weighs a lot more than just 100 horsepower of gasoline engine for a similar size car.
Cars like the BMW i3 with range extender undersize their gas engine and generator to save money and weight, yet are getting sued because in worst case conditions (driving up a mountain heavily laden), sometimes the car runs out of battery power and has to rely on gasoline alone, leading to a top speed of only 20 mph - not really usable!
California has bizarre regulations regarding range extenders.
I also don’t see why 50 hp is a good target. The oldest Model S cars can drive on the freeway (at moderate speed) using maybe 25 kW (33 hp). So a 25 kW generator would allow indefinite freeway driving at moderate speed. But almost no one does this except maybe long haul trucks that trade drivers.
IMO the right way to think of it is: a 25 kW generator will almost fully recharge the battery in under 4 hours. If you drive uphill or fast for two hours, and you run that generator, you have an extra 50 kWh. If you want to drive 10 hours (shudder), that’s an extra 250kWh — you should avoided about three long charging stops, so maybe one actual level 3 stop gets you there even if you drive moderately fast.
And you can stop for the night (or sightseeing or whatever, as long as you park outdoors), and you’ll be fully recharged afterwards. I would appreciate a 5kW onboard generator for this purpose!
Tiny engines (ie. sub 20 horsepower) have pretty poor efficiency, and tend not to meet modern emissions requirements (since they haven't been developed with automotive use in mind).
Nobody is putting much R&D into new engine designs.
Lots of countries have laws saying an engine in a car can't be running without a driver present.
For all those reasons, tiny range extenders on large batteries don't tend to exist.
Instead you get moderate or large range extenders paired with smallish batteries (ie. total range 50 miles). And they still have trouble if you drive fast, heavily laden, up a hill, on a hot day for more than the battery capacity.
Yes, but you also have the extra weight of the second engine - and you have to transform that mechanical energy to electricity before the electric engine transforms it back to mechanical energy again, which is lossy. So all in all I think it makes sense for long range/remote areas, but I rather would have a fuel cell as a range extension. (which has its own downsides of course)
I like the idea of one-way rentals of towable generators. Think a U-haul like model, where you pick one up at a gas station near your origin, and drop it at your destination. Now if EV makers would just allow charging while driving..
You can rent a pretty near CDL sized truck from UHaul/etc for little trouble. This would represent less than the upfront cost of a truck from the companies POV. They’d only need to worry about the chance people don’t reuturn the batteries. That seems unlikely given the same people would have given all their info up front and are highly likely to need a battery in the future. Vehicle rentals are far more risky and still a daily occurrence.
I’m 100% certain the market could exist. Probably the difficult part is car manufacturers supporting it and possibly some engineering problems (low probability of problems I think).
According to the page, you can't plug in these vehicles, is that right?
Chevy Volt was conceptualized as a serial hybrid iirc, but the engine drives the powertrain at higher speeds so it's not a pure serial hybrid. Mazda has a rotary engine based serial hybrid / range extender out or coming out too I believe.
Pretending you can logically deduce what the market most desires based on facts about their lives is a theory that is really far out there
1. Do you have any memory of when SUVs went mainstream? Who'd have thought single women would want to pay the vehicle and fuel premium to commute so inefficiently. Of course men as well.
2. Americans are addicted to options that remove limitations out of anxiety over those limitations, even when the extra cost is very low ROI. Look at data plan, buffet, etc. preferences
You know what's extremely cheap to manufacture? A larger fuel tank. How many mainstream passenger cars are being sold with a >80L (>20 gal) fuel tank because prospective car buyers "are addicted to options that remove limitations out of anxiety"?
Americans are addicted to features, lifestyle and luxury (actual or perceived).
> You know what's extremely cheap to manufacture? A larger fuel tank. How many mainstream passenger cars are being sold with a >80L (>20 gal) fuel tank because prospective car buyers "are addicted to options that remove limitations out of anxiety"?
It takes mere minutes to refill a tank, and there are gas stations everywhere throughout the country. It's quick, and incredibly easy. Far faster than EVs, and far more common that EV charging stations.
As a result, there's really no value in tanks that are that much larger, there's no range anxiety because even going long distance cross-country you're never that far away from a place to refuel.
These mythical Toyota batteries can supposedly run 10 minute stops every 700 miles. That's already way beyond what any normal person could handle.
I'm comfortable doing long distances in one day and even I would be taking 20+ minute breaks every 300km (200mi) or so. The current state-of-the-art long range EVs are plenty good enough with range and charging speeds, assuming a reliable charging network.
There is value. One of my cars has a 20 gallon tank and it's nice to go a few extra days without refueling for regular commuting/around town driving, or having the option to go an extra couple of hundred miles on the highway on longer trips.
Additonal 10 gallons of fuel is a rounding error to a typical car mass, its effect on fuel efficiency is not detectable without precise lab equipment. Certainly you're not going to notice that when paying for gas.
Well, I dunno if you've ever driven a performance car say around 420hp but having one extra passenger is absolutely noticable and undesirable, it really slows you down. 4 passengers in the car and it's no longer a fun drive. Not a rounding error as you can directly feel it.
I expect dragging around 120 lbs extra fuel for 100k miles does become noticable on the bank book, you'd be surprised.
My diesel car from 2020 has a 40-ish litre tank and a range of around 500 miles. I just drove back from my holidays yesterday, which took nearly six hours, including three stops for loo breaks, lunch, and looking around a very small museum. It still had half the tank remaining when I got home. I have never had range anxiety with this car.
A range of 745 miles means ten hours of driving in the best of circumstances without a stop. I cannot imagine wanting to drive for ten hours without stopping. I cannot understand why EV manufacturers are putting such large batteries into cars, especially when I hear how much heavier they are making them.
The problem isn’t needing to stop, it’s charge time and availability.
When I stop with an ICE car during a road trip it’s for 15 minutes max and I know I can do it basically whenever I want. With an EV, you have to carefully plan your road trip around fueling.
Roadtripping is much nicer in an EV, IMO. You just set your destination, it tells you where and when to stop, you almost always go to the bathroom and eat at those stops anyway. You never deal with gas station bathrooms, you just pop into a Starbucks or whatever. The car is almost always ready to go by the time you are, or maybe you wait 5-10 minutes.
There's an intuition that the minor additional flexibility gas cars give you on a road trip makes the experience better, but in practice I think it's worse.
Is this with a Tesla on their fast charging network? Most companies are standardizing on their plug type and so on, but I don’t want to buy a Tesla for a variety of reasons.
It's only relevant insofar as fast charging stations have a huge impact on how long you have to wait. The fact that basically only the Tesla network offers this is a pretty big limiting factor.
Yes, but it's not really a limiting factor or fair complaint about EVs in general. It is perhaps a limiting factor for people who only consider non-Tesla EVs and don't want to wait for the Tesla Supercharger network to become available to other brands.
Outside of few crazy people no normal people drive 5-6h at a time. If you can get out on the highway, plug in and spend 20min doing basic necessities you are find.
The United States is a huge country and lots of people take road trips with 5-6hr drives. If you live in California you can easily do 5+ hours and not even leave the state.
On most people almost never make such drives. This has been pretty well researched. And those that do most of the time stop and make 15min breaks at least.
So the whole issue is that on very, very long drive you might lost 15min. That not the end of the world.
When travelling long distances it's also important to derate the range for safety and comfort.
For example, it's well known that EV range decreases by 20-30% in cold weather and a recent study is claiming about the same loss in hot weather. And on long drives you tend to be more heavily loaded than normal, also cutting a few percent off actual range. Further, you need a reserve in case you get stuck on the road for some reason. Also you need a further reserve to ensure you can make it to the next next charger should the next charger be unavailable for some reason. And the advertised ranges are in better-than-average driving conditions at slower-than-average speeds, so you lose another few percent there as well.
All these derates stack which means if you want to ensure low stress in an EV you might have to derate the advertised range 50% or more depending on charger density for long drives when you decide to purchase. ICEs also need derating, but 25% is usually lots and ICEs tend to have much longer ranges to begin with.
Gas cars also have a 15%-24% range decrease in cold weather, and I'd expect similar results for hot weather. I think it's just more notable in EVs because of the higher average range of a gas car.
There are a lot of places in America where you can leave a city and go to a rural place where at best you might have a 120V charge, possibly nothing. An 800-1000 mile range battery takes a lot of the charging anxiety away until the infrastructure for electric catches up to convenience and availability of gas.
The weight issue, however, should be talked about more. I don't think filling highways with 10,000lb minivans with the acceleration speed of a Corvette is an improvement on the whole.
>The weight issue, however, should be talked about more. I don't think filling highways with 10,000lb minivans with the acceleration speed of a Corvette is an improvement on the whole.
But they aren't. The "minivans with the acceleration speed of a Corvette" exist today in the ICE world and are very few and far between because of price. You can buy a Lamborghini Urus that does 190mph, or a Range Rover Sport Turbo, or BMW X5. But those cars are all 6 figures++ so very few people can afford them.
Sure, a Rivian R1S can do 0-60 like a Corvette, but Bob down the corner isn't spending $100k on a car, so the ones that accelerate like a Corvette will be exactly as ubiquitous as a Corvette.
Meanwhile the fastest/heaviest Kia EV9 does 0-60 in 6.0 seconds, and weighs 5,700 lbs. Both a far cry from the numbers you're concerned with. Meanwhile a Chrysler Pacifica weighs 4,300 lbs, so the differences most people imagine are GREATLY exaggerated.
The vast majority of the "the vehicles are too fast and too heavy" are scare tactics by oil companies. The F-150 tips the scales at 5,500 lbs and nobody is worried about them "ruining our roads". Please don't buy into the nonsense.
The shape of the vehicle has far, far more to do with pedestrians dying than the weight of the vehicle. I would MUCH rather go over the hood of a 4800lbs Tesla model S going 30mph than under the front bumper of a 3900lbs Tacoma.
IIRC average car weight has been stable for ~20 years, not increasing, and also pedestrian deaths have been decreasing over the same period, even as people are buying big weirdo trucks and whatnot. Also, I'd expect increased prevalence of active safety features is more important than the weight of the vehicle for pedestrian safety.
That said, the rate hasn't gone up if you look at a 30-year timeframe, but it's a worrying trend nonetheless. It's a bit confusing though because I think you'd want to look at this per-capita. The absolute numbers show a 10-year upward trend, and the per-capita numbers are only split out by age group and show that same 10-year upward trend except it hasn't gone up at all for people under 20, which seems surprising.
But I remain confused because the 10-year weight increase is very small, less than 10% or so, so it is not clear to me that increasing vehicle weight is the most important factor. IIHS mentions road design and front-end design, but not weight as key factors.
In the case of EV pickups, it’s about towing. Towing a 3 ton trailer at highway speeds roughly triples the energy consumption of a pickup truck, so for 200 mile towing range you need 600 miles of unladen highway range.
> Tesla has already come out and said they could make cars that drive twice as far
You actually believed them? Tesla, that has a long track record of lying about what they can do, when they can deliver etc? That is facing major competition from every established car manufacturer who are all shipping vehicles with similar range to Tesla?
If they could release a car with double the distance/capacity they would. It would be a huge competitive advantage that no other manufacturer (except _possibly_ Toyota, if the article is to be believed) can match.
Actually it wouldn’t be an advantage. It would be a huge sunk cost (and added weight bogging down performance and handling) for a feature that virtually never gets used.
Tesla increases distance ideally by increasing efficiency. Their cars consistently score the best/lowest Wh/mi for their weight, by doing things like designing their own heat pump instead of traditional AC and resistive heating.
Because EV production is virtually always constrained by battery production, the number of cars you can sell is typically your battery production capacity (MWh) divided by your battery capacity per vehicle.
Their inherent efficiency combined with the Supercharger network to support longer trips lets them produce more cars at a lower cost / price.
There are cars like the Lucid Air which actually offer significantly more range than even the long range Teslas, while using the same battery tech (at a higher price point of course). They just recently had to scale down production because demand was waaaay below expectations. Tesla's best selling variants are also not the long range models, so it's not surprising that people won't pay for another 30% premium on something they barely ever need.
Of course, there is a market for it. Even if you don't have to have it, charging times and rage are the main arguments gas car owners bring up in discussions as a reason for why they don't buy an electric car.
> I'm sure someone with more familiarity with battery...
I won't claim more familiarity, but...
- How frequent/difficult is required maintenance? Recall that old lead-acid batteries often needed distilled water added to their cells.
- Does it need access to air - either supplied to it, or to vent gasses? That introduces a whole host of issues, even if it's not venting (say) hydrogen gas.
- How much does performance degrade when its only cycled through part of its charge/discharge range? Recall the NiCad batteries of yesteryear.
- What are its waste, OSHA, HAZMAT, and other environmental & safety issues? Those apply all the way from the raw materials mines to the final disposal. Which includes accident scenarios - fire / flood / whatever in a facility with many batteries (or parts thereof), one-off car crashes, and things more interesting. "Disposal" includes cases such as "abandoned in a pole barn".
(BTW - kudos for specifying "How available are ...", which covers a far longer list of real-world supply issues than "What is the (current) price of".)
I followed EESTOR closely for years. Someone should make a documentary about that saga. Amazing mix of inventor hubris, Canadian OTC pump and dump and a rabid online community of true believers mixed with speculators. Hard to believe that Kleiner Perkins invested in it.
Amazingly they are still around although they have rebranded and are now chasing some other unlikely scheme. It seems there is a limitless supply of suckers for these OTC deals, regardless how borderline their claims or history.
1. What is the 1.0 for distance, and model of car doing it
2. What is the expected multiplier for said new technology
3. What is the life expectancy curve for the new tech
4. is it any worse/better than the old battery on safety. I'm just not that worried about battery fires other than if newer tech is more apt to do it. I've been riding around sitting on gasoline tanks for decades now and it can't be much worse for safety.
The fact that the chemistries are changing and diverse is the most difficult thing from an End-of-life perspective. A lot of businesses born around recycling todays battery (lots of lithium and cobalt relatively speaking) are not economical on some of the newer chemistries (looking at you Li-Fe) because they cheapened out the expensive elements.
I think you are missing the most important one. The one that killed Nissan essentially. Degradation from time. Testing for that is the hardest. You simply cannot just accelerate time. We can do all the calculations and maybe do brutal environments and tests, but at the end, we can only wait.
> In another five years, and if a report in a Japanese newspaper is to be believed, Toyota will have the key technology for wide-spread adoption of battery-electric vehicles: Solid-state batteries with twice the range of today’s EVs, while charging only in minutes.
Well, it's six years now, but that doesn't seem that much of a delay?
There's just too much Bannon-esque "flooding the zone" these days...
And now, we wait for the entirely justified downvotes (though, this thread being so AG-ED* at this point, more likely I'm just talking to myself. Again...)
Not really? Mileage is probably the single largest thing people care about. If they never have to go to a charger and can just do it at home then it's a win.
Getting an EV with 200 miles that effectively is 120 is a joke. I couldn't even drive to and from work comfortably with that.
If you daily drive 60 miles (or more) each way to work, you might want to consider your life choices and what they represent. If nothing else, recognize that you're a far, far outlier and that technology and policy choices are not likely to be built around your needs & preferences.
> you might want to consider your life choices and what they represent
For most people who commute that far, their "choice" is not being able to afford rent anywhere closer where it's sufficiently safe and schools are sufficiently good.
It's also a catch-22 because even if those people could live closer to work, they would then need to park on the street, which would make the range just as -- if not more -- important.
What’s funny is, you’re both wrong and very right at the same time.
I’m sorry to tell you, only crazy outliers commute 100+ miles roundtrip to work (feel free to prove me wrong with real data) so current gen EVs are just fine in range for mainstream[1]. Just as some people NEED a snowplow attachment on their car because they live on a 5 mile driveway in the mountains, or NEED a v12 engine to pull a 20 ton RV, you will always have special needs with that commute.
But!! As far as Americans tending to absolutely obsess about range you’re right. Even dozens of non-outliers I’ve heard worrying themselves sick about “what if they do that road-trip they’ve been meaning to do.” And in a country where suburbanites buy $90,000 pickups and never even get the bed dirty with any kind of cargo, people will be buying vehicles with odd priorities in mind like the once-yearly road-trip.
[1] they’re not fine in infrastructure though since owning one without at least some home garage charger is certainly worse, and tens of millions of Americans live in apartments with garages and carports not even remotely equipped for even a handful of residents to electrify, and others just have to find a spot on the street. This is the thing really capping adoption today.
