Featured Electric car batteries with five-minute charging times produced

5 minutes for 100 miles compared to gas at 500 miles? How many times have you refueled only to get 100 more miles and have to do it again in another 100?

500 fast recharges till degradation? Yea, not all recharges are fast but for some cars almost all are.

 

Yet another battery innovation "produced in a factory for the first time" which means it has nothing to do with cost of mass production per KW hour at scale, which means you'll wait a decade or longer for this to play out in a meaningful way for cars.

As I've said many times it's cost of mass production at a super low competitive price that's the #1 challenge. Building a better mouse trap is the least of our worries at this stage.

 

Timelines look similar to many other working on solid state batteries and/or faster charging capable batteries. Yep, cost will remain #1 barrier.

...StoreDot is aiming to deliver 100 miles of charge to a car battery in five minutes in 2025...

...Dozens of companies around the world are developing fast-charging batteries, with Tesla, Enevate and Sila Nanotechnologies all working on silicon electrodes. Others are looking at different compounds, such as Echion which uses niobium oxide nanoparticles...​

 

I keep thinking: separate the battery and ownership therof from the car, and reduce the battery types. When battery is depleted you roll into a station, and swap it for a charged one. Like propane cylinders.

 

Mendel,

I would not trust a facility on the road to give me a good, fully charged battery. When the "new" battery unexpectantly runs out 50 miles down the road, what would you do?

JeffD

 

I don’t think that works.
Look at Toyota complaining about battery shortages now.
Next imagine needing three battery packs for every vehicle instead of one. Three is the estimates I have heard of how many would be required to support the logistics of battery swaps.

 

Its been done

The new Tesla battery swap? | PriusChat

Mike

 

Not really. Because most people would still recharge at home or work

The swap would have to have a fee associated with it or a high cost per kwh. Else how would they stay in business?

Mike

 

Likewise the re-fueling facility wouldn't trust people to bring in high quality batteries worth swapping...

But if the government was using the fossil fuel subsidies to pay for all the batteries, maybe that could work?

 

Batteries aren't like propane cylinders though. Would you be happy getting a battery with 80% of the capacity of the one you turned in, because it has seen more use?

Battery leasing raises other issues. Many of which when it comes to buying and selling a used car. You can find smart ED's cheap, but people mostly skip because they are tied to the leasing program they used to have. A UK poster use to go over this because it was what Renault did at one time; battery lease only. They've abandoned that, as battery prices have dropped.

That said, NIO is doing the battery lease and battery swapping in China.

 

The number of packs isn't dependent upon the rate of swaps, but simply on the logistics of all swap stations need an adequate supply of packs ready to be swapped.
Beyond the questions about how to handle getting a better, or more worn pack, the added pack inventory is a serious problem. It works fine at small numbers, but doesn't scale well.

 

Tesla planned to do this years ago but the logistics involved quickly killed any notion that they could scale it to profitability. As in it's way cheaper to build endless solar powered charging stations everywhere than it is to build automated pack swapping stations.

Perhaps what would make this idea viable is if you weren't swapping an expensive self contained product for same fully charged replacement product, but instead you were swapping the charged electrolyte.

And we don't yet know how solid the solid state battery technology will eventually be. But if it was designed to be fluid enough that you could press all your discharged electrolyte out of the car with freshly charged new electrolyte in 5 minutes, that may well be a faster more efficient way to recharge than the time it takes to recharge existing electrolyte without any swapping.

 

I think that you could give this approach a good name. How about a "Fuel Cell" vehicle.

JeffD

 

The hard part about this would be connecting up the electrolyte tubing to the approx 3000 cells in a SR M3, for example.

Mike

 

The 100 miles is for current charging infrastructure, they say seem to claim they can do 300 miles in 5 minutes with a bigger pack. I can definitely see a future were 200 mile charges in 10 minutes ;-) are good enough for most long trips. I need to stop and stretch that often. This will be arbitrarily fast if you build the chargers. I expect some to be built but not a nation wide network in any country anytime soon. China is proposing a 900 kw standard for trucks and busses that perhaps these could use.

If you have a 300 mile pack and charge it 500 times that is 150,000 fast charge miles. Since most charging will be done at L2, that is not much of a limitation.

The problem is cost. Storedot is currently using germanium, and is working on a silicon chemistry to reduce cost. Car prototypes or low production models then volume production with the less expensive chemistry. Still if charging networks are the limitations I can't see many people spending a lot more for incredibly fast charging. 2025 seems like a reasonable goal to get these in a production car. Still lots of competing ideas. Toyota, solid power, or Quantum Scape may be close to solving solid state cost problems by then.

 

Flow batteries already exist, and there are some working on cars using them in which the discharged electrolyte can be replaced with charged.