41–50 of 61 posts
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But you don’t need to have a 10 minute charger at home. At home overnight charging is completely fine.
Anyone in city apartments (millions/billions of people, half the world) can't do that.
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250 to 350kW chargers are already in common use. And batteries that charge this fast too. What's news here is that they've done it on an LFP battery which is the cheaper kind of lithium chemistry.
What other batteries are in mass manufacture that charge this fast?
To get a good comparison in a car we need a manufacturer to actually do the development work and release a car that can be tested in real world conditions. There are the temperature limitations the press release already mentions and also limits to avoid range loss from fast charging over the life of the car.
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Nice for expensive sports cars where cost doesn't matter. But everything else competes on cost, not weight. These high density batteries are going to be very premium priced for quite some time to come. Plenty of customers willing to pay that premium. High volume production of that things is likely some time away. Catl also produces some sodium ion batteries. They have even less density than LFP but contain no lithium…
I thought lithium wasn't especially valuable, especially compared to the other things that go into a battery. I'd buy that sodium is cheaper though, with the amount of sodium salts that are knocking around the economy.
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Definitely not limitless. Subsidies are only provided to get an industry to grow up. As they grow up and can increasingly fend for themselves, subsidies become progressively smaller. There are a ton of other sectors where subsidies don't help nearly as much as the govt hopes. Until the US sanctions hit, subsidies for the semiconductor industry only had very limited effect.
>There are a ton of other sectors where subsidies don't help nearly as much as the govt hopes. Until the US sanctions hit, subsidies for the semiconductor industry only had very limited effect. Probably some sectors are easier to grow if it only involves copying something that already exists, and outscaling/outpricing everyone else. Then this is (in most cases) is a purely money+organization problem. But if it isn’t…
On the other hand, new energy vechicles are... well... new. There is no mature ecosystem to copy, a lot of things have to be newly developed. In this sector, subsidies have been massively successful.
The problem is mainly one of market pressure, not one of technical ability. Chinese semiconductor companies wanted the best suppliers, so they chose international suppliers rather than domestic suppliers. Domestic customers didn't buy from domestic chip designers. Domestic chip designers didn't manufacture with domestic fabs. Domestic fabs didn't use domestic equipment. As a result, domestic suppliers never got enough customers to practice and improve their processes, which is why they remained low-quality. It was a vicious circle which the Chinese govt tried to solve for years without much success. Then US sanctions came and all of a sudden, Chinese semiconductor companies had no choice but to work together with domestic suppliers: it was either shitty domestic suppliers or die. Nowadays you see domestic semiconductor equipment companies have something like 150-200% growth YoY, something which they previously could only have dreamt of. Domestic DUV litography was at 65+nm for a long time but now 24nm DUV litography (still good for ~60+% of market demand) is around the corner because they finally get enough practice.
People ascribe too much to this simplistic view of China only being able to copy or that copying is easy, and totally underestimate economic pressures.
But this is different from the 500Wh/kg Battery that was announced around 3 month ago right [0]? Has something happened in this regard? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35649935
Yes, different market segments. That one is aimed at the aviation industry where weight matters a lot and is worth a lot to customers. LFP is technically a bit less energy dense than some other chemistries but it has cost as its big advantage which is why it is the go to choice for a lot of the mass produced mid range EVs. A cheap fast charging battery is going to be quite nice as it makes fast charging stops less di…
Why the "(Tesla Supplier)" remark, which is not in the original article? CATL is the largest battery manufacturing company, supplying battery for almost every high-end devices.
Because there is still the myth that Tesla has a secret sauce in their battery chemistry, and edge, and is not just using Pana, CATL and perhaps other vendor's cells?
https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/energy-consumption-electr...
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V3 Superchargers are 250 kW per car with 1MW power cabinets. The issue at the moment is that grids in a lot of places in the world can't keep up with the connection requests, and this is indeed mainly due to not being able to upgrade transmission capacity fast enough.
One of the boring ways to upgrade the grid is to raise the transmission limits set to prevent overheating in the summer when it's cold in the winter. Reminds me of "the duck curve" where the worry was that gas plants couldn't ramp output fast enough. There were many exciting high tech solutions but one solution was just to ask the gas plants if they could ramp faster. Turns out they could, they'd just not needed to b…
The National Grid connection queue is still a huge bottleneck for renewable and battery developers. The amnesty helped but at the end of the day, the overhead lines, substations and transformers need to be upgraded.
At least in the UK there's quite some visibility into the queue and required and ongoing works. Here in Europe it's like a black box.
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Because there is still the myth that Tesla has a secret sauce in their battery chemistry, and edge, and is not just using Pana, CATL and perhaps other vendor's cells?
The secret sauce isn't in the batteries themselves but the engineering of the entire drivetrain, the battery management system and so on. Tesla is consistently in the top of EV drivetrain efficiency for their models, allowing them to go farther with less batteries, with the IONIQ being one of the few EVs that have been able to fight Tesla for the top spots. https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/energy-consumption-electr…
From your link this doesn't seem to be true. The short range, non awd model 3 has great efficiency. Other model 3s are also good but clearly not anything particularly far ahead as there are a bunch of other models from other manufacturers with similar or better efficiency.
Looking at other Tesla models makes it clearer that they aren't anything particularly special. Even the model y, which is basically model 3 with minor body tweaks is basically middle of the road, model s and x are even worse.