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Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

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Re: Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

#61

Post by sandworm101 »

blueintegral wrote: post #50
sandworm101 wrote: post #27

(1) Those nasty things inside car batteries are easily recycled and in fact are recycled more often than not (like 95%+) (2) Car batteries do not last only 3-4 years as per the OP. Car batteries can last decades. There are many variables, but the car in my battery is far older than 4 years. (lol) (3) Replacing an easily-recyclable product with a less-recyclable one is no step forwards. (4) XX addressed by OP comment,…

You're right! Lead acid car batteries are one of the great recycling success stories. What's interesting is that the volume of lead acid car batteries in the world is so high, that even at that high recycling rate, that still leaves 24 million pounds of lead each year from car batteries that don't get recycled. There's also been some problems recently with lead recycling plants contaminating the environment [1]. You'…

Glad to see you are on top of the voltage/fire thing. But I still see these things as non-recyclable in comparison to industry-standard lead-acid batteries. I can drop my current battery off at any number of garages without issue. Once this new device inevitably breaks down (anything under a hood will eventually) it seems like just more e-waste.

Re: Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

#62

Post by blueintegral »

tomkinstinch wrote: post #21
blueintegral wrote: post #2

Hey everyone! I'm Hunter, one of the cofounders of Ohm. Let me know if I can answer any questions.

Great product idea! One possible side market: have you looked at adapting the capacitor+battery combo for electric bicycles? It could be a great application: batteries for energy density, a capacitor as a buffer that can be filled quickly in a pinch (for charging while out and about, or from regenerative braking) and the capacitor could be discharged quickly for high-power acceleration. For short trips the capacitor…

Interesting! I had not thought of that, but it makes a lot of sense. What's the average electric bike battery capacity?

Re: Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

#63

Post by benihana »

sandworm101 wrote: post #27

(1) Those nasty things inside car batteries are easily recycled and in fact are recycled more often than not (like 95%+) (2) Car batteries do not last only 3-4 years as per the OP. Car batteries can last decades. There are many variables, but the car in my battery is far older than 4 years. (lol) (3) Replacing an easily-recyclable product with a less-recyclable one is no step forwards. (4) XX addressed by OP comment,…

It's crazy how applicable the Presumption of Stupidity article that was posted a couple of days ago has been. Your comment is basically a re-hashing of that post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10034883

Re: Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

#64

Post by bbcbasic »

I remember watching youtube videos of a guy starting his car with just a capacitor a year ago (was it one of you guys?) and thought this idea had a lot of potential. Good on you for bringing it to market.

Please be careful to not make it too 'smart'. I don't think a car battery needs to be connected to the internet of things that can be remotely hacked into :-).

Re: Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

#65

Post by blueintegral »

sandworm101 wrote: post #61
blueintegral wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right! Lead acid car batteries are one of the great recycling success stories. What's interesting is that the volume of lead acid car batteries in the world is so high, that even at that high recycling rate, that still leaves 24 million pounds of lead each year from car batteries that don't get recycled. There's also been some problems recently with lead recycling plants contaminating the environment [1]. You'…

Glad to see you are on top of the voltage/fire thing. But I still see these things as non-recyclable in comparison to industry-standard lead-acid batteries. I can drop my current battery off at any number of garages without issue. Once this new device inevitably breaks down (anything under a hood will eventually) it seems like just more e-waste.

Yeah, we're still figuring out the best way to handle collecting the units at the end of life, but there's already places like this that we can send them to and keep it from turning into e-waste: http://www.kinsbursky.com/

Re: Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

#66

Post by msandford »

digitalneal wrote: post #40
msandford wrote: post #17

How does it handle a car that's iffy on starting? It's probably not hard to get something that'll crank a starter for a few seconds. But what happens if it needs to crank for 60 seconds over a 90 second window? I've got a 2006 Forester with a manual. I'll occasionally stall it backing out of a parking spot, so I'll have to start it again. For some reason it's much more difficult to start in between cold and warmed up…

Subaru ECU cold start logic is, well, questionable at best. As a side note, if your car is stalling that frequently, I would suggest adjusting the clutch engagement position. Sounds like its either very low or way too high.

It's definitely driver error and not the car's fault. I try not to rev too hard and slip too long, and it occasionally results in a stall.

I'm spoiled from having driven a number of very powerful manuals. Big engines mean a lot of rotating mass which means that no revving is needed, just pop the clutch and go. That extra rotating mass also means that the ECU has more time to notice the drop in RPM and give it a little extra gas to bring idle back up.

Not so in the Subaru. It's a very light engine and seemingly a pretty light flywheel too.

Re: Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

#67

Post by blueintegral »

bbcbasic wrote: post #64

I remember watching youtube videos of a guy starting his car with just a capacitor a year ago (was it one of you guys?) and thought this idea had a lot of potential. Good on you for bringing it to market. Please be careful to not make it too 'smart'. I don't think a car battery needs to be connected to the internet of things that can be remotely hacked into :-).

We've been trying to avoid using the term "smart battery" for that very reason haha. We don't think people would be psyched about having a BLE connection and an app for their car battery.

Re: Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

#68

Post by trhway »

smeyer wrote: post #15
Cshelton wrote: post #5

So yesterday Audi/Porsche/VW announced a new v6 engine that will be used in variations across all their vehicles. Further down the line, they said that engine would include an electric drive component as well, incorporating a battery, effectively making all their cars "hybrids". This seems to be the trend, see racing tech (Formula 1, WEC, etc.). We will probably see this in all new consumer cars sometime soon. Once e…

>At your price point, performance/luxury cars seem to be your only market Is this really true? It sounded from the article like they're only about $50 more than a typical battery, unless I missed something. I could see some people with normal cars shelling out $50 for the longer life and features to avoid a dead battery, even if the reduced weight doesn't matter much to them.

>I could see some people with normal cars shelling out $50 for the longer life and features to avoid a dead battery, even if the reduced weight doesn't matter much to them.

my current BMW battery cost $130 and rated for something like 6 years - the car is 14.5 years old, had batteries replaced at 6.5 and 12.5 years (both times it wasn't dead yet, just on suggestion by the shop).

Re: Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

#69

Post by conjecTech »

trhway wrote: post #34

it is only 10Ah! Comparing that to 45Ah+ typical car battery is like that MongoDB write performance comparison without actual writing to disk :) Such small capacity would work only for perfectly starting engine. Any issues and you're out of capacity. Cranking an engine requires hundreds of Amperes, like 500-800A. Thus each 10s of cranking burns 1.5-2.5Ah. The CCA rating of a car battery is the current the cold batter…

One of the things we discovered is it actually takes a lot less current and energy to start engine than we originally thought. It's rare that anyone even uses 1% of the capacity of a regular lead-acid while cranking. So we're confident 10AH is more than enough.

The high capacity of most lead-acid is really just a side-effect of making a battery that can deliver high current over a reasonable lifetime.

Re: Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car

#70

Post by sbierwagen »

Lithium-ion car batteries are already commercially available, though cripplingly expensive: http://www.jegs.com/p/Lithium-Pros/Lithium-Pros-12-Volt-Lith...

The innovation here seems to be the capacitor bank, which lets you get away with a much smaller and cheaper lithium ion pack.

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