[HN Gopher] Toyota has been developing a solid-state battery for...
___________________________________________________________________
Toyota has been developing a solid-state battery for EVs with a
range of 745mi
Author : achow
Score : 258 points
Date : 2023-07-23 09:42 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.topspeed.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.topspeed.com)
| Simulacra wrote:
| Like many of the comments around these types of posts, I will be
| very excited when a definitive product has been produced, perhaps
| demonstrated if it's not too much to ask. Solid state batteries
| are possible, but I think it's going to take a company like A
| Toyota to, basically, burn a boatload of cash to get there and
| absorb that loss so as not to increase the price of the EV too
| much.
|
| Perhaps solid state batteries will first appear on luxury lines.
| If you're already spending $90k for an EV, what's another $50k
| for the new battery?
| luuurker wrote:
| Yes, they've been developing it for the past 10 years and it's
| always 3 years away.
|
| I'll believe it when I see it on a car.
| lumost wrote:
| I used to wonder why such impossible research projects could
| exist in a private business. To some extent, the existence of
| such a project can give credence that management is not
| oblivious to larger trends - and has a plan to leapfrog the
| competition.
|
| To this end, It doesn't matter whether there is any credible
| plan to deliver said research project.
| AlpineG wrote:
| 745 mile range, charges in 10 mins. Already see there must be
| some BS. How many kw is this magical charger.
| willcipriano wrote:
| When you aren't charging your car you can use it to smelt
| aluminum.
| felipemnoa wrote:
| These are best case scenarios. It just tells you the upper
| limit of the technology. The higher the limit the better. In
| practice though it means that the infrastructure has a lot of
| catching up.
|
| I think this just speaks to how much of an advancement this is,
| if true.
|
| Like, this new battery technology is so advanced that there is
| no infrastructure for it yet.
| Siecje wrote:
| Is it better to keep an EV at 80% or to leave it between 50% and
| 80% for weeks?
|
| Instead of 80% I'd say optimal voltage but I don't know what that
| is, and the car doesn't show me the battery voltage.
|
| Why isn't there a setting to charge to optimize battery
| longevity? Even if that means the battery is at 70% or 75% or
| whatever.
|
| Often I get home with 60%. Should I wait until I get home with <
| 50% before charging? Or just keep it at 80%?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| They replaced hydrogen with solid state battery as a thing that's
| perpetually coming soon but not quite there yet.
|
| There are two metrics that matter for Toyota:
|
| - How much gwh per year of battery production can they get online
| and how soon? They need to shift production of millions of
| ICE/hybrid vehicles to fully electric. So, we're talking many
| hundreds of gwh here.
|
| - How expensive are those batteries going to be in $/kwh? Toyota
| is mostly known for its affordable cars. They have a few luxury
| models of course but mostly, they sell cars to people that can't
| afford those. The battery is by far the most expensive thing in
| an EV. I'd expect them to look at cheap sodium ion batteries
| rather than some fancy solid state batteries.
|
| Toyota is late to market and they don't have much more than a few
| concept cars and a few models that they pay BYD to produce for
| them. They are certainly starting to invest in production
| capacity. But it seems they are still a few years away from
| having much to show for their investments. Also, are they going
| to keep up with BYD, Nio, VinFast, and all those other asian
| manufacturers that are not holding back and are already producing
| EVs by the millions? Tesla is a category of its own at this point
| with a clear lead in terms of profitability and production cost.
| And you have the likes of Stellantis, Ford, and GM also trying to
| get e piece of the action. Toyota is a no show so far and the
| last 3 are showing the transition to electric is hard and
| involves a lot of learning and reinventing.
|
| Toyota needs more than a magic battery to catch up.
| worrycue wrote:
| > Toyota is mostly known for its affordable cars.
|
| The thing is current battery tech is still too expensive. Can
| you imagine what will happen to the price if the production
| levels of EVs went up?
|
| It's simply impossible to mass produce EVs cheaply at the
| moment.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Can you imagine what will happen to the price if the
| production levels of EVs went up?
|
| Batteries would be pushed further down the experience curve
| and they'd get cheaper?
|
| I mean, this is a Silicon Valley related site, so I assume
| you all understand experience curves.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Prices are already coming down. China actually has lots of
| cheap EVs on the road already. Think <10000$ cars. Are these
| cars amazing. No. But they are amazingly good value for the
| money.
|
| What's going to happen in the next 3 years is that several of
| those Chinese manufacturers are bringing production capacity
| online in Europe and North America. And they will start
| selling these vehicles at a premium and make a lot of profit
| because they don't have much local competition in terms of
| cost. Tesla is rumored to be working on a cheaper EV but they
| will likely build it for the international market and
| manufacture it in their Mexican plant.
|
| Meanwhile, the cost price of batteries keeps on dropping.
| CATL and other manufacturers are announcing new batteries all
| the time. For example CATL has had some success with bringing
| sodium ion batteries to market as well as LFP batteries.
| Component prices for EVs are dropping as well. It's not
| impossible to scale EV production. That's actually what's
| happening. Production volumes are growing year on year and
| cost per vehicle is trending down.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Considering the Model Y may very well outsell the Corolla
| this year, that doesn't look like it is the case any more.
| While they generally are more expensive up front, the total
| cost of ownership can end up less when you calculate fuel and
| maintenance.
| riku_iki wrote:
| my understanding is tesla secured sourcing of batteries, it
| doesn't mean they are cheap and obtainable on market in
| general.
| panick21_ wrote:
| All car makers sign longer term deals with suppliers.
| Those deals are often index towards the market.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| There is a huge market for PHEVs if Toyota had the competency
| to take it. Theor Prime vehicles are in high demand, just not
| made in large numbers for whatever reason. Tacoma and 4Runner-
| like trucks with a PHEV drive train would sell like crazy.
| panick21_ wrote:
| PHEV are just bad business. They don't make money. They are
| very expensive to produce and expensive to maintain. There is
| a reason car markets don't want to make that their primary
| thing.
| cottsak wrote:
| Toyota routinely seem to be developing all kinds of new things...
| all of which are not production vehicles that anyone wants to buy
| in any serious quantity.
|
| It's a distraction tactic.
|
| I don't know what they're buying time for but it had better be
| good else this won't end well for Toyota.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I don't know about other press releases but to say that "no one
| would want to buy" a 1200km range car (or just the battery tech
| of one) is ridiculous to the extreme. It's what everyone has
| literally been waiting for.
| hotstickyballs wrote:
| They're doing the Kodak maneuver. Meaning they'll be spending
| cash on innovation because a minority of shareholders want to
| see them investing in the future but almost everyone isn't
| willing to see actual losses. So then they'll just keep
| spending on innovation but barely change their corporate
| strategy and then eventually fizzle out.
| sam_goody wrote:
| No one mentions this, but IIRC solid state batteries are less
| likely to catch fire without a obvious reason.
|
| While such fires are extremely rare, they have happened, and
| scare at least some of the potential market.
|
| Considering that there are definitely those that do not buy a EV
| for fear of fire, that could be a selling point.
| panick21_ wrote:
| There are lots and lots of issues around fire. Its not correct
| that solid state automatically means fire is less. There are
| lots of technologies that play into that.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Regardless, they catch fire much less than ICEVs.
| briandw wrote:
| Same from Toyota in 2017
| https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/07/toyota-wants-to-commerc...
|
| Also from 2014
| https://www.autonews.com/article/20140127/OEM06/301279980/to...
| exabrial wrote:
| I know everyone on HN will tell me that my opinion on my personal
| want is wrong, all I want is a hydrogen + fuel cell/battery car,
| or recharge times in the 5-10m range for BEV.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Announcements of things happening more than 3 years from now
| don't have much actionable validity.
| Herzogralf wrote:
| [dead]
| wunderland wrote:
| [flagged]
| simbolit wrote:
| [flagged]
| roody15 wrote:
| This is a smart move. Current EV's have not quite solved enough
| of the issues to make them viable for most non urban areas.
| Hybrids remain the most in demand and the best of both worlds
| with current tech.
|
| If we can get a battery with a massive range then charging issues
| subside a bit and these vehicles become much more viable for most
| if not all of the US.
| TheRealSteel wrote:
| Toyota somehow develop this magical battery for an EV but forgot
| to develop an EV.
|
| I truly think Toyota's ignorance of EVs will end up turning them
| into the next Kodak or Blackberry.
|
| They don't NEED a breakthru battery like this, the current ones
| work well -- I drove 1200km today in a Tesla. What they need to
| do is develop and sell electiric cars.
|
| It's such a shame. Toyota had the first hybrid. And it was good
| -- I drove a Prius for ten years. They even made a plugin hybrid.
| They were the leaders. Now they seem to be last in the electric
| car race. Tragic.
| tasubotadas wrote:
| The last time I've done calculations it was something like x2
| of energy production increase is required to satisfy 100%
| migration to EVs.
|
| Not that big of increase.
| epolanski wrote:
| Seems a massive one for me, I had blackouts in recent years
| both at my house in Italy and Poland. Electricity in Poland
| is still highly coal dependent in my region in Italy it's
| 90%+ gas.
| Tagbert wrote:
| And spread out over several decades
| merpnderp wrote:
| Building an electric car is far simpler than an ICE. The
| batteries are by far the most important part.
| darkclouds wrote:
| But they are a lot harder to drive, mainly because you have
| not got any engine noise feedback.
|
| Just like if I were to buy a Porsche with a flappy paddle
| gearbox, I'd ask their Sonderwunsch dept, to put a clutch
| peddle in, for those times I need to dip the clutch in order
| to gain control of the vehicle when driving on the limit
| because of the reasons why the 930 got its nickname the Widow
| Maker.
|
| At best all I could do at the moment with a flappy paddle
| gearbox is try to boot the gearbox into a high gear like 6 or
| 7 and hope it can change gear fast enough whilst hoping the
| engine is not too powerful to act like the handbrake has been
| pulled up unceremoniously when taking my foot off the
| accelerator.
|
| Now where in the controls do I alter the regen amount on an
| electric car, in order to stop it from contributing to an
| accident when driving on the limit? I bet its not a single
| action control, but something buried deep inside a menu
| somewhere. Of course the added weight of the batteries and
| thus increased weight of the vehicle, makes the experience
| much more like driving an electric train on the open road,
| stable and safe most of the time, but one hell of an accident
| when one does occur!
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If you're driving a Porsche "on the limit" I hope you're on
| a racetrack and not the public roads.
| darkclouds wrote:
| You have heard of snow, ice, rain, mud and sand, you do
| find them on the open road you know.
|
| Glad to see your default impression of Porsche is speed
| though, that reinforces my desire to purchase one. :-)
|
| Thing is the 911 Dakar which is ideal for the above
| mentioned conditions doesnt come with a towing eye, so
| I'd have to have the surfboards on the roof rack or
| poking out through the sunroof, and I've got no where to
| tow some jet skis if I wanted to hit the beach but you
| can do anything you like between the high and low water
| mark on a UK beach and I know some fantastic beaches
| perfect for this car.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqc-HPeaQv8
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| You're talking about a gearbox. Those aren't generally used
| in EVs, because an electric motor will happily put out
| _tens_ of thousands of RPMs with plenty of torque at low
| speeds.
| darkclouds wrote:
| They arent in EV's the motors are wound to deliver a
| certain characteristic of a motor, but EV's nearly all
| have fantastic RPM abilities with max torque available
| through the entire rev range.
|
| Toyota I think have announced they are simulating a
| gearbox in one of their new EV's which in my opinion is
| an admission that EV's are much harder to control because
| the need to feather the accelerator becomes a necessity
| unless the rate of acceleration is dialed back by the
| manufacturer. And then extra acceleration performance
| sold as an in car purchase like we are now seeing in some
| cars with heated seats can be sold unless the owner
| doesnt know someone who can hack the vehicle management
| system.
|
| But just like many people complained about the brakes of
| the mk1 and mk2 VW golfs and polos, and porsche's in the
| 964's and earlier ie pre-ABS brakes, what those people
| complaining about is exactly how you want your brakes to
| work like if you dont have or need ABS. I could apply the
| brakes in such a way, I could have the front passenger
| side wheel locked up, but the remaining brakes not locked
| and then feathering the brakes so as to not flat spot the
| tyre.
|
| Its virtually impossible to do that in todays ABS braking
| system world and I would always switch the traction
| control and other systems off because I could react
| faster than the systems could. Although I have to admit
| the Mercedes AMG S63 has for over a decade now, have a
| better braking system which enables the rear end to slide
| out a bit more around roundabouts in certain conditions,
| like what is today known as drift mode.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > which in my opinion is an admission that EV's are much
| harder to control because the need to feather the
| accelerator becomes a necessity unless the rate of
| acceleration is dialed back by the manufacturer
|
| Are you speaking from personal experience here? The
| accelerator takes some getting used to, but most people
| adapt in like 30 or so seconds. What Toyota wants is
| something on an EV that simulates a manual
| transmission...for people who like sports cars, they like
| shifting. Sort of like EVs that put a subwoofer under
| your butt to simulate voom voom engine sounds. These are
| niche products.
| darkclouds wrote:
| No not driven an EV yet, I havent seen any that I like,
| and I hate driving big heavy cars, because they tend to
| slide off sidewise on bends, so anything over 1500kgs is
| pushing it for me, which discounts virtually all EV's.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Maybe drive a little slower on public roads?
| MrVitaliy wrote:
| No, not really -- https://www.drive.com.au/news/volkswagen-
| group-cariad-execut...
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Electric cars are significantly easier than ICEs to develop
| electrically and mechanically. Car companies are
| notoriously bad at writing software. These are orthogonal
| statements.
| chris11 wrote:
| You can custom order electric versions of random gas
| vehicles. Toyota can make an EV.
| https://www.zelectricmotors.com/tesla-porsche
| https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk/
| getarofilter wrote:
| [dead]
| YesBox wrote:
| Toyota's decision is based on their calculation that there wont
| be enough electricity produced to meet the demands of electric
| cars on a large scale, IIRC.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Given that it takes about the same amount of electricity to
| refine a gallon of gasoline as it does to power an EV over
| the same distance an ICEV would travel on that gallon, I
| think electrifying transportation isn't going to be a big
| deal. The grid will evolve for changing patterns of
| consumption, just as it always has. Even if we made 100% of
| all new car sales today EV the grid could keep up.
| gnicholas wrote:
| But the gallon of gas isn't refined in my neighborhood,
| every night. It's made in a centralized location, in
| advance, and if for some reason that location loses power,
| another location will make it and distribute to my local
| gas stations.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Agreed, the grid will need to adapt to the changing
| consumption pattern, but the capacity is a solved
| problem. And we're building much more anyway.
|
| Personally, I've never found gas stations to be the
| beacon of reliability. They go down quickly in any kind
| of shortage situation. During the last ice storm here the
| local station ran out of gasoline in a couple days and
| diesel right after that. But I was able to buy propane
| without interruption, so that was good -- it doesn't rely
| on electricity to be dispensed. This is why my portable
| generators are now all dual fuel.
| Tagbert wrote:
| " and distribute to my local gas stations."
|
| If you are having a widespread, long term power outage,
| those gas pumps will not run due to not having
| electricity.
|
| Do you live in an area that has frequent power outages,
| then maybe this would be a concern, but in most areas an
| outage is pretty rare and are short term. If your area
| has unreliable power, perhaps they should be putting more
| power transmission lines underground?
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yes, PG&E cuts power proactively via their PSPS program.
| It doesn't affect most gas stations though, as they are
| more centrally located and not in neighborhoods. I
| believe they have looked into burying transmission lines,
| but found it to be economically infeasible.
| babypuncher wrote:
| If your power grid is unreliable, then maybe work on
| fixing that rather than just giving up on climate goals.
|
| Defeatism never accomplishes anything.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I'm not defeatist, just pointing out that it's an
| oversimplification to say "it takes as much electricity
| to refine a gallon of fuel" given that the refining
| process happens in industrial areas where electricity may
| well be more reliable and less expensive.
| Server6 wrote:
| I've always argued this is a Field of Dreams problem. In that
| if you build it they will come. The electric will expand to
| meet demand.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Numbers that I saw recently: The largest US solar
| electrical generation plant right now is about 400MW. To
| electrify fast enough to get to about-as-close-to-net-zero-
| as-we-can-imagine by 2050, the US would need to build one
| of these plants and bring it online ...
|
| ... every two weeks.
| blake1 wrote:
| The US installed 11.8GW solar last year. That is
| 453MW/every 2 weeks. :-)
|
| Yes, that's nameplate capacity, so you can't count on
| solar to delivery the power to get us over the line by
| itself. But we are nearly on track to the net zero goal
| when you add in ...
|
| ... wind.
| bink wrote:
| Or they gambled that there would be enough hydrogen
| generation and distribution, which seems like an even worse
| bet. It's not that they decided to stick with ICE, it's that
| they chose an even worse fuel source.
| alephnerd wrote:
| A lot of this is because of the Japanese government itself.
|
| To Japan, Battery Tech would force them to be reliant on
| China or the US due to lack of natural lithium deposits,
| which makes the whole energy reliance aspect of battery
| tech moot.
|
| To combat this, the Japanese government felt Hydrogen would
| be the best bet due to
|
| 1. An early lead in hydrogen technology, so first mover
| advantage in technology exports and hydrogen infrastructure
| deals (already happening in India and Australia for
| example)
|
| 2. A large LNG capacity that could be revamped for Hydrogen
| fuels
|
| 3. Good relations with cheap coal producers like Australia
| and India to produce brown hydrogen (ie. Hydrogen fuel from
| carbon resources)
|
| 4. The economics and logistics of hydrogen fuel cells can
| mimic that for Natural Gas, meaning a quicker ramp up.
|
| These are a good overview -
|
| 1. Japan's Hydrogen Industrial Strategy -
| https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-
| str...
|
| 2. Japan Hydrogen Basic Strategy -
| https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/japan-hydrogen-
| basic...
|
| 3. Basic Strategy for Hydrogen (the actual strategy paper.
| It's in Japanese) - https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/enecho
| /shoene_shinene/suiso...
| narrator wrote:
| Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy. What do
| you think of recent developments of high efficiency
| electrolysis of sea water without precious metal
| catalysts? [1]
|
| Hydrogen will be needed for industrial processes as
| electric power can't generate temperatures high enough
| and hydrogen in the form of ammonia makes a pretty good
| energy storage system that does not need any special
| metals to use for power in a modified ICE. The sweet spot
| for ammonia engines seems to be long haul container
| shipping where batteries would be infeasible.[2]
|
| [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01195-x
|
| [2]https://gcaptain.com/man-reaches-milestone-with-
| successful-t...
| alephnerd wrote:
| First, I want to stress that I'm a Policy Wonk turned
| Cybersecurity practitioner. Though I have a STEM
| education, I haven't touched chemistry or physics in
| almost a decade.
|
| That said, this paper does look promising and it kind of
| reminds me of the heavy water electrolysis process used
| in Nuclear Energy.
|
| Using saltwater instead of fresh+distilled water would be
| great, though I'm curious about the cost of
| productionizing this, as the kind of cost and energy
| outlay needed for this at scale might not be efficient.
|
| That said, I am not a ChemE or Physicist so I could be
| wrong
|
| > Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy.
|
| Yep, but that will take time to build, hence the idea to
| use brown hydrogen in the meantime.
| jbm wrote:
| It's interesting that I just watched a video[0][1] on
| Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are
| nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable,
| Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage.
|
| Incidentally, I can't see how being dependent on the US
| is such an issue for Japan. They are completely and
| utterly dependent on the US for their national security,
| without any remaining meaningful popular movement to
| divorce themselves thereof. The Japanese Socialist party
| had some language about getting rid of the Anpo treaty,
| but hilariously, they backed out immediately when they
| came into power; the Japaense journalist / commentator
| Akira Ikegami wrote a (Japanese language) book [2] about
| this era that I thought was pretty enlightening.
|
| [0] Fair notice: the person who runs the channel is an MA
| and former UI/UX engineer, so YMMV with how far you trust
| the content.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zG-ZrC4BO0
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/%E6%B1%A0%E4%B8%8A-%E5%
| BD%B0-e...