My EV has a WLTP of 300km. I can count with my fingers the times I've had to stop to charge it during my regular life. Half of those were just this month because I'm on my summer holiday.
All other times the car is sitting and charging while I'm doing non-driving things anyway.
Tesla also released the Model Y 4 years ago and now it may outsell the Corolla this year. What do the waitlist and sales for the RAV4 or Prius Primes look like?
They announced the Cybertruck that year and they still haven't delivered one, and ditto for the new Roadster 2 years prior. Tesla has demonstrated that long development cycles aren't bad, especially when creating a new tech (the Model Y is built on the Model 3 platform)
Weird how the largest pandemic in 100 years, supply chain issues, and huge demand for the Model Y made changing plans a good idea. That is what competent leaders do; make decisions in the best interest of the company, rather than adhere to arbitrary timelines. Maybe they should be making decisions like Toyota instead.
Perhaps pay attention to the topic of the thread, and not treat every Tesla discussion as an opportunity to prove your loyalty and defend the honor of Elon. We are literally discussing the idea that Toyota can take their time to get something right, because Tesla has done the same thing, to great success.
The cybertruck was largely a marketing exercise, and hype generator, same as the Roadster 2. They were "announced" in a time when Tesla needed all the spare cash it could get, so they opened up pre-orders that they had no intention of fulfilling for 4-5 years.
I’m in the market for a RAV4 plugin hybrid and the wait time here is at least a year if not two. I’d love a Toyota EV though, I have no interest in a Tesla so if Toyota truly entered the market I’d be all over it.
When things like the pandemic and disrupted supply chains happen, companies sometimes need to move in a different direction than planned. Or is Tesla's massive growth in the last few years and sales numbers not enough to convince you they might actually know what they are doing?
Successful companies don't adhere to arbitrary announcements and timelines; they change plans when necessary.
Toyota somehow develop this magical battery for an EV but forgot to develop an EV.
I truly think Toyota's ignorance of EVs will end up turning them into the next Kodak or Blackberry.
They don't NEED a breakthru battery like this, the current ones work well -- I drove 1200km today in a Tesla. What they need to do is develop and sell electiric cars.
It's such a shame. Toyota had the first hybrid. And it was good -- I drove a Prius for ten years. They even made a plugin hybrid. They were the leaders. Now they seem to be last in the electric car race. Tragic.
They developed an entirely new platform for EVs [1]
They started a subsidiary for self driving with around a thousand employees [2]
They released EVs, the bZ3, the bZ4x, the Lexus RZ
Current battery technology is a huge reason why people don't switch to EVs. Everyone I know talks about the charging times, needing to find a supercharger route when going long distance.
A 10 minute charge on that massive range would convince me to switch easily.
> The important difference from ICE refuelling is that you don't have to be by the car when it charges.
That's a disingenuous take. ICE fueling takes significantly less time. So it's not an advantage that you can take a 20-30 minute break away from your car when you can just gas up your car in a few minutes (attended) and be on the road again.
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve just quickly filled the gas tank and kept driving. I know all people are different but I suspect not people are closer to me. I know many people who never do long road trips at all.
What I have experienced is having to take 10-15 minutes to find a gas station somewhere around my destination to fill up for the next day. I’ve also had plenty of stops where I’ve stopped for food or drinks and not filled gasoline because there wasn’t any gas station right there.
What’s remarkable with EVs is that on road trips I never find myself going somewhere I wouldn’t be going anyway. Instead of driving to a gas station at my destination, I just park at the hotel/resort I’m staying and charge right there over night.
In Norway almost every road side McDonalds have some fast chargers. As a father that’s where we tend to stop, and where we probably would have taken the kids for a break anyway. If we filled gasoline, even if there was a gas station right next by, that’d be an annoying distraction from what we want to be doing.
As a father with an EV I don’t recognise the situation in the article at all. Maybe Norway and even Denmark (where we took our road trip last year.. they’re a bit behind Norway) is ahead of USA in infrastructure. But it’s not that much ahead. 5 years at most.
Family road trips in EVs is fantastic because you’re encouraged to take breaks at places with playgrounds where kids can burn off some physical energy. And since the car is charging at the same time it doesn’t feel like a waste and you don’t feel any mental pressure to keep driving to get to the destination as fast as possible.
It is an advantage when you were going to take a break away from your car anyway. Fueling up, and then parking, and then getting coffee / food / break means you spend just as much time stopped with an ICE during a road trip as you do with an EV.
Hyundai/Kia do have great maximum charge rates...but the rub is finding a charger that supports those speeds, is not broken, and is not occupied. Is this trivial in Europe? It sure isn't here in the US (even in CA, which has relatively higher adoption rates of EVs).
Telsa's proposed, future v4 standard is still only capable of 250kW and meanwhile CCS stations have been deployed for years now that can do 400kW, with 700kW chargers being demonstrated.
It's an outdated, proprietary standard in both form and function, even if Tesla claims it's a public standard; they exert total business control over the plug and their charger network. There's no way they'll allow a random car to plug into a supercharger ('safety' and such), no way they'll allow any other payment methods on their network. There's no way they'll support configuring your Tesla to work with third party NACS chargers and payment systems.
The only chargers that exist with NACS connectors are in one country and controlled by Tesla. The only cars with NACS plugs are (at the moment) Teslas and the only proposed additional users are companies that have signed agreements with Tesla.
This is why it's so infuriating that Ford, GM, and Tesla did what they did. They just effectively killed CCS, and thus dealt a major blow to EV adoption in the US for the sake of a market share grab. 800v architecture meant EVs finally could lay claim to being practical for long distance charging. Plug in at a rest stop, everyone hits the bathrooms, maybe a snack, stretch their legs, and the car is nearly full again. A lot of errands and such fit into the 18-20 minute window a nearly-full-charge takes. "NACS" can't offer anywhere near a 18 minute 10-to-80 charge.
The US version of CCS is far from perfect; the weight of the cable causes connection issues due to the poor mechanical design of the socket, and we never should have had a unique CCS connector from Europe to begin with. But Tesla's "North American Charging Standard" is outdated and their supercharger network in addition to being outdated has been woefully underfunded and undersized for a while; with Ford and Chevy piling onto the network, that's going to get even worse.
What's even more infuriating is that in Europe, there is no such thing as "Superchargers", because the EU forced Tesla to use CCS2. And meanwhile, congress hasn't even noticed that Tesla just effectively captured the US EV charging market.
Ask yourself this: what could possibly go wrong giving the world's richest man - an unhinged narcissist to boot - exclusive control over how electric vehicles are charged in the US?
This is incorrect. I’m not sure where you’re finding 250kW as the max for a V4 Supercharger but they’ve been shown to charge at more power in the wild.
"CCS stations have been deployed for years now that can do 400kW"
There is no reliable CCS network in existence in the US. Can you show me a video of someone using these mythical chargers at 400kw to take a long road trip?
Ask yourself this: what could possibly go wrong depending on Electrify America who only exist due to court ordered action and have no incentive to actually do a good job?
CCS1 has no advantages over the Tesla plug. If we're not going to use CCS2, we should use NACS.
You're wrong about the limits. v3 is 250kW, and the limiting factor is the vehicle voltage. Take it up to 800 volts and that's already 400kW. Pushing the amps above 500 is possible for both connectors, with similar levels of difficulty.
My impression was that Hyundai/Kia EVs can take much more than 150kW — more like 350kW. Since 350kW chargers aren't yet common, I don't consider that an advantage when thinking about purchasing. There are plenty of EVs that charge in the neighborhood of 150kW, and a lot more chargers that are able to provide that throughput.
They peak at ~245kW. Charging from a 150kW charger isn't too bad either, because they can sustain that speed most of the time (unlike cars advertising 150kW max where it is only a peak of the curve, and the average is less).
For road trips charging speed is IMHO even more important than the range. My breaks take 20-25 min typically anyway, but a 45-minute car would keep me waiting.
I just drove from Brisbane to Melbourne in one weekend (1,800km in one weekend) -- to pick up a model 3 I bought interstate, actually -- and I assure you, charging was not an issue. The car automatically adds supercharger stops to the map and I didn't need to stay at one for longer than half an hour.
Okay, Toyota has technically released EVs. Still a half assed effort, and I think still a fair criticism - I can't buy one, as they don't sell it in Australia, and they barely promote them. They're not behind EVs in any meaningful way.
I mean, the fact that I just bought an EV and have never even heard of any of Toyota's says something. No mention of them on their Australian website. Never heard of them on social media either, and I'm constantly watching videos about EVs.
Kodak released digital cameras eventually. Blackberry released Android phones eventually. Didn't mean much, it was too little too late -- they ignored the writing on the wall for too long.
Yeah, but not until 2027 or so it seems, and then you’ll have to drag around an ic engine as well. Seems a bit of a waste for a car with that much battery range.
My dad just bought the bZ4x, I’m not particularly impressed, but that’s just my opinion. My dad likes it, mainly because he wasn’t comfortable using the touch screen while driving to adjust things like windshield wipers etc, which I think is a good decision for him. But what poor marketing department came up with an unpronounceable name like that.
Having tried to buy one recently I think the discrepancy is that dealers wasted their allotments on high-trim EVs expecting people to be willing to pay 15-20k premiums just to drive an EV. If you want a lower trim model you are going to be waiting weeks to months for it to arrive.
Toyota's decision is based on their calculation that there wont be enough electricity produced to meet the demands of electric cars on a large scale, IIRC.
"Does the electricity grid have enough capacity for charging EVs?
The most demand for electricity in recent years in the UK was for 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.
Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we believe demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range of manageable load fluctuation.
The US grid is equally capable of handling more EVs on the roads – by the time 80% of the US owns an EV, this will only translate into a 10-15% increase in electricity consumption.1
A significant amount of electricity is used to refine oil for petrol and diesel. Fully Charged’s video Volts for Oil estimates that refining 1 gallon of petrol would use around 4.5kWh of electricity – so, as we start to use less petrol or diesel cars, some of that electricity capacity could become available."
Parts of the US grid are barely able to handle the load today. Rolling blackouts have been used in some areas. There may be enough total capacity to handle more use, but peak demand levels are already straining the system.
I'm skeptical of a narrative where concern for the electrical grid's ability to handle load is only considered for EV growth over several years versus the air conditioning use in the current unprecedented heatwave.
Anecdotally, my A/C energy usage (compared to last year) far outweighs my energy usage in an EV.
Not to mention radical increases from demanding everyone switch to heat pumps plus demanding industry switch to electrified versions of everything too. It's seriously a complete fantasy to think the grid can happen all that with minimal upgrades.
The US is a huge exception, your power grid is from the age when cowboys roamed the lands. Literally.
There was a huge fire that was caused by a power line slowly mechanically wearing down its connector. OVER A HUNDRED YEARS. Nobody bothered to check or replace it.
Also you have exceptions for oil and gas pipelines. 1-2 permits on a high level and the land owners can pound sand if they complain.
For power lines you need levels on a dozen different levels and even after that everyone who can even see the power poles has the irrefutable right to veto said wire or at the very least sue and slow it down to a crawl...
You may be referring to California who had issues last year during an historically high heat wave. This year, they are not having the same trouble. Part of the reason is that they increased production capacity since last year.
The main reason is that this summer has been much, much cooler in CA. In SV, for example, we've had a handful of days over 90 this year, whereas last year there were probably 20 days over 90 at this point in the summer. Our AC has only kicked on a few times all year, whereas last year it was on much more frequently.
There may have been increases in production, but it would have been shocking if we'd had rolling blackouts this year, given how mild the summer has been. Other parts of CA are warmer than SV, but AFAIK (having family in Sacramento and LA) this summer has been cooler than last summer all over CA.
But that’s highly localized. And one of the most reported areas where this happens is Texas, who decided to roll their own grid, and is now paying the price for that stupidity.
This question depends on the specifics of local energy generation, so you’re not going to get good answers without zooming in.
Japan’s electrical grid has some unique challenges that explain why they are so interested in hydrogen. An article about the UK isn’t all that relevant for that,
Talking about the US electrical grid as a single entity doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when it’s not a single, nationwide market. There can definitely be local problems as we saw in Texas and California.
This makes no sense to me. Take Los Angeles. Almost everyone has AC. If you can power AC, you can charge an EV, and the loads peak at different times. (AC peaks around 3pm, EV can peak anywhere from 7PM to 5AM depending on programming)
Blackouts can happen, but EV normally charge when power is cheapest and demand is lowest.
Or they gambled that there would be enough hydrogen generation and distribution, which seems like an even worse bet. It's not that they decided to stick with ICE, it's that they chose an even worse fuel source.
A lot of this is because of the Japanese government itself.
To Japan, Battery Tech would force them to be reliant on China or the US due to lack of natural lithium deposits, which makes the whole energy reliance aspect of battery tech moot.
To combat this, the Japanese government felt Hydrogen would be the best bet due to
1. An early lead in hydrogen technology, so first mover advantage in technology exports and hydrogen infrastructure deals (already happening in India and Australia for example)
2. A large LNG capacity that could be revamped for Hydrogen fuels
3. Good relations with cheap coal producers like Australia and India to produce brown hydrogen (ie. Hydrogen fuel from carbon resources)
4. The economics and logistics of hydrogen fuel cells can mimic that for Natural Gas, meaning a quicker ramp up.
Japan depends on continuously imported oil and gas.
The BIG difference for lithium batteries is that you need to import lithium only ONCE then you reuse/recycle.
And yes there's big big money at play, so lots and lots of FUD around lithium and geopolitics, the obvious difference with oil is nearly never mentionned thanks to oil money.
I brought up the oil aspect in my comments below, but because this was a battery tech related convo I decided to bring up the (relatively minor) lithium portion. Though the battery tech issue did play a role in Toyota's decision to develop the Prius and the Mirai
Japan's hydrogen strategy is definetly a reaction to oil shocks a la 2008 and 1973
Wrong. It is the smartest choice we can think of. It is battery cars that is just an irrational reaction to oil shocks of the 2000s. Hydrogen is actually a fully sustainable idea and will eventually be adopted across the board. Batteries are just going to be a temporary stopgap.
That's complete nonsense. Almost no lithium is recovered in recycling, and we will need a truly massive increase in virgin materials to even get the process started. It will be just as big of a problem as oil for a very long time to come.
"These packs weighed a total of half a million pounds, and Redwood managed over 95% efficiency in recovering important metals from them. This is incredibly high efficiency – especially compared to the 0% recycling efficiency of gasoline, the energy storage device for competing vehicles."
That’s the claim, but no such process has been implemented yet. At best we’re in the early stages. One thing to be aware is just how much BS there is around this topic. It is classic greenwashing and it is similar to the plastic recycling story.
> The batteries are valuable and recyclable, but because of technical, economic, and other factors, less than 5% are recycled today.
Of course recycling 0.02 kg smartphone batteries is not viable, but 500 kg BEV batteries is (plus it's mandatory in lots of the world including where I live).
And the redwood process is in production since last year with so "no such process has been implemented yet" is just a blatant lie. Quantities are modest because number of BEV being scrapped is tiny due to their yound age.
Article you cite is from 2019, we're in 2023 in case you don't know.
And the BEV world moves really fast.
You should just stop continuously spreading FUD about BEV in all HN discussions, this is boring...
So it’s impossible at small scale, but suddenly it’s doable as large scale? A risky bet.
Also, the battery chemistries and pack structure are wildly different between different cars. One of the reasons why lead-acid batteries are recycled is because they’re always the same design. But it’s the Wild West in the BEV world. Nothing is the same between any two car models. How the recycling process could even work is not at all explained.
We heard this story before with plastic recycling. But then we found out that only pristine plastics can be recycled. The rest is just trash. In the li-ion battery world, you’re guaranteed to get a giant mishmash of different chemicals and metals in the end. It’s almost literally just battery shrapnel because they have to grind it all up to get at the metals. So it sounds a lot like the stories of plastic recycling.
"Redwood Materials will use both new and recycled feedstocks—comprised of critical materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt—to produce approximately 36,000 metric tons per year of ultra-thin battery-grade copper foil for use as the anode current collector, and approximately 100,000 metric tons per year of cathode active materials"
"At full production capacity, the project’s anode copper foil and cathode active material output is anticipated to support the production of more than 1 million EVs per year,"
And this is only for one plant...
