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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

> Sure you might get 1k km out of a brand new battery but what about in 5-10 years? After all, my phone's simple battery is basically done within 5 years and replacing a car's battery sounds like it would be very expensive.

Yep, don't buy into super duper larger batteries.

A bigger battery will last longer in cycle life, sure, but the vehicles itself may well be much more expensive.

If your EV will survive long enough to see a battery replacement, then a larger battery will be still a worse option economically.

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Affordability is one thing, but it also sounds like a colossal waste of resources to dispense with these batteries in volume. Gas engines last decades with good maintenance and can be rebuilt. The idea that the modern EV is basically toast (cost prohibitive to repair like all modern electronics) after 5-10 years is not the green future we are trying to work toward.

It would be interesting to understand the true environmental impact of EVs.

Tesla are talking about million mile batteries in their upcoming cars:

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/tesla/352330/teslas-new-low-co...

I know they tend to exaggerate but even if its only half that then it will be better than the average ICE car.

That chemistry is a prerequisite for structural batteries. Replacing a structural battery is obviously not economical.

You don't necessarily need to have structural battery to be firmly attached to something, nor have it to be housed in some inaccessible compartment.

At least, the battery case can support its own weight. This alone can shave up to 100kg from the battery, and make the whole task of engineering it that much easier.

This is what all that "blade battery" things is about.

Another idea is that if your battery chemistry is not prone to bursting in flames like gasoline, the battery can become a decent crash energy absorber.

This way instead of having to add weight to protect the battery, you can use the battery instead to reduce the weight of existing crash protection structures.

> The idea that the modern EV is basically toast (cost prohibitive to repair like all modern electronics) after 5-10 years is not the green future we are trying to work toward.

The current "unrepairability" of today's EV's is nothing inherent to them.

There is nothing that prevents Tesla's service centres to repair their cars, say, after collision damage, which they currently refuse to take beyond the most trivial cases.

The same goes for other EV brands who say you must scrap your car after borderline cosmetic damage.

- Electric motors are inherently more robust than IC engines, and can too be rebuilt with ease if you fry them (which should never really happen when thermal protection, and cooling work as they should.)

- Electronics is the least likely part of the electric vehicle to break, and is, again, mostly trivial to repair, or replace.

- Cells are the only wear element besides a simple gearbox, and brakes.

Seems like few people rebuild gas engines in their cars when they become "a few decades old", apart from a _very_ small minority that like retro car stuff. If the battery pack was the only thing needing replacement in EVs and they are possible or even easy to remove/replace, it sounds like it could be done quite easily and still give you a useful vehicle.

The batteries are replaceable, so the body of the car won't go to waste.

As for the battery, there's still plenty of useful things it can do. Just because it's not useful for a car, doesn't mean it dead. The most obvious use case right now is grid-scale energy storage. There you just need lots and lots of joules of storage, you're not really worried about space or weight (at least compared to car batteries), so it's perfectly viable to take thousands of scrap car batteries with only 60-70% of their original capacity and use them for grid storage.

Additionally in grid storage you can be much kinder to your batteries, further extending their life well beyond what they could do in car.

At the end of all that, break down the battery and recover the materials. Admittedly we don't have any cost effective ways of doing that today, but as demand for battery raw materials increases, the finical viability of recycling also increases.

>The idea that the modern EV is basically toast (cost prohibitive to repair like all modern electronics) after 5-10 years is not the green future we are trying to work toward.

A 1000km vehicle that lost 90% of its range still has 100km left. I don't see how that vehicle is toast.

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