so I'm a bit confused - lithium has a higher electronegativity than sodium.
why bother with sodium at all? cost ?
why bother with sodium at all? cost ?
As well, heavy industries around the world are looking at ways to electrify their fleets of vehicles working in remote sometimes extreme weather sites. This includes mining sites and marine operations, even consider that airplanes are an eventual target for EV.
Also, charge speed is would surely be the number one gripe for EV ownership, range and performance is pretty much comparable to modern ICE but charge speed, not even close.
As far as I can tell this mostly only a concern among those who do not own an EV.
I am also not amongst the superhumans on the internet who can drive 300mi without my bladder/stomach/legs crying out for a break first.
Being in NYC, the first hour of every trip is at 20mph, the second hour is average about 50mph, and then only if I am going beyond 70mi do I start to hit average speed about 60mph.
Supercharging for ~100mi on the highway is a parallel operation to your bathroom/food break, so its 10 minutes you were already going to use. Gas fill ups are 5 minute serial operations that you either do before or after using the rest area. I suppose if you were on a cannonball run, you could pee in a bottle while pumping gas but I think we can exclude that edge case.
Note that, contra the way it's often explained, cold batteries lose capacity, not energy. If you take a full battery and put it in the freezer, you'll be unable to drain the full charge but it'll come back when it warms up. Think about it: the back of an envelope will show you that if that energy were actually being "lost" from a cold battery, then the battery must actually be very, very hot, because the energy would have had to go somewhere.
Less temperature sensitivity to the range & charge rate would be a huge win.
Otherwise, personally charge rate hasn't been much of a problem because I'm not a big road tripper & have a charger at home.
300mi+ battery means I can drive 2 hours to see my parents & back 2 hours without charging, or drive down 4 hours to see my sister.. which means I'm going to be stopping along the way anyway, and charge 100mi+ while in the rest stop using the restroom, or more if I get a coffee or lunch.
In everyday driving, charge at home off-peak starting 11pm, then its basically irrelevant whether I can unplug at 11:30pm vs 3am.
Charging an EV takes longer, but generally its either at home or at a place you are already doing something else - shopping at Target, getting a coffee at Starbucks, making a pit stop on the highway, etc. Few regular EV drivers just sit in their car for 20min staring into space while they charge.
These attributes make it a good complement for lithium ion and it looks like CATL already has such a battery already to at least the prototype stage.
I think that's something that's often missed in EV discussions that focus on range and who has the best 0-60 time and so on: luxury car features are nice, but in the end what matters more is who can actually make the cheapest good-enough battery at the highest volume, because that's what's going to be in most of the world's cars. Wherever those batteries are made could basically be what Saudi Arabia was to the era of gas-powered vehicles. (Though to be fair you can build a battery factory almost anywhere, whereas oil is something you either have in abundance or you don't.)
Not sure what the inputs are to these sodium ion batteries, but most lithium ion batteries require cobalt, nickel, and lithium. Lithium iron phosphate has an advantage that it doesn't require cobalt or nickel.