I'll believe any time DOE experts to judge wether an existing proven process is scalable or not over a continously FUD spreading forum poster.
And for your information lead-acid batteries are not all the same, see various electrolytes in AGM (fibers...), Gel, ...
Since when did we trust the government to give a correct answer on a complex technical subject? The person is just repeating what he was told.
There's no evidence anything of significance being recycled. All of this is projections of future recycling achievements.
Like I said, it's the same story as plastic recycling. No one should believe any of the claims made.
AGM and gel lead-acid batteries are recycled in a separate pathway compared to flooded lead-acid batteries. This is okay because there aren't that many variations and the chemistry is basically the same. Li-ion batteries on the other are effectively hundreds of different chemistries spread across many different packaging methods. It is a complexity nightmare and no one has given any answer as to how it will all be solved.
DOE has no “track record.” It just funds things based on government policy.
Again, no evidence that this recycling is happening at scale. And given the enormous complexity of the problem, something no one has even bothered analyzing, it seems unlikely to be solvable anytime soon.
At this point, I can just proclaim that plastic recycling is 95% effective with the same amount of evidence. You’d have no choice but to believe me on this since you already believe the same thing about li-ion batteries.
Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy. What do you think of recent developments of high efficiency electrolysis of sea water without precious metal catalysts? [1]
Hydrogen will be needed for industrial processes as electric power can't generate temperatures high enough and hydrogen in the form of ammonia makes a pretty good energy storage system that does not need any special metals to use for power in a modified ICE. The sweet spot for ammonia engines seems to be long haul container shipping where batteries would be infeasible.[2]
First, I want to stress that I'm a Policy Wonk turned Cybersecurity practitioner. Though I have a STEM education, I haven't touched chemistry or physics in almost a decade.
That said, this paper does look promising and it kind of reminds me of the heavy water electrolysis process used in Nuclear Energy.
Using saltwater instead of fresh+distilled water would be great, though I'm curious about the cost of productionizing this, as the kind of cost and energy outlay needed for this at scale might not be efficient.
That said, I am not a ChemE or Physicist so I could be wrong
> Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy.
Yep, but that will take time to build, hence the idea to use brown hydrogen in the meantime.
It's interesting that I just watched a video[0][1] on Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable, Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage.
Incidentally, I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an issue for Japan. They are completely and utterly dependent on the US for their national security, without any remaining meaningful popular movement to divorce themselves thereof. The Japanese Socialist party had some language about getting rid of the Anpo treaty, but hilariously, they backed out immediately when they came into power; the Japaense journalist / commentator Akira Ikegami wrote a (Japanese language) book [2] about this era that I thought was pretty enlightening.
[0] Fair notice: the person who runs the channel is an MA and former UI/UX engineer, so YMMV with how far you trust the content.
> I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an issue for Japan
It's an issue the same way the US being dependent on Taiwanese Foundries even though they're an ally of our's.
Should some sort of a global commodities crunch occur (eg. hypothetically, China banning all exports of Rare Earth Metals), then prices are going to skyrocket in the global market because it will take 5-7 years for production to scale up in Australia, Bolivia, and the US.
For critical technologies, it's important to have some level of self reliance. This is why the US is now a net energy exporter, after getting burnt by the spike in commodity prices in 2005-2009 leading to a massive bipartisan push for fracking, natural gas, solar, Athabaskan oil sands projects w/ Harper's backing, etc.
Other large countries with limited rare metal supplies like Germany and India have modeled a hydrogen policy similar to Japan for this reason.
Also, Japan's economic recovery after 2008 was heavily at risk due to the spike in Oil prices, as well as a similar near recession that arose in the aftermath of the OPEC Embargo. Memories of both still resonate in Japanese policy circles.
> Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable, Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage
I'm not a MatSE or Physicist so I can't speak to the viability of that. That said, I can assume that rolling out any sort of mining and refining infrastructure would take time to scale out.
For example, it took China 15-20 years and an extreme amount of Govt protectionism to become a leader in the rare metals space. It's not that China has more deposits than other countries - it's just that it wasn't cost effective for most other countries to match the prices China was providing.
It's incredibly short-sighted to think like this. There will be a huge supply of hydrogen at some point in the future. This is due to it being the only truly sustainable energy storage technology. Nearly all others will have to be abandoned.
Given that it takes about the same amount of electricity to refine a gallon of gasoline as it does to power an EV over the same distance an ICEV would travel on that gallon, I think electrifying transportation isn't going to be a big deal. The grid will evolve for changing patterns of consumption, just as it always has. Even if we made 100% of all new car sales today EV the grid could keep up.
But the gallon of gas isn’t refined in my neighborhood, every night. It’s made in a centralized location, in advance, and if for some reason that location loses power, another location will make it and distribute to my local gas stations.
If you are having a widespread, long term power outage, those gas pumps will not run due to not having electricity.
Do you live in an area that has frequent power outages, then maybe this would be a concern, but in most areas an outage is pretty rare and are short term. If your area has unreliable power, perhaps they should be putting more power transmission lines underground?
Yes, PG&E cuts power proactively via their PSPS program. It doesn't affect most gas stations though, as they are more centrally located and not in neighborhoods. I believe they have looked into burying transmission lines, but found it to be economically infeasible.
I'm not defeatist, just pointing out that it's an oversimplification to say "it takes as much electricity to refine a gallon of fuel" given that the refining process happens in industrial areas where electricity may well be more reliable and less expensive.
Agreed, the grid will need to adapt to the changing consumption pattern, but the capacity is a solved problem. And we're building much more anyway.
Personally, I've never found gas stations to be the beacon of reliability. They go down quickly in any kind of shortage situation. During the last ice storm here the local station ran out of gasoline in a couple days and diesel right after that. But I was able to buy propane without interruption, so that was good -- it doesn't rely on electricity to be dispensed. This is why my portable generators are now all dual fuel.
This is pure spin. Toyota cannot make this claim for every region in the world where they sell cars. It is especially disingenuous when they have been pushing their hydrogen vehicles and there is not enough hydrogen production either, in any region, because it makes no sense to overproduce when there is no market.
I always think it’s weird to believe in either of those things (that we can’t make enough electricity, which can be made in like a dozen different ways whether coal, oil, gas, biomass, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, etc, and that there won’t be enough lithium, even tho lithium isnt burned up, is extremely plentiful from conventional sources plus can be practically extracted from the ocean not to mention recycled indefinitely) and then be like “therefore, since we’ll have unlimited fossil fuels, let’s make more fossil fuel cars.”
A) improving the eMPG (or is it MPGe?) of more cars on the road to reduce their fossil fuel consumption is better than giving a few cars zero-emission powertrains, courtesy of the 80-20 rule. (Hence the riddle about you having two cars you use equally and someone offering to magically take one from 40mpg to 1000mpg or the other from 10mpg to 40mpg - you are better off financially with taking the latter option.)
B) The infrastructure for fossil fuel mining is here but scaling up lithium mining is going to add new horrors to the environment and the developing world.
If you look at the amount of oil and gas that is extracted vs the amount of lithium that would we need to mine; it is like comparing the size of the Sun to Pluto. Mining lithium has downsides but there is just no way it could be as bad as oil and gas due to the orders of magnitude difference in quantities needed.
Are you talking about pure lithium quantities? Those are small indeed, but... the concentration of lithium in the ore mined is low (some mines work with 0.2% ore), so you need to move 500kg of rocks to mine 1kg of lithium.
Then where are all their Prime vehicles that have had a huge waitlist for years?
Toyota is just not delivering on the EV front at all. They could be cleaning up by stealing some of the Model Y customers back by selling a ton of RAV4s, especially the Prime versions.
Large companies have difficulty making changes. The reason is exactly that: the goal is to make money, and doing what has made heaps of money for heaps of time already always seems like the best option.
> The Innovator's Dilemma is the title of an excellent book by Clayton Christensen. The dilemma itself is the fact that though large innovators have some motivation to innovate, they also have a strong disincentive from doing so as new products will undermine their existing ones.
I don't think the biggest markets will mandate EVs in under a decade. More importantly, it's possible the bigwigs at Toyota don't think so either, and they will act on what they think, even if it happens to be wrong.
To continue to sell cars which are unreliable and have huge supply chains.
Electric cars require much less assembly time, have a much smaller supply chain, and require much less maintenance.
Japan is literally propped up by its auto industry - they make it prohibitively expensive to own a vehicle more than a few years in order to artificially create a market for newer cars. The other result in a huge used vehicle export to most of the world except for the US.
I don't think the average non-Japanese understands that owning an old car in Japan is a significant status symbol.
Also, did you notice that damn near every model year of Japanese car has different headlights, taillights, and bumpers? And small narrow bits of the lights now extend well into the quarter panels with unique shapes? You think it's coincidence that parts most likely to be damaged even in a minor collision are year-specific and thus more expensive and harder for non-OEMs to keep up with manufacturing compatible parts?
The lights extending into bumpers and quarter panels aren't just a styling thing, they're physically keying the parts. They even do unique rest-of-world vs US styling to make it even more difficult for third party parts.
It also lets them keep cranking out models people think are new and exciting...when in reality the underpinnings rarely change. The Corolla is a perfect example, using largely the same underpinnings for nearly two decades.
The grid is going to explode. Let's start with California. Because they're a large economy, a large population centre and a famously leading on environmental issues, they tend to run into scaling and environmental problems first.
Do you remember news about the California grid straining under the heat wave in 2022? The governor sent text messages to every Californian asking them to minimise their power usage? Power consumption across the state* reached 52GW.
Every April, by the rules of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, each state receives submissions of new projects that people want to build and connect to the grid. Each of these is called a "Cluster". In April 2021, cluster 14 included a proposed 110GW of new power generation. This was so many submissions that the state couldn't even finish their legally mandated analysis of all of the proposed projects in time for the new submissions for April 2022, so they pushed Cluster 15 back to 2023 (approved by FERC). It's past April 2023 and Cluster 15 projects proposed 354GW worth of power. If we take that CA can produce 50GW now, and add clusters 14 and 15, that's a little over 10× our current maximum power generation. You could argue that maybe some of these projects won't get built, that always happens in every cluster, but the number of withdrawn applications is a smaller percentage than usual.
Estimates are that EVs will require us to double our current power generation.
* technically across the California Independent State Operator, https://caiso.com , which is about 80% of California and also includes a tiny bit of Nevada for geographical reasons.
There's reason to think otherwise: Natural Gas is being replaced and is due to see price increases. It will likely be replaced by electricity (namely Heat-Pump HVAC systems, and induction cook tops).
In some states some developments aren't even hooked to the gas network, and the homes standards are such that electrification is the default.
You have to measure electricity demand over years, not months, because seasonal changes and or weather can really corrupt your data.
Numbers that I saw recently: The largest US solar electrical generation plant right now is about 400MW. To electrify fast enough to get to about-as-close-to-net-zero-as-we-can-imagine by 2050, the US would need to build one of these plants and bring it online ...
The US installed 11.8GW solar last year. That is 453MW/every 2 weeks. :-)
Yes, that’s nameplate capacity, so you can’t count on solar to delivery the power to get us over the line by itself. But we are nearly on track to the net zero goal when you add in …
And so they decided to go for hydrogen? If there isn't enough electricity, that means hydrogen derived from fossil fuels. So their hydrogen take was even more evil that it first appeared.
Toyota and its fellow Japanese car makers were betting the bank on hydrogen based green cars. This was wishful thinking but they had a reason. A regular ICE car produces several post sales revenue streams. For example, regular oil changes, brake replacements, engine issues and etc. EV's produce almost none of these ongoing revenue streams and therefor the ongoing value for Toyota would drop significantly.
With hydrogen based car though it's an almost exact copy of the ICE car. It's got a big, hot finicky fuel cell under the hood that requires ongoing highly qualified maintenance. It would require complex 'hydrogen stations' to refuel. If there's no battery then brakes will continue to wear out on schedule. In short, everything a ICE car offers except the CO2.
It's not surprising that this is the future that Toyota had its eyes on for way too long. Group think. Now they're playing catch up and they're far behind.
I don't believe this maintenance argument, maintenance on EVs is insanely more expensive when it comes to battery replacements. Replacing an entire engine on the average sedan is an insanely cheaper option. Even the Nissan Leaf's engine replacement is like 14k $, that's the cost of a new car ffs.
By the time your battery needs replacement it will cost a fraction of what it costs today. Battery prices have been falling fast as the volume production of these batteries have scaled up.
>> By the time your battery needs replacement it will cost a fraction of what it costs today<<
There is absolutely no guarantee that it would be the case. The cost of batteries is largely determined by raw materials such as lithium, nickel, etc, and the demand for those minerals will exceed that of supply for some foreseeable time -- at least not until 2030.
>> Battery prices have been falling fast as the volume production of these batteries have scaled up.<<
Yeah, that's only if you get a brand different battery with improved energy density and chemistry. Your EV is stuck with the same old efficient and expensive batteries from the date/year of purchase.
There has been no evidence of this, not to mention people just get cars with even bigger batteries. It is likely to always be an expensive replacement problem.
How many times an ICE has its engine replaced on average?
The capacity retention of a Tesla battery from a decade ago plateau at 88% after 200,000 miles. That's for nickel-based battery, and most OEMs are switching to iron-based (LFP) which degrade even less.
I bet that zero EV will have to replace their battery in the near future.
> With hydrogen based car though it's an almost exact copy of the ICE car. It's got a big, hot finicky fuel cell under the hood that requires ongoing highly qualified maintenance.
That's utter bullshit. A fuel cell is literally an electrochemical system no different than a battery.
A fuel cell is not a closed system, a battery is. A fuel cell need a supply of hydrogen (obvious) and oxygen from the air and in return it produces heat, water, and some electricity (with pretty terrible efficiency). A battery produces electricity and heat (depending on load).
That's widely inaccurate. The fundamental advantage of an electrochemical system is that you are no longer limited by Carnot's theorem in the same way as heat engines. As a result, the efficiency of both systems can be the same. Not to mention you don't have to deal with all that heat either, making operation much simpler.
In the end, a fuel cell is basically a metal-air battery, and has the same level of efficiency.
Except it does not have the same efficiency when you compare how many kWh you have to feed into an electrolyzer so that you make 1 kWh of electricity out of the fuel cell in a car.
You cannot get every kWh from renewable energy into a BEV no matter what. The intermittency problem guarantees that a lot of it will be lost or never captured. An idea like hydrogen that lets you store energy for long periods lets you utilize energy that otherwise would be lost. As a result, the full cycle efficiency of a hydrogen car can exceed that of a battery car.
'... lets you store store hydrogen for long periods of time' is not as easy as you suggest. It's well known that hydrogen makes most (possibly all) metals become brittle over time. Hydrogen also leaks easily through metals because the atoms are so small. Consequently very expensive tanks are require to '..store hydrogen for long periods of time...'. It's a near certainty that storing energy for long periods is more effectively done with Megapacks of batteries. A little googling will show that Tesla (and others) are now making a booming business in this technology whereas, to my knowledge, not one substantive hydrogen storage plant has been built to date, because of the problems stated above.
> It's well known that hydrogen makes most (possibly all) metals become brittle over time.
It's not "well known." In fact, this is bullshit. Only some metals have this problem. Even then there are ways of preventing the problem via coatings and the like. Nor is it even necessary, as geological formations can be used to store hydrogen in the same way we store natural gas.
You are simply reading too much pro-BEV propaganda. These are solved or are easily solvable problems.
Nokia, Palm, Blackberry, and Microsoft had years of experience making smartphones…
In hybrids the electric motor doesn’t have to be maximally efficient, because the electric range is only a nice to have, not the key selling point.
Hybrid battery density doesn’t matter much, because it’s 1/10th of BEV's size anyway.
In hybrids the charging speed can be an abysmal trickle, and still suffice to charge the tiny battery. In BEV you need to work with 4x higher voltages, 10x higher wattage, and push thermal management to the limits.
That’s why bz4x sucks. Its efficiency is meh. It charges at below average speeds, and still overheats.
In hybrids the battery is used primarily to lower average fuel consumption and lower (a lot) noise and fuel consumption in cities (where hybrids run generally a large amount of time on electric).