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an
| issue for Japan
|
| It's an issue the same way the US being dependent on
| Taiwanese Foundries even though they're an ally of our's.
|
| Should some sort of a global commodities crunch occur
| (eg. hypothetically, China banning all exports of Rare
| Earth Metals), then prices are going to skyrocket in the
| global market because it will take 5-7 years for
| production to scale up in Australia, Bolivia, and the US.
|
| For critical technologies, it's important to have some
| level of self reliance. This is why the US is now a net
| energy exporter, after getting burnt by the spike in
| commodity prices in 2005-2009 leading to a massive
| bipartisan push for fracking, natural gas, solar,
| Athabaskan oil sands projects w/ Harper's backing, etc.
|
| Other large countries with limited rare metal supplies
| like Germany and India have modeled a hydrogen policy
| similar to Japan for this reason.
|
| Also, Japan's economic recovery after 2008 was heavily at
| risk due to the spike in Oil prices, as well as a similar
| near recession that arose in the aftermath of the OPEC
| Embargo. Memories of both still resonate in Japanese
| policy circles.
|
| > Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are
| nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable,
| Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage
|
| I'm not a MatSE or Physicist so I can't speak to the
| viability of that. That said, I can assume that rolling
| out any sort of mining and refining infrastructure would
| take time to scale out.
|
| For example, it took China 15-20 years and an extreme
| amount of Govt protectionism to become a leader in the
| rare metals space. It's not that China has more deposits
| than other countries - it's just that it wasn't cost
| effective for most other countries to match the prices
| China was providing.
| guerby wrote:
| Japan depends on continuously imported oil and gas.
|
| The BIG difference for lithium batteries is that you need
| to import lithium only ONCE then you reuse/recycle.
|
| And yes there's big big money at play, so lots and lots
| of FUD around lithium and geopolitics, the obvious
| difference with oil is nearly never mentionned thanks to
| oil money.
|
| Also : https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-to-
| subsidize-half-of-c...
| alephnerd wrote:
| Good point.
|
| I brought up the oil aspect in my comments below, but
| because this was a battery tech related convo I decided
| to bring up the (relatively minor) lithium portion.
| Though the battery tech issue did play a role in Toyota's
| decision to develop the Prius and the Mirai
|
| Japan's hydrogen strategy is definetly a reaction to oil
| shocks a la 2008 and 1973
| _hypx wrote:
| Wrong. It is the smartest choice we can think of. It is
| battery cars that is just an irrational reaction to oil
| shocks of the 2000s. Hydrogen is actually a fully
| sustainable idea and will eventually be adopted across
| the board. Batteries are just going to be a temporary
| stopgap.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I was responding to his point about Oil dependency.
| [deleted]
| _hypx wrote:
| His point is backwards. You want to switch to hydrogen if
| you want to avoid future crises. Batteries just create
| the same situation.
| _hypx wrote:
| That's complete nonsense. Almost no lithium is recovered
| in recycling, and we will need a truly massive increase
| in virgin materials to even get the process started. It
| will be just as big of a problem as oil for a very long
| time to come.
| _hypx wrote:
| It's incredibly short-sighted to think like this. There
| will be a huge supply of hydrogen at some point in the
| future. This is due to it being the only truly sustainable
| energy storage technology. Nearly all others will have to
| be abandoned.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Yes, because the grid is static and never can be expanded.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| And peak demand is 24 hours a day :p
| treeman79 wrote:
| It is more likely to be contracted.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| We're adding capacity to the grid literally every day,
| both at the transmission and distribution level. It's not
| going to 'contract'
| Someone1234 wrote:
| There's reason to think otherwise: Natural Gas is being
| replaced and is due to see price increases. It will
| likely be replaced by electricity (namely Heat-Pump HVAC
| systems, and induction cook tops).
|
| In some states some developments aren't even hooked to
| the gas network, and the homes standards are such that
| electrification is the default.
|
| You have to measure electricity demand over years, not
| months, because seasonal changes and or weather can
| really corrupt your data.
| nlewycky wrote:
| The grid is going to explode. Let's start with
| California. Because they're a large economy, a large
| population centre and a famously leading on environmental
| issues, they tend to run into scaling and environmental
| problems first.
|
| Do you remember news about the California grid straining
| under the heat wave in 2022? The governor sent text
| messages to every Californian asking them to minimise
| their power usage? Power consumption across the state*
| reached 52GW.
|
| Every April, by the rules of the Federal Energy
| Regulatory Commission, each state receives submissions of
| new projects that people want to build and connect to the
| grid. Each of these is called a "Cluster". In April 2021,
| cluster 14 included a proposed 110GW of new power
| generation. This was so many submissions that the state
| couldn't even finish their legally mandated analysis of
| all of the proposed projects in time for the new
| submissions for April 2022, so they pushed Cluster 15
| back to 2023 (approved by FERC). It's past April 2023 and
| Cluster 15 projects proposed 354GW worth of power. If we
| take that CA can produce 50GW now, and add clusters 14
| and 15, that's a little over 10x our current maximum
| power generation. You could argue that maybe some of
| these projects won't get built, that always happens in
| every cluster, but the number of withdrawn applications
| is a smaller percentage than usual.
|
| Estimates are that EVs will require us to double our
| current power generation.
|
| The glut in new power construction is not a California-
| specific phenomenon. https://www.ferc.gov/news-
| events/news/ferc-proposes-intercon...
|
| * technically across the California Independent State
| Operator, https://caiso.com , which is about 80% of
| California and also includes a tiny bit of Nevada for
| geographical reasons.
| willio58 wrote:
| Keep in mind these "calculations" are based on biased data to
| help support the overall goals set forth by the leaders of
| the company.
| throwaway106382 wrote:
| and what "goal" would that be? to _not_ sell cars and make
| money once the biggest markets all mandate them in under a
| decade?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| To continue to sell cars which are unreliable and have
| huge supply chains.
|
| Electric cars require much less assembly time, have a
| much smaller supply chain, and require much less
| maintenance.
|
| Japan is literally propped up by its auto industry - they
| make it prohibitively expensive to own a vehicle more
| than a few years in order to artificially create a market
| for newer cars. The other result in a huge used vehicle
| export to most of the world except for the US.
|
| I don't think the average non-Japanese understands that
| owning an old car in Japan is a significant status
| symbol.
|
| Also, did you notice that damn near every model year of
| Japanese car has different headlights, taillights, and
| bumpers? And small narrow bits of the lights now extend
| well into the quarter panels with unique shapes? You
| think it's coincidence that parts most likely to be
| damaged even in a minor collision are year-specific and
| thus more expensive and harder for non-OEMs to keep up
| with manufacturing compatible parts?
|
| The lights extending into bumpers and quarter panels
| aren't just a styling thing, they're physically keying
| the parts. They even do unique rest-of-world vs US
| styling to make it even more difficult for third party
| parts.
|
| It also lets them keep cranking out models people think
| are new and exciting...when in reality the underpinnings
| rarely change. The Corolla is a perfect example, using
| largely the same underpinnings for nearly two decades.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Large companies have difficulty making changes. The
| reason is exactly that: the goal is to make money, and
| doing what has made heaps of money for heaps of time
| already always seems like the best option.
|
| > The Innovator's Dilemma is the title of an excellent
| book by Clayton Christensen. The dilemma itself is the
| fact that though large innovators have some motivation to
| innovate, they also have a strong disincentive from doing
| so as new products will undermine their existing ones.
|
| I don't think the biggest markets will mandate EVs in
| under a decade. More importantly, it's possible the
| bigwigs at Toyota don't think so either, and they will
| act on what they think, even if it happens to be wrong.
| thuuuomas wrote:
| Which calculations? What data? What biases? What goals?
| ip26 wrote:
| This makes no sense to me. Take Los Angeles. Almost everyone
| has AC. If you can power AC, you can charge an EV, and the
| loads peak at different times. (AC peaks around 3pm, EV can
| peak anywhere from 7PM to 5AM depending on programming)
|
| Blackouts can happen, but EV normally charge when power is
| cheapest and demand is lowest.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Opel, Peugeot Sticking To Bicycles - Motorcars Will Never
| Have Enough Petrol Stations.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I thought it was that it's a more efficient use of lithium to
| make one hundred hybrids instead of ten EVs?
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Then where are all their Prime vehicles that have had a
| huge waitlist for years?
|
| Toyota is just not delivering on the EV front at all. They
| could be cleaning up by stealing some of the Model Y
| customers back by selling a ton of RAV4s, especially the
| Prime versions.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I always think it's weird to believe in either of those
| things (that we can't make enough electricity, which can be
| made in like a dozen different ways whether coal, oil, gas,
| biomass, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, etc, and
| that there won't be enough lithium, even tho lithium isnt
| burned up, is extremely plentiful from conventional sources
| plus can be practically extracted from the ocean not to
| mention recycled indefinitely) and then be like "therefore,
| since we'll have unlimited fossil fuels, let's make more
| fossil fuel cars."
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I _kind of_ get it.
|
| A) improving the eMPG (or is it MPGe?) of more cars on
| the road to reduce their fossil fuel consumption is
| better than giving a few cars zero-emission powertrains,
| courtesy of the 80-20 rule. (Hence the riddle about you
| having two cars you use equally and someone offering to
| magically take one from 40mpg to 1000mpg or the other
| from 10mpg to 40mpg - you are better off financially with
| taking the latter option.)
|
| B) The infrastructure for fossil fuel mining is here but
| scaling up lithium mining is going to add new horrors to
| the environment and the developing world.
| megaman821 wrote:
| If you look at the amount of oil and gas that is
| extracted vs the amount of lithium that would we need to
| mine; it is like comparing the size of the Sun to Pluto.
| Mining lithium has downsides but there is just no way it
| could be as bad as oil and gas due to the orders of
| magnitude difference in quantities needed.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Are you talking about pure lithium quantities? Those are
| small indeed, but... the concentration of lithium in the
| ore mined is low (some mines work with 0.2% ore), so you
| need to move 500kg of rocks to mine 1kg of lithium.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| The British National Grid disagrees:
| https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-
| zero/ele...
|
| "Does the electricity grid have enough capacity for charging
| EVs?
|
| The most demand for electricity in recent years in the UK was
| for 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation's peak demand has
| fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy
| efficiency.
|
| Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we believe 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 of manageable load fluctuation.
|
| The US 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
|
| A significant amount of electricity is used to refine oil for
| petrol and diesel. Fully Charged's video Volts for Oil
| estimates that refining 1 gallon of petrol would use around
| 4.5kWh of electricity - so, as we start to use less petrol or
| diesel cars, some of that electricity capacity could become
| available."
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Also, this weekend in the UK
| https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/latest-fleet-
| news/electric-...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Parts of the US grid are barely able to handle the load
| today. Rolling blackouts have been used in some areas.
| There may be enough total capacity to handle more use, but
| peak demand levels are already straining the system.
| redserk wrote:
| I'm skeptical of a narrative where concern for the
| electrical grid's ability to handle load is only
| considered for EV growth over several years versus the
| air conditioning use in the current unprecedented
| heatwave.
|
| Anecdotally, my A/C energy usage (compared to last year)
| far outweighs my energy usage in an EV.
| _hypx wrote:
| Not to mention radical increases from demanding everyone
| switch to heat pumps plus demanding industry switch to
| electrified versions of everything too. It's seriously a
| complete fantasy to think the grid can happen all that
| with minimal upgrades.
| redserk wrote:
| Dominion Energy in Virginia has an even worse problem
| than EVs to worry about: datacenters
|
| https://rga.lis.virginia.gov/Published/2022/RD216/PDF
|
| If you scroll to page 66 of the PDF, it's insane how much
| more demand is needed for datacenters. It completely
| dwarfs forecasted EV power usage.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The US is a huge exception, your power grid is from the
| age when cowboys roamed the lands. Literally.
|
| There was a huge fire that was caused by a power line
| slowly mechanically wearing down its connector. OVER A
| HUNDRED YEARS. Nobody bothered to check or replace it.
|
| Also you have exceptions for oil and gas pipelines. 1-2
| permits on a high level and the land owners can pound
| sand if they complain.
|
| For power lines you need levels on a dozen different
| levels and even after that everyone who can even see the
| power poles has the irrefutable right to veto said wire
| or at the very least sue and slow it down to a crawl...
| somsak2 wrote:
| power outages that aren't weather related are not
| increasing. https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-
| matters/surging-weath...
| edgyquant wrote:
| Where did they say they were?
| Tagbert wrote:
| You may be referring to California who had issues last
| year during an historically high heat wave. This year,
| they are not having the same trouble. Part of the reason
| is that they increased production capacity since last
| year.
| gnicholas wrote:
| The main reason is that this summer has been much, much
| cooler in CA. In SV, for example, we've had a handful of
| days over 90 this year, whereas last year there were
| probably 20 days over 90 at this point in the summer. Our
| AC has only kicked on a few times all year, whereas last
| year it was on much more frequently.
|
| There may have been increases in production, but it would
| have been shocking if we'd had rolling blackouts this
| year, given how mild the summer has been. Other parts of
| CA are warmer than SV, but AFAIK (having family in
| Sacramento and LA) this summer has been cooler than last
| summer all over CA.
| _hypx wrote:
| California is very close to seeing blackouts right now.
| If there's another heat wave on the scale of last year,
| there will be blackouts again.
| alistairSH wrote:
| But that's highly localized. And one of the most reported
| areas where this happens is Texas, who decided to roll
| their own grid, and is now paying the price for that
| stupidity.
| [deleted]
| skybrian wrote:
| This question depends on the specifics of local energy
| generation, so you're not going to get good answers without
| zooming in.
|
| Japan's electrical grid has some unique challenges that
| explain why they are so interested in hydrogen. An article
| about the UK isn't all that relevant for that,
|
| Talking about the US electrical grid as a single entity
| doesn't make a whole lot of sense when it's not a single,
| nationwide market. There can definitely be local problems
| as we saw in Texas and California.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Since when does Toyota only sell in England?
| pfdietz wrote:
| And so they decided to go for hydrogen? If there isn't enough
| electricity, that means hydrogen derived from fossil fuels.
| So their hydrogen take was even more evil that it first
| appeared.
| willio58 wrote:
| Agreed. If they started releasing EVs en mass tomorrow they
| could stay relevant. If they wait another 3 years they'll decay
| away
| entropicgravity wrote:
| Toyota and its fellow Japanese car makers were betting the bank
| on hydrogen based green cars. This was wishful thinking but
| they had a reason. A regular ICE car produces several post
| sales revenue streams. For example, regular oil changes, brake
| replacements, engine issues and etc. EV's produce almost none
| of these ongoing revenue streams and therefor the ongoing value
| for Toyota would drop significantly.
|
| With hydrogen based car though it's an almost exact copy of the
| ICE car. It's got a big, hot finicky fuel cell under the hood
| that requires ongoing highly qualified maintenance. It would
| require complex 'hydrogen stations' to refuel. If there's no
| battery then brakes will continue to wear out on schedule. In
| short, everything a ICE car offers except the CO2.
|
| It's not surprising that this is the future that Toyota had its
| eyes on for way too long. Group think. Now they're playing
| catch up and they're far behind.
| _hypx wrote:
| > With hydrogen based car though it's an almost exact copy of
| the ICE car. It's got a big, hot finicky fuel cell under the
| hood that requires ongoing highly qualified maintenance.
|
| That's utter bullshit. A fuel cell is literally an
| electrochemical system no different than a battery.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| A fuel cell is not a closed system, a battery is. A fuel
| cell need a supply of hydrogen (obvious) and oxygen from
| the air and in return it produces heat, water, and some
| electricity (with pretty terrible efficiency). A battery
| produces electricity and heat (depending on load).
| _hypx wrote:
| That's widely inaccurate. The fundamental advantage of an
| electrochemical system is that you are no longer limited
| by Carnot's theorem in the same way as heat engines. As a
| result, the efficiency of both systems can be the same.
| Not to mention you don't have to deal with all that heat
| either, making operation much simpler.
|
| In the end, a fuel cell is basically a metal-air battery,
| and has the same level of efficiency.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't believe this maintenance argument, maintenance on EVs
| is insanely more expensive when it comes to battery
| replacements. Replacing an entire engine on the average sedan
| is an insanely cheaper option. Even the Nissan Leaf's engine
| replacement is like 14k $, that's the cost of a new car ffs.
| JoshTko wrote:
| By the time your battery needs replacement it will cost a
| fraction of what it costs today. Battery prices have been
| falling fast as the volume production of these batteries
| have scaled up.
| _hypx wrote:
| There has been no evidence of this, not to mention people
| just get cars with even bigger batteries. It is likely to
| always be an expensive replacement problem.
| pornel wrote:
| This has already happened with Nissan Leaf. It debuted
| with 24kWh, and now you get 40kWh for the same price, and
| there's 60kWh option.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| How many times an ICE has its engine replaced on average?
|
| The capacity retention of a Tesla battery from a decade
| ago plateau at 88% after 200,000 miles. That's for
| nickel-based battery, and most OEMs are switching to
| iron-based (LFP) which degrade even less.
|
| I bet that zero EV will have to replace their battery in
| the near future.
| _hypx wrote:
| ICEs can be fixed. It's pretty rare to have a truly dead
| ICE. For non-luxury cars, even a replacement is no big
| deal.
|
| Zero is a pretty low number. A lot of them will have to
| be replaced. Especially for commercial vehicles where
| they often drive 100k miles every year.
| whalabi wrote:
| ?
|
| They developed an entirely new platform for EVs [1]
|
| They started a subsidiary for self driving with around a
| thousand employees [2]
|
| They released EVs, the bZ3, the bZ4x, the Lexus RZ
|
| Current battery technology is a huge reason why people don't
| switch to EVs. Everyone I know talks about the charging times,
| needing to find a supercharger route when going long distance.
|
| A 10 minute charge on that massive range would convince me to
| switch easily.
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_New_Global_Architecture...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woven_by_Toyota,_Inc.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > They started a subsidiary for self driving with around a
| thousand employees [2]
|
| Lots of 'self driving' investments have invested a huge
| amount without much benefit.
|
| > They released EVs, the bZ3, the bZ4x, the Lexus RZ
|
| Their total EV sales are tiny. The bZ4x is universally mocked
| at one of the worst EV in class and not actually cheaper then
| the competition.
|
| > Current battery technology is a huge reason why people
| don't switch to EVs.
|
| And yet huge amounts of people are switching to EV and the
| actual limit is batteries supply limitations not battery
| size.
| [deleted]
| meling wrote:
| Yeah, but not until 2027 or so it seems, and then you'll have
| to drag around an ic engine as well. Seems a bit of a waste
| for a car with that much battery range.
|
| My dad just bought the bZ4x, I'm not particularly impressed,
| but that's just my opinion. My dad likes it, mainly because
| he wasn't comfortable using the touch screen while driving to
| adjust things like windshield wipers etc, which I think is a
| good decision for him. But what poor marketing department
| came up with an unpronounceable name like that.
| Eldandan wrote:
| Ah, yes, the renowned bz4x, or busy forks for the
| initiated.
| pornel wrote:
| Hyundai/Kia needs about 20 minutes of charging per 3 hours of
| driving.
|
| The important difference from ICE refuelling is that you
| don't have to be by the car when it charges.
|
| I've taken road trips across Europe, and it's been fine.
| 20min is about as much as I need for a bathroom break and to
| get a coffee.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Hyundai/Kia do have great maximum charge rates...but the
| rub is finding a charger that supports those speeds, is not
| broken, and is not occupied. Is this trivial in Europe? It
| sure isn't here in the US (even in CA, which has relatively
| higher adoption rates of EVs).
| zlsa wrote:
| It is trivial in the US if you're able to use Tesla's
| supercharger network.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Telsa's _proposed, future_ v4 standard is still only
| capable of 250kW and meanwhile CCS stations have been
| deployed for years now that can do 400kW, with 700kW
| chargers being demonstrated.
|
| It's an outdated, proprietary standard in both form and
| function, even if Tesla claims it's a public standard;
| they exert total business control over the plug and their
| charger network. There's no way they'll allow a random
| car to plug into a supercharger ('safety' and such), no
| way they'll allow any other payment methods on their
| network. There's no way they'll support configuring your
| Tesla to work with third party NACS chargers and payment
| systems.
|
| The only chargers that exist with NACS connectors are in
| one country and controlled by Tesla. The only cars with
| NACS plugs are (at the moment) Teslas and the only
| proposed additional users are companies that have signed
| agreements with Tesla.
|
| This is why it's so infuriating that Ford, GM, and Tesla
| did what they did. They just effectively killed CCS, and
| thus dealt a major blow to EV adoption in the US for the
| sake of a market share grab. 800v architecture meant EVs
| finally could lay claim to being practical for long
| distance charging. Plug in at a rest stop, everyone hits
| the bathrooms, maybe a snack, stretch their legs, and the
| car is nearly full again. A lot of errands and such fit
| into the 18-20 minute window a nearly-full-charge takes.
| "NACS" can't offer anywhere near a 18 minute 10-to-80
| charge.
|
| The US version of CCS is far from perfect; the weight of
| the cable causes connection issues due to the poor
| mechanical design of the socket, and we never should have
| had a unique CCS connector from Europe to begin with. But
| Tesla's "North American Charging Standard" is outdated
| and their supercharger network in addition to being
| outdated has been woefully underfunded and undersized for
| a while; with Ford and Chevy piling onto the network,
| that's going to get even worse.
|
| What's even more infuriating is that in Europe, there is
| no such thing as "Superchargers", because the EU forced
| Tesla to use CCS2. And meanwhile, congress hasn't even
| noticed that Tesla just effectively captured the US EV
| charging market.
|
| Ask yourself this: what could possibly go wrong giving
| the world's richest man - an unhinged narcissist to boot
| - exclusive control over how electric vehicles are
| charged in the US?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| CCS1 has no advantages over the Tesla plug. If we're not
| going to use CCS2, we should use NACS.
