Technology

I was thinking that this is one of those thousands of battery technologies we will never hear about again.

yea, charging speed probably capped by anode chemistry. would splitting the pack by multiple BMS's help circumvent this? if the charging time is the limit, people who prefer to drive 800km at a time could use an extra battery pack. that way a 20 min could be justified for them lol also we all know that it wont be 400km per charge. it would be only 330km at best.

Possibly even more significant, those are some large cables and even larger contacts required. There's no way a 1MW disconnect is just a little plug you stick into your car.

In fact as an electrician I can't think of anything even near megawatt class that would be connected with a portable cord, or at a voltage that would be safe for consumers to handle.

Maybe someone in the mining industry or similar can chime in, but I currently run a pumping station that includes 3000HP motors (2.2MW). These are 4kV 3 phase units where each phase cable is as thick as your arm. All connections are bolted and taped to avoid corona discharge. Just dragging the cable to the car would be more than the average driver could handle.

I don't see a way to get these power levels into a car short of a standardized and semi-automated docking system. Or maybe go back to the idea of standard swappable batteries where the battery then is charged rapidly for the next customer.

thats assuming 100% efficiency. which is impossible

most EV cars are more like 60kwh though.

Don't worry about it too much. These sorts of articles focus on battery tech, but the ultimate limiting factor is the ability of the plug to supply power.

A Tesla Model 3 has a 75kwh battery. Let's say it's at 20% charge. That's 60kwh to get it full (assuming 100% charge efficiency). It would take 600kw to charge that in 6 minutes.

The SAE J1772 plug is only rated to go up to 400kw on DC level 2, and you'd be hard pressed to find a charger that does it. I couldn't find info on Tesla's plug, but since it's about the same size, it's likely around the same. Tesla's superchargers are themselves only going up to 250kw.

It would take yet another plug standard, and chargers that can actually handle such a load. Oh, and upgrading the electrical network to handle such a beast in widespread use.

Most of which is pointless, anyway. EVs are best handled by giving them a little charge wherever they're parked. For road trips, unless you're the type to pee in a bottle and eat sandwiches you prepared ahead of time, about 300mi range with existing charge rates is sufficient.

I recently got a phone that charges at 65W, from empty to full in 30 minutes. It's at least getting better all the time, I'd say

It's a matter of power delivery at the moment. A modern rapid charger you can add about 10 miles a minute so 10 minutes is normally fine.. barely enough time to have a cup of tea.

Getting power to a battery faster starts to become impractical simply because of the thickness of cable you'd need to do it, and the internal heat the battery would generate if you threw power at it that fast.

Think of it like a swimming pool. You can fill it with a small hose, might take an hour or two.. bigger hose, maybe down to 30 minutes.. you want it to be done in seconds? Sure.. let me just turn up with this dump truck full of water...

Most of the things you read are about as useful as potato batteries. 'We've come up with this new compound that can take charge really fast'. Sure. Now make millions of them, the size of a car, for a price people will pay. Oh you can't... there's the rub.

Turns out there are a near infinite ways of combining materials that make a battery, and only a handful that scale to industrial production.

If at all. A lot of published science turns out not to be usable in real products, if not completely wrong. For starters, someone else should replicate the findings independently, to confirm them, then the manufacturing process needs to be scaled and the cost reduced, then ... someone will need to figure out how many MW this thing needs to charge in 6 minutes ...

The barrier to adoption is so often outlier scenarios though.

A vehicle is a huge purchase. For many it's the largest purchase they will make. For everyone else it's the second largest, behind their home. They want to make sure it does everything they do normally, and everything they might do once in a while.

As a small example, my family travels to a specific lake about once per year, for around a week. We switched cell phone providers to one that worked better at that lake. It costs a bit more, but even though on an average week it doesn't matter at all if our phones work at that lake because on average we aren't there, it was important to have our carrier work there. The outlier scenario actually made the decision for us with all other factors equal.

It doesn't matter if the average buyer isn't likely to take longer trips frequently. What does matter is that those outlier scenarios can be conceivably accomplished without significant hassle. And before you say that's not reasonable, consider that it doesn't matter that it isn't reasonable.

People base their purchase decisions on unreasonable factors all the time. How else do we explain how many trucks are on the road?

It does not matter that current charging methods cover 99% of scenarios for 99% of people. The glare of that 1% will shine a light brighter than the positives from the standpoint of widespread adoption. And from that perspective, news of a solution to slower charging is a very good thing.

Also slow chargers in houses will not work for many people. The majority of ICE drivers that won't even consider an EV as an option yet live in apartment buildings which currently don't have electric charging and likely won't install them anytime soon, or live in areas without access to a driveway/garage (i.e. basement suites)

Faster charging means a lower chance of all the chargers are in use at the service stations en-route. Currently if you're in need of a charge you'll have to wait for the others cars to get charged and then you still have the 20+ minute wait for your own car. That's going to put a lot of folks off owning an EV. Coupled with the fact the EV uptake is growing a lot faster than the charging infrastructure to support it. Faster charging has a lot of benefits.

Average trip duration is not a great metric because they measure a trip as going from point A to point B. That's great, but then I do six trips a day in errands.

Total miles per day is the metric to use. On average, in America, it's 37 miles.

That is to say, EV cars would work for many people. But to reach the majority we need these advancements.

I still don't understand why people need ultra distance in EVs. If I drove as much as often as the "I need a million mile range" crew I'd take a good, long look at my life and what was wrong with it.

Averages are useless. It does not matter if my car is fine most of the time, I'm not going to have a second car for when it is difficult or impossible.

Hydrogen is the other tech which makes quick refuelling possible, but there are not yet enough hydrogen refuelling stations to make them feasible for most drivers. And we don't yet know if leaks can be controlled enough to make hydrogen a net positive for consumer applications.