Maybe for modern hybrids. For my 2005 Hybrid, the engine is an Atkinson cycle engine and that is where most of the efficiency gains come from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_AZ_engine#2AZ-FXE “The large valve overlap leads to a reduction in cylinder charge and reduced torque and power output, but efficiency is increased. This combination makes the 2AZ-FXE suitable for use only in hybrid vehicles, where peak torque and power demands can be met by the electric motor and battery.”
So the hybrid battery is used for acceleration. Note that my Hybrid battery is a 200V 50Wh Nickel metal hydride battery - Note I think Toyota Hybrids didn’t start using Lithium batteries until late 2010’s).
When town driving it doesn’t seem to me that the regenerative braking makes much difference: It is very noticeable that the engine is in use during acceleration from a dead-stop. Certainly regeneration is insignificant on hills because the
The Prius has also been a PHEV for years now. I doubt it would require a huge change in manufacturing processes to make a pure EV version.
But it's manufacturing the actual battery modules that has been the hard problem for Tesla competitors as I understand it. I guess it's not surprising if so that Toyota would want to have their technology choice set for a while before ramping that up, since it probably affects many of the surrounding design choices.
It is hard to develop the knowledge and processes to build batteries effectively. You need to start doing it and refine your process as you learn more and expand capacity along the way. Tesla went through this phase several years ago. GM, Ford, and others are currently in this phase. They will work out the kinks. Toyota won’t learn how to do this until they actually start building batteries at scale and work out the process using the continuous improvement techniques that they learned from Deming.
Investing in electric engines is still much cheaper than investing in combustion engines.
As a reference, R&D for Mercedes' 2017+ OM654 diesel engine alone costed the company 3.5 B $. And that amount is relatively low because Mercedes had a huge know how in building diesel engines.
But in EV those amounts are much smaller, catching up is no longer a matter of decades and hundreds of billions, but years and ten times smaller investments (see Korea).
This is why China was never competitive in the ICE era, but companies like BYD are booming.
Also, I strongly believe that from now to 2035 multiple companies will be selling their electric powertrains to dozens of different automakers.
There is a good Munro and Assoc video going into the packaging differences between ICE and EV vehicles. The Prius (of which I am a happy operator) is ICEV packaging-wise. The battery is relatively high, small and not integrated into the frame.
As a huge company Toyota may well have the people with ideas about EV transition. Unfortunately as a huge company there are a thousand interests that will be harmed by EV transition. Can Toyota (or VW, MB, Stellantis, etc) overcome those internal conflicts to produce something out of their wheelhouse? Or will it take an acquisition that moves with distinct branding that eventually becomes the entire company?
No, it doesn't count, as the Prius in 1997 was entirely powered by petrol.
It was a great car. I drove a Prius for ten years and only sold it because I moved overseas. But it was no EV. Even the plugin Prius is not what we mean when we say 'EV'.
Tesla innovates at a rapid pace, even if judging solely on the battery architecture and cell chemistry between their platforms over the last decade. The tech in my 2021 and 2023 Ys is far superior to my earlier 2018 S and X. The jump in tech from v1 Superchargers to v4 is material.
Toyota invented the hybrid drive when the US was encouraging higher fuel standards with policy (and Toyota was concerned about being left behind), and have barely put forth a half hearted effort to build EVs. Their earlier compliance car RAV4 EVs used Tesla drivetrains, for example.
Meanwhile, Tesla sells almost 2 million EVs a year and continues to ramp manufacturing. Toyota manufactures press releases.
Tesla is the ultimate one-trick pony. There will come a day when the BEV is abandoned. Tesla has shown no ability to move past that event. Toyota will make whatever car is in demand in the future.
You are aware that there is no hydrogen refueling infrastructure in most of the developed world and lots of jurisdictions have banned new combustion vehicle sales between now and 2035, yeah? What proven technology would you use besides batteries? Hydrogen infra that doesn’t exist?
Toyota isn’t dying tomorrow, but if they don’t switch to BEVs, they’ll die like Kodak or Xerox. There is no light vehicle hydrogen future.
We can build hydrogen infrastructure if we had to. None of those ICE bans are going to happen by 2035, at least not without massive loopholes. We will be driving ICE cars for a very long time to come. The correct pathway is finding a sustainable alternative to ICE cars that could happen organically, not fantasize about instantly turning everything into a zero emissions car tomorrow.
Tesla is the company that is going to die. The BEV is not going to be the only car in the future, nor will last forever. If anything, it is an outdated idea, and was an overreaction to the 2000s oil shock. Toyota will just make whatever cars people want.
> None of those ICE bans are going to happen by 2035
Many of the bans are happening by 2030. In Norway, 83% of new cars are already BEVs. I don't think they will look back, the market will make selling new ICEs in that country at least, impractical.
Hydrogen probably has a future in goods transportation (trucking), but even there they have to compete with a fully electrified rail system that goes to the arctic circle.
And either be reversed or will have loopholes. And Norway is one (small) country that is not representative of the rest of the world. And I don't think the political situation in Europe is all that stable either. A lot of the movement in European politics is about abandoning many of these absurd green energy ideas.
Hydrogen will just take over at some point simply because it is the only sustainable idea.
> Hydrogen will just take over at some point simply because it is the only sustainable idea.
Hydrogen is a horrible idea for personal vehicles: it takes a bunch of new expensive infrastructure to even get going (gas stations, but with compressed hydrogen tanks), it is energy inefficient (a lot of energy lost in compression, keeping it compressed, and then turning it in to electrons). It is just not economically viable when compared to BEVs where the biggest worry is finding a power plug.
It might make sense for trucking given its power to weight density, and the fact that trucks can have huge hydrogen tanks without much consequence.
It is cheaper than building out the grid needed to power all cars. In fact, you use basically the same land that gas stations current use up. It is quite straightforward.
Attacks on efficiency are anti-hydrogen FUD arguments. They were made up by BEV companies and are almost entirely false. It's important to realize that fuel cells are electrochemical systems just like batteries. FCEVs are also EVs just like BEVs. There is no fundamental downside. The upside however is that you avoid the huge amount of raw materials needed for the batteries. So this will be a far cheaper solution once we hit mass production.
In short, it is pretty much guaranteed that we will eventually switch to hydrogen cars. It is only a question of when and not if.
It really isn't. The grid is literally already there! The only new infrastructure needed is at the end point. If you are going to be generating hydrogen from electricity anyways, it isn't any different, except maybe you need less electricity because going from electrons to hydrogen back to electrons again you lose 40% energy.
The BEV companies aren't pushing FUD. They are just choosing the option that they see the most demand from, and can make the most money from. Japan has tried to make hydrogen happen for 20 years now, and it simply isn't going to happen.
Batteries don't require much more raw material than the fancy cyrogenic compressed hydrogen tank and fuel cell you need for a hydrogen car. Those batteries are also than those two things also.
That's complete nonsense. We will need vast amounts of grid upgrades to be able to be able to power all cars. And if the grid needs to be purely renewable, that problem explodes into something far harder. In fact, the problem becomes so hard that you will need hydrogen-based energy storage systems to make it work. But that completely undermines any efficiency arguments against hydrogen cars.
BEVs are over 100 years old. It is just a repeat of an obsolete idea. The moment we get serious about green energy, hydrogen cars will happen.
Hydrogen tanks are literally just tanks. They require very little raw materials compared to batteries. Fuel cells are tiny compared to batteries, and use up about the same level of raw materials as catalytic converters. Everything else is basically the same between FCEVs and BEVs. So you can quickly realize that the FCEV will be the far cheaper of the two ideas.
> That's complete nonsense. We will need vast amounts of grid upgrades to be able to be able to power all cars.
That is complete nonsense:
> A typical EV would require about 3,857 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. For 26.4 million EVs, that's over 101 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in a year or about 2.5% of what the U.S. grid produced in 2020. Although it's a small percentage, it's much more than what we're currently asking of the electrical grid.
You keep saying hydrogen tanks are literally just tanks. I get it, you don't believe compression is necessary, so no cyrogenic cooling at gas stations (powered by the grid of course), no fancy compression in cars. Is that what you actually believe?
Now do the math with 300 million EVs. Also, assuming SUV sized ones being popular too, alongside many commercial vehicles too. It is not that simple. Especially since so much of it will be DC fast charging and not slow speed charging.
Also, it is recoverable energy. Compressed gases are energy storage mechanisms in their own right. In the long run, this will be very minor loss of energy.
In the long-run, likely FCEVs. They are also EVs, just without the huge batteries. Advances in production are likely to reduce cost to ICE car levels. Advances in hydrogen production will make green hydrogen follow the curve of wind and solar, which is extremely cheap.
Electric cars are significantly easier than ICEs to develop electrically and mechanically. Car companies are notoriously bad at writing software. These are orthogonal statements.
But they are a lot harder to drive, mainly because you have not got any engine noise feedback.
Just like if I were to buy a Porsche with a flappy paddle gearbox, I'd ask their Sonderwunsch dept, to put a clutch peddle in, for those times I need to dip the clutch in order to gain control of the vehicle when driving on the limit because of the reasons why the 930 got its nickname the Widow Maker.
At best all I could do at the moment with a flappy paddle gearbox is try to boot the gearbox into a high gear like 6 or 7 and hope it can change gear fast enough whilst hoping the engine is not too powerful to act like the handbrake has been pulled up unceremoniously when taking my foot off the accelerator.
Now where in the controls do I alter the regen amount on an electric car, in order to stop it from contributing to an accident when driving on the limit? I bet its not a single action control, but something buried deep inside a menu somewhere. Of course the added weight of the batteries and thus increased weight of the vehicle, makes the experience much more like driving an electric train on the open road, stable and safe most of the time, but one hell of an accident when one does occur!
You're talking about a gearbox. Those aren't generally used in EVs, because an electric motor will happily put out tens of thousands of RPMs with plenty of torque at low speeds.
They arent in EV's the motors are wound to deliver a certain characteristic of a motor, but EV's nearly all have fantastic RPM abilities with max torque available through the entire rev range.
Toyota I think have announced they are simulating a gearbox in one of their new EV's which in my opinion is an admission that EV's are much harder to control because the need to feather the accelerator becomes a necessity unless the rate of acceleration is dialed back by the manufacturer. And then extra acceleration performance sold as an in car purchase like we are now seeing in some cars with heated seats can be sold unless the owner doesnt know someone who can hack the vehicle management system.
But just like many people complained about the brakes of the mk1 and mk2 VW golfs and polos, and porsche's in the 964's and earlier ie pre-ABS brakes, what those people complaining about is exactly how you want your brakes to work like if you dont have or need ABS. I could apply the brakes in such a way, I could have the front passenger side wheel locked up, but the remaining brakes not locked and then feathering the brakes so as to not flat spot the tyre.
Its virtually impossible to do that in todays ABS braking system world and I would always switch the traction control and other systems off because I could react faster than the systems could. Although I have to admit the Mercedes AMG S63 has for over a decade now, have a better braking system which enables the rear end to slide out a bit more around roundabouts in certain conditions, like what is today known as drift mode.
> which in my opinion is an admission that EV's are much harder to control because the need to feather the accelerator becomes a necessity unless the rate of acceleration is dialed back by the manufacturer
Are you speaking from personal experience here? The accelerator takes some getting used to, but most people adapt in like 30 or so seconds. What Toyota wants is something on an EV that simulates a manual transmission...for people who like sports cars, they like shifting. Sort of like EVs that put a subwoofer under your butt to simulate voom voom engine sounds. These are niche products.
No not driven an EV yet, I havent seen any that I like, and I hate driving big heavy cars, because they tend to slide off sidewise on bends, so anything over 1500kgs is pushing it for me, which discounts virtually all EV's.
So how exactly does the higher mass of EV's and lower centre of gravity change the centrifugal and momentum force?
I think Pirelli and Michelin will like to know this one as will half of the experts in physics!
In racing, there is something called Marbles. Now this is debris, typically rolled chucks of rubber thats peeled off tyres on a race track, but on the open road, this will typically be aggregate, chunks of stone that has been released from the road surface.
You find this on the edges of roads or on the outer edge of roundabouts.
These are an absolute nightmare to drive on, but if you have a lightweight car you can drive on these parts of the roundabout fast enough to undertake people who cut across to the inner lane of the roundabout, even in the wet.
I would not dare attempt that in an EV, the car would just just slide off the road. I dont care for the lower center of gravity that much, in fact if its too low it starts to affect the suspension and handling, where the suspension hits the bump stops.
Front wheel drive diesels have this problem over the front axle, where their suspension bottoms out on the bump stops.
> I would not dare attempt that in an EV, the car would just just slide off the road.
Ok, hold up. You have:
1. roundabouts, ok, no problem, we have lots of those, I've never had a problem in an EV.
2. Gutter curbs around roundabouts. Yes driving in those is bad, you'll get a flat tire pretty quickly that way (no matter your car). I used to ride my bike in those and got flats all the time.
3. You want to race around other people in the round about. Ugh, this isn't the USA is it? I'm guessing Russia or China, or some other developing world country?
I think this is a niche case, like doing donuts or drifting.
Maybe its what I've had to do to avoid people from crashing into me. I've even had someone release what looked like a small deer in front of my car one time from the central reservation armco barrier on an unlit part of a dual carriageway at night towards the end of a 5hr stint of driving.
I think they were hoping I wouldnt see them and I'd be tired from such a long journey, and the use of a deer enables a car crash whilst being able to blame it on "wildlife"!
There really are some right royal nutters living here, thats why I hope the porsche night vision system can record these events besides just being a display for night time use.
You have heard of snow, ice, rain, mud and sand, you do find them on the open road you know.
Glad to see your default impression of Porsche is speed though, that reinforces my desire to purchase one. :-)
Thing is the 911 Dakar which is ideal for the above mentioned conditions doesnt come with a towing eye, so I'd have to have the surfboards on the roof rack or poking out through the sunroof, and I've got no where to tow some jet skis if I wanted to hit the beach but you can do anything you like between the high and low water mark on a UK beach and I know some fantastic beaches perfect for this car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqc-HPeaQv8
You may want to give some benefit of doubt to unarguably the most successful car company of this world.
Unlike USA (and Europe?) public charging infra' is nonexistent in most part of the world. Compounded by unavailability of affordable home charging devices and easy/affordable installation logistics. Toyota perhaps does not see sense in riding the 'hype', instead continue to focus on where demand is - conventional cars.
However, they seem to be investing for the future when charging infra catches up. They started on electric car tech in 1992 (way before anyone else), and continue to invest in R&D; infact had released mainstream electric vehicle - Rav4, which they discontinued in 2014 as the "charging time was slow".
Toyota couldn’t convince the world it wasn’t reluctant about EVs, in part because of Toyoda’s straight-shooting, plain-spoken approach. He (new CEO Toyoda) outlined insufficient clean energy and charging infrastructure as a “limiting option” for customers. At the end of last year, Toyoda said “it takes time,” while also noting that they’d “been investing in electrification” since they “started working on hybrids, with our sights on building BEVs (battery electric vehicles). [0]
You could say all this about Kodak in the early 2000s - they were incredibly successful, demand was still mostly for film cameras, people didn't have PC for transferring photos etc...
I'm not saying it makes business sense for Toyota to drop ICE sales immediately. But their feeble, half assed EV effort is going to turn them into another Blackberry if it doesn't change quickly.
I drove ~1050km, SF -> Portland in my model 3 in one day. Around 11 hours total with a ~30 minute charge stop every ~2.5hrs. This was before the V3 superchargers.
Why the skepticism? It's pretty obvious from the car and supercharger stats that this is trivial to accomplish. I had an easy 700mi day trip years ago in my m3p and the range and chargers are better nowadays.
I'm pretty good at long distance driving (e.g. 14hrs of driving with no stops except gas and bathroom). I could drive 700 miles in a day in an ICE vehicle, but I'd never call it easy. Add in any charging time, and it gets even less so.
Might be me. I've semi-routinely made day trips of 1300mi, and I've done a few out-west road trips that involved long bouts of driving.
I'm not happy with FSD yet, but Autopilot is excellent and really helps with driver fatigue. The charging stops don't really change anything. You just stop when you would otherwise bathroom break or eat.
It is hard (or maybe it was hard) to average more than 60mph on US interstates, including gas/pee/food stops. 1300 miles @ 60mph is 21hrs. Unless you plan to not drive the next day, that's a LOT of driving, and definitely not easy.
Yep, 1300mi isn't easy. (I said 700mi was). You're correct, for me, it's mostly been non-stop interstate travel on a lot of midwest/western interstates.