|
| You're wrong about the limits. v3 is 250kW, and the
| limiting factor is the vehicle voltage. Take it up to 800
| volts and that's already 400kW. Pushing the amps above
| 500 is possible for both connectors, with similar levels
| of difficulty.
| redserk wrote:
| This is incorrect. I'm not sure where you're finding
| 250kW as the max for a V4 Supercharger but they've been
| shown to charge at more power in the wild.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/19/23689247/tesla-v4-supe
| rch...
|
| And while not deployed in the wild, NACS supports up to
| 1MW with a forward and backward compatible larger 1000V
| connector in the NACS spec:
| https://www.tesla.com/support/charging-product-
| guides#techni...
| gnicholas wrote:
| But that's not compatible with Hyundais or Kias, which is
| what GP was talking about.
| pornel wrote:
| Yes, 300kW chargers from Ionity and Fastned are pretty
| common. FR, NL, DE have especially good coverage.
| r00fus wrote:
| More and more so it appears that the US is falling way
| behind the EU (and probably China) in terms of charging.
|
| 150kW charging is common in France. I hear it's even
| better in other EU countries.
| dghughes wrote:
| >Toyota somehow develop this magical battery for an EV but
| forgot to develop an EV.
|
| The Prius in 1997 doesn't count? Sure it was a Hybrid mainly
| because of no charging network. A decade before Tesla. And
| selling ever since.
|
| They could have a dozen models in development ready to release
| who knows. It's a huge company.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| One trick pony. Been sitting on their hands since the hybrid
| synergy drive.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > One trick pony.
|
| Care to explain? Because by this metric every carmaker is a
| one trick pony. Tesla even more so.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Tesla innovates at a rapid pace, even if judging solely
| on the battery architecture and cell chemistry between
| their platforms over the last decade. The tech in my 2021
| and 2023 Ys is far superior to my earlier 2018 S and X.
| The jump in tech from v1 Superchargers to v4 is material.
|
| Toyota invented the hybrid drive when the US was
| encouraging higher fuel standards with policy (and Toyota
| was concerned about being left behind), and have barely
| put forth a half hearted effort to build EVs. Their
| earlier compliance car RAV4 EVs used Tesla drivetrains,
| for example.
|
| Meanwhile, Tesla sells almost 2 million EVs a year and
| continues to ramp manufacturing. Toyota manufactures
| press releases.
|
| https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g15377976/what-
| came-be...
|
| https://www.motorbiscuit.com/toyota-once-partnered-with-
| tesl...
| martin8412 wrote:
| Tesla model 2023 is worse than earlier years simply
| because they removed USS.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Sales and revenue matter, opinions don't. USS deprecation
| is unfortunate, but they still sell the cars so
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| _hypx wrote:
| Tesla is the ultimate one-trick pony. There will come a
| day when the BEV is abandoned. Tesla has shown no ability
| to move past that event. Toyota will make whatever car is
| in demand in the future.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You are aware that there is no hydrogen refueling
| infrastructure in most of the developed world and lots of
| jurisdictions have banned new combustion vehicle sales
| between now and 2035, yeah? What proven technology would
| you use besides batteries? Hydrogen infra that doesn't
| exist?
|
| Toyota isn't dying tomorrow, but if they don't switch to
| BEVs, they'll die like Kodak or Xerox. There is no light
| vehicle hydrogen future.
| _hypx wrote:
| We can build hydrogen infrastructure if we had to. None
| of those ICE bans are going to happen by 2035, at least
| not without massive loopholes. We will be driving ICE
| cars for a very long time to come. The correct pathway is
| finding a sustainable alternative to ICE cars that could
| happen organically, not fantasize about instantly turning
| everything into a zero emissions car tomorrow.
|
| Tesla is the company that is going to die. The BEV is not
| going to be the only car in the future, nor will last
| forever. If anything, it is an outdated idea, and was an
| overreaction to the 2000s oil shock. Toyota will just
| make whatever cars people want.
| [deleted]
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > None of those ICE bans are going to happen by 2035
|
| Many of the bans are happening by 2030. In Norway, 83% of
| new cars are already BEVs. I don't think they will look
| back, the market will make selling new ICEs in that
| country at least, impractical.
|
| Hydrogen probably has a future in goods transportation
| (trucking), but even there they have to compete with a
| fully electrified rail system that goes to the arctic
| circle.
| _hypx wrote:
| And either be reversed or will have loopholes. And Norway
| is one (small) country that is not representative of the
| rest of the world. And I don't think the political
| situation in Europe is all that stable either. A lot of
| the movement in European politics is about abandoning
| many of these absurd green energy ideas.
|
| Hydrogen will just take over at some point simply because
| it is the only sustainable idea.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Hydrogen will just take over at some point simply
| because it is the only sustainable idea.
|
| Hydrogen is a horrible idea for personal vehicles: it
| takes a bunch of new expensive infrastructure to even get
| going (gas stations, but with compressed hydrogen tanks),
| it is energy inefficient (a lot of energy lost in
| compression, keeping it compressed, and then turning it
| in to electrons). It is just not economically viable when
| compared to BEVs where the biggest worry is finding a
| power plug.
|
| It might make sense for trucking given its power to
| weight density, and the fact that trucks can have huge
| hydrogen tanks without much consequence.
| _hypx wrote:
| It is cheaper than building out the grid needed to power
| all cars. In fact, you use basically the same land that
| gas stations current use up. It is quite straightforward.
|
| Attacks on efficiency are anti-hydrogen FUD arguments.
| They were made up by BEV companies and are almost
| entirely false. It's important to realize that fuel cells
| are electrochemical systems just like batteries. FCEVs
| are also EVs just like BEVs. There is no fundamental
| downside. The upside however is that you avoid the huge
| amount of raw materials needed for the batteries. So this
| will be a far cheaper solution once we hit mass
| production.
|
| In short, it is pretty much guaranteed that we will
| eventually switch to hydrogen cars. It is only a question
| of when and not if.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It really isn't. The grid is literally already there! The
| only new infrastructure needed is at the end point. If
| you are going to be generating hydrogen from electricity
| anyways, it isn't any different, except maybe you need
| less electricity because going from electrons to hydrogen
| back to electrons again you lose 40% energy.
|
| The BEV companies aren't pushing FUD. They are just
| choosing the option that they see the most demand from,
| and can make the most money from. Japan has tried to make
| hydrogen happen for 20 years now, and it simply isn't
| going to happen.
|
| Batteries don't require much more raw material than the
| fancy cyrogenic compressed hydrogen tank and fuel cell
| you need for a hydrogen car. Those batteries are also
| than those two things also.
| _hypx wrote:
| That's complete nonsense. We will need vast amounts of
| grid upgrades to be able to be able to power all cars.
| And if the grid needs to be purely renewable, that
| problem explodes into something far harder. In fact, the
| problem becomes so hard that you will need hydrogen-based
| energy storage systems to make it work. But that
| completely undermines any efficiency arguments against
| hydrogen cars.
|
| BEVs are over 100 years old. It is just a repeat of an
| obsolete idea. The moment we get serious about green
| energy, hydrogen cars will happen.
|
| Hydrogen tanks are literally just tanks. They require
| very little raw materials compared to batteries. Fuel
| cells are tiny compared to batteries, and use up about
| the same level of raw materials as catalytic converters.
| Everything else is basically the same between FCEVs and
| BEVs. So you can quickly realize that the FCEV will be
| the far cheaper of the two ideas.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > That's complete nonsense. We will need vast amounts of
| grid upgrades to be able to be able to power all cars.
|
| That is complete nonsense:
|
| > A typical EV would require about 3,857 kilowatt-hours
| (kWh) of electricity. For 26.4 million EVs, that's over
| 101 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in a year or
| about 2.5% of what the U.S. grid produced in 2020.
| Although it's a small percentage, it's much more than
| what we're currently asking of the electrical grid.
|
| https://www.evconnect.com/blog/can-the-power-grid-handle-
| ele...
|
| Let's say we have 100 million cars, that is 10%.
|
| You keep saying hydrogen tanks are literally just tanks.
| I get it, you don't believe compression is necessary, so
| no cyrogenic cooling at gas stations (powered by the grid
| of course), no fancy compression in cars. Is that what
| you actually believe?
| _hypx wrote:
| Now do the math with 300 million EVs. Also, assuming SUV
| sized ones being popular too, alongside many commercial
| vehicles too. It is not that simple. Especially since so
| much of it will be DC fast charging and not slow speed
| charging.
|
| Compression is not that energy intensive. It's more BEV
| FUD to make this to be a big deal. If done correctly, it
| is only a few percent loss of energy: https://www.hydroge
| n.energy.gov/pdfs/9013_energy_requirement...
|
| Also, it is recoverable energy. Compressed gases are
| energy storage mechanisms in their own right. In the long
| run, this will be very minor loss of energy.
| scythe wrote:
| The Prius has also been a PHEV for years now. I doubt it
| would require a huge change in manufacturing processes to
| make a pure EV version.
|
| But it's manufacturing the actual battery modules that has
| been the hard problem for Tesla competitors as I understand
| it. I guess it's not surprising if so that Toyota would want
| to have their technology choice set for a while before
| ramping that up, since it probably affects many of the
| surrounding design choices.
| Tagbert wrote:
| It is hard to develop the knowledge and processes to build
| batteries effectively. You need to start doing it and
| refine your process as you learn more and expand capacity
| along the way. Tesla went through this phase several years
| ago. GM, Ford, and others are currently in this phase. They
| will work out the kinks. Toyota won't learn how to do this
| until they actually start building batteries at scale and
| work out the process using the continuous improvement
| techniques that they learned from Deming.
| epolanski wrote:
| Investing in electric engines is still much cheaper than
| investing in combustion engines.
|
| As a reference, R&D for Mercedes' 2017+ OM654 diesel
| engine alone costed the company 3.5 B $. And that amount
| is relatively low because Mercedes had a huge know how in
| building diesel engines.
|
| But in EV those amounts are much smaller, catching up is
| no longer a matter of decades and hundreds of billions,
| but years and ten times smaller investments (see Korea).
|
| This is why China was never competitive in the ICE era,
| but companies like BYD are booming.
|
| Also, I strongly believe that from now to 2035 multiple
| companies will be selling their electric powertrains to
| dozens of different automakers.
| pornel wrote:
| Nokia, Palm, Blackberry, and Microsoft had years of
| experience making smartphones...
|
| In hybrids the electric motor doesn't have to be maximally
| efficient, because the electric range is only a nice to have,
| not the key selling point.
|
| Hybrid battery density doesn't matter much, because it's
| 1/10th of BEV's size anyway.
|
| In hybrids the charging speed can be an abysmal trickle, and
| still suffice to charge the tiny battery. In BEV you need to
| work with 4x higher voltages, 10x higher wattage, and push
| thermal management to the limits.
|
| That's why bz4x sucks. Its efficiency is meh. It charges at
| below average speeds, and still overheats.
| epolanski wrote:
| In hybrids the battery is used primarily to lower average
| fuel consumption and lower (a lot) noise and fuel
| consumption in cities (where hybrids run generally a large
| amount of time on electric).
| robocat wrote:
| Maybe for modern hybrids. For my 2005 Hybrid, the engine
| is an Atkinson cycle engine and that is where most of the
| efficiency gains come from
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_AZ_engine#2AZ-FXE
| "The large valve overlap leads to a reduction in cylinder
| charge and reduced torque and power output, but
| efficiency is increased. This combination makes the 2AZ-
| FXE suitable for use only in hybrid vehicles, where peak
| torque and power demands can be met by the electric motor
| and battery."
|
| So the hybrid battery is used for acceleration. Note that
| my Hybrid battery is a 200V 50Wh Nickel metal hydride
| battery - Note I think Toyota Hybrids didn't start using
| Lithium batteries until late 2010's).
|
| When town driving it doesn't seem to me that the
| regenerative braking makes much difference: It is very
| noticeable that the engine is in use during acceleration
| from a dead-stop. Certainly regeneration is insignificant
| on hills because the
| adolph wrote:
| There is a good Munro and Assoc video going into the
| packaging differences between ICE and EV vehicles. The Prius
| (of which I am a happy operator) is ICEV packaging-wise. The
| battery is relatively high, small and not integrated into the
| frame.
|
| As a huge company Toyota may well have the people with ideas
| about EV transition. Unfortunately as a huge company there
| are a thousand interests that will be harmed by EV
| transition. Can Toyota (or VW, MB, Stellantis, etc) overcome
| those internal conflicts to produce something out of their
| wheelhouse? Or will it take an acquisition that moves with
| distinct branding that eventually becomes the entire company?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > The Prius in 1997 doesn't count? Sure it was a Hybrid
| mainly because of no charging network.
|
| A hybrid is not an EV. It gets 100% of its energy from
| gasoline. Plug-in hybrids have a better claim to being an EV.
| asantos3 wrote:
| Prius has a PHEV version...
| hliyan wrote:
| > I drove 1200km today in a Tesla
|
| Sorry, was this in one day, with a single charge? Or over
| multiple days (ending today), with charges in between?
| samstave wrote:
| I've spent the last 40,000 hours on the phone. With breaks,
| sleep, meals, adventures, and some charging in between...
|
| -
|
| Personally, I want the boutique car shops of the early 1900s
| style to re-open - whereby they build bespoke vehicles on a
| standard EV sled, such as this or the Tesla sleds that they
| open sourced their patents for back in the day...
|
| I'd love to be able to literally design and build my body-
| work around a safety-rated-regulated frame/sled - and then
| have these made - the problem with this idea is the advent of
| monoquoque frames which is the frame and major body-panels
| are all one-piece, which then required the advent of
| automotive robotics to be able to pick-up the frame and turn
| it at angles where the degrees-of-freedom assembly arms can
| reach, insert/weld things...
|
| but I'd rather have a "tesla" or this "toyota" guts with a
| custome body set that I can design with a studio, have them
| fabricated/printed and affix to the standard mounting
| holes/brackets of my safety-cage.
|
| I especially would like to do this for what would be a
| camper-van design where you plop the van body atop the sled,
| have some interconnects for internals to controls etc... and
| then have the van body mount in a sensible manner...
| drewg123 wrote:
| I've done a 1600km trip 6 or 8 times in a 2017 Model X 100D.
| I do it in one ~18 hour drive. About 3.5hrs of that time
| spent charging. Charging has never been a problem. I think
| the worst experience I've had was a few years ago, on a V1
| charger that had > 1/2 the stalls occupied, so I needed to
| share a 120Kw hour charger.
| foobazgt wrote:
| Why the skepticism? It's pretty obvious from the car and
| supercharger stats that this is trivial to accomplish. I had
| an easy 700mi day trip years ago in my m3p and the range and
| chargers are better nowadays.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I had an easy 700mi day trip
|
| I'm pretty good at long distance driving (e.g. 14hrs of
| driving with no stops except gas and bathroom). I could
| drive 700 miles in a day in an ICE vehicle, but I'd never
| call it easy. Add in _any_ charging time, and it gets even
| less so.
| foobazgt wrote:
| Might be me. I've semi-routinely made day trips of
| 1300mi, and I've done a few out-west road trips that
| involved long bouts of driving.
|
| I'm not happy with FSD yet, but Autopilot is excellent
| and really helps with driver fatigue. The charging stops
| don't really change anything. You just stop when you
| would otherwise bathroom break or eat.
| JoshTko wrote:
| What FSD issues are the most problematic?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It is hard (or maybe it was hard) to average more than
| 60mph on US interstates, including gas/pee/food stops.
| 1300 miles @ 60mph is 21hrs. Unless you plan to not drive
| the next day, that's a LOT of driving, and definitely not
| easy.
| venv wrote:
| I mean, who drives 1200km in day anyway? But it is doable
| with todays EVs, many of which have ranges of around 500km or
| more, and only need a couple of hours of charging to drive
| 1200km (after starting with full capacity), during breaks you
| would mostly take anyways. Teslas, VW's ID.4, Hyundai's Kona
| electric and many more come to mind. Cheers for Toyota's
| research, though.
| xcskier56 wrote:
| In the US, long drives aren't crazy. This year I've done 4
| single day drives in excess of 1400km. The furthest I've
| ever driven without stopping was 2500km, but that was with
| 4 drivers, and I guess a "day" isn't quite right bc it took
| us like 27hrs.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 750 miles are still fairly rare, as a fraction of all
| road trips. We'll hear from everybody who does it in this
| thread, of course, but on average it's definitely an edge
| case.
|
| However, it doesn't matter, I could do 750 miles a day in
| my Model 3 just as easily as my gas car. It would be more
| comfortable in the Tesla, too.
| epolanski wrote:
| More comfortable than which other car?
|
| I've driven lots of cars and nothing beats the comfort of
| a premium German station wagon such as a Mercedes E class
| for long trips followed by Volvo ones.
|
| A model Y or 3 are in a very different tier of cars.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Everyone likes Volvo, but I continue to find them very
| underwhelming. Mercedes is good, but they have really
| fallen behind the other German manufacturers in many
| ways.
|
| A Model 3 is decidedly in the middle, I'll grant you, but
| it has adaptive cruise and lane centering, which makes
| long cruises effortless.
|
| But before I'd take a Mercedes E class or any other
| station wagon, I'd take an F150 King Ranch ;-). Truly
| that is the land yacht of the modern era. Inefficient,
| expensive, but there aren't too many cars more spacious
| or soft for cruising down the highway. In the US, obv.
| bragr wrote:
| >who drives 1200km in day anyway?
|
| Lot's of people all the time? Perhaps you live in a small
| country or have all your important people quite close to
| you if these numbers don't seem reasonable. I must make 1-2
| road trips like this a year to attend family events,
| weddings, funerals, etc. It's not fun to drive 12 hours
| straight, but it's doable, especially with 2 drivers.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I live in North Dakota, so if I want to get anywhere I
| usually drive. I did Fargo to Bozeman by myself last
| year. Have driven Fargo to Yellowstone in a day. Fargo to
| Seattle in 2 days with another driver. Chicago is a 9
| hour drive. Denver is 13 hours. Long road trips are a
| regular part of life when you live in the middle of
| nowhere.
| driverdan wrote:
| I've driven 1600km/1000mi in a day multiple times. I don't
| find driving that far in one day fun but sometimes it's a
| better choice than dealing with hotel rooms, especially
| with pets.
| hx8 wrote:
| This number is plausible to reach on one day while stopping
| for charges.
|
| My median driving is very short (<30km/week), but I'll make
| one way drives of 1800km about 6 times a year. I did lots of
| research about the long range capabilities of Tesla when
| making my last purchase.
| ryaneager wrote:
| I drove ~1050km, SF -> Portland in my model 3 in one day.
| Around 11 hours total with a ~30 minute charge stop every
| ~2.5hrs. This was before the V3 superchargers.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| [dead]
| linsomniac wrote:
| For additional data, when we go visit my wife's family that's
| a 2,400 mile trip (3,800km) that we usually do in 3 long-ish
| days (8am-10pm) if I'm with my family, or around 40 hours if
| I'm going solo. This is in a 2016 Model S 75D (smaller
| battery).
| londons_explore wrote:
| Fast chargers exist. One could drive 1200 km in an EV in a
| day.
|
| The Cross-US race in an EV managed to _average_ 66 mph - 80
| mph average while driving, with twenty-four 18 minute
| charging stops.
|
| Obviously a 1200 km drive could do even better than this -
| since it could start the day at 100% and end at 0%, saving
| ~25 mins of charge time.
| ezfe wrote:
| My 2023 Corolla Hybrid is a great vehicle as someone who cannot
| go electric - wish they had gone further for the people who
| can.
| _hypx wrote:
| Tesla is shaping up to be the next Blackberry. They are stuck
| with just one idea: The battery powered car. An idea that
| predates internal combustion BTW.
| sremani wrote:
| Toyota is a Japanese company, a country that will burn any
| thing to keep lights on. So, when people question Toyota's
| commitment to Electric, I do not take them seriously. Toyota
| might have sunk-cost going with Hydrogen, but sooner or later
| they will build electric vehicles. My take is, the complexity
| of Li-based battery supply chain coupled with their views on
| Total Carbon Footprint of Li-based cars made them wait for
| better options.
| _hypx wrote:
| This is totally backwards. We will have to switch to hydrogen
| cars because batteries are not sustainable. It is nearly
| everyone else that picked wrong and will eventually have to
| pay the price.
| troyvit wrote:
| When there's a gold rush sell shovels.
| _hypx wrote:
| Bullshit. All car companies will have to abandon batteries
| because it is not a sustainable idea. It is Tesla and not
| Toyota that is facing a disruptive risk because of that.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Toyota does have a couple of electric cars; bZ* plus a Lexus.
| drewg123 wrote:
| The charging performance of one of the bZ variants is so bad
| one could say it doesn't really do "fast" charging. See the
| out of spec review "The Toyota bZ4X AWD Sets A New Low Record
| In Our 10% EV Road Trip Challenge (US Spec / CATL Battery)"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9A73U-kAO0
| Dalewyn wrote:
| It's commonplace for whoever gets a throne to inevitably
| squander it because they get complacent and proud, becoming top
| dog is essentially the grim reaper giving you written notice.
|
| Combined with other failures Japan is going through right now,
| it really is tragic how far Japan has fallen from its former
| glory.
| twelve40 wrote:
| for all this talk of tragic failures, it is an extremely rich
| country, and Toyota is #1 automaker in the world. So compared
| to wars and true craziness elsewhere, they are still facing
| just the first-world problems.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| They need another Meiji revolution.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| I don't know anything about cars, but is an all electric really
| that much different from a plug in hybrid?
