111–120 of 211 posts
Hey scythe, write a blog abut this. This seems like semi-decent conjecture that'd get a lot of pull with the electric car crowd on the Fediverse, and you'd get a fair number of eyeballs pointed in the same direction.
A Tell HN is basically a blog post right? Permalink, comments, it’s got it all. There’s even an RSS feed.
This will be neat if it works but really there isn't going to be a huge market for 500+ mile cars vs the cost savings of getting a 300-400 mile car. The exception might be road-trippers and people who do a lot of towing but I suspect that is a much smaller population than people tend to think.
The newest electric cars take a half hour to do this (a non-trivial amount of time) and only go about 2/3rds as far (less on the highway), so if you actually want to go somewhere you're taking on about an extra hour of charging for 6 hours of driving. Recharging this kind of car damages its most expensive part- the fuel tank- and it shrinks every time you charge it (whether quickly or slowly).
Now, if the car had 1600 miles of range, then a half-hour charge time and the slow shrinkage of its gas tank is more acceptable because you're getting approximately the same rate of recharge per minute (as it would be if the 200-mile range electric cars charged as fast as a gas car does). With a range or charge time like that, the other inherent disadvantages to electric cars are muted to a massive degree (a 20% range degradation isn't as big a deal for a car that can still go 1200 miles, and a 30% range reduction in cold months isn't as big a deal if the car could be charged in 3 minutes).
But neither of those things are currently true, and that's in large part why these kinds of cars don't really sell unless they're known to be rolling gimmicks or transformative in other ways (the electric trucks that let you run power tools off their batteries are the best example of this). Which is why Tesla's cars are the way that they are, and why every other major manufacturer who doesn't have a good idea of how to sell their inferior cars take the "look, we can do a massive screen in our car too just like Tesla" approach (and fail specifically because they aren't Tesla), or they just keep developing really good gas cars (an approach currently favored by the Japanese companies).
This will be neat if it works but really there isn't going to be a huge market for 500+ mile cars vs the cost savings of getting a 300-400 mile car. The exception might be road-trippers and people who do a lot of towing but I suspect that is a much smaller population than people tend to think.
Since it's a bit more than a doubling of energy density, it's less that you can get a 500+ mile car and more that you can drop the price & weight of a 300-400 mile car. Imagine cutting the weight of an EV battery by 500 pounds while maintaining its current capacity. All that weight savings will probably get you some additional range, and save you on cost of materials, meaning you could cut the battery down a bit more…
That’s how I mentally model it anyhow.
Hey scythe, write a blog abut this. This seems like semi-decent conjecture that'd get a lot of pull with the electric car crowd on the Fediverse, and you'd get a fair number of eyeballs pointed in the same direction.
A Tell HN is basically a blog post right? Permalink, comments, it’s got it all. There’s even an RSS feed.
> it could release highly toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. How bad is it in real world conditions? Because from what I'm reading it's not the "it makes you sick" kind of toxic, but rather the "it kills you in seconds" kind of toxic.
Someone else pointed out LD50 is ~700ppm It's unlikely you'd be exposed to this level for any period of time unless the battery ruptured into the car, underwater, with the windows up, in which case you have bigger problems. You're unlikely to to see 700ppm in an outdoor situation like a car wreck or battery malfunction on the highway during a rainstorm. Atmospheric CO2 is about 450ppm for comparison. Ammonia is a sup…
For example, check out this case where what you describe (battery rupture) happened, killing both occupants from H2S inhalation:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161005164308/http://www.wesh.c...
And this was only from a starter battery, not a battery sized for vehicle locomotion.
> 750 Wh/kg is great. To put it mildly. Energy density in the current leaders in that category, lithium ion batteries, 250-270 wh/kg. So, provided a similar or better ratio of watt-hours to unit of volume, we’re basically looking at tripling the energy storage of EVs or significant weight reduction, in the ideal scenario of this design being a safe and cost effective replacement for current batteries.
I think for the EV skeptics it’s easy to forget how fast battery chemistry has been evolving. There’s an common assumption that the EV status quo of 300 mile range at barely-affordable prices will continue forever, and therefore with all the woes surrounding charging and bad weather affecting range, EVs are dead in the water. Ten years ago $30k got you 75 miles of range out of a Nissan Leaf. Fast forward to present d…
There are average people and EV fanboys. It's just that fanboys call the other people skeptics.
EVs are in early adoption still, from my point of view. Try to pump it all you want, but EVs offer far less utility for a higher price, and they are more inconvenient.
Until the industry standardizes on batteries and stations offer pre-charged battery swaps, I'll hang on to my ICE machine.
> it could release highly toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. How bad is it in real world conditions? Because from what I'm reading it's not the "it makes you sick" kind of toxic, but rather the "it kills you in seconds" kind of toxic.
Depending on concentrations required for consequences a smelly gas is much safer than something like CO
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2019/fatal-chemical-inhalations...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the Audi is already on the heavier side for vehicles of that size. Mainstream non-'luxury' sedans of comparable size are often 3200-3300, like Accord/Camry/Altima, and the construction of these vehicles is a more equal comparison.
S3 is heavy because it has 4wd and a bigger everything compared to a lower trim model. The same as the vw golf 8 starts at 1300kg, but my R model is in the 1500 range because it has 4wd and other things like adaptive damping that make it heavy
i can't tell which sulfide it is from the nature link, but many metal sulfides release hydrogen sulfide only very slowly in contact with water, sometimes over geological timescales. it only becomes a problem if you, say, grind them up and mix the finely divided powder (which is also often pyrophoric!) into sheetrock
consider for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalcocite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphalerite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_sulfide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realgar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stibnite and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molybdenite are all relatively stable metal sulfide minerals which don't offgas hydrogen sulfide fast enough to pose a significant hazard (or at all; many oxidize to sulfates instead)
even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_sulfide is relatively innocuous aside from the bad smell, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_sulfide is routinely handled by photographers and dyers despite the hazard. you have to get into the exotics like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_sulfide before metal sulfides really get scary