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GBatteries (YC W14) let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

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Re: GBatteries (YC W14) let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

#81

Post by C1sc0cat »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #78

The obsession with fast charging is getting tiresome. Here in Norway we have more electric cars per head than anywhere else and most people wake up to a fully charged car. It is really rare to need to charge the car at a public charger unless you have nowhere off road to park your car. What is most needed in most places is somewhere to charge the car overnight or while you are at work. Such chargers need no new techn…

A lot of countries are much denser and don't have off road parking where you can run a cooker circuit 415v to

Re: GBatteries (YC W14) let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

#82

Post by michaelt »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #44
dexen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>swappable batteries would require a huge engineering effort. Worked just fine back in 2013. The people's habits were the only obstacle: owners wanted to retain their own battery pack, instead of getting pre-owned one left by somebody else, in unknown condition. And/or drive over a weird contraption. [1] (loud music warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

I wonder why it bothers people about battery packs, but not propane tanks. They seem to have equal chances of exploding.

Propane technology has matured and stabilised; a 2019 propane tank is no better than a 2009 propane tank, it'll be the same size, supply the same amount of energy, and have the same connectors. A 2029 propane tank will, in all likelihood, be the same.

The same cannot be said of EV battery technology.

So why the Tesla demo video? According to [1] just doing the demo entitled them to $90 million of Californian "ZEV credits", and they never believed in or planned to roll out the technology.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Whatever-happened-to-Tesla-battery-swa... apologies for the Quora link

Re: GBatteries (YC W14) let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

#83

Post by ovi256 »

bash-j wrote: post #38
lolc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other fix would be swappable batteries. But it would require a huge engineering effort.

Why not fill up with loose cells? They are small, they roll. Couldn't they roll into a ribbed tray and then a rail on both sides clamps them in place and connects them? Or pulled in on a chain like a machine gun loading mechanism?

This is an original idea that I haven't seen elsewhere.

The big issue is that assembling loose cells into a battery pack is a hard enough operation. It must achieve good mechanical properties (the pack must be rigid enough), good electrical contact with the battery terminals (bad contact would ruin a pack, could start a fire as a bad contact could overheat) and good cooling (battery packs heat, so afaik all designs use liquid cooling, which needs very good thermal contact between the cells and the cooling assembly). Loose cells would essentially mean you're feeding the loose cells inside the pack and the pack has some robotic assembly arms that it uses to put the cells in the right places while it achieves the three objectives.

With some different, taylor made cell design you could make this self-assembly easier, maybe even make it mechanically passive - have the cells orient vertically and slide into their places, and then they're locked. But the current cell design is definitely not chosen for this.

Re: GBatteries (YC W14) let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

#84

Post by acct1771 »

ovi256 wrote: post #83
bash-j wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not fill up with loose cells? They are small, they roll. Couldn't they roll into a ribbed tray and then a rail on both sides clamps them in place and connects them? Or pulled in on a chain like a machine gun loading mechanism?

This is an original idea that I haven't seen elsewhere. The big issue is that assembling loose cells into a battery pack is a hard enough operation. It must achieve good mechanical properties (the pack must be rigid enough), good electrical contact with the battery terminals (bad contact would ruin a pack, could start a fire as a bad contact could overheat) and good cooling (battery packs heat, so afaik all designs u…

tailor-made, unless we're talking golf, ha

Re: GBatteries (YC W14) let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

#85

Post by stcredzero »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #18
stcredzero wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm on road trips with my friends, I can never get them out of a rest stop faster than 25 minutes. When I'm on the road with my wife, 15 minutes is about the right time.

That's the time it takes to visit the convenience store. Relevant in some circumstances, but if you're not already in need of a break you only visit the pump and even five minutes is oddly slow. And the article and company site specifically say the time to fill the tank , not to visit a gas station. So they're blatantly lying.

For my personal situation, I can't fill the tank in under 25 minutes on road trips with my friends. So it works for me.

Re: GBatteries (YC W14) let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

#86

Post by gwbas1c »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #78

The obsession with fast charging is getting tiresome. Here in Norway we have more electric cars per head than anywhere else and most people wake up to a fully charged car. It is really rare to need to charge the car at a public charger unless you have nowhere off road to park your car. What is most needed in most places is somewhere to charge the car overnight or while you are at work. Such chargers need no new techn…

Fast charging is needed for road trips, and for people who don't have access to a charger at home. (Think about people who rent or who need to park on the street)

Re: GBatteries (YC W14) let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

#88

Post by timsher »

amluto wrote: post #53
timsher wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I'm one of the founders at GBatteries, please let me try to clear that up. We've demonstrated 5 min to 50% charge, 10 min to 100% - I’ll edit this to include a demo that we’ve done at CES 2019, and that we’re now exhibiting at the Detroit Auto show demonstrating. [EDIT] Video here: https://youtu.be/kSLrqR4TfnU Note: Charging times can vary by ~1 minute here and there, because the algorithm is adaptive and charact…

What are you doing differently? Unless you’re pulsing your charging or otherwise varying the current rapidly, then it seems that all you can really do is vary the current as a function of temperature, state of charge, and maybe some other variables. At the end of the day, if you’re going to deliver energy e in time t, you need average power e/t, and the fancier your curve, the more your peak power will exceed your av…

You're correct - On a high level, our technology is based on pulses that are fully adaptive, and their parameters are adjusted by the AI controlling the charging.

Re: GBatteries (YC W14) let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

#89

Post by mikeytown2 »

timsher wrote: post #39
dkoston wrote: post #11

476mi/h of charging isn’t gorundbreaking. Aston Martin, Tesla and Porsche already charge at those speeds or faster. https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1118575_gm-working-on-u... I believe their “secret sauce” is allowing existing packs which charge slower to get “up to speed”. If so, that’s a pretty limited market as it’s likely that within a few years, all EVs sold will charge faster than the listed speeds. They’l…

Hi! I'm one of the founders at GBatteries - I’ve partially answered this in another comment, so will copy paste portions. We've demonstrated 5 min to 50% charge, 10 min to 100% charge - below is a demo that we’ve done at CES 2019, and that we’re now exhibiting at the Detroit Auto show demonstrating this. [Video here: https://youtu.be/kSLrqR4TfnU Note: Charging times can vary by ~1 minute here and there, because the a…

Should have a current clamp on the cable to show that you're not cheating when doing the demo.

Re: GBatteries (YC W14) let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

#90

Post by gniv »

sandworm101 wrote: post #47
floatrock wrote: post #20

Super skeptical here, or at least the wording is misleading as hell. > The product allows users to charge a 60kWh EV battery pack with 119 miles of range in 15 minutes as compared to 15 miles in 15 minutes today. > The technology works with off-the-shelf lithium ion batteries and existing fast charge infrastructure by integrating via a patented self-contained adapter on a car charge port First read says that they're…

"119 miles of range in 15 minutes" is also nowhere near as fast as an IC car "visiting the pump". It does not take 15 minutes to fill the tank on a normal car. Short of physically swapping out batteries, charging an EC will never be as fast as pouring gasoline into a tank. Transferring that much energy that quickly over wires is ... I don't want to stand anywhere near it. Fillup time is not an are where EC should try…

> "119 miles of range in 15 minutes" is also nowhere near as fast as an IC car "visiting the pump".

The article was corrected to say 5 minutes. See also replies from timsher upthread.

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