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Well, do you know much about physics?
|
| What do you think happens to overall system efficiency if you
| need to carry an internal combustion engine, a gas tank, and
| gas along with you, in addition to a battery, inverter, and
| electric motor?
|
| Hybrids are strictly worse than electrics in every measure
| except range, and most customers do not need the range they
| claim to need.
|
| But salesmen are not paid commissions to explain why
| customers don't need things, so we have hybrids.
| VectorLock wrote:
| >Hybrids are strictly worse than electrics in every measure
| except range, and most customers do not need the range they
| claim to need.
|
| Thats the benefit of a plug-in Hybrid. Most people don't
| need to drive much on a day to day basis and the smaller
| battery can handle that fine. For longer driving you have
| the ICE engine. The ICE engine can weigh as much or less
| than a comparatively "long range" battery.
| amai wrote:
| Sounds like FUD -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
| simbolit wrote:
| What does the article really contribute? The announcement was 10
| days ago. I can't find anything in the article that gives me new
| actionable information.
|
| Can people who upvoted this please explain why they did? Thanks!
| Mistletoe wrote:
| It's the first time I'm hearing of it and it sounds neat and
| I'd like to know more?
| simbolit wrote:
| 10 days ago: The Japanese automaker says it has found a new
| material that will help commercialize the elusive, long-
| awaited solid state battery, but it's light on details.
| https://uk.pcmag.com/cars-auto/147312/toyota-touts-solid-
| sta...
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Yes I get that lol but I don't have a neural link to all
| news that is created at the time it happens.
| brianmorris10 wrote:
| Agree. This article takes the phrase "745 mile solid state
| battery, charges in 10 minutes created by Toyota" and fluffs it
| to 1000 words. No further information is conveyed.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| Personally, this is the first time I'm seeing this info, and to
| me it's pretty exciting. 750mi on a single charge would
| significantly change the calculus on EVs for me personally. It
| pretty much eliminates any range worries I have, and makes it
| way more feasible for me to own one if I live in an apartment
| or condo where I cannot install a more powerful charger. It's
| the difference between hanging out at a charger station once a
| week vs once a month.
|
| So at the very least, the article is a nice heads-up to me and
| others alike that are somewhat on the fence about EVs, that
| some of our concerns may very well be assuaged.
| comfypotato wrote:
| Do you know the lifetime of current battery technology?
| Expected years until 80% capacity, etc.? Asking because I
| don't know.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Tesla claims their Model S and X batteries degrade 12% over
| 200,000 miles: https://www.notateslaapp.com/tesla-
| reference/1371/tesla-show...
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| I do not, sorry.
|
| Until very recently, EV's weren't even a consideration for
| me, because of their limitations on range, but also because
| of difficulty of charging them if you lived in a condo or
| an apartment (heck, my current car is a Mazda, a company
| which _just_ started offering EVs in some markets). Because
| of that, I am not well versed in the specific details of
| the current generation of EVs. With that said, anecdotally,
| I have heard of old Prius hybrids getting 100k miles out of
| their batteries, but that was a decade ago. I don't know
| what modern battery chem is capable of.
| andybak wrote:
| I upvoted it because I didn't hear the announcement until I saw
| this post.
| RileyJames wrote:
| Selfishly, I'm excited only because it might mean Toyota
| continues to be a viable operation into the future.
|
| I want them to be one of the leaders of next generation
| vehicles, what ever the technology, only because it means they
| will continue to support their previous generation vehicles,
| for which they have an honourable history.
|
| I want my BJ74 landcruiser to run on diesel until it's no
| longer available, and then I want it to run as a
| hybrid/electric vehicle until like the ship of Theseus we are
| debating whether or not it's still a BJ74.
| sgt wrote:
| Also Land Cruiser owner here, although gasoline one. No
| intentions of conversion. I'm pretty sure gas will be
| available for the next 100 years.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I envy you with your Toyota diesel. I could only manage to
| get a VW.
| anovikov wrote:
| Even if it was true, by 2027-28 the market will be completely
| lost for Toyota and probably, every Western brand except Tesla.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| EU will ban the sale of gasoline fueled cars in 2035, there is
| plenty of time.
| worrycue wrote:
| Why? At the end of the day if they can produce a good car at a
| good price by the time EV hit mass adoption / ICEs get banned,
| they will be fine.
|
| I don't understand why people think just because you are late
| to market means you can't get market share - or even dominate.
| Cars aren't operating systems or social media platforms, there
| is no network effect.
|
| Heck, Toyota entered the US car market when US manufacturers
| like GM and Ford were long established.
| anovikov wrote:
| Because they will need some kind of advantage. Tesla has been
| on it for like, 10 years longer than anyone else so they have
| an advantage of learning curve. China has advantage of
| established production chain and low costs. Toyota has none.
| If they try to seriously compete they will just spend all
| money in 2-3 years and go bust.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Do people really believe, that everyone will drive a Tesla?
| People need stimulation, variety and there are multitude of
| other factors that weigh in on their buying preferences.
| worrycue wrote:
| GM and Ford were also at it for decades before Toyota even
| existed ... The idea that Tesla and China's head start is
| insurmountable needs justification.
| anovikov wrote:
| Toyota at that point had a huge cost advantage because
| their labor was many times cheaper than American, even
| bigger advantage than China has today. They were not
| unionised and worked almost for food, as Japan was still
| poor and half-wrecked after WWII. And it was the time
| when an assembly line worker in the U.S. with Homer
| Simpson level of education attainment could buy a
| 4-bedroom home on a single income. So they managed to
| squeeze in in spite of America having a huge head start,
| much like China did with Tesla. Today's Japan is nothing
| like that.
| worrycue wrote:
| But we are talking about "learning curves" and "supply
| chains". You still haven't explained why they won't be
| able to catch up and make a good affordable EV.
| anovikov wrote:
| Because you need something to begin. Either a learning
| advantage (build better stuff as cheap as others can
| build crappy one because of less trial and error
| involved), or a cost advantage (but crappy stuff but
| cheaply due to lower costs and thus win market share).
| Not having either, they will have to compete head-on, and
| simple comparison of valuations and thus WACCs of Tesla
| vs Toyota clearly shows that if they try to compete, they
| will be drained and bankrupt very quickly.
|
| I think they will eventually not try. They see the
| writing on the wall and know they will be bankrupt and
| dissolved in some years. Thus spreading FUD about EVs
| plus promising much better EV of their own to simply slow
| down this process to make some final bucks before going
| bust. That is the smartest thing they can do at this
| point.
| worrycue wrote:
| > Because you need something to begin
|
| They have experience with electric drive trains/motors
| with the hydrogen vehicles and experience with batteries
| with their (plugin) hybrids.
|
| They just haven't bothered to release a full EV for
| whatever reason. Maybe they don't think it will be
| profitable at the moment and it will hurt sales of more
| profitable existing product lines.
|
| > Thus spreading FUD about EVs
|
| Are they wrong about their concerns over the supply of
| lithium? Or that for many people EV won't be an option -
| due to lack of infrastructure in their countries, range
| issues, ... etc.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| In 2022, 80% of new cars sold in Norway were EVs[1]. Even in
| our most cold and remote region, Finnmark, over 50% of new cars
| were EVs. All on the top 10 list are BEVs.
|
| Of the top 10, five were German models. The top two, ID.4 and
| Enyaq are essentially the same car and combined outsold the
| only Tesla model, Model Y.
|
| Yes Tesla has a tech advantage currently. Their advantage isn't
| magic though, and for some people other things matter more.
|
| However I will agree that Toyota has some serious work ahead to
| get back into the lead here in Norway.
|
| [1]: https://elbil.no/hele-10-pa-topp-lista-er-elektrisk/
| Eumenes wrote:
| I'll believe it when it's been in the field for years. EVs have
| been a major let down, lot's of hype.
| SergeAx wrote:
| > For those who prefer metric, that's a range of 1200 kilometers
| and a charge time of six hectoseconds
|
| That was actually funny. Otherwise, please call me back when
| vehicles with such batteries will be available.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| 1200km is more than enough. Nobody should be driving longer
| distances in one day anyway. If this will hold up, Toyota will
| have leap-frogged their competition. As a German, it kind of
| pains me to see how asleep at the wheel the German car industry
| is: too timid, too conservative and too slow.
|
| Edit: Although a bit of a bummer further down: "Toyota claims it
| will be ready for sale in 2027 or 2028."
| hinkley wrote:
| Given the weight of the batteries, I expect you'll see
| companies and customers opt for a battery half that size. The
| reduced weight will add a few percent to the expected range, so
| you might see a 600 mile battery with 45% of the capacity.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >1200km is more than enough.
|
| That's 560 kilos more than what Bill Gates said.
| dheera wrote:
| > 1200km is more than enough. Nobody should be driving longer
| distances in one day anyway.
|
| No not really. When they say 1200km that's under ideal
| conditions. Put a roof rack, a kayak or two bikes, load it up
| with 4 passengers and a trunk full of luggage, and drive up
| into the mountains on a hot summer day with the air conditioner
| on full blast, and you're probably looking at a range of 400km.
| And your destination probably doesn't have a place to charge
| overnight.
|
| This whole "in one day" mentality is the problem. If you're
| going to the backcountry of death valley where there is
| absolutely no civilization, you want your vehicle to hold
| enough energy for your _entire trip_ , not just for one day.
| mcswell wrote:
| You _do_ realize that if you do all of those things in an
| ICE, you 'll get a similar drop in range, right?
|
| At any rate, most people _never_ do all those things, nor do
| they go into some death valley. Because most of us don 't
| like death.
|
| As for the charging places, yes that is an issue. I never had
| trouble filling my horse with that gasoline stuff, either.
| TheRealSteel wrote:
| It's funny for me to come across this comment now. Just 15
| minutes ago I got home from driving 1,250km today in an EV.
| Yes, I am tired. Yes, I agree nobody should drive longer in one
| day.
| [deleted]
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I'll be getting an EV when I can purchase one for $50k with
| more than 700 mile range. Then I won't need to stop more often
| than our gas car on road trips, and I won't have to worry about
| the cold/speed/altitude significantly reducing range.
| tyingq wrote:
| I would guess the longer ranges benefit apartment dwellers,
| house renters, etc. People that maybe can't get reliable
| daily/nightly access to a charger. Apartments and workplaces
| could dole out stickers for access on specific days of the week
| or similar to spread out use of chargers.
| freetanga wrote:
| Or anyone that needs to do a 500-600 km every 2-3 months and
| is not eager to add 90 mins and uncertainty to those trips.
|
| I think is a fairly common situation in Europe, you might
| live in a city but relatives are away. You visit but don't
| see the point of making a complex planning factoring cold
| weather, vehicle load, potentially broken chargers no your
| planned stop,....
|
| And train is not an option if you are carrying a family of 5
| or plan on moving around once you arrive.
|
| Why adopt a solution that is worse than the status quo?
| vel0city wrote:
| It's not a 90min stop to go 500-600km in a lot of modern
| EVs. More like 10-20min.
|
| I just looked up a trip in A Better Route Planner in a
| Hyundai Ioniq 6 going on a trip around Texas, 495km trip.
| 4h44min total trip time, _8 minutes_ of charging.
|
| Do you really not take a 10 minute break in nearly 5 hours
| of driving?
| c0nfused wrote:
| As someone who has been tooting the ev horn for a while,
| generally most arguments against EVs are couched in "I do
| x now and don't want to change" or they are I heard about
| x and am afraid of it.
|
| People who are willing to look into the situation on the
| ground tend to react positively
| wongarsu wrote:
| At that point it's worth considering renting a car every
| 2-3 months for those trips, and get a car sized to your
| day-to-day needs instead.
|
| Of course that's also worse than the status quo (well,
| probably cheaper than the status quo, but less convenient),
| so I don't expect people to flock to that solution
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Rental is so expensive it compares poorly to owning a
| small 10-15 year old ICE car.
| hinkley wrote:
| Similar sentiment to, "just rent a UHaul pickup instead
| of owning one just in case you need to move
| furniture/appliances".
| masklinn wrote:
| > probably cheaper than the status quo, but less
| convenient
|
| If it lets you get rid of your cars, maybe.
|
| If you also need a daily car (or even two), rental is not
| necessarily cheap, and beyond convenience it has
| flexibility issues.
|
| For instance the rental closest to me is a half hour bus
| ride away, and not open on the weekends, and the prices
| can vary a lot depending on time to trip or period, and
| obviously the type of car can triple the rental price.
|
| It's worth it to me, because I can otherwise get by fine
| without owning a car. But if I need a daily anyway, it
| makes more sense to upscale it a bit and get the extra
| freedom. Especially if relatives start getting up in age
| and you never know when you need to pack up quick.
|
| It's the same issue with timeshare vehicles, if people
| have kids they'll all need it at the same time (because
| school schedules), and you'll always remember when it was
| _not_ available for an emergency.
| kibwen wrote:
| As someone who has driven the complete breadth of
| Pennsylvania (300 miles) dozens of times in my life in ICE
| cars, the rule is that you add 30 minutes of stoppage per 3
| hours of driving, in order to stretch, use the bathroom,
| refill your water bottle, get snacks, etc. As long as an EV
| can fill 3 hours of charge (180 miles) in under 30 minutes,
| charging time adds nothing to the trip. The only thing that
| matters is that rest stops have adequate charger capacity.
| glogla wrote:
| > Why adopt a solution that is worse than the status quo?
|
| Depends. If you believe climate change is a hoax pushed by
| evil liberals or whatever, the status quo is fine.
|
| If you understand that it is real, then you know that
| keeping the status quo of burning oil means working towards
| destroying human civilization. Then it's easy to decide
| that mild inconvenience of charging an EV is worth keeping
| humanity around.
| cj wrote:
| Let's not forget that simply driving an EV is enough to
| reduce your carbon emissions.
|
| How many miles do you need to drive an EV until you break
| even on the emissions required to balance out
| manufacturing of the car, recycling of the battery and
| car once it has reached its max lifetime use, and how the
| electricity to charge your EV was generated?
|
| If your concern is climate change, lobbying for EV use
| probably isn't the biggest bang for the buck.
|
| I'm not 100% convinced an EV is better for the
| environment when you consider all of the indirect
| emission sources.
|
| (I'm bracing for the downvotes, but would much prefer to
| be proved wrong with citations and research studies)
| vel0city wrote:
| Sounds like most studies point to a little over 20,000mi
| break even for cars based on the average US grid energy
| source mix. In my area it's an even higher mix of
| renewables than average, so probably 20,000 or less.
|
| My EV is already a bit over 26,000mi, so it's most likely
| past it's break even and I plan on probably putting
| another 100,000+ miles on it before I sell it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > If your concern is climate change, lobbying for EV use
| probably isn't the biggest bang for the buck.
|
| Absolutely is not. Passenger road transport accounts for
| only about 10% of CO2 emissions[1], and reducing that is
| one of the more difficult approaches because you're
| asking millions of people to each change their personal
| habits which individually have essentially no impact.
|
| State regulatory changes applying to large industrial
| emitters will have the biggest impact and while the costs
| will ultimately be borne by customers, it is more likely
| to actually happen. This includes both encouraging
| "green" energy production such as nuclear and renewables,
| as well as demanding capture and/or reduction of
| emissions.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-
| transport
| pornel wrote:
| Existing BEVs are already good enough for city dwellers. Only
| hybrids need to be charged ~daily. BEVs have batteries 10x
| their size.
|
| BEVs last a week or more between charges. If you have a
| charger at work, supermarket, gym, or such, you just plug it
| in when you have a chance.
| mschild wrote:
| Too expensive is another issue.
|
| The e-up from VW is the cheapest one they sell. It's 30k, more
| than double than the combustion version. I simply cannot
| believe that the same car but with battery an e engine costs
| 16k more.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Well, VW sells an ID.3 for about 16kEUR in China.
| tromp wrote:
| That sounds wrong but seems confirmed by
| https://insideevs.com/news/675842/volkswagen-slashes-
| id3-pri...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Cost of doing business in China -- the government sets the
| price. You either play by their rules or get shut out.
| mschild wrote:
| By that logic, they'd keep VW prices high. China's
| vehicle manufacturers have made impressive strides of the
| past few years, especially in the EV market. Considering
| the growing nationalist tendencies, they'd try to get
| there citizens to buy more wholly produced and designed
| Chinese cars. How does lowering prices on foreign ones
| help that goal?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| codedokode wrote:
| It is often said that electric cars are simpler than ICE, why
| are they more expensive then?
| panick21_ wrote:
| Battery supply chain limits and cost.
|
| If you only have batteries for X amount of cars, selling X
| amount of expensive cars makes much more sense.
|
| Also despite being conceptually simpler, the cost of the
| battery is still high.
| dagmx wrote:
| Simpler doesn't mean cheaper to the consumer at time of
| purchase. You have to factor in R&D, price of parts etc...
|
| ICE cars have had decades to bring down the cost of
| manufacturing, through shared components and improved
| manufacturing processes.
|
| EVs are newer, with a lot of cost going into R&D that must
| be recouped and parts that aren't shareable across their
| entire lineup of vehicles yet.
|
| The simplicity of EVs results in reduced ownership cost
| though with little maintenance required
| jandrese wrote:
| Simple usually means fewer parts. Doesn't mean those parts
| are cheap. Raw material costs for EVs are still a problem,
| although the increased demand in the past few years has
| spurred mining annd refining companies into action and we
| are now seeing drops in the Lithium and other commodity
| markets. The invisible hand at work.
| shafyy wrote:
| Missing economies of scale, for starters.
| epups wrote:
| I can, considering demand is through the roof. If it's a good
| deal for the customer, that's another story. I'm not sure
| what the ROI is in fuel and maintenance savings but over the
| lifetime of the vehicle it's probably close?
| mschild wrote:
| Oh I was not questioning VW trying to charge as much as
| possible.
|
| I just believe the profit margins on those 2 versions are
| wildly different.
|
| Electric cars are more expensive to produce, for now at
| least, but that that price difference doesn't excuse a 2x
| price difference to the end customer.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > 1200km is more than enough. Nobody should be driving longer
| distances in one day anyway.
|
| It's not necessarily about the range, there's also charging
| frequency. I personally don't have anywhere to charge my car
| where I live (apartment complex) so I have to go to my office
| building or my city hall/library, etc.. and of course pay for
| it, while I coordinate whatever errands I have to match the
| charging time. I would like to do that as seldom as possible.
| blackbeans wrote:
| Even in Germany the top selling electric cars are not German.
| Combined with the uprising of cheaper Chinese brands in Europe
| in the coming years, I fear the worst for the German car
| industry. However German car manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz
| also cooperate with solid state cell manufacturers
| (https://group.mercedes-
| benz.com/company/news/220127-prologiu...)
| fsh wrote:
| The VW group has by far the largest electric car market share
| in Germany (~30 %): https://app.handelsblatt.com/mobilitaet/e
| lektromobilitaet/el...
| blackbeans wrote:
| Market share is a different measurement unit compared to
| top selling. From your article:
|
| Tesla hatte VW im zweiten Halbjahr 2022 die deutsche
| Elektroautokrone abgejagt. Nun verteidigte das Unternehmen
| von Elon Musk den Spitzenplatz. Der Vorsprung schrumpfte
| allerdings von 7400 auf 2000 Autos. Die Marktanteile der
| Marken lagen dabei bei 16,5 und 15,6 Prozent der insgesamt
| in Deutschland neu zugelassenen Elektroautos.
|
| See also in English: https://www.best-selling-
| cars.com/electric/2022-full-year-ge...
| rsynnott wrote:
| This is essentially due to different marketing decisions
| by VW. VW, like most car companies, has loads of brands.
| Tesla has one. Items 2, 6, 12, 13, and 21 on your list
| are all VW. VW could, if it wanted to move up on that
| leaderboard, rename the Cupra (Seat sub-brand) Born,
| which is a mildly weird-looking id.3, id.3 (mildly weird
| looking trim) tomorrow.
| fsh wrote:
| 15.6% only refers to VW branded cars. VW group cars (VW,
| Audi, Skoda, Cupra,...) have ~30% total market share.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Kinda surprised Tesla hasn't split into multiple brands
| for high end, mid range and cheapo cars.
|
| That way they can sell cheap shitty cars without damaging
| their reputation for high end vehicles.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The idea that this is a good idea is very questionable.