Tesla has Autopilot. My 1200km day was the car driving itself 90% of the way. Of course I was paying attention and ready to take over, but the effort is reduced. Still, I agree... not easy. It still sucked.
One day but multiple charges. Got up at 7am and got home at 1am. Port Macquarie to Melbourne. I was bringing the car home from buying it interstate. On autopilot probably 95% of the time.
I charged 6 times that day, but those were around 40% to 90%, not 0 to 100. It could have been 3 charges if I risked getting closer to zero and spent more total time charging.
The car mapped the charging stops out for me. Sometimes multiple supercharger stops are better as the car can charge faster when the battery is low - I.e. 30% to 40% is quicker than 90 to 100, so if they're not much out of the way it's quicker to stop for 6 quick charges than 3 slow ones.
For additional data, when we go visit my wife's family that's a 2,400 mile trip (3,800km) that we usually do in 3 long-ish days (8am-10pm) if I'm with my family, or around 40 hours if I'm going solo. This is in a 2016 Model S 75D (smaller battery).
I mean, who drives 1200km in day anyway? But it is doable with todays EVs, many of which have ranges of around 500km or more, and only need a couple of hours of charging to drive 1200km (after starting with full capacity), during breaks you would mostly take anyways. Teslas, VW's ID.4, Hyundai's Kona electric and many more come to mind.
Cheers for Toyota's research, though.
In the US, long drives aren’t crazy. This year I’ve done 4 single day drives in excess of 1400km. The furthest I’ve ever driven without stopping was 2500km, but that was with 4 drivers, and I guess a “day” isn’t quite right bc it took us like 27hrs.
750 miles are still fairly rare, as a fraction of all road trips. We'll hear from everybody who does it in this thread, of course, but on average it's definitely an edge case.
However, it doesn't matter, I could do 750 miles a day in my Model 3 just as easily as my gas car. It would be more comfortable in the Tesla, too.
I've driven lots of cars and nothing beats the comfort of a premium German station wagon such as a Mercedes E class for long trips followed by Volvo ones.
A model Y or 3 are in a very different tier of cars.
Everyone likes Volvo, but I continue to find them very underwhelming. Mercedes is good, but they have really fallen behind the other German manufacturers in many ways.
A Model 3 is decidedly in the middle, I'll grant you, but it has adaptive cruise and lane centering, which makes long cruises effortless.
But before I'd take a Mercedes E class or any other station wagon, I'd take an F150 King Ranch ;-). Truly that is the land yacht of the modern era. Inefficient, expensive, but there aren't too many cars more spacious or soft for cruising down the highway. In the US, obv.
> I'll grant you, but it has adaptive cruise and lane centering, which makes long cruises effortless.
That's all stuff that Mercedes cars have since decades?
The first radar-based dynamic cruise control was implemented on the 1999 W-220 S class. Mercedes cars had lane centering and even automatic lane changing since 2013.
Even today Mercedes is the first and only manufacturer to offer level 3 automatic self driving.
There's lots of things that Mercedes has been doing wrong in years (design wise especially, but engine choices on AMG models have also been questionable lately) but the safety and comfort of their premium cars (E class and upwards) is still at the top end of the industry.
I've driven 1600km/1000mi in a day multiple times. I don't find driving that far in one day fun but sometimes it's a better choice than dealing with hotel rooms, especially with pets.
Lot's of people all the time? Perhaps you live in a small country or have all your important people quite close to you if these numbers don't seem reasonable. I must make 1-2 road trips like this a year to attend family events, weddings, funerals, etc. It's not fun to drive 12 hours straight, but it's doable, especially with 2 drivers.
I live in North Dakota, so if I want to get anywhere I usually drive. I did Fargo to Bozeman by myself last year. Have driven Fargo to Yellowstone in a day. Fargo to Seattle in 2 days with another driver. Chicago is a 9 hour drive. Denver is 13 hours. Long road trips are a regular part of life when you live in the middle of nowhere.
I've done a 1600km trip 6 or 8 times in a 2017 Model X 100D. I do it in one ~18 hour drive. About 3.5hrs of that time spent charging. Charging has never been a problem. I think the worst experience I've had was a few years ago, on a V1 charger that had > 1/2 the stalls occupied, so I needed to share a 120Kw hour charger.
I've spent the last 40,000 hours on the phone. With breaks, sleep, meals, adventures, and some charging in between...
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Personally, I want the boutique car shops of the early 1900s style to re-open - whereby they build bespoke vehicles on a standard EV sled, such as this or the Tesla sleds that they open sourced their patents for back in the day...
I'd love to be able to literally design and build my body-work around a safety-rated-regulated frame/sled - and then have these made - the problem with this idea is the advent of monoquoque frames which is the frame and major body-panels are all one-piece, which then required the advent of automotive robotics to be able to pick-up the frame and turn it at angles where the degrees-of-freedom assembly arms can reach, insert/weld things...
but I'd rather have a "tesla" or this "toyota" guts with a custome body set that I can design with a studio, have them fabricated/printed and affix to the standard mounting holes/brackets of my safety-cage.
I especially would like to do this for what would be a camper-van design where you plop the van body atop the sled, have some interconnects for internals to controls etc... and then have the van body mount in a sensible manner...
This number is plausible to reach on one day while stopping for charges.
My median driving is very short (<30km/week), but I'll make one way drives of 1800km about 6 times a year. I did lots of research about the long range capabilities of Tesla when making my last purchase.
It's commonplace for whoever gets a throne to inevitably squander it because they get complacent and proud, becoming top dog is essentially the grim reaper giving you written notice.
Combined with other failures Japan is going through right now, it really is tragic how far Japan has fallen from its former glory.
for all this talk of tragic failures, it is an extremely rich country, and Toyota is #1 automaker in the world. So compared to wars and true craziness elsewhere, they are still facing just the first-world problems.
I don't think Toyota has lost anything. I think they understand the mid-range market better than other care makers and are executing on a strategy that pushes most people's first EV purchase out into 2030, with hybrid and plugin-hybrids dominating until then. I think that's probably the right bet.
My basic thought on TSLA's long-term prospects and the EV market in general is that the legacy auto makers are patient, not sclerotic.
(Also, toyota has several EVs: the Toyota-badged BZ4X, the Subaru-badged Solterra, and the Lexus-badged RZ. Branding aside, those are all Toyota EVs.)
What's unique for Toyota is that their hybrids are sold like a pancake. Hybrids also uses batteries but it uses far less. Battery supply is the current constraint for xEV. Since they can sell many hybrids for less battery use, I understand that they don't want to "waste" batteries for BEV, but it makes bad reputation for slow BEV transition.
It's the classic innovator's dilemma, but hybrids are also great vehicle for who can't afford BEV for some reason now. Still, I think they should released moderate BEV (like Nissan Aria?) in 2021, even if they ship very limited count.
Toyota is a Japanese company, a country that will burn any thing to keep lights on. So, when people question Toyota's commitment to Electric, I do not take them seriously. Toyota might have sunk-cost going with Hydrogen, but sooner or later they will build electric vehicles. My take is, the complexity of Li-based battery supply chain coupled with their views on Total Carbon Footprint of Li-based cars made them wait for better options.
This is totally backwards. We will have to switch to hydrogen cars because batteries are not sustainable. It is nearly everyone else that picked wrong and will eventually have to pay the price.
Seems a massive one for me, I had blackouts in recent years both at my house in Italy and Poland. Electricity in Poland is still highly coal dependent in my region in Italy it's 90%+ gas.
The plug in hybrid is a better choice for most people honestly these days. Fiat only sold the 500e in california where every other new parking garage sees a dozen ev charging spots put in. It’s hard to imagine that being viable in other parts of this country.
The charging performance of one of the bZ variants is so bad one could say it doesn't really do "fast" charging. See the out of spec review "The Toyota bZ4X AWD Sets A New Low Record In Our 10% EV Road Trip Challenge (US Spec / CATL Battery)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9A73U-kAO0
Tesla is shaping up to be the next Blackberry. They are stuck with just one idea: The battery powered car. An idea that predates internal combustion BTW.
In the short-run, just more practical cars such as hybrids and plug-in cars. In the long-run, it is the inevitable plunge in cost of hydrogen, which will make fuel cell cars the cheaper type of car to own.
What do you think happens to overall system efficiency if you need to carry an internal combustion engine, a gas tank, and gas along with you, in addition to a battery, inverter, and electric motor?
Hybrids are strictly worse than electrics in every measure except range, and most customers do not need the range they claim to need.
But salesmen are not paid commissions to explain why customers don't need things, so we have hybrids.
>Hybrids are strictly worse than electrics in every measure except range, and most customers do not need the range they claim to need.
Thats the benefit of a plug-in Hybrid. Most people don't need to drive much on a day to day basis and the smaller battery can handle that fine. For longer driving you have the ICE engine. The ICE engine can weigh as much or less than a comparatively "long range" battery.
Bullshit. All car companies will have to abandon batteries because it is not a sustainable idea. It is Tesla and not Toyota that is facing a disruptive risk because of that.
I've been seeing a lot of articles like this. I feel like Toyota is planting these stories to encourage its customers to wait for its EVs. After all, why would anyone want a 300 mile EV when these hypothetical vaporware "745 mile" EVs are around the corner?
I'm starting to wonder if the "745 mile" claim is actually admission of technical failure. Think about it. If their battery really does have that capacity and can "charge in 10 minutes" then why not a battery half or even a quarter the capacity?
Perhaps this battery's maximum rate of discharge is so low that such a massively oversized pack is needed to get sufficient momentary power to the electric motors?
> Perhaps this battery's maximum rate of discharge is so low
If someone invented a battery great in all dimensions except a low discharge rate, it would just be paired with a regular lithium battery to provide brief bursts of power for acceleration.
In fact, thats the way most fuel cell vehicles work (fuel cells are expensive, so you use one as small as possible and use it at full power all the time, storing any excess in a regular battery)
You’re overthinking it. Range is main thing people worry about, especially ones with no EV experience (which is majority of the world). Big range is how to you get headlines.
That doesn't really matter if the car is ludicrously expensive or the battery takes up too much space (or something else, like it's prone to bulging or spontaneous combustion). People don't worry about those things with today's EVs because they aren't problems. I have three EVs and no amount of range would overcome certain downsides.
You sound exactly like anti-EV people. I don’t need EV, it’ll be too expensive, etc, etc.
Toyota, at least historicity, is targeting mass market, where they can make affordable and reliable car. Current EV works for you? Great! But it doesn’t for many others.
I have EV and PHEV, and I won’t abandon my PHEV (big car) till battery is significantly better - I need a second big car, with a big range, that comes without any asterisks.
I think you're missing the point: "range at all costs" isn't the answer if it means tradeoffs that most people wouldn't make. As the topmost comment said, if you can charge in ten minutes, why do you need 700 miles of range? They're talking about a battery that can get you from SF to LA and nearly all the way back in one charge. Who is making that trip without ten minutes to spare along the way?
Every positive aspect to a battery (lacking some novel miracle) means a tradeoff. Faster charges? More weight. More capacity? Physically larger. Better heat management? More expensive materials. (Obviously just hypothetical examples)
To the point of the root comment, 700+ miles of range is outrageous when you can refuel in nearly the same time as an ICE vehicle just doesn't make a lot of sense. So why bother accepting the other tradeoffs? Make a battery that's 500 miles and doesn't eat through tires nearly as fast due to weight. Make a battery that charges in 20 minutes instead of 10 and make the trunk a normal size. What technical challenges painted them into this specific corner that they're not talking about?
It’s trade off at all cost, according to you. Again, just because current tech works for you, it doesn’t mean it should stop there. I don’t understand why you’re so triggered that someone may get bigger battery. And why 500 is ok why 700 isn’t?
90% of people don’t need SUVs and trucks, yet they still dominate sales.
And, 700 miles in EV, after you add all asterisks can easily become 350 miles.
You're still missing the point: I would love a battery that has these attributes without tradeoffs. But as the root comment says: the numbers here are exceptionally large, breaking the step function of progress. And they make no mention of downsides, which implies they're hiding the problems.
It's not about being "triggered", it's asking the legitimate question of whether (and specifically, which) technical problems led them to these battery properties. I think we can all agree that this battery isn't going to be a miracle innovation, or they'd have hyped its lack of downsides. That being the case, we must admit that the battery has problems (acceptable to some consumers or not) and that the regular re-hyping of this vaporware is indeed an admission of technical failure in some way.
I'm just going by the statistics, where I live (France), half of the workers are living less than 12km from their workplace.
Right now, electric cars have improved and the ones being sold are in the 300km battery range.
That's already overkill for most of the normal usage. People have a warped idea on how they are using their car and think they are doing way longer trips than the statistics tells you.
I'm using an EV myself and I changed nothing to my behavior, everything is alright.
The problem is that here in the US, the chance of making a 200 mile trip 10-20x in 3-5 years is high and no one here wants to deal with getting a rental or special car just to do that.
We like our road trips and while they're rare, they're important and we don't want to rent or have a second car in order to do that.
EVs need to be comparable with gas cars in realistic scenarios and that means a real 3-400 miles. Not 400 miles but with a giant list of can't do's
I had one from 2019 till a few months ago and I never really shook the anxiety and I live in SoCal where there were chargers coming out of my ears. I think the anxiety is mostly there unless you own a home or garage where you can charge nightly.
The last couple of decades have shown what happens if you warn people about some imperceptible (to them) danger and tell them sacrifice personally, even in minor ways, to stave it off.
Frighteningly little happens. The change that does happen has been frequently coming in on a wave of technical innovation making greener options superior to old ones.
Everything here is accurate. I still chose an EV because I can deal with the caveats, but this helps clarify to me why others wouldn't want to bother. This doesn't even mention access to charging; much easier for homeowners to justify an EV.
One thing though:
> You shouldn't charge above 85-90% to avoid going against recommendations
Daily driving this doesn't matter much. Longer drives you can charge to 100% as long as you depart within a reasonable time frame of say within 6 hours, probably longer. More annoying is the charging curve after 80% at fast charging stations. In my experience you usually won't want to spend the time to get that last 20% unless absolutely necessary.
Yeah, I'm not hating at all on EVs. Just saying that a 700 mile battery would assuage a lot of fears. I owned a Tesla from 2019 till a few months ago. I got bored and sold it for a profit and got myself an old LX470.
Most of those problems are exactly the same with ICE engines. You may not want that comment, but it's true.
Except the roof rack one is bogus. I installed the cross bars of a roof rack on my Bolt EUV (it came with the rails), and afaict it affected my mileage not at all. I still get 320 to 330 estimated miles (against the EPA's 247 estimated miles).
And the don't charge above 85--90% one is bogus too; there's talk about that on forums, but the manufacturer says nothing about it.
And I wouldn't want to go below 10% on a gas powered car either...
I'm open to you explaining how those ice issues are the same instead of just saying they are.
Running your car to zero fuel may potentially damage your fuel pump while running your Tesla or electric car to 0% constantly will completely destroy the battery. Much more expensive issue. Someone can easily bring you a small Jerry can of gas if you run out while it's day near impossible to do the same thing for an electric car. It'll need to be towed.
Yep, this is an excellent point: if you could get that sort of range, then most of the market would happily buy about a 1/4 of that provided the price was similarly much lower.
I've been wondering the same. I'd be fine with a 350 mile range vehicle - it would cover more than 99.9% of all of my trips. It would be cheaper since presumably it would only need less than 1/2 of the batteries required to go 745 miles and also it would make the vehicle lighter. Not a lot of people actually need a vehicle capable of going 745 miles on a charge - most gas cars only go 400 to 500 miles on a tank of gas currently.
This is the most true-to-myself comment I've seen so far. I've only ever bought Toyota cars, but my next car will be an EV and Toyota's offerings are... subpar, and barely there. I trust Toyota build quality and manufacturing, but my current vehicle is probably going to need replacing before they have a proven, large volume native EV on the market. They waited too long.
They replaced hydrogen with solid state battery as a thing that's perpetually coming soon but not quite there yet.
There are two metrics that matter for Toyota:
- How much gwh per year of battery production can they get online and how soon? They need to shift production of millions of ICE/hybrid vehicles to fully electric. So, we're talking many hundreds of gwh here.
- How expensive are those batteries going to be in $/kwh? Toyota is mostly known for its affordable cars. They have a few luxury models of course but mostly, they sell cars to people that can't afford those. The battery is by far the most expensive thing in an EV. I'd expect them to look at cheap sodium ion batteries rather than some fancy solid state batteries.
