Solid commuter car but not too annoying on the rare roadtrip.
But, I am guessing grid frequency regulation use cases are going to make these too expensive for a car for a long time.
And yes it's not always possible but it'll be available in enough places.
If a particular station can't get better lines, then as someone else said they could have fewer charging spots. High load per spot still works out well for them, because they can save space.
Especially because the station would want to have multiple cars worth of energy stored, which means the load is divided among more cells and they don't have to work nearly as hard.
Battery-backed charging stations are already common, because it allows use of cheaper grid interconnection, and use of cheaper off-peak or renewable energy.
So the peak would be the same, but if there were too many customers then sort of like at a busy gas station people would be waiting for a spot rather than waiting for charging to complete.
Fortunately these batteries have "an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles". Also, since there aren't super-dangerous elements in them, they should be much easier and cleaner to recycle/renew - especially with the giant recharge-station-scale ones' we're talking about, which could be designed specifically for that.
Megawatt charging system is big but doesn't seem unreasonable, and that gives you 5x the amps. In two minutes it can add 80kWh to an 800 volt battery, and the max voltage is 1250.
https://resources.news.e.abb.com/images/2023/5/12/0/Next_gen...
https://www.engineerlive.com/sites/engineerlive/files/ITM.11...
However, as more and more generation capacity shifts to renewable sources that by design have very small (wind) to zero (solar) inertia, there will be a requirement to build out frequency stabilizer units like the Tesla unit in Hornsdale, Australia [1].
Also I'd say the inertia in a normal wind turbine doesn't count because it's not tied into the grid frequency.
That's why the UK grid has been building some "high-inertia synchronous compensators", and a 2019 outage showed that it's urgently needed.
10x of charging speed of Li-ion would be in megawatts per single charging device.
Not sure I follow here. Can you elaborate?
Are you saying the the demand for sodium batteries for power grid backup is going to be high vs supply such that they're not going to make it into cars anytime soon? Isn't one of the Chinese EV makers starting to use sodium batteries?
Having said that - if we can get cheap and safe batteries installed within the charging stations, this would make for an awesome improvement
A lot of people tend to think of the ideal charging station as a gas station, where lots of cars go to quickly add range. But gas stations have large capacity because of their disadvantages. Ideally if they were safe, cheap, and compact, wouldn't you want gas stations everywhere? I'd love to have a gas station at home, in every parking garage, and at every scenic viewpoint on the road. The reason we don't have that is because gas stations emit toxic vapors and have giant tanks of combustible liquid. They need tanker trucks to regularly refuel them. Charging stations don't have those problems, which is why you can make them much smaller and put them almost anywhere. You don't even need a grid connection. Solar + batteries works in places where land is cheap.
That system also allows you to participate in oil futures as an end user, not to mention it lets you keep your generator up and running for a very long time.
Downside is, modern e10 gasoline tends to adsorb water from the air over time, so fuel isn't stable long term. Most guys doing this are running diesel cars/gensets for that reason.
The model is, go to a truck depot with a 300 gallon trailer, fill up trailer and truck, park the trailer at home. Then fuel the truck off the trailer until it needs to be filled again, repeat. Do understand that, you can get a larger tank, but anything over 1000 gallons requires a placard/permit to haul around. That's in a single tank, so, in theory, a legal length 5th wheel trailer could have multiple tanks under that and be compliant. If you want the tanks attached to a vehicle itself, the maximum size is 150 gallons, hence why semi trucks have multiple fuel tanks that are smaller than that.
Really the only difficulty is finding a place nearby that is willing to sell that much fuel to an individual.
Either way, people forget about this, because if you have any sort of power generation, doesn't matter the method, if you go over capacity, you have brownouts/blackouts/grid failure/etc. What is deployed now, for the most part, is sufficient genset capacity to ramp into peak load, and most of it is under-utilized the majority of the time. Batteries eventually pay for themselves because of this, as they allow for peak load handling in addition to allowing generating capacity to stay online and remain profitable outside of peak load events. It really is revolutionary.
More or less, gridscale batteries are what dams/reservoirs were to water systems, and if you consider the impact of us as a species being able to save water for later use at-will, the promise we're looking at is going to really change the way we live.
If it's just the former, the slow steady march of EV mindshare might solve your needs before the "L4" super-fast-charging battery. I am starting to see L2 chargers pop up in apartment parking lots, for example. IMO, "always charged" is significantly more convenient than short stops at a station, so it would still be desirable in a world where "L4" batteries and stations were common.