| If you buy an expensive car, you expense quality. If you
| buy a cheap Tesla you get a cheaper product. Not sure why
| costumers wouldn't be able to understand that.
|
| The many brands are mostly historical by consolidation in
| the industry.
| jansan wrote:
| Yeah, it's a bit confusing with all those brands. Tesla
| is just Tesla, but Volkswagen is a company and also a
| brand, and the company owns the brands Volkswagen, Skoda,
| Seat, Cupra, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley and Porsche. But
| it is owned partly by another company called Porsche as
| well.
|
| So yes, Tesla sold more cars in Germany than the
| Volkswagen brand, but fewer than the Volkswagen group.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The interesting part here is how close Tesla is in VW
| group home market and how far VW Group is away from them
| in the US/China.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Literally ever large car company signs a bunch of stuff with
| lots of battery startups. If any of this pays off is
| questionable. Most of these 'solid state' cell companies will
| have a very, very hard time. This is research level stuff
| not, making millions of cars with these cells anytime soon.
| netsharc wrote:
| I mean if you want your German pride back, Mercedes has a car
| (exactly one, it's a concept car) on the road that actually
| does 1200km on a single charge, the EQXX:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G7Egi36C4M
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It's the coolest concept car in a long time. It makes
| progress in something that actually matters and it looks
| elegant, not like an oversized Transformers toy.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Concept cars don't inspire pride. If anything the opposite.
| Etheryte wrote:
| To put this into context, with 1200km of range, this car would be
| a fair bit ahead of its competitors. According to [0], the
| current top of the line is the Lucid Air with 830km, followed by
| the Tesla Model S with 650km and the Hyundai Ioniq 6 with 580 km
| of range.
|
| [0] https://www.cars.com/articles/electric-vehicles-with-the-
| lon...
| clouddrover wrote:
| You're better off looking at real world highway range rather
| than the EPA numbers:
|
| https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/
|
| Some cars like the Porsche Taycan out perform their EPA range,
| other cars like the Tesla Model S under perform their EPA
| range.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| You're not kidding - there's a plus/minus 30% delta in some
| cases!
| gardenhedge wrote:
| To me Toyota has been one of the top car brands. Are they really
| just to be reckoned with now?
| simondotau wrote:
| > Are they really just to be reckoned with now?
|
| Given that they're claiming it'll make it into customer hands
| no earlier than 2027, and there's countless ways a new
| technology can take longer than predicted, and Toyota has no
| experience manufacturing battery cells anyway, no. They're
| still not a company "to be reckoned with" yet.
|
| Toyota might well end up being the Nokia of the EV world,
| modulo the Japanese Government's preparedness to do GM-style
| bailouts.
| glogla wrote:
| In EV space, they're not even that. They have no competitive
| offerings and they wasted a lot of time going after hydrogen,
| which was shown to be not feasible like a decade ago.
|
| Their current hybrids are nice, though.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Their current hybrids are great and very much in demand,
| especially the Prime models. Now if only Toyota could make
| anywhere near enough to satisfy that demand they would be
| doing really well. And an equivalent truck as capable and
| reliable as the Tacoma would probably ignite a sales frenzy.
| But whether they can't make the margins or don't have access
| to enough batteries, they can't seem to really perform in
| that space.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Toyota has been a top car brand for a long time, their
| production capacity is huge, their build quality is high, their
| vehicle reliability is rightly praised.
|
| Every car band is moving into the EV space. These companies are
| lumbering beasts, but after moving with "deliberate speed" for
| a few years, it's becoming noticeable. I see electric VWs and
| BMWs on the roads locally, along with Hyundai, Kia, Polestar
| and of course Teslas.
|
| There are plenty of hybrid Toyota Priuses around, but for pure
| EVs, Toyota is the outlier, the laggard, the company that
| appears to have made the wrong bet and is now struggling to
| catch up.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
| worrycue wrote:
| > now struggling to catch up
|
| How far are they behind really though? They have been working
| on hydrogen fuel cell (i.e. they generate electricity) cars
| ... isn't that practically the same thing except the power
| source is different? Serious question.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Toyota have been working on hydrogen fuel cell, isn't
| that practically the same thing
|
| No, it's totally different.
|
| "Hydrogen-powered vehicles don't need charging like an
| electric vehicle. You refuel them with hydrogen gas, pumped
| in the same safe and convenient way you would a
| conventional petrol or diesel car"
| https://www.toyota.co.uk/hydrogen/how-do-i-charge-a-
| hydrogen...
|
| You can't fuel an hydrogen car on the new electric
| infrastructure, or vice versa.
|
| > isn't that practically the same thing except the power
| source is different
|
| Nuclear power stations and coal power stations are same
| thing except the power source is different.
|
| Sure, it's the same except for all the many things that are
| different.
| worrycue wrote:
| But the rest of the car is the same. Just the battery and
| its charging circuitry vs hydrogen fuel cell + pump
| mechanism(?) differs.
|
| Edit: And do they make plugin hybrids -
| https://www.toyota.com/priusprime/
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| You can't fuel the one on the infrastructure for the
| other, and vice versa. EV charging infrastructure is
| happening, hydrogen infrastructure isn't. So Toyota's bet
| on hydrogen isn't paying off. Was that your question?
|
| If your question is "why isn't Toyota just catching up
| since the differences are so minor in my mind?" maybe ask
| them, but we haven't seen it happen yet. I've driven
| Toyotas and liked it, I'd welcome more Toyota full EVs,
| but they seem to be struggling with full EVs so maybe
| it's not that minor in practice. That's the main thing
| that I can tell you.
|
| I'm sure you can google on the topic, takes that are
| sympathetic https://insideevs.com/news/650150/toyota-
| says-ev-extremists-... mixed
| https://slate.com/business/2023/01/toyota-electric-
| vehicles-... and negative
| https://thedriven.io/2023/01/30/toyota-faces-disaster-
| unless...
|
| I'll add a couple of things that I do know: car companies
| that have been in business for decades and operate at
| huge scale in big factory assumbly lines across global
| supply chains are, as I said above, "lumbering beasts",
| the new models are planned multiple years in advance.
| They don't turn on a dime, changes in Toyota management
| this year translate to new models on sale in 2026 or
| thereabouts. VW, BMV etc have a head start, as they have
| EV models out right now, and not the 1st generation of
| them either - e.g. I see VW ID3s locally, and the VW ID6
| will be out by end 2023. Toyota's 2026 model will compete
| with an ID6 successor. And a Polestar 4 successor, etc.
| This is hard, from a standing start.
|
| You mentioned the Prius. Toyota owns this market, sure. I
| see lots of them around, it's the vehicle of choice for
| "minicab" private hire taxis. But for Toyota, that's also
| an barrier to doing anything that takes sales away from
| that market.
|
| If it was so easy to pivot to full EVs, would people be
| saying "Toyota faces disaster unless new CEO performs
| miracle" ?
| worrycue wrote:
| I was just saying I don't think they are as far behind as
| many think. They seem to have all the components to make
| an EV.
|
| As to why they haven't executed and delivered a car, who
| knows. Could be lack of profitability at the projected
| numbers they could sell vs cost to bring up a
| manufacturing line - in addition to, as you mentioned,
| cannibalization of more profitable products. VW, BMW, ...
| etc. are they making money or just eating losses selling
| EVs right now?
|
| Maybe they aren't rushing it, it is a relatively new type
| of "engine/fuel" for them, and they want all the kinks
| and gotchas worked out before they release something to
| preserve their reputation for reliability.
|
| That said, just because they haven't released anything
| doesn't necessarily mean they can't.
| dev_daftly wrote:
| Except we do know why because they have written blog
| posts about it. They would rather make 100 hybrids than
| 10 BEV's. They think it's better environmentally and they
| haven't said this part, but probably a lot more
| profitable as well.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Then where are their PHEVs? Their Prime vehicles have
| long waitlists and are produced in relatively small
| numbers. Either they can't make the margins with them or
| their access to battery supplies is very limited.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Well, we will wait and see, I'd be very happy to see
| Toyota join the party and finally release a good EV.
|
| It is not quite right to say that "they haven't released
| anything", there is e.g, the Toyota bZ4X, widely regarded
| as a really bad car (1). And other EVs that have made no
| impact (2)
|
| 1) https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/26/toyota-
| bz4x-first-revie...
|
| 2) https://www.toyota.co.uk/electric
| worrycue wrote:
| > It is not quite right to say that "they haven't
| released anything", there is e.g, the Toyota bZ4X, widely
| regarded as a really bad car (1). And other EVs that have
| made no impact (2)
|
| So technically they have "joined the party". Granted they
| don't seem fully committed yet and don't seem to be
| trying very hard - based on the review you linked, they
| have QC problems ... on the wheels; and they haven't put
| much marketing muscle behind the others. At least they
| have a foot in the door.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Technically yes, and _only_ technically yes. I don't see
| Toyota bZ4Xs on the roads, no-one is looking forward to
| them. Do you know what a "compliance car" or "compliance
| vehicle" is? It's not a serious intent to be in that
| market.
| discobean wrote:
| - it "may" have solved the range and battery weight problems.
|
| Just like every other battery announcement. Progress is progress
| though, so good news.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| Solid-state? Are there batteries with vacuum tubes?
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| CATL's and BYD's sodium ion batteries are appearing already. Cars
| are on sale in China and you can buy the cells on AliExpress.
| Those are about EUR50 a KWH for similar density which compares
| favourably to Li-on at over $100 and LiPho at $130.
|
| Next generation batteries from their competitors are already
| hitting the market and the new Li-on is expected next year with
| double capacity which will match Toyota's stated battery and CATL
| are unlikely to be lying. Toyota has been talking about this
| since 2017 and nothing has been shown so far, whereas CATL have
| shown the tech off.
|
| This coming year looks like it's finally the year when all the
| promises of new battery technology actually happens in volume.
| pfdietz wrote:
| What's the cycle life on these batteries? Because EUR50/kWh
| would be wonderful for stationary storage.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Based on articles I read in trade mags via my work email is
| that battery manufacturers suspect that with careful design
| and thermal management a lightly used automotive battery
| could have a 20-40 year service life.
|
| I think people have a disbelief that there have been large
| improvements in battery lifespan in the last 20 years when
| there absolutely has been. Modern ion batteries aren't just
| 20 year old ones but cheaper. Degradation and charge
| discharge rates are substantially better.
| glogla wrote:
| Lately I'm more and more convinced that the challenge is not
| doing a thing, the challenge is scaling it up. Doing a thing is a
| necessity for moving forward, but scaling it up is how you change
| the world.
|
| On one hand, Toyota is pretty good at scaling things up. On the
| other hand, they have not shown scaling it up, they have shown
| doing a thing.
|
| We'll have to see. The time is running out.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| They haven't been very good about scaling up production of
| their Prime vehicles. Lots of people would love to buy them and
| have for years.
| simondotau wrote:
| > they have shown doing a thing.
|
| What they showed is a bench experiment. What they need is a
| battery which is proven capable in an EV -- in terms of
| resilience, power handling, environmental tolerances, etc. The
| challenge is scaling THAT up.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| They have sold hybrids at scale, lots of similar components, so
| no reason to think they can't scale when they have a design
| they are ready to produce. Toyota runs a huge global car
| manufacturing company that is known for quality and shipping a
| lot of cars. They know how to scale.
|
| Toyota reminds me of Microsoft when the internet went
| mainstream. Very slow to respond, but once they got their giant
| tanker turned in the right direction they were all in. I
| suspect Toyota will be the same.
| float4 wrote:
| Toyota already said it was around the corner in 2017[0]. Now it's
| 2023 and it's still around the corner. I'll believe it when I see
| it.
|
| [0]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2017/07/25/ultraf...
| simbolit wrote:
| HN really needs an audio player with a certain Run DMC song on
| loop.
| jansan wrote:
| I did not know there is a song from Run DMC called "Two more
| weeks".
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Toyota already said it was around the corner...
|
| One of those "corners" that are more like a telephone pole that
| we keep going around.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > In another five years, and if a report in a Japanese
| newspaper is to be believed, Toyota will have the key
| technology for wide-spread adoption of battery-electric
| vehicles: Solid-state batteries with twice the range of today's
| EVs, while charging only in minutes.
|
| Well, it's six years now, but that doesn't seem that much of a
| delay?
| simondotau wrote:
| Toyota are still saying it's five years away. So that's a
| minimum of eleven years.
| labster wrote:
| But why get a battery car when fusion cars are just 20
| years away?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| About every 3 years[1], Toyota comes around to say they have
| a new battery tech coming out in about 3 years.
|
| I wish this was a stupid meme, but apparently this is more
| reality than meme.
|
| [1]: https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22960448&c
| id=6...
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Well, it 's six years now, but that doesn't seem that much
| of a delay?_
|
| If Tesla can work that way, why can't Toyota?
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Tesla also released the Model Y 4 years ago and now it may
| outsell the Corolla this year. What do the waitlist and
| sales for the RAV4 or Prius Primes look like?
| bdcravens wrote:
| They announced the Cybertruck that year and they still
| haven't delivered one, and ditto for the new Roadster 2
| years prior. Tesla has demonstrated that long development
| cycles aren't bad, especially when creating a new tech
| (the Model Y is built on the Model 3 platform)
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Weird how the largest pandemic in 100 years, supply chain
| issues, and huge demand for the Model Y made changing
| plans a good idea. That is what competent leaders do;
| make decisions in the best interest of the company,
| rather than adhere to arbitrary timelines. Maybe they
| should be making decisions like Toyota instead.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Perhaps pay attention to the topic of the thread, and not
| treat every Tesla discussion as an opportunity to prove
| your loyalty and defend the honor of Elon. We are
| literally discussing the idea that Toyota can take their
| time to get something right, because Tesla has done the
| same thing, to great success.
| katbyte wrote:
| likely referring to cybertuck, tesla semi, actual FSD,
| and all the other promises from musk that were "next
| year"
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| When things like the pandemic and disrupted supply chains
| happen, companies sometimes need to move in a different
| direction than planned. Or is Tesla's massive growth in
| the last few years and sales numbers not enough to
| convince you they might actually know what they are
| doing? Successful companies don't adhere to arbitrary
| announcements and timelines; they change plans when
| necessary.
| [deleted]
| bdcravens wrote:
| The world was hungry for EVs; Tesla had products to sell.
| As other options become available, their lead has
| shrinked over time.
| sgarman wrote:
| It did outsell the Corolla, it was the 2 most popular car
| sold in America only behind the Ford F150 which has been
| number one for FORTY YEARS.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Nobody can cure America's fetish for TRUCKS =)
| TheRealSteel wrote:
| The Tesla Model 3 has been out for six years. Toyota could
| release this tomorrow and still have alot of catching up to
| do.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| Not really? Mileage is probably the single largest thing
| people care about. If they never have to go to a charger
| and can just do it at home then it's a win.
|
| Getting an EV with 200 miles that effectively is 120 is a
| joke. I couldn't even drive to and from work comfortably
| with that.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > Not really? Mileage is probably the single largest
| thing people care about.
|
| And yet in lots of places we are 30% of total market and
| its growing.
|
| Mileage isn't actually that important because most people
| don't actually need it very much.
|
| Yes, if Tesla had some uber mileage car that would be
| nice, but that's not actually where the main market
| competition and limits are.
| mowse_winded wrote:
| Range is find, if charging time was equivalent to filling
| up a gas tank and if EV chargers were as common as gas
| stations.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| My EV has a WLTP of 300km. I can count with my fingers
| the times I've had to stop to charge it during my regular
| life. Half of those were just this month because I'm on
| my summer holiday.
|
| All other times the car is sitting and charging while I'm
| doing non-driving things anyway.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If you daily drive 60 miles (or more) each way to work,
| you might want to consider your life choices and what
| they represent. If nothing else, recognize that you're a
| far, far outlier and that technology and policy choices
| are not likely to be built around your needs &
| preferences.
| exhilaration wrote:
| I've been seeing a lot of articles like this. I feel like Toyota
| is planting these stories to encourage its customers to wait for
| its EVs. After all, why would anyone want a 300 mile EV when
| these hypothetical vaporware "745 mile" EVs are around the
| corner?
| pramsey wrote:
| This is the most true-to-myself comment I've seen so far. I've
| only ever bought Toyota cars, but my next car will be an EV and
| Toyota's offerings are... subpar, and barely there. I trust
| Toyota build quality and manufacturing, but my current vehicle
| is probably going to need replacing before they have a proven,
| large volume native EV on the market. They waited too long.
| simondotau wrote:
| I'm starting to wonder if the "745 mile" claim is actually
| admission of technical failure. Think about it. If their
| battery really does have that capacity and can "charge in 10
| minutes" then why not a battery half or even a quarter the
| capacity?
|
| Perhaps this battery's maximum rate of discharge is so low that
| such a massively oversized pack is needed to get sufficient
| momentary power to the electric motors?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I've been wondering the same. I'd be fine with a 350 mile
| range vehicle - it would cover more than 99.9% of all of my
| trips. It would be cheaper since presumably it would only
| need less than 1/2 of the batteries required to go 745 miles
| and also it would make the vehicle lighter. Not a lot of
| people actually need a vehicle capable of going 745 miles on
| a charge - most gas cars only go 400 to 500 miles on a tank
| of gas currently.
| justapassenger wrote:
| You're overthinking it. Range is main thing people worry
| about, especially ones with no EV experience (which is
| majority of the world). Big range is how to you get
| headlines.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| That doesn't really matter if the car is ludicrously
| expensive or the battery takes up too much space (or
| something else, like it's prone to bulging or spontaneous
| combustion). People don't worry about those things with
| today's EVs because they aren't problems. I have three EVs
| and no amount of range would overcome certain downsides.
| justapassenger wrote:
| You sound exactly like anti-EV people. I don't need EV,
| it'll be too expensive, etc, etc.
|
| Toyota, at least historicity, is targeting mass market,
| where they can make affordable and reliable car. Current
| EV works for you? Great! But it doesn't for many others.
|
| I have EV and PHEV, and I won't abandon my PHEV (big car)
| till battery is significantly better - I need a second
| big car, with a big range, that comes without any
| asterisks.
| realusername wrote:
| Yes, people have a very warped idea on how far they are
| actually traveling and focus on range at all costs.
| xeromal wrote:
| If you've actually driven an EV, you realize mileage is a
| crock of shit so getting 700 miles actually means you can
| not worry.
|
| * You can't use the bottom 10% without going against
| recommendations
|
| * You shouldn't charge above 85-90% to avoid going
| against recommendations
|
| * If you drive over 65 mph, the drain is above average.
|
| * If you tow a trailer, your range is halved.
|
| * If you install a little storage roof rack, you lose
| 20-30% of range
|
| * You experience 10% battery degradation in the first
| couple years of ownership.
|
| * 20% loss to cold weather (Thanks to a comment for this
| one)
|
| I really don't want a reply to this comment to be
| "Well...gas engines..."
| mcswell wrote:
| Most of those problems are _exactly_ the same with ICE
| engines. You may not _want_ that comment, but it 's true.
|
| Except the roof rack one is bogus. I installed the cross
| bars of a roof rack on my Bolt EUV (it came with the
| rails), and afaict it affected my mileage not at all. I
| still get 320 to 330 estimated miles (against the EPA's
| 247 estimated miles).
|
| And the don't charge above 85--90% one is bogus too;
| there's talk about that on forums, but the manufacturer
| says nothing about it.
|
| And I wouldn't want to go below 10% on a gas powered car
| either...
| xeromal wrote:
| I'm open to you explaining how those ice issues are the
| same instead of just saying they are.
|
| Running your car to zero fuel may potentially damage your
| fuel pump while running your Tesla or electric car to 0%
| constantly will completely destroy the battery. Much more
| expensive issue. Someone can easily bring you a small
| Jerry can of gas if you run out while it's day near
| impossible to do the same thing for an electric car.
| It'll need to be towed.
| realusername wrote:
| I'm just going by the statistics, where I live (France),
| half of the workers are living less than 12km from their
| workplace.
|
| Right now, electric cars have improved and the ones being
| sold are in the 300km battery range.
|
| That's already overkill for most of the normal usage.
| People have a warped idea on how they are using their car
| and think they are doing way longer trips than the
| statistics tells you.
|
| I'm using an EV myself and I changed nothing to my
| behavior, everything is alright.
| xeromal wrote:
| The problem is that here in the US, the chance of making
| a 200 mile trip 10-20x in 3-5 years is high and no one
| here wants to deal with getting a rental or special car
| just to do that.
|
| We like our road trips and while they're rare, they're
| important and we don't want to rent or have a second car
| in order to do that.
|
| EVs need to be comparable with gas cars in realistic
| scenarios and that means a real 3-400 miles. Not 400
| miles but with a giant list of can't do's
| Tagbert wrote:
| My gasoline car doesn't get 400mi of range. Most modern
| EVs easily get 200 miles. Only a fraction of people will
| tow a boat or camper.
|
| Once you drive an EV you realize that the range is less
| of a concern than you though it would be.
| xeromal wrote:
| I had one from 2019 till a few months ago and I never
| really shook the anxiety and I live in SoCal where there
| were chargers coming out of my ears. I think the anxiety
| is mostly there unless you own a home or garage where you
| can charge nightly.
| revscat wrote:
| It's either get off fossil fuels or die.
| charrondev wrote:
| Then we'll die if we can't innovate fast enough.
|
| The last couple of decades have shown what happens if you
| warn people about some imperceptible (to them) danger and
| tell them sacrifice personally, even in minor ways, to
| stave it off.
|
| Frighteningly little happens. The change that does happen
| has been frequently coming in on a wave of technical
| innovation making greener options superior to old ones.
| xeromal wrote:
| I'm well aware. The masses have to believe that though
| Eldandan wrote:
| Everything here is accurate. I still chose an EV because
| I can deal with the caveats, but this helps clarify to me
| why others wouldn't want to bother. This doesn't even
| mention access to charging; much easier for homeowners to
| justify an EV.
|
| One thing though:
|
| > You shouldn't charge above 85-90% to avoid going
| against recommendations
|
| Daily driving this doesn't matter much. Longer drives you
| can charge to 100% as long as you depart within a
| reasonable time frame of say within 6 hours, probably
| longer. More annoying is the charging curve after 80% at
| fast charging stations. In my experience you usually
| won't want to spend the time to get that last 20% unless
| absolutely necessary.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not hating at all on EVs. Just saying that a
| 700 mile battery would assuage a lot of fears. I owned a
| Tesla from 2019 till a few months ago. I got bored and
| sold it for a profit and got myself an old LX470.
| katbyte wrote:
| you forgot about the up to 20%? degradation in the cold
| xeromal wrote:
| Great point. That's another one.
| dataflow wrote:
| I think the heat also causes problems too?
| https://blog.carvana.com/2023/04/preventing-ev-battery-
| degra...