Toyota is late to market and they don't have much more than a few concept cars and a few models that they pay BYD to produce for them. They are certainly starting to invest in production capacity. But it seems they are still a few years away from having much to show for their investments. Also, are they going to keep up with BYD, Nio, VinFast, and all those other asian manufacturers that are not holding back and are already producing EVs by the millions? Tesla is a category of its own at this point with a clear lead in terms of profitability and production cost. And you have the likes of Stellantis, Ford, and GM also trying to get e piece of the action. Toyota is a no show so far and the last 3 are showing the transition to electric is hard and involves a lot of learning and reinventing.
Toyota needs more than a magic battery to catch up.
There is a huge market for PHEVs if Toyota had the competency to take it. Theor Prime vehicles are in high demand, just not made in large numbers for whatever reason. Tacoma and 4Runner-like trucks with a PHEV drive train would sell like crazy.
PHEV are just bad business. They don't make money. They are very expensive to produce and expensive to maintain. There is a reason car markets don't want to make that their primary thing.
Considering the Model Y may very well outsell the Corolla this year, that doesn't look like it is the case any more. While they generally are more expensive up front, the total cost of ownership can end up less when you calculate fuel and maintenance.
yes, but say toyota would want to significantly ramp up ev production tomorrow, it is not clear if they will get the same pricing as tesla who already secured contracts before demand started growing.
Prices are already coming down. China actually has lots of cheap EVs on the road already. Think <10000$ cars. Are these cars amazing. No. But they are amazingly good value for the money.
What's going to happen in the next 3 years is that several of those Chinese manufacturers are bringing production capacity online in Europe and North America. And they will start selling these vehicles at a premium and make a lot of profit because they don't have much local competition in terms of cost. Tesla is rumored to be working on a cheaper EV but they will likely build it for the international market and manufacture it in their Mexican plant.
Meanwhile, the cost price of batteries keeps on dropping. CATL and other manufacturers are announcing new batteries all the time. For example CATL has had some success with bringing sodium ion batteries to market as well as LFP batteries. Component prices for EVs are dropping as well. It's not impossible to scale EV production. That's actually what's happening. Production volumes are growing year on year and cost per vehicle is trending down.
1200km is more than enough. Nobody should be driving longer distances in one day anyway. If this will hold up, Toyota will have leap-frogged their competition. As a German, it kind of pains me to see how asleep at the wheel the German car industry is: too timid, too conservative and too slow.
Edit: Although a bit of a bummer further down: "Toyota claims it will be ready for sale in 2027 or 2028."
The e-up from VW is the cheapest one they sell. It's 30k, more than double than the combustion version. I simply cannot believe that the same car but with battery an e engine costs 16k more.
Nah, the price is because EV market in China is very competitive. Tesla there still has the brand value and dominates the premium segment, BYD and the likes hold all of the budget segment, where Tesla has no offering. VW cannot compete with Tesla because it has no such brand attachment in China, so it has to compete for budget segment, hence the budget car prices.
Best-selling EV in China after Model Y is BYD Yuan Plus, which costs ~20k USD. That's the niche VW has to compete for.
VW has lots of brand attachment in China. Black Audis have been synonymous with rich officials since the 80s, and VW is not really a slouch either (they aren’t premium like their Audi brand, but that is true over here as well).
VW is just behind on EV tech, they don’t have much to offer their Chinese JV partners beyond a brand.
By that logic, they'd keep VW prices high. China's vehicle manufacturers have made impressive strides of the past few years, especially in the EV market. Considering the growing nationalist tendencies, they'd try to get there citizens to buy more wholly produced and designed Chinese cars. How does lowering prices on foreign ones help that goal?
I can, considering demand is through the roof. If it's a good deal for the customer, that's another story. I'm not sure what the ROI is in fuel and maintenance savings but over the lifetime of the vehicle it's probably close?
Oh I was not questioning VW trying to charge as much as possible.
I just believe the profit margins on those 2 versions are wildly different.
Electric cars are more expensive to produce, for now at least, but that that price difference doesn't excuse a 2x price difference to the end customer.
Simple usually means fewer parts. Doesn’t mean those parts are cheap. Raw material costs for EVs are still a problem, although the increased demand in the past few years has spurred mining annd refining companies into action and we are now seeing drops in the Lithium and other commodity markets. The invisible hand at work.
I would guess the longer ranges benefit apartment dwellers, house renters, etc. People that maybe can't get reliable daily/nightly access to a charger. Apartments and workplaces could dole out stickers for access on specific days of the week or similar to spread out use of chargers.
Or anyone that needs to do a 500-600 km every 2-3 months and is not eager to add 90 mins and uncertainty to those trips.
I think is a fairly common situation in Europe, you might live in a city but relatives are away. You visit but don’t see the point of making a complex planning factoring cold weather, vehicle load, potentially broken chargers no your planned stop,….
And train is not an option if you are carrying a family of 5 or plan on moving around once you arrive.
Why adopt a solution that is worse than the status quo?
At that point it's worth considering renting a car every 2-3 months for those trips, and get a car sized to your day-to-day needs instead.
Of course that's also worse than the status quo (well, probably cheaper than the status quo, but less convenient), so I don't expect people to flock to that solution
> probably cheaper than the status quo, but less convenient
If it lets you get rid of your cars, maybe.
If you also need a daily car (or even two), rental is not necessarily cheap, and beyond convenience it has flexibility issues.
For instance the rental closest to me is a half hour bus ride away, and not open on the weekends, and the prices can vary a lot depending on time to trip or period, and obviously the type of car can triple the rental price.
It’s worth it to me, because I can otherwise get by fine without owning a car. But if I need a daily anyway, it makes more sense to upscale it a bit and get the extra freedom. Especially if relatives start getting up in age and you never know when you need to pack up quick.
It’s the same issue with timeshare vehicles, if people have kids they’ll all need it at the same time (because school schedules), and you’ll always remember when it was not available for an emergency.
It's not a 90min stop to go 500-600km in a lot of modern EVs. More like 10-20min.
I just looked up a trip in A Better Route Planner in a Hyundai Ioniq 6 going on a trip around Texas, 495km trip. 4h44min total trip time, 8 minutes of charging.
Do you really not take a 10 minute break in nearly 5 hours of driving?
As someone who has been tooting the ev horn for a while, generally most arguments against EVs are couched in "I do x now and don't want to change" or they are I heard about x and am afraid of it.
People who are willing to look into the situation on the ground tend to react positively
I used to be one of those people who really tried to just power through and rush through the drive every time, massively minimizing my stops. It felt pretty easy as a single guy doing this.
Now I'm married with kids. Even road trips in my ICE, I tend to stop more often and for a little longer than I would have otherwise. And you know what? Overall, my road trips are more enjoyable. I'm far less drained when I arrive. I'm less stressed on my drive. I'm more alert in the car for more of the trip. Its a much better experience in the end taking a few more breaks on a long road trip, and I look back at my previous min-maxing attempts in regret of stressing myself out so much unnecessarily.
The road trips I've done in my EV have been absolutely pleasant, and my EV isn't even that great for road trips.
As someone who has driven the complete breadth of Pennsylvania (300 miles) dozens of times in my life in ICE cars, the rule is that you add 30 minutes of stoppage per 3 hours of driving, in order to stretch, use the bathroom, refill your water bottle, get snacks, etc. As long as an EV can fill 3 hours of charge (180 miles) in under 30 minutes, charging time adds nothing to the trip. The only thing that matters is that rest stops have adequate charger capacity.
> Why adopt a solution that is worse than the status quo?
Depends. If you believe climate change is a hoax pushed by evil liberals or whatever, the status quo is fine.
If you understand that it is real, then you know that keeping the status quo of burning oil means working towards destroying human civilization. Then it's easy to decide that mild inconvenience of charging an EV is worth keeping humanity around.
Let’s not forget that simply driving an EV is enough to reduce your carbon emissions.
How many miles do you need to drive an EV until you break even on the emissions required to balance out manufacturing of the car, recycling of the battery and car once it has reached its max lifetime use, and how the electricity to charge your EV was generated?
If your concern is climate change, lobbying for EV use probably isn’t the biggest bang for the buck.
I’m not 100% convinced an EV is better for the environment when you consider all of the indirect emission sources.
(I’m bracing for the downvotes, but would much prefer to be proved wrong with citations and research studies)
> If your concern is climate change, lobbying for EV use probably isn’t the biggest bang for the buck.
Absolutely is not. Passenger road transport accounts for only about 10% of CO2 emissions[1], and reducing that is one of the more difficult approaches because you're asking millions of people to each change their personal habits which individually have essentially no impact.
State regulatory changes applying to large industrial emitters will have the biggest impact and while the costs will ultimately be borne by customers, it is more likely to actually happen. This includes both encouraging "green" energy production such as nuclear and renewables, as well as demanding capture and/or reduction of emissions.
Sounds like most studies point to a little over 20,000mi break even for cars based on the average US grid energy source mix. In my area it's an even higher mix of renewables than average, so probably 20,000 or less.
My EV is already a bit over 26,000mi, so it's most likely past it's break even and I plan on probably putting another 100,000+ miles on it before I sell it.
I'll be getting an EV when I can purchase one for $50k with more than 700 mile range. Then I won't need to stop more often than our gas car on road trips, and I won't have to worry about the cold/speed/altitude significantly reducing range.
Even in Germany the top selling electric cars are not German. Combined with the uprising of cheaper Chinese brands in Europe in the coming years, I fear the worst for the German car industry.
However German car manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz also cooperate with solid state cell manufacturers (https://group.mercedes-benz.com/company/news/220127-prologiu...)
Market share is a different measurement unit compared to top selling.
From your article:
Tesla hatte VW im zweiten Halbjahr 2022 die deutsche Elektroautokrone abgejagt. Nun verteidigte das Unternehmen von Elon Musk den Spitzenplatz. Der Vorsprung schrumpfte allerdings von 7400 auf 2000 Autos. Die Marktanteile der Marken lagen dabei bei 16,5 und 15,6 Prozent der insgesamt in Deutschland neu zugelassenen Elektroautos.
The idea that this is a good idea is very questionable. If you buy an expensive car, you expense quality. If you buy a cheap Tesla you get a cheaper product. Not sure why costumers wouldn't be able to understand that.
The many brands are mostly historical by consolidation in the industry.
Yeah, it's a bit confusing with all those brands. Tesla is just Tesla, but Volkswagen is a company and also a brand, and the company owns the brands Volkswagen, Škoda, Seat, Cupra, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley and Porsche. But it is owned partly by another company called Porsche as well.
So yes, Tesla sold more cars in Germany than the Volkswagen brand, but fewer than the Volkswagen group.
This is essentially due to different marketing decisions by VW. VW, like most car companies, has loads of brands. Tesla has one. Items 2, 6, 12, 13, and 21 on your list are all VW. VW could, if it wanted to move up on that leaderboard, rename the Cupra (Seat sub-brand) Born, which is a mildly weird-looking id.3, id.3 (mildly weird looking trim) tomorrow.
Literally ever large car company signs a bunch of stuff with lots of battery startups. If any of this pays off is questionable. Most of these 'solid state' cell companies will have a very, very hard time. This is research level stuff not, making millions of cars with these cells anytime soon.
I mean if you want your German pride back, Mercedes has a car (exactly one, it's a concept car) on the road that actually does 1200km on a single charge, the EQXX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G7Egi36C4M
It's the coolest concept car in a long time. It makes progress in something that actually matters and it looks elegant, not like an oversized Transformers toy.
It's funny for me to come across this comment now. Just 15 minutes ago I got home from driving 1,250km today in an EV. Yes, I am tired. Yes, I agree nobody should drive longer in one day.
> 1200km is more than enough. Nobody should be driving longer distances in one day anyway.
No not really. When they say 1200km that's under ideal conditions. Put a roof rack, a kayak or two bikes, load it up with 4 passengers and a trunk full of luggage, and drive up into the mountains on a hot summer day with the air conditioner on full blast, and you're probably looking at a range of 400km. And your destination probably doesn't have a place to charge overnight.
This whole "in one day" mentality is the problem. If you're going to the backcountry of death valley where there is absolutely no civilization, you want your vehicle to hold enough energy for your entire trip, not just for one day.
> You do realize that if you do all of those things in an ICE, you'll get a similar drop in range, right?
Yes but when most people talk about 400 miles of range in an ICE car they are usually referring to at least typical (==harsh, if you are in the western part of the US) conditions with AC on full blast and lots of mountains.
When EV companies boast 400 miles of range they're testing it on an ideal track. Very different.
I have a model 3 long range, advertised 358 miles, I get nowhere near that, more like 200 miles in realistic California conditions, which are (a) searing heat in the central valley in summer (b) mountains everywhere else (c) biting cold in the winter anywhere in the far north or far east part of the state (d) stop sign hell in the bay area which forces you to stop and go every block.
Given the weight of the batteries, I expect you’ll see companies and customers opt for a battery half that size. The reduced weight will add a few percent to the expected range, so you might see a 600 mile battery with 45% of the capacity.
> 1200km is more than enough. Nobody should be driving longer distances in one day anyway.
It's not necessarily about the range, there's also charging frequency. I personally don't have anywhere to charge my car where I live (apartment complex) so I have to go to my office building or my city hall/library, etc.. and of course pay for it, while I coordinate whatever errands I have to match the charging time. I would like to do that as seldom as possible.
»Toyota has been secretly developing a solid-state battery for EVs with a range of 745 miles and a charge time of 10 minutes, which could revolutionize the industry.«
If you charge a battery with anything near the capacity necessary for 1200 km range within ten minutes, you will need at least a charger with 1000 kW (1 MW) output power.
For perspective: The two new units at Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant have 1100 MW each.
Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come from?
You could use some kind of buffer; another battery. There are already a few companies out there working on MW+ chargers. Mostly they are aimed at trucks and buses. But the technology is there.
The peak load is clearly not coming from the grid. One issue would be that that power is relatively expensive. Using that kind of is a last resort. Instead you'd want a lot of on site battery that can provide lots of power quickly and can soak up power from nearby solar panels, or cheap night time grid power. Easy to say because that is already how a lot of fast chargers work. If you operate these commercially, ensuring access to cheap power is key.
Also, just because people buy bigger batteries doesn't mean they actually drive more or use more kwh. It just means they can spread out their charging a bit more. Which means fast chargers would be something they would need to use less.
With a battery that large, you'd almost never run out as driving that kind of distance on a single day would be very rare for most people. And honestly the few times you actually do that, take some breaks.
This charging pattern is of course already the case for EVs with far smaller batteries. Most EV owners rely more on overnight slow charging than fast charging. With a battery that big you might get away with never having to use a fast charger at all.
If you're asking "where do we get the power plants", that is a valid concern, especially as we want to get rid of coal power plants at the same time.
But ultimately it is not that much power - I did a back of the envelope calculation for my country and converting annual vehicle-miles driven into kWh with average EV efficiency ended up adding 11 % increase in electricity consumption.
Not sure how it stacks up with other countries, and yes, we need more and cleaner power, but 11 % increase is not insurmountable problem.
If you're asking "how does that much power gets places", electric trains routinely run as much power. My city runs hundreds of trams that take over 700 kW each, and full power electric locomotive usually takes about 5 MW. The grid already knows how to handle it.
Rapid chargers are primarily a psychological safety net. Prospective EV owners really worry about them, but EV owners rarely use them. You might take a road trip once a year, but the average driver covers less than 40 miles per day. The normal overnight charging that represents the vast majority of EV power consumption is actively beneficial to the grid by providing demand smoothing; the marginal cost of a kWh falls if someone is willing to buy super-off-peak power at 2am.
Superchargers are almost always full where I'm from, even in shopping malls. I'm sure they'd be even more commonly used if more of them existed. People just know they can't rely on them yet in the same way they rely on finding a gas station
As much energy per time (say 24h), hence as much power. This is assuming the grid spreads the load geographically (not all the chargers at one place) and not everyone is rapid charging their car at the same time (impossible since there won't be enough rapid chargers).
Under the assumptions, power equals average power (to a margin). It would be a huge mistake to try to build the grid to withstand the power of all existing electric devices at the same time, as the probability of such a situation is 0.