Keep in mind that EVs charge unattended, so you only spend a minute plugging in, and can leave to get a coffee, etc.
There are setups that have their max rated power per dispenser (“pump”), and halve it if two cars are plugged in to the same dispenser at the same time. Good chargers can do 300kW. If that splits to 150kW it’s not too bad - maybe 5 min slower, rather than double. That’s because the max speed the car can take is a curve, and that only flattens the peak.
However, for the 18-min charging the biggest gotcha is the temperature. In Hyundai/Kia it requires the battery to be at 20-25°C. That’s easy in the summer. In the winter the charging speed can drop as low as 80kW.
We would have walked to a nearby restaurant if needed.
I still have a gas vehicle but I never want to use it for long trips.
So on a road trip that I only wanted to charge twice for, one of the stops didn't work. Oh, and on the way back we had to wait for access to the faster charger. Maybe not so overblown.
Think of it like modern SLC backed QLC flash storage. As long as the usage profile fits inside of the cache, it runs as though the entire system is cache.
You are almost certainly not charging from 0->100%. It's probably more like 10%->90% which gives you 32kW to charge. We currently have 350kW chargers on the market, they'd do that in ~6 minutes.
At some point trying to get 2 minutes vs 6 minutes is just silly nit picking.
One way to reduce initial costs is not to electrify the whole length but to have, say, one mile of electrified road per every ten miles of highway. To get unlimited range from that 1:10 ratio, you need the vehicles to have batteries capable of absorbing power 9x faster than the vehicle uses it to maintain highway speeds.
I could see EVs having a large lithium ion pack and, if this technology is really that good, a smaller sodium ion battery to act sort of like a capacitor to smooth out intermittent charging.
I could also see low-capacity-high-power-density batteries being used in hybrids, though those need to be able to sustain high discharge rates as well as high charge rates, and I don't think the article mentioned discharge rates.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/12/worlds-f...
Overhead cables are simpler and cheaper, but not easily compatible with cars (which would need a comically tall pantograph to connect to the cables).
(Induction is a third option, but it's not really viable except in certain special cases because it's way more expensive, can't deliver as much power, and tends to be less energy efficient.)
Electrifying highways may sound expensive or complicated, but consider what the alternatives are. We could stick with fossil fuels. The U.S. burns about 4 million barrels of gasoline and about 4 million barrels of diesel a day, most of which is used to push cars and trucks around. That's not simple or cheap, we're just accustomed to the cost.
Another option is we switch to EVs and rely on big batteries for range. That kind of works, but battery manufacturing scale isn't there. It's also kind of wasteful to have a substantial portion of the vehicle weight being batteries. It means cars and trucks are heavier than they need to be, and they can haul less cargo.
If we could get to the point where, say, someone could drive coast-to-coast without ever having to stop to charge with only 30 or 40 kwh battery, that would be huge. It would reduce EV costs dramatically, it would reduce average vehicle weight, and you might even get better performance.
(This wouldn't completely eliminate the need for some long-range vehicles for areas not served by electrified highways, but for most uses it should be fine.)
If we combine a modern EV with 100 year old tram technology, you get the ability for a car to charge itself when travelling on roads that have a compatible system of overhead power lines. Having a huge pantograph on top of the car is kind of impractical, but powering cars from underneath via power rails embedded in slots in the road, like a full-sized version of those toy slot cars that used to be popular, is another option that's been tried on some roads in Sweden.
Converting to EVs is the obvious alternative, but batteries are expensive and we haven't scaled up battery manufacturing yet to the degree necessary to replace ICE vehicles. We can get more EVs on the road though if the average EV can get by with a much smaller battery.
On some level it's an optimization problem: using the U.S. as an example, there are about 280 million cars/trucks currently registered. Is it cheaper/better to build about 280 million EVs with about 60kwh of batteries each on average, or build 280 million EVs with about 30kwh of batteries each and electrify our major highways?
If batteries cost $100/kwh, then 280 million * $100 * 30 = 840 billion dollars. If electrifying the major highways can be done for under $840 billion dollars, then it makes sense to do.
The interstate highway system is about 50,000 miles.
Sweden spent about a million euros per kilometer to electrify a section of road using the slot-embedded-in-the-road system. That's about $1.7 million per mile, or $86.5 billion.