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Perhaps this battery's maximum rate of discharge is so low
|
| If someone invented a battery great in all dimensions except
| a low discharge rate, it would just be paired with a regular
| lithium battery to provide brief bursts of power for
| acceleration.
|
| In fact, thats the way most fuel cell vehicles work (fuel
| cells are expensive, so you use one as small as possible and
| use it at full power all the time, storing any excess in a
| regular battery)
| XorNot wrote:
| Yep, this is an excellent point: if you could get that sort
| of range, then most of the market would happily buy about a
| 1/4 of that provided the price was similarly much lower.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Ah Toyota and its 10 year quest claiming that amazing next
| generation batteries are just around the corner and that they
| make their EV best in class from 1 day to another.
| villgax wrote:
| Absolutely love this progress
| kbos87 wrote:
| How many people are regularly driving more than 300 miles without
| stopping for 30-45 minutes anyway? I guess this does step around
| the need for more charging infrastructure, but it seems like most
| range anxiety is pretty misinformed at this point.
| dsr_ wrote:
| What I think people feel about range anxiety is a combination
| of several internalizations:
|
| - battery-powered toys run out of power at inconvenient times;
| that's our benchmark
|
| - gasoline fuel stations are everywhere, and we know it takes
| 5-10 minutes for everything to be completed
|
| - we can't afford to have a second vehicle just for long-range
| trips, so our annual longest trip is what we think about.
| Adding 30 minutes to every 10 minute stop might or might not be
| a problem
|
| - we've all had the experience of waking up a little late,
| needing to get somewhere immediately, and then realizing that
| we need to fuel the car -- and that makes us 5 minutes late. If
| the equivalent makes us 35 minutes late, that's not acceptable
|
| - in five years, is this car going to be undrivable because the
| batteries only hold half as much charge? Is it going to be
| worth much less because it needs a new $10K battery pack?
|
| But the number one reason why people aren't buying electric
| cars is the same reason they aren't buying new cars: too damn
| expensive. US passenger car sales peaked in 1986. In 2018 they
| were lower than any year since 1951, and they have sunk even
| lower in every year since.
|
| 1951 car sales: 5.3 million
|
| 1986 car sales: 11.4 million
|
| 2018 car sales: 5.3 million
|
| 2022 car sales: 2.86 million
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Your final statistic is the most damning, especially given
| there are (officially) 43% more people living in the USA
| today than in 1986.
|
| Also, I don't think the point of comparison is battery-
| powered toys. People have experience with electric tools (I
| can't even vacuum my living room properly and with good
| conscience with the meager battery life the top-of-line
| battery vacuums offer!) which is probably a fairer
| comparison.
| pornel wrote:
| Your list of fears is very true, but not all of them are an
| actual problem in practice.
|
| BEVs report remaining battery _very_ reliably, and keep going
| even at 1% (way better than all your gadgets). But you 're
| very unlikely to even get a close call, because you plan
| charging stops before you leave (good EVs plan them
| automatically).
|
| DC rapid chargers can add 50 miles of range in 5 minutes
| (nearly empty batteries charge fastest). 5min emergency on a
| 1h drive doesn't seem too bad. Traffic adds more uncertainty.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Also if you run out of petrol or diesel far from a station,
| you can get road services or someone else (yourself?) to haul
| a couple gallons over and get going.
|
| You can even just pump some out of a passing car if you have
| a long enough hose and lungs.
|
| Now I've never owned an EV and I suspect there is a way to
| use one car as a charger for another, in which case the
| latter becomes less of a point the more EVs are on the road.
| OTOH I imagine it would still take quite a while longer to
| get enough charge to drive to the nearest charging point than
| it does to transfer a little liquid fuel though.
| belltaco wrote:
| Mobile charging services are already a thing
|
| https://insideevs.com/news/449438/sparkcharge-shark-tank-
| dea...
| stirbot wrote:
| Do you have a source for those numbers? They don't agree with
| the Fed's statistics:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ALTSALES
| dsr_ wrote:
| here's what I used:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/199974/us-car-sales-
| sinc...
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| So the Model Y is beginning to outsell the Corolla but Toyota is
| just going to wait until 2027 to launch this for reasons? Because
| they are so awesome they don't mind other companies eating their
| lunch? That isn't believable.
| Simulacra wrote:
| EVs are coming and we must adjust.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Someone should tell the Japanese auto industry. They didn't
| get the memo.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Toyota has one BEV and it's a joke. Look it up. We'll wait.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| And that is unlikely to change any time soon not because they
| just want to wait for 2027 for unknown reasons despite
| massive demand for EVs and PHEVs that they still can't make
| in large numbers.
| [deleted]
| panick21_ wrote:
| > for reasons
|
| Because they don't actually have the technology and the
| manufacturing figured out and this is just marketing.
| tyronehed wrote:
| [dead]
| cbmuser wrote:
| >>Toyota has been secretly developing a solid-state battery for
| EVs with a range of 745 miles and a charge time of 10 minutes,
| which could revolutionize the industry.<<
|
| If you charge a battery with anything near the capacity necessary
| for 1200 km range within ten minutes, you will need at least a
| charger with 1000 kW (1 MW) output power.
|
| For perspective: The two new units at Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant
| have 1100 MW each.
|
| Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come from?
| mike_hock wrote:
| Presumably from the same place all the lithium and the
| necessary infrastructure upgrades would come from (even for
| "regular" EVs).
|
| Maybe Toyota has wised up to the game after getting backlash
| for commenting honestly on its realistic strategies.
|
| In 2023, we want vaporware that promises to fix climate change
| by emitting 6x as much CO2 during production, but don't worry,
| it'll break even with ICEs after a mileage that the battery
| will never get to.
| myko wrote:
| > it'll break even with ICEs after a mileage that the battery
| will never get to
|
| Generally EVs get to 15-20k miles without issue, which is the
| break even point on the optimistic side:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/when-d...
|
| Even ~40-80k (the high estimate for break even) isn't that
| many miles / doesn't take long to achieve.
|
| There's been a lot of FUD recently about EVs being more
| damaging to the climate than ICE, please correct it when you
| see it.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Not everyone will be rapid charging at the same time, and the
| grid will spread the load geographically. Megawatt-scale rapid
| charging already exists for some e-buses that can be charged in
| minutes at the terminus while passengers get off and on.
| fulafel wrote:
| > Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come
| from?
|
| For a given size of EV fleet and usage amount it doesn't matter
| if they charge quickly or slowly from your power plants point
| of view, higher power charging means there is correspondingly
| fewer cars charging concurrently since they finish quicker.
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _If you charge a battery with anything near the capacity
| necessary for 1200 km range within ten minutes, you will need
| at least a charger with 1000 kW (1 MW) output power._
|
| Or you could just charge it at 500 kW for 20 minutes.
|
| Chargers out perform the batteries at present. No current
| passenger EV can sustain 350 kW across the whole charge curve.
|
| If Toyota's battery will sustain a flat 500 kW or even a flat
| 350 kW for most of the charge curve then that's a very good
| thing.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| You could use some kind of buffer; another battery. There are
| already a few companies out there working on MW+ chargers.
| Mostly they are aimed at trucks and buses. But the technology
| is there.
|
| The peak load is clearly not coming from the grid. One issue
| would be that that power is relatively expensive. Using that
| kind of is a last resort. Instead you'd want a lot of on site
| battery that can provide lots of power quickly and can soak up
| power from nearby solar panels, or cheap night time grid power.
| Easy to say because that is already how a lot of fast chargers
| work. If you operate these commercially, ensuring access to
| cheap power is key.
|
| Also, just because people buy bigger batteries doesn't mean
| they actually drive more or use more kwh. It just means they
| can spread out their charging a bit more. Which means fast
| chargers would be something they would need to use less.
|
| With a battery that large, you'd almost never run out as
| driving that kind of distance on a single day would be very
| rare for most people. And honestly the few times you actually
| do that, take some breaks.
|
| This charging pattern is of course already the case for EVs
| with far smaller batteries. Most EV owners rely more on
| overnight slow charging than fast charging. With a battery that
| big you might get away with never having to use a fast charger
| at all.
| serpix wrote:
| From a battery bank that is charged at constant rate which
| discharges at 1MW.
| jdietrich wrote:
| Rapid chargers are primarily a psychological safety net.
| Prospective EV owners really worry about them, but EV owners
| rarely use them. You might take a road trip once a year, but
| the average driver covers less than 40 miles per day. The
| normal overnight charging that represents the vast majority of
| EV power consumption is actively beneficial to the grid by
| providing demand smoothing; the marginal cost of a kWh falls if
| someone is willing to buy super-off-peak power at 2am.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Superchargers are almost always full where I'm from, even in
| shopping malls. I'm sure they'd be even more commonly used if
| more of them existed. People just know they can't rely on
| them yet in the same way they rely on finding a gas station
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Who says you need to charge it in 10 minutes? Plug it in
| overnight or while you're in the office and suddenly this
| becomes a lot less of an issue. Sure, if you're going on a 1500
| mile road trip and need to charge on the way you'll have a
| problem, but I doubt that's a very common use case.
| troupo wrote:
| > Plug it in overnight or while you're in the office and
| suddenly this becomes a lot less of an issue.
|
| I live in an apartment building that has no charging
| infrastructure.
|
| Many people work from home.
|
| If everyone charges at the same time, you still have issues
| with "where will all this power come from"?
| glogla wrote:
| If you live in an apartment and often work from home, you
| probably don't drive hundred miles every day, and as such
| don't need to charge the car very often.
|
| I did the math for myself, and with how far and how often I
| go places, I would need to charge a 400 km range Hyundai
| Kona about once every two to three weeks.
|
| I do have pretty favorable conditions, though (and mostly
| continue to use the bus).
| troupo wrote:
| > If you live in an apartment and often work from home,
| you probably don't drive hundred miles every day
|
| But people who work in offices do?
|
| > you probably don't drive hundred miles every day, and
| as such don't need to charge the car very often.
|
| The question of "where to charge a car" remains.
|
| > I would need to charge a 400 km range Hyundai Kona
| about once every two to three weeks.
|
| Let's say I have the same math. Where would I charge the
| car?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| YMMV, but for me as someone who can't charge at home, the
| options are:
|
| * Charge at work (1-3kW so not always enough to fill
| battery, and chargers need to be shared some days... But
| my commute isn't long enough that I'd need a full charge
| every day)
|
| * While shopping at the grocery store (some by me have
| free charging, especially if you shop at non-peak times)
|
| * There's a few chargers attached to lampposts on my
| street. $2/hr at 7kW, so cheaper for me than gas.
| Sometimes these are ICE'd out, but parking enforcement in
| my city recently got the ability to enforce EV-only
| parking spots
|
| * Public library (free). There used to be some issues
| with vagrants but less so since the library got a
| security guard
|
| * Movie theater
|
| * Mall (the problem is that these are 350kW chargers, so
| the car is probably full too quickly to do any shopping)
|
| * Most of my long drives are to visit family, so they
| usually have a 120v plug I can use. If you're in a place
| where the standard voltage is higher, this is even more
| viable. And there's plenty of 350kW chargers along the
| freeways.
| glogla wrote:
| So we're talking about people who live in an apartment,
| yet far from work or in place with bad public transport
| so they need a long drive to work? I'm not going to claim
| people like that don't exist, but is it a common use
| case?
|
| For me, I have paid charging station right in front of my
| building, because the electric company recently added
| charging to all local substations. But for myself I would
| probably charge the car at free charging places in one of
| the nearby grocery stores, I usually stop there like once
| a week anyway. We're also trying to get our employer to
| enable charging in the office garage, but it's dragging a
| bit. The larger shopping mall I visit with friends for
| cinema also has free charging for customers.
|
| It's not that many places, and people in countryside or
| suburbia who can charge EVs with free electricity from
| solar panels have it easier, but since people in who live
| apartments are probably covered by public transport or
| can bike or whatever, and as such don't really need to
| drive ever day, I'm not convinced charging EVs is not
| solved problem right now. We'll see how it scales up.
| troupo wrote:
| > So we're talking about people who live in an apartment,
| yet far from work or in place with bad public transport
| so they need a long drive to work?
|
| No, we're not. We're talking about electric cars. I mean,
| come on. It's not even ten replies above: "Who says you
| need to charge it in 10 minutes? Plug it in overnight or
| while you're in the office and suddenly this becomes a
| lot less of an issue."
|
| > For me, I have paid charging station right in front of
| my building, because the electric company recently added
| charging to all local substations. But for myself I would
| probably charge the car at free charging places in one of
| the nearby grocery stores
|
| I live in a suburb of 50 000 people, we have about twenty
| charging stations in total.
|
| > but since people in who live apartments are probably
| covered by public transport or can bike or whatever, and
| as such don't really need to drive ever day, I'm not
| convinced charging EVs is not solved problem right now.
|
| So, the question of how I would charge my EV still
| remains.
| mleo wrote:
| > I live in a suburb of 50 000 people, we have about
| twenty charging stations in total.
|
| The infrastructure will get built in time as there is a
| greater need for it. Within my city of 40,00 there are
| probably over 100 charging stations. Though we are next
| to a larger metropolitan area. Most all have been added
| in last 4 years.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'm sure there are plenty of people who are currently in
| a situation where charging an EV would be problematic.
| I'm also certain that more charging infrastructure will
| continue to be built it over time. There should be fewer
| and fewer people with this problem as time goes by.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Actually, in US suburbia, a big portion of the population
| is living in an apartment with poor access to public
| transit. I look around all the many places I've lived and
| see huge apartment complexes with little access to
| transit. Transit has not caught up with urban sprawl in
| most places.
|
| As far as EVs, if one is in an apartment with no charging
| infrastructure and have a relatively long daily commute,
| and poor charging access at the worksite, an EV is just a
| bad choice. If there is good charging at work, and the
| commute is short enough, then an apartment can work but
| it is still inconvenient to have an EV if you can't
| charge it while sleeping.
|
| I think eventually more and more apartment owners are
| going to start using charging infrastructure as a
| marketing tool so perhaps it will get better over time.
| glogla wrote:
| I'll admit I'm a bit surprised by "apartment in
| suburbia". Of US I have only seen few places. I thought
| most people either live in a house in the endless
| featureless landscape of suburban New Jersey or in
| Brooklyn apartment or whatever - and the former can
| charge in their driveway and the latter can just mostly
| use the subway and citibike.
|
| Anyway my assumption was that someone would likely either
| have a driveway or a public transport. But I'm sure there
| are places that have neither - I'm just not sure how
| common that is.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| So, you're telling me we can have 1100 of these cars charging
| at any one time on that grid. Super!
| glogla wrote:
| Your comment can be interpreted two ways.
|
| If you're asking "where do we get the power plants", that is a
| valid concern, especially as we want to get rid of coal power
| plants at the same time.
|
| But ultimately it is not that much power - I did a back of the
| envelope calculation for my country and converting annual
| vehicle-miles driven into kWh with average EV efficiency ended
| up adding 11 % increase in electricity consumption.
|
| Not sure how it stacks up with other countries, and yes, we
| need more and cleaner power, but 11 % increase is not
| insurmountable problem.
|
| If you're asking "how does that much power gets places",
| electric trains routinely run as much power. My city runs
| hundreds of trams that take over 700 kW each, and full power
| electric locomotive usually takes about 5 MW. The grid already
| knows how to handle it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Also, plenty of power plants are 500 Megawatts+.
|
| 1 Megawatt really isn't that much.
| topspin wrote:
| > Where do people expect the necessary charging power to come
| from?
|
| Unknown. An interesting data point, however: Tesla's "V4"
| charger uses liquid cooled (!) conductors to supply 1KA at 1KV;
| 1MW.
|
| I can't explain where they're getting that supply, but
| apparently they're doing it.
| jtc331 wrote:
| Liquid cooled charging cables is pretty standard for high
| speed DC fast chargers already. When that cooling is broken
| at an Electrify America charger, for example, charging is
| limited to something around 50kW.
| simondotau wrote:
| Liquid cooling is indeed commonplace among DC fast charging
| systems. The Tesla V3 supercharger cable is also liquid
| cooled. The novel aspect of the Tesla V4 supercharger cable
| is that the conductors are directly immersed in the
| coolant.
|
| https://eepower.com/uploads/articles/image5_10.png
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _Tesla 's "V4" charger uses liquid cooled (!) conductors to
| supply 1KA at 1KV; 1MW_
|
| Does it? Can you show me a public Tesla charger that delivers
| 1 megawatt?