The utility infrastructure to support 150 kW for an hour is much cheaper than 1 MW for 10 minutes. And at these scales the utility will be passing the costs directly on to the customer. No possible way it will be allowed at a residential location.
Rapid charging is not typically needed at houses (you can charge while you sleep), but if you want one, you can have another, stationary battery that charges slowly when you are sleeping or not at home. When you rapid charge your car, the energy does not come from the grid but from this second battery.
Not everyone will be rapid charging at the same time, and the grid will spread the load geographically. Megawatt-scale rapid charging already exists for some e-buses that can be charged in minutes at the terminus while passengers get off and on.
Who says you need to charge it in 10 minutes? Plug it in overnight or while you're in the office and suddenly this becomes a lot less of an issue. Sure, if you're going on a 1500 mile road trip and need to charge on the way you'll have a problem, but I doubt that's a very common use case.
If you live in an apartment and often work from home, you probably don't drive hundred miles every day, and as such don't need to charge the car very often.
I did the math for myself, and with how far and how often I go places, I would need to charge a 400 km range Hyundai Kona about once every two to three weeks.
I do have pretty favorable conditions, though (and mostly continue to use the bus).
So we're talking about people who live in an apartment, yet far from work or in place with bad public transport so they need a long drive to work? I'm not going to claim people like that don't exist, but is it a common use case?
For me, I have paid charging station right in front of my building, because the electric company recently added charging to all local substations. But for myself I would probably charge the car at free charging places in one of the nearby grocery stores, I usually stop there like once a week anyway. We're also trying to get our employer to enable charging in the office garage, but it's dragging a bit. The larger shopping mall I visit with friends for cinema also has free charging for customers.
It's not that many places, and people in countryside or suburbia who can charge EVs with free electricity from solar panels have it easier, but since people in who live apartments are probably covered by public transport or can bike or whatever, and as such don't really need to drive ever day, I'm not convinced charging EVs is not solved problem right now. We'll see how it scales up.
Actually, in US suburbia, a big portion of the population is living in an apartment with poor access to public transit. I look around all the many places I've lived and see huge apartment complexes with little access to transit. Transit has not caught up with urban sprawl in most places.
As far as EVs, if one is in an apartment with no charging infrastructure and have a relatively long daily commute, and poor charging access at the worksite, an EV is just a bad choice. If there is good charging at work, and the commute is short enough, then an apartment can work but it is still inconvenient to have an EV if you can't charge it while sleeping.
I think eventually more and more apartment owners are going to start using charging infrastructure as a marketing tool so perhaps it will get better over time.
I'll admit I'm a bit surprised by "apartment in suburbia". Of US I have only seen few places. I thought most people either live in a house in the endless featureless landscape of suburban New Jersey or in Brooklyn apartment or whatever - and the former can charge in their driveway and the latter can just mostly use the subway and citibike.
Anyway my assumption was that someone would likely either have a driveway or a public transport. But I'm sure there are places that have neither - I'm just not sure how common that is.
Note: even though there are parking lots, no one is adding chargers to them because it's either too expensive or the existing infrastructure cannot support it.
The company that manages my building manages about 3000 apartment blocks around Stockholm. They recently sent a letter that they have found the possibility of equipping 200 (yup, two hundred) parking places with chargers.
Ah, you're calling that suburban. Ok, then it kind of makes sense. When I hear apartment, I imagine place like this: https://goo.gl/maps/hArPffCzEF8GZfHh6
In your case, we're not talking about some kind of physical or technological limitation but about politics - it would be very easy to add chargers to the parking lots, and it would be easy to have better public transport. It is not an EV problem, but municipal elections problem.
Whatever to match your idea of an apartment blocks or suburbs or whatever other idea.
> we're not talking about some kind of physical or technological limitation but about politics - it would be very easy to add chargers to the parking lots
Literally in my text: "it's either too expensive or the existing infrastructure cannot support it."
But sure, it's easy.
> and it would be easy to have better public transport.
Stockholm has great public transport. You still need a car from time to time. And yet, all we hear is "it's trivial to charge, just"
It seems that if there aren't thousands of chargers in Stockholm as of today, then it is horribly terribly inconvenient to use EV. And since it will never get better, I guess we just have no choice than to keep burning oil and destroying the planet.
> So we're talking about people who live in an apartment, yet far from work or in place with bad public transport so they need a long drive to work?
No, we're not. We're talking about electric cars. I mean, come on. It's not even ten replies above: "Who says you need to charge it in 10 minutes? Plug it in overnight or while you're in the office and suddenly this becomes a lot less of an issue."
> For me, I have paid charging station right in front of my building, because the electric company recently added charging to all local substations. But for myself I would probably charge the car at free charging places in one of the nearby grocery stores
I live in a suburb of 50 000 people, we have about twenty charging stations in total.
> but since people in who live apartments are probably covered by public transport or can bike or whatever, and as such don't really need to drive ever day, I'm not convinced charging EVs is not solved problem right now.
So, the question of how I would charge my EV still remains.
> I live in a suburb of 50 000 people, we have about twenty charging stations in total.
The infrastructure will get built in time as there is a greater need for it. Within my city of 40,00 there are probably over 100 charging stations. Though we are next to a larger metropolitan area. Most all have been added in last 4 years.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who are currently in a situation where charging an EV would be problematic. I’m also certain that more charging infrastructure will continue to be built it over time. There should be fewer and fewer people with this problem as time goes by.
YMMV, but for me as someone who can't charge at home, the options are:
* Charge at work (1-3kW so not always enough to fill battery, and chargers need to be shared some days... But my commute isn't long enough that I'd need a full charge every day)
* While shopping at the grocery store (some by me have free charging, especially if you shop at non-peak times)
* There's a few chargers attached to lampposts on my street. $2/hr at 7kW, so cheaper for me than gas. Sometimes these are ICE'd out, but parking enforcement in my city recently got the ability to enforce EV-only parking spots
* Public library (free). There used to be some issues with vagrants but less so since the library got a security guard
* Movie theater
* Mall (the problem is that these are 350kW chargers, so the car is probably full too quickly to do any shopping)
* Most of my long drives are to visit family, so they usually have a 120v plug I can use. If you're in a place where the standard voltage is higher, this is even more viable. And there's plenty of 350kW chargers along the freeways.
Not really. Unlike a gas station, those are mostly places I'd be going anyways. And even thought it takes longer, I can be doing other stuff (like my job) while charging
Liquid cooled charging cables is pretty standard for high speed DC fast chargers already. When that cooling is broken at an Electrify America charger, for example, charging is limited to something around 50kW.
Liquid cooling is indeed commonplace among DC fast charging systems. The Tesla V3 supercharger cable is also liquid cooled. The novel aspect of the Tesla V4 supercharger cable is that the conductors are directly immersed in the coolant.
> If you charge a battery with anything near the capacity necessary for 1200 km range within ten minutes, you will need at least a charger with 1000 kW (1 MW) output power.
Or you could just charge it at 500 kW for 20 minutes.
Chargers out perform the batteries at present. No current passenger EV can sustain 350 kW across the whole charge curve.
If Toyota's battery will sustain a flat 500 kW or even a flat 350 kW for most of the charge curve then that's a very good thing.
> Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come from?
For a given size of EV fleet and usage amount it doesn't matter if they charge quickly or slowly from your power plants point of view, higher power charging means there is correspondingly fewer cars charging concurrently since they finish quicker.
Presumably from the same place all the lithium and the necessary infrastructure upgrades would come from (even for "regular" EVs).
Maybe Toyota has wised up to the game after getting backlash for commenting honestly on its realistic strategies.
In 2023, we want vaporware that promises to fix climate change by emitting 6x as much CO2 during production, but don't worry, it'll break even with ICEs after a mileage that the battery will never get to.
CATL's and BYD's sodium ion batteries are appearing already. Cars are on sale in China and you can buy the cells on AliExpress. Those are about €50 a KWH for similar density which compares favourably to Li-on at over $100 and LiPho at $130.
Next generation batteries from their competitors are already hitting the market and the new Li-on is expected next year with double capacity which will match Toyota's stated battery and CATL are unlikely to be lying. Toyota has been talking about this since 2017 and nothing has been shown so far, whereas CATL have shown the tech off.
This coming year looks like it's finally the year when all the promises of new battery technology actually happens in volume.
Based on articles I read in trade mags via my work email is that battery manufacturers suspect that with careful design and thermal management a lightly used automotive battery could have a 20-40 year service life.
I think people have a disbelief that there have been large improvements in battery lifespan in the last 20 years when there absolutely has been. Modern ion batteries aren't just 20 year old ones but cheaper. Degradation and charge discharge rates are substantially better.
Just search sodium ion on AliExpress and you will get all sorts from 18650s andmother sizes as well as pouch batteries in various quantities. The voltage curve on them is really extreme compared to Li-on, should make estimating SOC very reliable.
So the Model Y is beginning to outsell the Corolla but Toyota is just going to wait until 2027 to launch this for reasons? Because they are so awesome they don't mind other companies eating their lunch? That isn't believable.
And that is unlikely to change any time soon not because they just want to wait for 2027 for unknown reasons despite massive demand for EVs and PHEVs that they still can't make in large numbers.
I used to wonder why such impossible research projects could exist in a private business. To some extent, the existence of such a project can give credence that management is not oblivious to larger trends - and has a plan to leapfrog the competition.
To this end, It doesn’t matter whether there is any credible plan to deliver said research project.
To put this into context, with 1200km of range, this car would be a fair bit ahead of its competitors. According to [0], the current top of the line is the Lucid Air with 830km, followed by the Tesla Model S with 650km and the Hyundai Ioniq 6 with 580 km of range.
For anyone interested in solid-state battery usage, Mercedes-Benz has already released vehicles with such batteries to customers, even as far back as 2021 [0].
No they have not. This is just a total misunderstanding of the technologies involved. Sadly for dumb marketing reasons 'solid state' has become the terms that is used, but that is the wrong term. The actual reason why 'solid state' was important is because people believe lithium metal anodes would only be possible with solid state. When we are talking about next generation 'solid state' we actually mean 'next generation li-ion batteries with lithium metal anode'.
The 'solid state' technology in buses that is talked about in that article is a totally different thing. That tech has been known to exist for a long time and is a totally different technology that has nothing to do with the hype around 'solid state'. Its 'lithium-polymer' that as a far narrower application and isn't all that interesting and certainly not some amazing next generation battery.
This is a sad issue in battery marketing world where people mix up what these technologies actually mean.
> For those who prefer metric, that’s a range of 1200 kilometers and a charge time of six hectoseconds
my brother in christ, literally the entire world not only prefers metric, but it’s the only one we know
like, i don’t mind seeing miles, esp given that it’s a US publication, and i already pretty much automatically convert from miles to km in my head, but please be humble with your silly system :)
Lately I'm more and more convinced that the challenge is not doing a thing, the challenge is scaling it up. Doing a thing is a necessity for moving forward, but scaling it up is how you change the world.
On one hand, Toyota is pretty good at scaling things up. On the other hand, they have not shown scaling it up, they have shown doing a thing.
They have sold hybrids at scale, lots of similar components, so no reason to think they can't scale when they have a design they are ready to produce. Toyota runs a huge global car manufacturing company that is known for quality and shipping a lot of cars. They know how to scale.
Toyota reminds me of Microsoft when the internet went mainstream. Very slow to respond, but once they got their giant tanker turned in the right direction they were all in. I suspect Toyota will be the same.
What they showed is a bench experiment. What they need is a battery which is proven capable in an EV — in terms of resilience, power handling, environmental tolerances, etc. The challenge is scaling THAT up.
Toyota routinely seem to be developing all kinds of new things… all of which are not production vehicles that anyone wants to buy in any serious quantity.
It’s a distraction tactic.
I don’t know what they’re buying time for but it had better be good else this won’t end well for Toyota.
They’re doing the Kodak maneuver. Meaning they’ll be spending cash on innovation because a minority of shareholders want to see them investing in the future but almost everyone isn’t willing to see actual losses. So then they’ll just keep spending on innovation but barely change their corporate strategy and then eventually fizzle out.
I don’t know about other press releases but to say that “no one would want to buy” a 1200km range car (or just the battery tech of one) is ridiculous to the extreme. It’s what everyone has literally been waiting for.
This is important, and the sources are terrible. The Guardian had an article over two weeks ago with essentially the same information.[1] There's no press release from Toyota on batteries this month.[2]
I work with batteries, it is almost always the cost of setting up a factory for a new process is just too high. Especially the first factory where you need new machines that don't exist yet.
My company is actually developing new lithium-metal battery chemistry that uses existing process for manufacturing, this is much more cost-effective and lower risk. You can just slightly retool an existing lithium-ion factory to pump out these new batteries.
Large-scale lithium-ion ever became a thing because Sony pumped a ton of R&D into walkmans.
These are best case scenarios. It just tells you the upper limit of the technology. The higher the limit the better. In practice though it means that the infrastructure has a lot of catching up.
I think this just speaks to how much of an advancement this is, if true.
Like, this new battery technology is so advanced that there is no infrastructure for it yet.
Everyone time I read a low charge time, the thing that comes to mind is the ability of the charging cable to carry that much power that quickly. Minimally that means you’re delivering 6x the electricity (2x the amount and 3x as fast). I’m assuming the charging is pretty efficient, so you have to scale up the charger, and a bunch of issues start coming up. For this reason I think 10m charge times are bs.
There’s a Starbucks I frequent where the drive through is on the same side of the building as the electrical service (!?) and every time I’m waiting for coffee I look at the multiple 2-3 inch conduits and think what kind of equipment are they running in there? They share a building with another business that I don’t think would put a dent in the power usage for the building, unless they have a server room I don’t know about.
I could run a class 2 charger at my house and that’s only a 1” conduit, but those take half a dozen hours to deliver that current. You’re gonna need a lot more shielding.
Class 2 would be 9 to 10 kw. For reference 33 kw is around requires cables in the us roughly 1 - 3/4 inch conduit. Each piece of equipment requires its own circuit so you likely have multiple circuits in the conduit depending on code. All that said commercial cooking and refrigeration require a lot of power.
Going back to charging, for a circuit the size this would likely need your be looking at something with at least 3 1 inch wires, and would be at least 2.5 inches in diameter when packaged. It likely needs cooling too which means even more diameter.
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by the time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
I think we will see solid state battery's in portables (Phones, Laptops) long before we see them in cars. The yield required, cooling, structural integrity, is all very hard to solve. Starting on a smaller scale for the significantly larger per unit market seems to me to make more sense.
I want manufacturers to be mandated to retrofit new technology to some portion existing vehicles. I have two 5-7yo Toyota hybrids and would love to have a better battery technology to replace the NIMH batteries when the time comes. There are aftermarket Li-ion batteries, but I’d love a third party solution that would convert these into PHEVs. I only have a 8 mi per day commute, and would basically never need to buy gas with a PHEV. With one of these solid-state battery packs, I could even take longer trips all electric. I’d probably pay $15k per vehicle for this.
Toyota is building a new battery factory in Liberty North Carolina (about 20 miles southeast of Greensboro). Their press site for it only says "Lithium-ion Batteries" and that they will be used for BEV vehicles, so it doesn't preclude it being used to build these new solid-state batteries.
Like many of the comments around these types of posts, I will be very excited when a definitive product has been produced, perhaps demonstrated if it's not too much to ask. Solid state batteries are possible, but I think it's going to take a company like A Toyota to, basically, burn a boatload of cash to get there and absorb that loss so as not to increase the price of the EV too much.
Perhaps solid state batteries will first appear on luxury lines. If you're already spending $90k for an EV, what's another $50k for the new battery?
I know everyone on HN will tell me that my opinion on my personal want is wrong, all I want is a hydrogen + fuel cell/battery car, or recharge times in the 5-10m range for BEV.
Ah Toyota and its 10 year quest claiming that amazing next generation batteries are just around the corner and that they make their EV best in class from 1 day to another.
I'm shocked at how seriously people are taking the 745 mile statistic, as if EVs were like rockets, range set at the limit of physical feasibility, rather than market-led compromises between range, power, weight, and price. If you develop a fancy new high-density, high-power battery, the market optima sits at a smaller battery. This holds true at least until the market is saturated.
Why? At the end of the day if they can produce a good car at a good price by the time EV hit mass adoption / ICEs get banned, they will be fine.
I don’t understand why people think just because you are late to market means you can’t get market share - or even dominate. Cars aren’t operating systems or social media platforms, there is no network effect.