You'd probably need to do more than just the interstates, but then at the same time you don't need to electrify 100% of the length of those highways. Maybe just 10% or 20%, as long as electrified section come at regular intervals.
This is all kind of simplistic and hand-wavey, but it seems like it passes the threshold of "we should at least consider doing this."
Maybe you mean it isn't 'sustainable'? ICE vehicles are the epitome of practical, they are used in practice all around the world.
> You'd probably need to do more than just the interstates, but then at the same time you don't need to electrify 100% of the length of those highways. Maybe just 10% or 20%,
The people who developed that project estimated they'd need to implement it on 25% of all roads. Also the project is just in a technical demonstrator phase. It is literally just a tech demo, and there are still major concerns about adoption, implementation, and maintenance.
> This is all kind of simplistic and hand-wavey, but it seems like it passes the threshold of "we should at least consider doing this."
I agree it should be tested further, but there are likely significant barriers that will prevent it from being useful, particularly in less dense areas.
For trucks on the highway, it is a much better idea, but for many of those cases, you'd be significantly better off investing in more rail.
Have short charging strips at traffic lights then prioritize lanes with cars that dont need much charge.
Where people are more likely to need the extra charge is on the long country roads between major cities. Probably a high priority could be on the major highways going into and out of cities, as those are the roads people are likely to use for long daily commutes.
I really have dozens of strange ideas. If the charging stations need to be equiped with similar batteries we might as well make all cars into charging stations. You can charge your much to large 3x per year road trip battery with your much to large solar array. Park it some place (preferably in need), flag the car in the app as wont move for x hours and has y kwh availble then charge your 40km range coworker premium tarif while you work.
A rail with a towing cable could also charge batteries while also usable for ic engines.
Needs say 720kW delivery for those two minutes (need higher if counting inefficiency losses).
Note that Tesla 's V3 Superchargers provide a maximum of 250kW. I've assumed a 30kWh battery charged to 24kWh (80%), because the spec for a new Nissan Leaf is 59kWh battery for 385km driving range.
But I am definitely not expert on this.
Sure, they are always going to be more complex than a full electric but good gasoline cars are don't have any huge maintenance costs for a good long while.
One caveat is, depending on your workload, you might put only 25% of the time on the ICE per mile driven (since most short trips would be electric). I.e. if an ICE car runs the engine for 2,500 hours per 100,000 miles, a plug-in hybrid might only have run the engine 500-600 hours at 100k miles.
And honestly, the ICE itself isn't very heavy -- nothing compared to a battery -- and as I said elsewhere, maintenance hasn't been an issue in the 5 years I've had mine. Oil change every 2 years (or more if you use the ICE a lot... I don't), that's it.
The heaviness argument is especially baffling to me. Carrying around a 60kWh battery pack that you only use for road trips is way heavier and less efficient. Most drivers are not using their whole battery pack in daily use, so it's just stupid expensive dead weight, much heavier than an ICE you use occasionally.
I want an ICE-less future as much as the next person, but it kinda pisses me off how EV purists who actually knew very little about the Voltec drivetrain basically got that product killed off. Emissions on roads would be drastically reduced if vehicles were switched to that model (which is not a PHEV like the other junk hybrids, but more of a range-assisted EV) without the very high cost and weight of large battery packs. Very much a "best is the enemy of the good" situation.
I'd like about 10kWh more in my Volt, and 6kW charging. Other than that, perfect car.
The most maintenance on this car ever has just been the breaks, because like most EVs, they're prone to corroding because they don't get used as much due to regeneration.
The "ICE is a maintenance problem" thing is honestly kind of a bogus argument borne out by people's hunches, rather than reality. Most reliable vehicle I've ever owned, and, yeah, I am about 95% electric only on it.
For the BMW i3 which is another series hybrid with more range, it seems 60% of owners think the engine isn’t worth it, but the rest love having the engine. There is no in between.
The original i3 had 80 mile range, the second generation 120, and the last 150. From what I saw in researching by the time the range was up to 150 the BEV only folks were loudest.
Only other thing is that it is consuming more oil now so needs topping up every few thousand miles.
I know the Chevy Volt had an all-electric power train, and the ICE is purely a generator that dumps power into the electrical system, and the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid has a dual power train, but I wasn't able to find a concise list of which hybrids have taken what strategy.
I apologize for forgetting the benefits of parallel hybrid systems, but i know there are some, including needing a smaller ICE, all things equal.
For climate control, they are nearly identical to a gas Toyota.