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| But they'll be using 1000Kw for 10 minutes rather than 150 for
| an hour.
|
| Apart from a little less efficiency from the fast charging -
| there's just as much total much power being used as if slow
| charging.
| thebears5454 wrote:
| I think you mean there's as much energy being used.
|
| There's clearly more power.
| tuukkah wrote:
| As much energy per time (say 24h), hence as much power.
| This is assuming the grid spreads the load geographically
| (not all the chargers at one place) and not everyone is
| rapid charging their car at the same time (impossible since
| there won't be enough rapid chargers).
| adrian_b wrote:
| "hence as much power" => "hence as much _average_ power "
| tuukkah wrote:
| Under the assumptions, power equals average power (to a
| margin). It would be a huge mistake to try to build the
| grid to withstand the power of all existing electric
| devices at the same time, as the probability of such a
| situation is 0.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| The utility infrastructure to support 150 kW for an hour is
| much cheaper than 1 MW for 10 minutes. And at these scales
| the utility will be passing the costs directly on to the
| customer. No possible way it will be allowed at a residential
| location.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Rapid charging is not typically needed at houses (you can
| charge while you sleep), but if you want one, you can have
| another, stationary battery that charges slowly when you
| are sleeping or not at home. When you rapid charge your
| car, the energy does not come from the grid but from this
| second battery.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Price me out a 150 kWh battery that can discharge at 1 MW
| for a reasonable number of cycles and get back to me.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Well, isn't it the same one as in the car?
| gpapilion wrote:
| Everyone time I read a low charge time, the thing that comes to
| mind is the ability of the charging cable to carry that much
| power that quickly. Minimally that means you're delivering 6x the
| electricity (2x the amount and 3x as fast). I'm assuming the
| charging is pretty efficient, so you have to scale up the
| charger, and a bunch of issues start coming up. For this reason I
| think 10m charge times are bs.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's a Starbucks I frequent where the drive through is on
| the same side of the building as the electrical service (!?)
| and every time I'm waiting for coffee I look at the multiple
| 2-3 inch conduits and think what kind of equipment are they
| running in there? They share a building with another business
| that I don't think would put a dent in the power usage for the
| building, unless they have a server room I don't know about.
|
| I could run a class 2 charger at my house and that's only a 1"
| conduit, but those take half a dozen hours to deliver that
| current. You're gonna need a lot more shielding.
| gpapilion wrote:
| Class 2 would be 9 to 10 kw. For reference 33 kw is around
| requires cables in the us roughly 1 - 3/4 inch conduit. Each
| piece of equipment requires its own circuit so you likely
| have multiple circuits in the conduit depending on code. All
| that said commercial cooking and refrigeration require a lot
| of power.
|
| Going back to charging, for a circuit the size this would
| likely need your be looking at something with at least 3 1
| inch wires, and would be at least 2.5 inches in diameter when
| packaged. It likely needs cooling too which means even more
| diameter.
| samwillis wrote:
| I think we will see solid state battery's in portables (Phones,
| Laptops) long before we see them in cars. The yield required,
| cooling, structural integrity, is all very hard to solve.
| Starting on a smaller scale for the significantly larger per unit
| market seems to me to make more sense.
| xwdv wrote:
| I can only imagine the horrific explosion that would occur if
| this battery fails catastrophically.
| samwillis wrote:
| I imagine fairly similar to what happens with a gas/petrol
| vehicle, similar amount of energy to release. Maybe with a
| bunch more toxic fumes...
| clouddrover wrote:
| Solid state batteries tend to be safer than other batteries.
|
| Here is ProLogium's solid state battery failing to fail after
| it's been shot with a bullet:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOubFHO1I3o
|
| Here is Ionic Materials' solid state battery failing to fail
| after it's been cut with scissors:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik
| Animats wrote:
| This is important, and the sources are terrible. The Guardian had
| an article over two weeks ago with essentially the same
| information.[1] There's no press release from Toyota on batteries
| this month.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/04/toyota-
| clai...
|
| [2] https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/
| taminka wrote:
| > For those who prefer metric, that's a range of 1200 kilometers
| and a charge time of six hectoseconds
|
| my brother in christ, literally the entire world not only prefers
| metric, but it's the only one we know
|
| like, i don't mind seeing miles, esp given that it's a US
| publication, and i already pretty much automatically convert from
| miles to km in my head, but please be humble with your silly
| system :)
| a6 wrote:
| For anyone interested in solid-state battery usage, Mercedes-Benz
| has already released vehicles with such batteries to customers,
| even as far back as 2021 [0].
|
| [0] - https://www.electrive.com/2021/12/20/mercedes-buses-with-
| sol...
| panick21_ wrote:
| No they have not. This is just a total misunderstanding of the
| technologies involved. Sadly for dumb marketing reasons 'solid
| state' has become the terms that is used, but that is the wrong
| term. The actual reason why 'solid state' was important is
| because people believe lithium metal anodes would only be
| possible with solid state. When we are talking about next
| generation 'solid state' we actually mean 'next generation li-
| ion batteries with lithium metal anode'.
|
| The 'solid state' technology in buses that is talked about in
| that article is a totally different thing. That tech has been
| known to exist for a long time and is a totally different
| technology that has nothing to do with the hype around 'solid
| state'. Its 'lithium-polymer' that as a far narrower
| application and isn't all that interesting and certainly not
| some amazing next generation battery.
|
| This is a sad issue in battery marketing world where people mix
| up what these technologies actually mean.
| Veedrac wrote:
| I'm shocked at how seriously people are taking the 745 mile
| statistic, as if EVs were like rockets, range set at the limit of
| physical feasibility, rather than market-led compromises between
| range, power, weight, and price. If you develop a fancy new high-
| density, high-power battery, the market optima sits at a smaller
| battery. This holds true at least until the market is saturated.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > Toyota's Lackluster EV History Makes This A Surprise
|
| Indeed. In fact from the article it would appear to be vaporware
| with no hard evidence at all.
| mcswell wrote:
| From the article: "solid-state batteries... don't do well in cold
| weather, tend to weaken quickly after repeatedly getting charged
| and drained, are particularly costly... Toyota...said it may have
| solved the range and battery weight problems."
|
| Problems are A, B, C, and D, and Toyota solved X and Y. What
| gives?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Would wait till a product comes out as there is a new revolution
| a day for ev batt
| phtrivier wrote:
| > Toyota claims it will be ready for sale in 2027 or 2028
|
| Should be the first, last, and, honestly, single line of the
| discussion. We need those battery breakthrough yesterday, and
| we're still stuck with press releases and misleading car ranges.
|
| I'll give all the credit due as soon as I can aford a car that
| let me drive the 500km of highway separating my house from my
| mom's with less than 2 charges. For all those who're readying to
| chant the gospel of Elon and tout the range of they model W,
| noticed how I used the word "afford".
|
| And I'm a f-ing software engineer with the purchasing power of at
| least two people with a real job - and those two people would not
| mind getting an EV to get to their real jobs, too.
|
| The clock is ticking, people are working hard, in the end the
| laws will force the car manufacturers to do what the market could
| not - but damn, in the meantime, am I tired of press releases...
| bagacrap wrote:
| I bought a Nissan leaf in 2020 with 225 miles range for approx
| 20,000 USD...
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Toyota has been researching this solid state batteries for
| years. I saw a post here (or many on the EV subreddit?) with a
| timeline showing how in 2018 Toyota was claiming they'd be
| selling cars with 700 miles of range by 2023.
|
| But in the non-fantasy version of 2023, they're selling EVs
| with weird tradeoffs, like how the bz4x AWD version has a worse
| charging experience than the RWD
| simondotau wrote:
| It seems there's news of a battery breakthrough every week. I've
| learned to temper expectations, because so many "breakthroughs"
| turn out to be dead ends. Because it's not enough for a battery
| to be incredibly light, or made of abundant materials, or last
| for ten thousand cycles. It needs to be good at many things and
| at least _okay_ at most things.
|
| E.g.--
|
| * How much capacity per dollar?
|
| * How much capacity per kilogram?
|
| * How much capacity per litre?
|
| * How quickly can it be charged?
|
| * How quickly can it be discharged?
|
| * How much energy is lost between charging and discharging?
|
| * How predisposed is it to catching fire?
|
| * How available are the materials needed to manufacture it?
|
| * How available are the tools/skills required to manufacture it?
|
| * How resilient is it to mechanical stress, e.g. vibration?
|
| * How much does performance degrade per cycle?
|
| * How much does performance degrade when stored at a high state
| of charge?
|
| * How much does performance degrade when stored at a low state of
| charge?
|
| * How much does performance drop at high temperatures?
|
| * How much does performance drop at low temperatures?
|
| * How well can it be recycled at end-of-life?
|
| A sufficiently bad answer for any one of these could utterly
| exclude it from contention as an EV battery. A battery which
| scores well on everything except mechanical resilience is a non-
| starter, for example. Though it might be great for stationary
| storage.
|
| I'm only a layperson and this list is what I came up with just a
| few minutes of layperson thought. I'm sure someone with more
| familiarity with battery technology could double the length of
| this list. But the point is, when you daydream about some
| hypothetical future battery tech, you need to appreciate just how
| well today's lithium chemistries score in so many areas.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > I'm sure someone with more familiarity with battery
| technology could double the length of this list.
|
| Actually, not really. For one, no serious manufacturer
| currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't meet
| the most basic of the mentioned criteria.
|
| Secondly, some of these, like storing at a low/high state of
| charge or high/low temperature performance are nowadays managed
| by the BMS - models that don't have that are already not
| competitive. The reason is that energy density already crossed
| the threshold at which some of the capacity can be spared for
| this purpose.
|
| To me the more important question to ask than any of these is:
| is there a process in place to manufacture the batteries at
| scale?
|
| That is what ultimately makes or breaks an emerging battery
| technology.
| simondotau wrote:
| > For one, no serious manufacturer currently even proposes a
| battery technology if it doesn't meet the most basic of the
| mentioned criteria.
|
| I don't think Toyota would qualify as a serious manufacturer
| of battery cells. Has Toyota ever manufactured battery cells
| before? Not battery packs, but battery cells.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| AFAIU Toyota is the main owner of Primergy EV Energy,
| together with Panasonic. They have been manufacturing both
| battery cells and packs for the Prius and other hybrids.
| They used to mainly make NiMH cells, but I think nowadays
| mostly Li-ion.
|
| This new battery tech is done in another subsidiary that is
| also co-owned by Toyota and Panasonic.
| panick21_ wrote:
| This is the mostly the same kind of partnership as Tesla
| and Panasonic and people never stopped saying Panasonic
| is actually making the cells. The actual cell technology
| is Panasonic and the partnership is about manufacturing.
|
| For Toyota to build up its own end to end manufacturing
| of battery cells is something quite different.
|
| Its doable, as Tesla has shown, but its not easy.
| Specially with a new technology.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| There's an even bigger issue that noone seems to get apart
| from Tesla: Is there actually a market for such a battery?
| Today's EVs can already be used for normal daily commutes
| without even thinking at all about range anxiety. That covers
| 95% of all drives for normal people. And the remaining 5% can
| be covered with some slightly more sophisticated route-
| planning. Tesla has already come out and said they could make
| cars that drive twice as far, but there is no real market for
| that. And since battery resources are a limiting factor that
| pretty much grow linearly with range, they rather make twice
| as many cars.
| guidedlight wrote:
| Places like Australia has some seriously large distances,
| with some of the most isolated populations on earth.
|
| Sure it's a small market (most Australians live in their
| state's capital city), but there needs to be some
| consideration for those that need serious range. The issue
| is frequently mentioned when talking about banning ICE
| vehicles.
|
| Toyota Landcruiser's with auxiliary fuel tanks (over 240
| litres) are the workhorses in outback Australia.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Stuff like this is always brought up. And while it is
| true in principle, it doesn't change the above statement.
| Almost 90% of Australians live in cities and average
| distance driven per day by Australians is 30-40km. There
| will always be a small, single digit percentage market
| for long haul transport that needs alternatives. But the
| mass market doesn't need better EVs. That's why range has
| stagnated over the past years. Noone is willing to pay
| twice as much for slightly less inconvenience once every
| 6 months. Sure, if we had a working breakthrough battery
| that could deliver twice the performance for the same
| price it would be great, but in reality it would only be
| great for about 5% of personal traffic.
| xtracto wrote:
| In Mexico and Singapore, Nissan introduced the Epower
| technology which is a hybrid in which the combustion part
| only serves as generator. All the driving machinery is
| electrical, and both the mpg and range are great.
|
| In hindsight I think it's an obvious technooogy: the
| conplexity of the combustion generator is pretty low,
| doesn't need gearbox, pistols, cylinders and whatnot. And
| the fuel tank still gives good range NY recharging the
| battery.
|
| Got a Kicks with this tech, and so far it has been pretty
| good for both city and the road (5 hr drives to the
| beach!)
| ianai wrote:
| Or why can't an EV drive up to a gas station and pick up
| a towable battery to get to the next stop. I've heard
| it's done in China.
| recursive wrote:
| It's probably more trouble and cost than it's worth. How
| many thousands of dollars are you willing to deposit for
| the use of the battery?
| drewg123 wrote:
| I like the idea of one-way rentals of towable generators.
| Think a U-haul like model, where you pick one up at a gas
| station near your origin, and drop it at your
| destination. Now if EV makers would just allow charging
| while driving..
| londons_explore wrote:
| Every other manufacturer calls this a series hybrid or
| electric with range-extender.
|
| They have cost challenges - because if you want to drive
| one at a constant 80 mph on the freeway, you need at
| least ~50 horsepower of gasoline generator, ~50
| horsepower of generator ~ 50 horsepower of generator
| inverter, ~50 horsepower of motor, ~50 horsepower of
| motor inverter.
|
| Turns out all of that costs and weighs a lot more than
| just 100 horsepower of gasoline engine for a similar size
| car.
|
| Cars like the BMW i3 with range extender undersize their
| gas engine and generator to save money and weight, yet
| are getting sued because in worst case conditions
| (driving up a mountain heavily laden), sometimes the car
| runs out of battery power and has to rely on gasoline
| alone, leading to a top speed of only 20 mph - not really
| usable!
| amluto wrote:
| California has bizarre regulations regarding range
| extenders.
|
| I also don't see why 50 hp is a good target. The oldest
| Model S cars can drive on the freeway (at moderate speed)
| using maybe 25 kW (33 hp). So a 25 kW generator would
| allow indefinite freeway driving at moderate speed. But
| almost no one does this except maybe long haul trucks
| that trade drivers.
|
| IMO the right way to think of it is: a 25 kW generator
| will almost fully recharge the battery in under 4 hours.
| If you drive uphill or fast for two hours, and you run
| that generator, you have an extra 50 kWh. If you want to
| drive 10 hours ( _shudder_ ), that's an extra 250kWh --
| you should avoided about three long charging stops, so
| maybe one actual level 3 stop gets you there even if you
| drive moderately fast.
|
| And you can stop for the night (or sightseeing or
| whatever, as long as you park outdoors), and you'll be
| fully recharged afterwards. I would appreciate a 5kW
| onboard generator for this purpose!
| londons_explore wrote:
| Tiny engines (ie. sub 20 horsepower) have pretty poor
| efficiency, and tend not to meet modern emissions
| requirements (since they haven't been developed with
| automotive use in mind).
|
| Nobody is putting much R&D into new engine designs.
|
| Lots of countries have laws saying an engine in a car
| can't be running without a driver present.
|
| For all those reasons, tiny range extenders on large
| batteries don't tend to exist.
|
| Instead you get moderate or large range extenders paired
| with smallish batteries (ie. total range 50 miles). And
| they still have trouble if you drive fast, heavily laden,
| up a hill, on a hot day for more than the battery
| capacity.
| tremon wrote:
| _the conplexity of the combustion generator is pretty
| low_
|
| To add: you can always run the engine at its most
| efficient rpm, getting the most out of every liter of
| fuel.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Yes, but you also have the extra weight of the second
| engine - and you have to transform that mechanical energy
| to electricity before the electric engine transforms it
| back to mechanical energy again, which is lossy. So all
| in all I think it makes sense for long range/remote
| areas, but I rather would have a fuel cell as a range
| extension. (which has its own downsides of course)
| croes wrote:
| These hybrids totally fail the reason of EVs, to get rid
| of the CO2 emissions of combustion engines.
| briffle wrote:
| While it's great to see in a car, this has been the
| standard technology for locomotives for 70 years.
|
| There are lots of pluses to not having a transmission,
| and always running your engine in a narrow, tuned, power
| band
| tln wrote:
| Pretty sure the engine still has pistons and cylinders :)
|
| Here's a nice page explaining the system -- a serial
| hybrid. https://www.nissan-
| global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHI...
|
| According to the page, you can't plug in these vehicles,
| is that right?
|
| Chevy Volt was conceptualized as a serial hybrid iirc,
| but the engine drives the powertrain at higher speeds so
| it's not a pure serial hybrid. Mazda has a rotary engine
| based serial hybrid / range extender out or coming out
| too I believe.
| Olreich wrote:
| If the only ICE vehicles left are in the outback, we're
| doing okay.
| KingMob wrote:
| > If the only ICE vehicles left are in the outback, we're
| doing okay.
|
| Are you sure? That sounds like Mad Max to me :)
| mnw21cam wrote:
| My diesel car from 2020 has a 40-ish litre tank and a range
| of around 500 miles. I just drove back from my holidays
| yesterday, which took nearly six hours, including three
| stops for loo breaks, lunch, and looking around a very
| small museum. It still had half the tank remaining when I
| got home. I have never had range anxiety with this car.
|
| A range of 745 miles means ten hours of driving in the best
| of circumstances without a stop. I cannot imagine wanting
| to drive for ten hours without stopping. I cannot
| understand why EV manufacturers are putting such large
| batteries into cars, especially when I hear how much
| heavier they are making them.
| swalling wrote:
| The problem isn't needing to stop, it's charge time and
| availability.
|
| When I stop with an ICE car during a road trip it's for
| 15 minutes max and I know I can do it basically whenever
| I want. With an EV, you have to carefully plan your road
| trip around fueling.
| wilg wrote:
| Roadtripping is much nicer in an EV, IMO. You just set
| your destination, it tells you where and when to stop,
| you almost always go to the bathroom and eat at those
| stops anyway. You never deal with gas station bathrooms,
| you just pop into a Starbucks or whatever. The car is
| almost always ready to go by the time you are, or maybe
| you wait 5-10 minutes.
|
| There's an intuition that the minor additional
| flexibility gas cars give you on a road trip makes the
| experience better, but in practice I think it's worse.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Outside of few crazy people no normal people drive 5-6h
| at a time. If you can get out on the highway, plug in and
| spend 20min doing basic necessities you are find.
| threetonesun wrote:
| There are a lot of places in America where you can leave
| a city and go to a rural place where at best you might
| have a 120V charge, possibly nothing. An 800-1000 mile
| range battery takes a lot of the charging anxiety away
| until the infrastructure for electric catches up to
| convenience and availability of gas.
|
| The weight issue, however, should be talked about more. I
| don't think filling highways with 10,000lb minivans with
| the acceleration speed of a Corvette is an improvement on
| the whole.
| tw04 wrote:
| >The weight issue, however, should be talked about more.
| I don't think filling highways with 10,000lb minivans
| with the acceleration speed of a Corvette is an
| improvement on the whole.
|
| But they aren't. The "minivans with the acceleration
| speed of a Corvette" exist today in the ICE world and are
| very few and far between because of price. You can buy a
| Lamborghini Urus that does 190mph, or a Range Rover Sport
| Turbo, or BMW X5. But those cars are all 6 figures++ so
| very few people can afford them.
|
| Sure, a Rivian R1S can do 0-60 like a Corvette, but Bob
| down the corner isn't spending $100k on a car, so the
| ones that accelerate like a Corvette will be exactly as
| ubiquitous as a Corvette.
|
| Meanwhile the fastest/heaviest Kia EV9 does 0-60 in 6.0
| seconds, and weighs 5,700 lbs. Both a far cry from the
| numbers you're concerned with. Meanwhile a Chrysler
| Pacifica weighs 4,300 lbs, so the differences most people
| imagine are GREATLY exaggerated.
|
| The vast majority of the "the vehicles are too fast and
| too heavy" are scare tactics by oil companies. The F-150
| tips the scales at 5,500 lbs and nobody is worried about
| them "ruining our roads". Please don't buy into the
| nonsense.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| It's not about ruining roads, it's about how deadly heavy
| vehicles are for the pedestrians they hit.
| wilg wrote:
| IIRC average car weight has been stable for ~20 years,
| not increasing, and also pedestrian deaths have been
| decreasing over the same period, even as people are
| buying big weirdo trucks and whatnot. Also, I'd expect
| increased prevalence of active safety features is more
| important than the weight of the vehicle for pedestrian
| safety.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I think neither of these statements are true. Car weight
| has increased
| (https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-
| car/...) as well as pedestrian deaths which have
| increased 77% in the last 10 odd years
| (https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/map-pedestrian-
| fatalit...)
| travisb wrote:
| When travelling long distances it's also important to
| derate the range for safety and comfort.
|
| For example, it's well known that EV range decreases by
| 20-30% in cold weather and a recent study is claiming
| about the same loss in hot weather. And on long drives
| you tend to be more heavily loaded than normal, also
| cutting a few percent off actual range. Further, you need
| a reserve in case you get stuck on the road for some
| reason. Also you need a further reserve to ensure you can
| make it to the next next charger should the next charger
| be unavailable for some reason. And the advertised ranges
| are in better-than-average driving conditions at slower-
| than-average speeds, so you lose another few percent
| there as well.
|
| All these derates stack which means if you want to ensure
| low stress in an EV you might have to derate the
| advertised range 50% or more depending on charger density
| for long drives when you decide to purchase. ICEs also
| need derating, but 25% is usually lots and ICEs tend to
| have much longer ranges to begin with.
| wilg wrote:
| Gas cars also have a 15%-24% range decrease in cold
| weather, and I'd expect similar results for hot weather.
| I think it's just more notable in EVs because of the
| higher average range of a gas car.
|
| https://www.motorbiscuit.com/gas-powered-cars-lose-
| driving-r...
| Krasnol wrote:
| Of course, there is a market for it. Even if you don't have
| to have it, charging times and rage are the main arguments
| gas car owners bring up in discussions as a reason for why
| they don't buy an electric car.
| silverpepsi wrote:
| Pretending you can logically deduce what the market most
| desires based on facts about their lives is a theory that
| is really far out there
|
| 1. Do you have any memory of when SUVs went mainstream?
| Who'd have thought single women would want to pay the
| vehicle and fuel premium to commute so inefficiently. Of
| course men as well.
|
| 2. Americans are addicted to options that remove
| limitations out of anxiety over those limitations, even
| when the extra cost is very low ROI. Look at data plan,
| buffet, etc. preferences
| simondotau wrote:
| You know what's extremely cheap to manufacture? A larger
| fuel tank. How many mainstream passenger cars are being
| sold with a >80L (>20 gal) fuel tank because prospective
| car buyers "are addicted to options that remove
| limitations out of anxiety"?
|
| Americans are addicted to features, lifestyle and luxury
| (actual or perceived).