Heck, Toyota entered the US car market when US manufacturers like GM and Ford were long established.
Because they will need some kind of advantage. Tesla has been on it for like, 10 years longer than anyone else so they have an advantage of learning curve. China has advantage of established production chain and low costs. Toyota has none. If they try to seriously compete they will just spend all money in 2-3 years and go bust.
Do people really believe, that everyone will drive a Tesla? People need stimulation, variety and there are multitude of other factors that weigh in on their buying preferences.
GM and Ford were also at it for decades before Toyota even existed ... The idea that Tesla and China's head start is insurmountable needs justification.
Toyota at that point had a huge cost advantage because their labor was many times cheaper than American, even bigger advantage than China has today. They were not unionised and worked almost for food, as Japan was still poor and half-wrecked after WWII. And it was the time when an assembly line worker in the U.S. with Homer Simpson level of education attainment could buy a 4-bedroom home on a single income. So they managed to squeeze in in spite of America having a huge head start, much like China did with Tesla. Today's Japan is nothing like that.
But we are talking about "learning curves" and "supply chains". You still haven't explained why they won't be able to catch up and make a good affordable EV.
Because you need something to begin. Either a learning advantage (build better stuff as cheap as others can build crappy one because of less trial and error involved), or a cost advantage (but crappy stuff but cheaply due to lower costs and thus win market share). Not having either, they will have to compete head-on, and simple comparison of valuations and thus WACCs of Tesla vs Toyota clearly shows that if they try to compete, they will be drained and bankrupt very quickly.
I think they will eventually not try. They see the writing on the wall and know they will be bankrupt and dissolved in some years. Thus spreading FUD about EVs plus promising much better EV of their own to simply slow down this process to make some final bucks before going bust. That is the smartest thing they can do at this point.
They have experience with electric drive trains/motors with the hydrogen vehicles and experience with batteries with their (plugin) hybrids.
They just haven't bothered to release a full EV for whatever reason. Maybe they don't think it will be profitable at the moment and it will hurt sales of more profitable existing product lines.
> Thus spreading FUD about EVs
Are they wrong about their concerns over the supply of lithium? Or that for many people EV won't be an option - due to lack of infrastructure in their countries, range issues, ... etc.
But this isn't how it will work at all. EVs will take over because ICE cars will be excluded from too many markets by law for the remaining ones to stay profitable price wise due to negative scale effects. People won't switch to EVs because they will want it, they will just have to. Question is who will make the money resulting from it.
As for supplies of lithium - supply is created when there is demand. Surely today's lithium reserves are insufficient, just as existing oil reserves were insufficient for even the whole eventual production run of Ford Model T when it was first launched. Reserves are created by demand, we should ignore current data: when there is demand, miners will find and give it to us.
In 2022, 80% of new cars sold in Norway were EVs[1]. Even in our most cold and remote region, Finnmark, over 50% of new cars were EVs. All on the top 10 list are BEVs.
Of the top 10, five were German models. The top two, ID.4 and Enyaq are essentially the same car and combined outsold the only Tesla model, Model Y.
Yes Tesla has a tech advantage currently. Their advantage isn't magic though, and for some people other things matter more.
However I will agree that Toyota has some serious work ahead to get back into the lead here in Norway.
That’s amazing. This means people can avoid plugging in their EVs overnight and overall be less taxing on the grid. Instead of charging every night, charge once or twice a week.
Bad news. Todays EVs are going straight to the landfill. Yet another hit for the environment. If only there was a more efficient transportation option…
There are lots and lots of issues around fire. Its not correct that solid state automatically means fire is less. There are lots of technologies that play into that.
Toyota has been a top car brand for a long time, their production capacity is huge, their build quality is high, their vehicle reliability is rightly praised.
Every car band is moving into the EV space. These companies are lumbering beasts, but after moving with "deliberate speed" for a few years, it's becoming noticeable. I see electric VWs and BMWs on the roads locally, along with Hyundai, Kia, Polestar and of course Teslas.
There are plenty of hybrid Toyota Priuses around, but for pure EVs, Toyota is the outlier, the laggard, the company that appears to have made the wrong bet and is now struggling to catch up.
How far are they behind really though? They have been working on hydrogen fuel cell (i.e. they generate electricity) cars ... isn't that practically the same thing except the power source is different? Serious question.
> Toyota have been working on hydrogen fuel cell, isn't that practically the same thing
No, it's totally different.
"Hydrogen-powered vehicles don’t need charging like an electric vehicle. You refuel them with hydrogen gas, pumped in the same safe and convenient way you would a conventional petrol or diesel car" https://www.toyota.co.uk/hydrogen/how-do-i-charge-a-hydrogen...
You can't fuel an hydrogen car on the new electric infrastructure, or vice versa.
> isn't that practically the same thing except the power source is different
Nuclear power stations and coal power stations are same thing except the power source is different.
Sure, it's the same except for all the many things that are different.
You can't fuel the one on the infrastructure for the other, and vice versa. EV charging infrastructure is happening, hydrogen infrastructure isn't. So Toyota's bet on hydrogen isn't paying off. Was that your question?
If your question is "why isn't Toyota just catching up since the differences are so minor in my mind?" maybe ask them, but we haven't seen it happen yet. I've driven Toyotas and liked it, I'd welcome more Toyota full EVs, but they seem to be struggling with full EVs so maybe it's not that minor in practice. That's the main thing that I can tell you.
I'll add a couple of things that I do know: car companies that have been in business for decades and operate at huge scale in big factory assumbly lines across global supply chains are, as I said above, "lumbering beasts", the new models are planned multiple years in advance. They don't turn on a dime, changes in Toyota management this year translate to new models on sale in 2026 or thereabouts. VW, BMV etc have a head start, as they have EV models out right now, and not the 1st generation of them either - e.g. I see VW ID3s locally, and the VW ID6 will be out by end 2023. Toyota's 2026 model will compete with an ID6 successor. And a Polestar 4 successor, etc. This is hard, from a standing start.
You mentioned the Prius. Toyota owns this market, sure. I see lots of them around, it's the vehicle of choice for "minicab" private hire taxis. But for Toyota, that's also an barrier to doing anything that takes sales away from that market.
If it was so easy to pivot to full EVs, would people be saying "Toyota faces disaster unless new CEO performs miracle" ?
I was just saying I don't think they are as far behind as many think. They seem to have all the components to make an EV.
As to why they haven't executed and delivered a car, who knows. Could be lack of profitability at the projected numbers they could sell vs cost to bring up a manufacturing line - in addition to, as you mentioned, cannibalization of more profitable products. VW, BMW, ... etc. are they making money or just eating losses selling EVs right now?
Maybe they aren't rushing it, it is a relatively new type of "engine/fuel" for them, and they want all the kinks and gotchas worked out before they release something to preserve their reputation for reliability.
That said, just because they haven't released anything doesn't necessarily mean they can't.
Well, we will wait and see, I'd be very happy to see Toyota join the party and finally release a good EV.
It is not quite right to say that "they haven't released anything", there is e.g, the Toyota bZ4X, widely regarded as a really bad car (1). And other EVs that have made no impact (2)
> It is not quite right to say that "they haven't released anything", there is e.g, the Toyota bZ4X, widely regarded as a really bad car (1). And other EVs that have made no impact (2)
So technically they have "joined the party". Granted they don't seem fully committed yet and don't seem to be trying very hard - based on the review you linked, they have QC problems ... on the wheels; and they haven't put much marketing muscle behind the others. At least they have a foot in the door.
Technically yes, and _only_ technically yes. I don't see Toyota bZ4Xs on the roads, no-one is looking forward to them. Do you know what a "compliance car" or "compliance vehicle" is? It's not a serious intent to be in that market.
Except we do know why because they have written blog posts about it. They would rather make 100 hybrids than 10 BEV's. They think it's better environmentally and they haven't said this part, but probably a lot more profitable as well.
Then where are their PHEVs? Their Prime vehicles have long waitlists and are produced in relatively small numbers. Either they can't make the margins with them or their access to battery supplies is very limited.
Given that they're claiming it'll make it into customer hands no earlier than 2027, and there's countless ways a new technology can take longer than predicted, and Toyota has no experience manufacturing battery cells anyway, no. They're still not a company "to be reckoned with" yet.
Toyota might well end up being the Nokia of the EV world, modulo the Japanese Government's preparedness to do GM-style bailouts.
In EV space, they're not even that. They have no competitive offerings and they wasted a lot of time going after hydrogen, which was shown to be not feasible like a decade ago.
Their current hybrids are great and very much in demand, especially the Prime models. Now if only Toyota could make anywhere near enough to satisfy that demand they would be doing really well. And an equivalent truck as capable and reliable as the Tacoma would probably ignite a sales frenzy. But whether they can't make the margins or don't have access to enough batteries, they can't seem to really perform in that space.
From the article:
"solid-state batteries... don’t do well in cold weather, tend to weaken quickly after repeatedly getting charged and drained, are particularly costly... Toyota...said it may have solved the range and battery weight problems."
Problems are A, B, C, and D, and Toyota solved X and Y. What gives?
How many people are regularly driving more than 300 miles without stopping for 30-45 minutes anyway? I guess this does step around the need for more charging infrastructure, but it seems like most range anxiety is pretty misinformed at this point.
What I think people feel about range anxiety is a combination of several internalizations:
- battery-powered toys run out of power at inconvenient times; that's our benchmark
- gasoline fuel stations are everywhere, and we know it takes 5-10 minutes for everything to be completed
- we can't afford to have a second vehicle just for long-range trips, so our annual longest trip is what we think about. Adding 30 minutes to every 10 minute stop might or might not be a problem
- we've all had the experience of waking up a little late, needing to get somewhere immediately, and then realizing that we need to fuel the car -- and that makes us 5 minutes late. If the equivalent makes us 35 minutes late, that's not acceptable
- in five years, is this car going to be undrivable because the batteries only hold half as much charge? Is it going to be worth much less because it needs a new $10K battery pack?
But the number one reason why people aren't buying electric cars is the same reason they aren't buying new cars: too damn expensive. US passenger car sales peaked in 1986. In 2018 they were lower than any year since 1951, and they have sunk even lower in every year since.
Also if you run out of petrol or diesel far from a station, you can get road services or someone else (yourself?) to haul a couple gallons over and get going.
You can even just pump some out of a passing car if you have a long enough hose and lungs.
Now I've never owned an EV and I suspect there is a way to use one car as a charger for another, in which case the latter becomes less of a point the more EVs are on the road. OTOH I imagine it would still take quite a while longer to get enough charge to drive to the nearest charging point than it does to transfer a little liquid fuel though.
Your list of fears is very true, but not all of them are an actual problem in practice.
BEVs report remaining battery very reliably, and keep going even at 1% (way better than all your gadgets). But you're very unlikely to even get a close call, because you plan charging stops before you leave (good EVs plan them automatically).
DC rapid chargers can add 50 miles of range in 5 minutes (nearly empty batteries charge fastest). 5min emergency on a 1h drive doesn't seem too bad. Traffic adds more uncertainty.
Your final statistic is the most damning, especially given there are (officially) 43% more people living in the USA today than in 1986.
Also, I don’t think the point of comparison is battery-powered toys. People have experience with electric tools (I can’t even vacuum my living room properly and with good conscience with the meager battery life the top-of-line battery vacuums offer!) which is probably a fairer comparison.
What does the article really contribute? The announcement was 10 days ago. I can't find anything in the article that gives me new actionable information.
Can people who upvoted this please explain why they did? Thanks!
Personally, this is the first time I'm seeing this info, and to me it's pretty exciting. 750mi on a single charge would significantly change the calculus on EVs for me personally. It pretty much eliminates any range worries I have, and makes it way more feasible for me to own one if I live in an apartment or condo where I cannot install a more powerful charger. It's the difference between hanging out at a charger station once a week vs once a month.
So at the very least, the article is a nice heads-up to me and others alike that are somewhat on the fence about EVs, that some of our concerns may very well be assuaged.
Until very recently, EV's weren't even a consideration for me, because of their limitations on range, but also because of difficulty of charging them if you lived in a condo or an apartment (heck, my current car is a Mazda, a company which _just_ started offering EVs in some markets). Because of that, I am not well versed in the specific details of the current generation of EVs. With that said, anecdotally, I have heard of old Prius hybrids getting 100k miles out of their batteries, but that was a decade ago. I don't know what modern battery chem is capable of.
Agree. This article takes the phrase "745 mile solid state battery, charges in 10 minutes created by Toyota" and fluffs it to 1000 words. No further information is conveyed.
Selfishly, I’m excited only because it might mean Toyota continues to be a viable operation into the future.
I want them to be one of the leaders of next generation vehicles, what ever the technology, only because it means they will continue to support their previous generation vehicles, for which they have an honourable history.
I want my BJ74 landcruiser to run on diesel until it’s no longer available, and then I want it to run as a hybrid/electric vehicle until like the ship of Theseus we are debating whether or not it’s still a BJ74.
This is a smart move. Current EV’s have not quite solved enough of the issues to make them viable for most non urban areas. Hybrids remain the most in demand and the best of both worlds with current tech.
If we can get a battery with a massive range then charging issues subside a bit and these vehicles become much more viable for most if not all of the US.
> Toyota claims it will be ready for sale in 2027 or 2028
Should be the first, last, and, honestly, single line of the discussion. We need those battery breakthrough yesterday, and we're still stuck with press releases and misleading car ranges.
I'll give all the credit due as soon as I can aford a car that let me drive the 500km of highway separating my house from my mom's with less than 2 charges. For all those who're readying to chant the gospel of Elon and tout the range of they model W, noticed how I used the word "afford".
And I'm a f-ing software engineer with the purchasing power of at least two people with a real job - and those two people would not mind getting an EV to get to their real jobs, too.
The clock is ticking, people are working hard, in the end the laws will force the car manufacturers to do what the market could not - but damn, in the meantime, am I tired of press releases...
Toyota has been researching this solid state batteries for years. I saw a post here (or many on the EV subreddit?) with a timeline showing how in 2018 Toyota was claiming they'd be selling cars with 700 miles of range by 2023.
But in the non-fantasy version of 2023, they're selling EVs with weird tradeoffs, like how the bz4x AWD version has a worse charging experience than the RWD
Which is about twice as much as I ever paid for a car.
I absolutely know you can recoup a part of that in the long run, especially given the price of gas, etc... But at the moment I'm already indebted to do insulation work in my house - there's a limit to how much an individual can invest at any given point, even if the investment is sure to pay off.
And again, remember that you have to be _rich_ to afford such a car. Real people are already having a hard time buying second hand cars at around 5000€/10000€.
I realize I don't have any real data point, so let's digg in.
At current exchange rate, $20000 is 18000€. I checked the 3 most sold cars for last year in France [1], and the listed price range from 12k€ to 16k€.
So, it's not obvious that a 18k€ car is "cheap" - but it's just a napkin computation.
I'm surprised to learn that each model accounts for a pretty small percentage of the total sales, around 5% each. I would have expected more for at least the top salers.
If we wanted to get a real sense of what "cheap" means, what would make more sense in your opinion ?
- A simple "average" of the prices ?
- A weighted average of the prices, taking the percentage of sales into account ?
Also, in the distribution, do you define "cheap" as "the lower half" ? "the last decile" ?
E.g.—
• How much capacity per dollar?
• How much capacity per kilogram?
• How much capacity per litre?
• How quickly can it be charged?
• How quickly can it be discharged?
• How much energy is lost between charging and discharging?
• How predisposed is it to catching fire?
• How available are the materials needed to manufacture it?
• How available are the tools/skills required to manufacture it?
• How resilient is it to mechanical stress, e.g. vibration?
• How much does performance degrade per cycle?
• How much does performance degrade when stored at a high state of charge?
• How much does performance degrade when stored at a low state of charge?
• How much does performance drop at high temperatures?
• How much does performance drop at low temperatures?
• How well can it be recycled at end-of-life?
A sufficiently bad answer for any one of these could utterly exclude it from contention as an EV battery. A battery which scores well on everything except mechanical resilience is a non-starter, for example. Though it might be great for stationary storage.
I'm only a layperson and this list is what I came up with just a few minutes of layperson thought. I'm sure someone with more familiarity with battery technology could double the length of this list. But the point is, when you daydream about some hypothetical future battery tech, you need to appreciate just how well today's lithium chemistries score in so many areas.