Their engineering is just that insanely conservative. They just make giant, absurdly understressed engines. You can pull a 2.5L 4cyl engine out of a Camry, designed to make 180 horsepower, replace only a few components, and make 400hp with the reliability you would normally expect from an engine built for endurance racing. They are super popular in drift racing leagues.
Other systems, think Volvo, pop the EV bits in the back of the car and replace where the drive shaft used to be with batteries. That seems like a decent trade to me as well. Still have a transmission, but at least it's not purely additive.
AND one man's added complexity is another's redundancy. If the charging module goes bad in a hybrid, you can still drive. Or if you run out of gas.
All that said... I still prefer EVs to hybrids. Do one thing, do it well, I say!
You don't even need to limit it to the lower end models with Subaru. The top trim Outback and Ascent have a CVT these days. If you want an automatic transmission in your WRX, same thing - a CVT. Anyway, you're not wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_transmission#/media/...
Modern ICE are also extremely complex. Turbo systems, sensors, air management, heat management, the list goes on.
So yeah, a modern transmission is complex but a modern ICE isn’t simple. By comparison they’re very similar in terms of complexity, the ICE possibly being even more complex.
I don't disagree with your posts greater point, but I disagree with this.
There is an endless amount of variable complexity in the engineering behind friction materials, actuation styles, the control systems within the computer control, the material selections.. the list goes on.
I mean entire branches of metallurgy were more or less founded in the pursuit of finding stronger alloys for gearbox work. entire branches of metrology were developed for the sake of gearbox failure analysis -- there is a lot of complexity.
It's stupid to get into a pissing contest between engines and transmissions, they're both astoundingly complex.
Transmissions are complex but so are a lot of things. Internal combustion engines are more complex than transmissions.
Pages in a shop manual are a proxy for the complexity of service, not of the component itself.
But all those costs are correlated with engine hours, in a hybrid used most of the time for commuting, ICE engine hours would be really low
Suppose 90% of your miles are electric. After you've put 250K miles (400K km) on the car, you've only got 25K miles (40K km) on the engine. Rarely do you have significant engine trouble at that mileage.
Also, the engine design can probably be simplified if it's just acting as a generator. You don't need a turbo to provide extra bursts of power. Nor things like variable valve timing for good performance across a wide range of RPMs. Maybe you could even use an air-cooled engine like old VW Beetles and Porsches.
That said, they certainly have tow-behind generators, and they're certainly available for rent, it's just without modification you'd have to stop in order to charge. I've seen people with a model X doing exactly this out in the desert. Seemed to be an ok solution honestly, because they were camping and had genset power for camping needs, assuming of course that the whole electricity while camping thing is something you're into.
MBAs at car manufacturing companies will ensure that battery pack cost savings are NOT passed on to the consumer, don't worry about that.
We were supposed to hit $100/KWh on battery packs several years ago, but EV prices skyrocketed instead, despite literally being in the same plastic/aluminum shitbox where every car looks alike.
Cheap battery packs = higher margins for companies.
For example, my daily mileage averages about 5 miles. As an errand-runner, a 30 mile EV would be very practical. The huge benefit of this is a smaller and cheaper battery, and the biggie - much less weight. Much less weight leads to much less tire/brake wear and tire/brake dust pollution.
I'd still have a second gas car for the trips.
The average one-way commute for someone in the United States is ~28 miles. Most people would love your commute.
> I'd still have a second gas car for the trips.
I feel like you answered your own question here. Having two cars is pretty expensive, if nothing else you have to pay for insurance for both.
This was a lower middle class area.
I worry that I’ll never see a compatible replacement battery with the tech though.
Also that’s just cell cost. It takes quite a bit to assemble a pack, plus profit margin.
p.s. I doubt that rumour, unless Hyundai really likes to milk their customers. Teslas largest packs are less than 20k. Small ones less than 10k (which is how much I save per year because power is cheap and gas is expensive here).
> Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we estimate 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 the grid can capably handle.
> In the US, the 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
https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...
That's ~= 15 light bulbs from the 1990's, or roughly 6 desktop PCs. I switched from incandescent to LED bulbs, and a desktop to a laptop, so that's almost enough to offset the EV's usage. Also, we have solar panels, and a house battery that can time shift our energy consumption.
The power grid also naturally grows from year to year. As more and more battery systems come online and are available to store and discharge power (your car, a household power backup system, solar, etc), the load on the grid will smooth out.