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Larger fuel tank makes the car heavier and thus less fuel
| efficient
| Detrytus wrote:
| Additonal 10 gallons of fuel is a rounding error to a
| typical car mass, its effect on fuel efficiency is not
| detectable without precise lab equipment. Certainly
| you're not going to notice that when paying for gas.
| Twirrim wrote:
| > You know what's extremely cheap to manufacture? A
| larger fuel tank. How many mainstream passenger cars are
| being sold with a >80L (>20 gal) fuel tank because
| prospective car buyers "are addicted to options that
| remove limitations out of anxiety"?
|
| It takes mere minutes to refill a tank, and there are gas
| stations everywhere throughout the country. It's quick,
| and incredibly easy. Far faster than EVs, and far more
| common that EV charging stations.
|
| As a result, there's really no value in tanks that are
| that much larger, there's no range anxiety because even
| going long distance cross-country you're never that far
| away from a place to refuel.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There is value. One of my cars has a 20 gallon tank and
| it's nice to go a few extra days without refueling for
| regular commuting/around town driving, or having the
| option to go an extra couple of hundred miles on the
| highway on longer trips.
| Twirrim wrote:
| > Tesla has already come out and said they could make cars
| that drive twice as far
|
| You actually believed them? Tesla, that has a long track
| record of lying about what they can do, when they can
| deliver etc? That is facing major competition from every
| established car manufacturer who are all shipping vehicles
| with similar range to Tesla?
|
| If they could release a car with double the
| distance/capacity they would. It would be a huge
| competitive advantage that no other manufacturer (except
| _possibly_ Toyota, if the article is to be believed) can
| match.
| zaroth wrote:
| Actually it wouldn't be an advantage. It would be a huge
| sunk cost (and added weight bogging down performance and
| handling) for a feature that virtually never gets used.
|
| Tesla increases distance ideally by increasing
| efficiency. Their cars consistently score the best/lowest
| Wh/mi for their weight, by doing things like designing
| their own heat pump instead of traditional AC and
| resistive heating.
|
| Because EV production is virtually always constrained by
| battery production, the number of cars you can sell is
| typically your battery production capacity (MWh) divided
| by your battery capacity per vehicle.
|
| Their inherent efficiency combined with the Supercharger
| network to support longer trips lets them produce more
| cars at a lower cost / price.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| There are cars like the Lucid Air which actually offer
| significantly more range than even the long range Teslas,
| while using the same battery tech (at a higher price
| point of course). They just recently had to scale down
| production because demand was waaaay below expectations.
| Tesla's best selling variants are also not the long range
| models, so it's not surprising that people won't pay for
| another 30% premium on something they barely ever need.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > You actually believed them? Tesla, that has a long
| track record of lying about what they can do
|
| This is just basic physics not a conspiracy theory.
|
| It simply doesn't make sense to massively improve
| distance.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > like storing at a low/high state of charge or high/low
| temperature performance are nowadays managed by the BMS
|
| What a BMS can do, depends on what the underlying cell alows
| or doesn't.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| > Actually, not really. For one, no serious manufacturer
| currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't
| meet the most basic of the mentioned criteria.
|
| Until you realize that Toyota is peddling hydrogen as the
| future which makes about the least sense of anything you
| could choose.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Hydrogen could have made sense in an alternate timeline
| where government and industry cooperated on standardizing
| form factors for fast tank-swapping... but then, that would
| have made even more sense for batteries, and it didn't
| happen. People would whine about not "owning" their
| hydrogen tanks, just as they do when someone brings up the
| advantages of swappable batteries.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| There is no world where hydrogen would ever work for
| cars.
|
| It takes 50% more energy to generate hydrogen than to
| just use electricity itself. It takes million dollar
| facilities to generate that hydrogen and turn it into
| electricity.
|
| Then, it has to be stored at a very high pressure in your
| car, which has a number of risks. Then, if you have an
| accident and it doesn't completely blow you up, there can
| be a fire, in which case you are now on fire but people
| just think you are a crazy person running around because
| hydrogen has an invisible flame.
|
| Or, you just use electricity.
| _hypx wrote:
| You are repeating pure FUD. This is pretty much what BEV
| companies want people to believe so that they never
| consider any alternatives.
|
| In reality, fuel cell cars are literally just EVs, no
| different than BEVs. There are no fundamental downsides.
| But since FCEVs don't have the huge need for raw
| materials that BEVs do, they will be a far cheaper
| solution. Once you understand the unsustainable nature of
| BEVs, you'll realize that nearly all cars will have to
| switch to hydrogen eventually.
|
| And hydrogen is safer than gasoline. This is just more
| FUD, and is of the fearmongering variety.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Hydrogen is absolutely NOT safer than gasoline. This is a
| ridiculous claim. For starters, it's an explosive gas
| rather than a flammable liquid.
| _hypx wrote:
| It is much lighter than air. Any hydrogen leaks will
| float away a lot faster than gasoline.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| This is not even wrong.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| You are an account that is a couple hours old and has
| only talked about how bad electric is and how good
| hydrogen is.
| _hypx wrote:
| My account is older than yours...
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| Not in terms of posting it isnt
| _hypx wrote:
| It's time to stop digging...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Car makers like BEVs because (a) no new infrastructure
| other than electricity which is available almost anywhere
| already and (b) none of that energy lost to compression
| or fancy cryogenic compression tanks to keep the hydrogen
| in the car or at the gas station. Lastly, most people
| don't want to go from $5/gallon gas to $10/gallon
| hydrogen.
| _hypx wrote:
| Car makers are just following the subsidies and the hype.
| It is not even a sustainable idea and it will eventually
| die.
|
| Hydrogen will eventually be nearly free. It is just going
| to be made from excess wind and solar energy and will
| follow the same cost reduction curve.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Hydrogen will eventually be nearly free. It is just
| going to be made from excess wind and solar energy and
| will follow the same cost reduction curve.
|
| How is that different from charging a battery at a super
| charger? Because it can be delivered via more expensive
| pipeline or trucks rather than cheaper wires? Heck, it
| doesn't even store well, you need to keep those tanks
| cold so the hydrogen stays compressed, you are going to
| be using more electricity for that.
| _hypx wrote:
| Because you can't always have electricity available at
| super chargers. How do you power your car if the wind is
| not blowing and it is not daytime? You will need energy
| storage, something hydrogen provides in spades. That
| ensures hydrogen will be needed and be very cheap since
| it is made from wind, solar and water alone.
|
| A pipeline is cheaper than a wire at moving energy
| around. About 10x cheaper in fact. This is just another
| example of BEV FUD. BEV companies just make shit up to
| demonization the competition, and often times the exact
| opposite is true.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| I'd love to see a peer reviewed paper or even a report on
| a project that's already been built showing that a
| hydrogen pipeline is cheaper to run per kWh final
| electricity, much less 10x cheaper.
| _hypx wrote:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258900
| 422...
| _hypx wrote:
| Hydrogen refuels just like gasoline cars. It is the most
| logical replacement for current cars. It probably will
| just happen via natural progress without any external
| desire for CO2 emissions reduction.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Hydrogen refuels just like gasoline cars. It is the
| most logical replacement for current cars.
|
| You should talk to this other guy who's currently arguing
| that the current paradigm doesn't matter and we should
| focus on what _will_ make sense.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36839960
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| It is not the most logical replacement.
|
| It isn't the the one with fewest infrastructure changes
| (that would be biodiesel).
|
| And it is the result of stuck about things in terms of
| the past: we used to power cars by pumping molecules into
| it, therefore we need another molecule.
|
| Most of our green electricity will start _as_
| electricity. So it makes more sense to keep it as that
| and pump _it_ directly into the car.
|
| Given the choice, why would people still want to have to
| take their car to a pump when they can simply charge it
| at home or at work as much as possible?
|
| If my cellphone lasted 5 days without a charge but needed
| me to go to a special charging station, I would never buy
| it. I just charge it overnight, or at work, and forget
| about it.
| _hypx wrote:
| Biofuels aren't really a solution.
|
| The problem with electricity is that you can't easily
| store it. And the only way to do so at large scale will
| be converting it to molecules. That implies hydrogen.
|
| As a result, green electricity just means a nearly
| infinite supply of green hydrogen at the same level of
| cost. That implies nearly free hydrogen for any purpose.
|
| Economically, that all leads to the hydrogen car as the
| future. You avoid both the weaknesses of ICE cars and
| BEVs.
| [deleted]
| _hypx wrote:
| > Until you realize that Toyota is peddling hydrogen as the
| future which makes about the least sense of anything you
| could choose.
|
| Wrong. It is the only technology in current existence that
| actually makes sense. Everything else is unsustainable and
| eventually has to be abandoned.
| panick21_ wrote:
| It makes 'sense' according to you and not 99.9% of actual
| costumers. But you do you.
| _hypx wrote:
| Then the future is ICE cars because it makes sense to
| "actual costumers." But that isn't the topic at hand. It
| is what _will_ make sense, and that can only be hydrogen
| cars in the long run.
| Beached wrote:
| most battery tech dies at the "can it be manufactured en
| mass" stage.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Next you're going to tell me you don't believe in the
| carbon nanotube fairy. :)
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Secondly, some of these, like storing at a low/high state
| of charge or high/low temperature performance are nowadays
| managed by the BMS - models that don't have that are already
| not competitive. The reason is that energy density already
| crossed the threshold at which some of the capacity can be
| spared for this purpose.
|
| No - this is dishonesty by some battery/car manufacturers.
| They say "Our car can drive 300 miles", and "our car battery
| will last 10 years/100,000 miles", but the reality is that if
| you actually drive it 300 miles on each charge, you'll only
| be doing about 30,000 miles before it no longer meets your
| needs.
|
| Instead car manufacturers say things like "only charge to 85%
| to prolong battery life" and "under 15% charge is for
| 'reserve capacity' use only".
|
| An honest manufacturer would only advertise the amount of
| capacity you can actually use day to day, rather than the
| capacity that is there but you really shouldn't use unless
| you want your battery to die young.
| benj111 wrote:
| Is it dishonest when an IC car manufacturer advertises a
| range, but the fuel light comes on before that?
|
| If you use a tank full of petrol each day, your car may not
| last 10 years. If you only do 1 mile a day, every day, it
| may not last 100k miles.
|
| All mechanical things have usage patterns that are worse
| than others. You just get used to the tradeoffs.
| mcbishop wrote:
| Deception in marketing doesn't mean that there haven't been
| significant improvements in battery management systems.
| gpm wrote:
| The convenient truth of the matter is that you don't want
| to drain your battery "to 0" regardless of whether or not
| it increases wear and tear on the battery, because you
| don't want to be stranded. As such giving lifetime aspects
| under that assumption that people won't do that regularly
| is fairly reasonable.
|
| On the flip side, I agree that the "100%" mark should be
| the mark that people regularly charge to, people don't
| leave empty space in the tank for fun.
| r00fus wrote:
| Except for the Nissan Leaf, most EV car batteries do great
| at managing heat even in adverse conditions (high heat,
| fast charging, etc).
|
| I have a 5 year old EV which is always charged to 100% and
| it's lost maybe 5% of its range capacity so far. Perhaps it
| was over provisioned (undersold the actual capacity) but
| it's unlikely as it's a cheap compliance car (that I still
| love to drive).
| wesleyd wrote:
| > An honest manufacturer would only advertise the amount of
| capacity you can actually use day to day, rather than the
| capacity that is there but you really shouldn't use unless
| you want your battery to die young.
|
| Toyota do this. In fact, all PHEV manufacturers seem to do
| this: they keep their batteries between 15% and 85% and
| only advertise this range.
|
| Insofar as they advertise it at all: the battery size in eg
| a Prius prime is buried in a footnote, and the range -
| miles/km - is what's advertised, and is real, and
| corresponds to the 15-85.
|
| I guess it is more important in a PHEV to never fully
| charge not discharge their batteries: most cycle from full-
| ish to empty-ish much more than a BEV. And so it is more
| logical for them to publish their 15-85. But the honesty is
| refreshing; BEV numbers feel disingenuous to me.
|
| I ignore all breathlessly excited battery "breakthrough"
| headlines, but I ignore any from Toyota less!
| monkpit wrote:
| As a layperson when it comes to batteries, this whole
| 15-85% thing seems like a silly detail that should be
| handled by computers. Like, at 85% the readout should say
| "100%", and at 15% it should say "0%".
|
| Is that something they do, or do they expect users to be
| aware of these thresholds?
| Detrytus wrote:
| But then Tesla decides to be different, advertises full
| 0-100% capacity and range, and Musk brags on Twitter how
| other EV manufacturers can't keep up.
| kube-system wrote:
| And then builds a level 2 driver assistance system that
| doesn't meet any SAE criteria of "self driving", and
| brags how other manufacturers can't keep up.
|
| The Silicon Valley style of "fake it till you make it"
| business is dishonest.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > Is that something they do
|
| Pretty much. There's a catalogue of EVs here:
|
| https://ev-database.org/
|
| Where nominal and usable capacity is stated. Currently
| even Tesla includes a few kWh of buffer capacity.
|
| State of charge in li-ion batteries isn't a
| straightforward thing anyway. 4.2V used to be considered
| 100%, but nowadays some chemistries allow for going up to
| 4.35V safely - doesn't sound like much, but it translates
| to ~15% more capacity.
| Retric wrote:
| Depends on the company and product.
|
| Traditional hybrids hide all these details. Most plug in
| EV's only show 15-85% as 0-100 because you have a fall
| back for range extension. Many EV show the close to full
| range because you might daily drive just fine on 15-85%
| while charging at home and want to take the occasional
| long trip or use 0-15% capacity if a charging station is
| down etc.
|
| Also, charge cycles become less important as range
| increases an EV with a 220 mile range is noticeably worse
| at 180 mile range where a 440 mile EV sees 1/2 as many
| charge cycles and is still perfectly useable with a 360
| mile range.
| martin8412 wrote:
| My VW PHEV does this. It doesn't use the HV battery below
| 20% and the range calculator knows this.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| So I can die on the road with enough energy to drive
| another 50 km?
| [deleted]
| SECProto wrote:
| > So I can die on the road with enough energy to drive
| another 50 km?
|
| My gas car has a 42 litre tank, if i wait until the light
| has come on and the gauge is on (and then drive another
| 20km past that), I can only get 38.5 litres in.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I'll do you one better: mine has a 45 litre tank, light
| goes on at 5 litres left, gauge stops indicating at half
| of that, but there's an unmentioned anywhere buffer of 5
| litres, which is there so that the fuel pump doesn't
| overheat or pick up any contaminants at the very bottom
| the tank.
|
| I only know this because a motoring journalist filmed
| himself riding the same model dry.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| > An honest manufacturer would only advertise the amount of
| capacity you can actually use day to day
|
| Why? It's not common to use your cars full range every day.
| Most people I know drive <100km on most days, and use the
| full range of their car maybe twice a year when they go on
| vacation.
|
| Why would manufacturers advertise worst case numbers if
| they are not representative of the average consumers needs?
|
| If they advertise their cars for business use, they
| probably should put some more detailed info somewhere. But
| if you advertise your car to commuters, it makes sense to
| use numbers that the average commuter can expect.
| badtension wrote:
| What's stopping them from advertising exactly that?
| Usable everyday range being 200km and occasional max
| range 500km for prolonged life of the battery pack?
|
| Just inform the customer instead of doing the advertising
| mumbo-jumbo.
| eptcyka wrote:
| 50% of the time I use my car, I drive more than 150 miles
| on a trip.
|
| However, I do not commute with my car. And most people
| should press their local authorities to develop
| infrastructure so that they don't have to either :)
| Beached wrote:
| an honest manufacturer would advertise the fuel economy you
| can expect day to day, rather than the fuel economy of a
| perfect test scenario.
|
| car manufacturers have been overstating range/fuel economy
| since the dawn of time. people are tuned to look at those
| numbers and think "in perfect lab conditions." and no one
| expects these numbers to be their day to day numbers
| Tade0 wrote:
| > but the reality is that if you actually drive it 300
| miles on each charge, you'll only be doing about 30,000
| miles before it no longer meets your needs.
|
| False. Nowadays manufacturers include a capacity buffer, so
| you're not actually fully charging/discharging. Teslas used
| to have no buffer whatsoever - exactly like smartphones -
| but they dropped the practice a few years ago.
|
| Case in point: the battery in the Mercedes EQS 450+ has a
| nominal capacity of 120kWh, while usable is 107.8kWh -
| that's a 10% buffer - likely on the top end because that's
| where most of the wear happens.
|
| You can reasonably expect 200,000 miles out of that before
| range degrades to 80% of the original figure. And no wonder
| - that's less than 600 cycles assuming highway driving.
| Consumer-grade batteries last this much, and the ones in
| EVs are anything but consumer-grade.
| jrsj wrote:
| It is this manufacturing question that Toyota is claiming to
| have a solution to here, but afaik we don't have details yet
| so it's hard to say. But they _claim_ to be able to mass
| produce these and bring them to market within ~4 years.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The problem is that 'within ~4 years' the avg improvement
| that everybody else has at that time makes these claims
| much less interesting.
| fwungy wrote:
| There has been so much money and time spent on battery
| research. We are in the incremental phase of battery
| evolution. There will not likely be any major leap in battery
| cost or performance.
|
| A battery is a box of minerals with electrochemical
| reactivity, i.e. it can catch on fire if something goes
| wrong. More energy from the battery means more minerals,
| which means higher cost. More reactive chemistries can reduce
| mineral inputs, but tend to be more expensive or less stable.
|
| Tldr; there are no quantum leaps available for batteries. If
| Toyota has a giant range EV it's either really expensive or
| it's a research vehicle staying far away from consumers.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > More energy from the battery means more minerals, which
| means higher cost.
|
| This is a fundamentally false understanding of battery
| innovation.
|
| > More reactive chemistries can reduce mineral inputs, but
| tend to be more expensive or less stable.
|
| Less stable, sometimes but not more expensive.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| All I really need to know is
|
| 1. What is the 1.0 for distance, and model of car doing it
|
| 2. What is the expected multiplier for said new technology
|
| 3. What is the life expectancy curve for the new tech
|
| 4. is it any worse/better than the old battery on safety. I'm
| just not that worried about battery fires other than if newer
| tech is more apt to do it. I've been riding around sitting on
| gasoline tanks for decades now and it can't be much worse for
| safety.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > I'm sure someone with more familiarity with battery...
|
| I won't claim more familiarity, but...
|
| - How frequent/difficult is required maintenance? Recall that
| old lead-acid batteries often needed distilled water added to
| their cells.
|
| - Does it need access to air - either supplied to it, or to
| vent gasses? That introduces a whole host of issues, even if
| it's not venting (say) hydrogen gas.
|
| - How much does performance degrade when its only cycled
| through part of its charge/discharge range? Recall the NiCad
| batteries of yesteryear.
|
| - What are its waste, OSHA, HAZMAT, and other environmental &
| safety issues? Those apply all the way from the raw materials
| mines to the final disposal. Which includes accident scenarios
| - fire / flood / whatever in a facility with many batteries (or
| parts thereof), one-off car crashes, and things more
| interesting. "Disposal" includes cases such as "abandoned in a
| pole barn".
|
| (BTW - kudos for specifying "How available are ...", which
| covers a far longer list of real-world supply issues than "What
| is the (current) price of".)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| * How far can it be discharged and still be able to be
| recharged.
| the-dude wrote:
| It would be nice to mention you are recycling this comment.
| Rychard wrote:
| Does recycling the comment make it any less relevant?
| recycledmatt wrote:
| // How well can it be recycled at end-of-life?
|
| The fact that the chemistries are changing and diverse is the
| most difficult thing from an End-of-life perspective. A lot of
| businesses born around recycling todays battery (lots of
| lithium and cobalt relatively speaking) are not economical on
| some of the newer chemistries (looking at you Li-Fe) because
| they cheapened out the expensive elements.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Indeed, these announcements about a solid state battery have
| been coming out for years, for example here's one from Toyota
| in 2017 claiming 2020 availability:
| https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/toyotas-new-solid-state-ba...
| -> https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-nears-major-
| technologica...
|
| Some of us remember prior generations of battery breakthrough
| claims like eestor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor
| pnw wrote:
| I followed EESTOR closely for years. Someone should make a
| documentary about that saga. Amazing mix of inventor hubris,
| Canadian OTC pump and dump and a rabid online community of
| true believers mixed with speculators. Hard to believe that
| Kleiner Perkins invested in it.
|
| Amazingly they are still around although they have rebranded
| and are now chasing some other unlikely scheme. It seems
| there is a limitless supply of suckers for these OTC deals,
| regardless how borderline their claims or history.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Something isn't right.
|
| Title: With The 745-mile Solid-state Battery, Toyota Just Became
| A Force To Reckon With
|
| 1st link in article: Toyota's Solid-State Batteries Will Offer
| Over 900 Miles On A Single Charge
|
| 2nd link: Toyota's Solid-state Batteries Will Offer A Range Of
| 745 Miles And Charge In Under 10 Minutes!
| sp332 wrote:
| Further down in that first article:
|
| - First-gen solid-state batteries will allow up to 745 miles of
| range.
|
| - Second-gen solid-state batteries will push this to 932 miles.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 932 miles. Not 931, not 933. Seems legit.
| mchouza wrote:
| Probably just converted from 1500 km.
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