Li-Ion Batteries Hit Final R&D Phase for Plug-in Cars 238
An anonymous reader writes "Tesla finally delivered its first production model of the all-electric Roadster this month. Coinciding with that, researchers from the big automakers and their outsourced startup labs are hitting stride in the development of cheap, high-powered lithium-ion batteries. These may actually end up in our garages. Toyota, in fact, says it's got enough of the chemistry down to roll out a test fleet for the plug-in Prius before the end of 2009. It's mass production of battery tech that's the holdup — which might mean Mercedes' electric hybrids beat the Prius to market en masse by 2010 or 2011."
Still waiting (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Still waiting (Score:4, Insightful)
Really, Tesla's approach is not economical for anything but the high-end market. "Laptop batteries" (graphite anode, LiCoO2 cathode) are ill-suited for EV applications. They're too expensive, and even if they weren't, their lifespans are too short, so only those who have money to burn can afford them. I think Aptera's approach is the most realistic: first, use a reasonable battery choice (lithium phosphate) -- sacrifice a little energy density for long life, a high degree of safety, high power density, low cost, and fast charging. Second, build the car light and ultra-aerodynamic. This adds extra cost, but it lets you get by on signficantly less battery power, meaning less battery expense (the Typ-1e only needs 10kWh for 120 mi). And since battery expense is the big cost in EVs, the extra you spent on streamlining is saved several times over in batteries.
Anyways, keep your eyes out for:
Lithium vanadium oxide batteries
Silicon nanowire batteries
Barium titanate ultracapacitors
All of these promise 2-3x energy density with current tech while retaining rapid charge ability, and lower cost -- thus keeping all of the EV advantages over gasoline vehicles (noise, efficiency, home charging, pollution reduction, pollution displacement, high torque, low maintenance, low energy costs, etc), while meeting all of gasoline's traditional advantages over EVs (purchase price, range, recharge time). They're game changers. For now, we'll stick with a normal gasoline sedan for long trips (until a fast charging infrastructure becomes widespread) and our (upcoming) Aptera for daily use.
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Picture's for those that want to see the car! (Score:3, Informative)
http://forumpix.co.uk/i.php?I=1202393049 [forumpix.co.uk]
http://forumpix.co.uk/i.php?I=1202393063 [forumpix.co.uk]
http://forumpix.co.uk/i.php?I=1202393091 [forumpix.co.uk]
Re:Picture's for those that want to see the car! (Score:5, Funny)
One picture. Two pictures. No apostrophe. English, motherfucker... do you speak it?
Re:Picture's for those that want to see the car! (Score:5, Funny)
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Dude, where the heck is she driving, Neo Tokyo?
The publishers of those photos should put the driver in LA at peak hour, instead
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Oh noes!!! (Score:5, Funny)
"50 cars caught fire on I-4 today."
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Yeah, but most people don't drive around with a car full of the most combustible fluid on earth... (hint: petroleum spirit isn't this fluid).
Git yer marsmallows and grahams ready for... (Score:4, Insightful)
Infrastructure? (Score:3, Insightful)
Plug-in hybrids are a good compromise, though.
Re:Infrastructure? (Score:5, Funny)
1) Buy an extension cable.
2) Find the nearest Starbucks.
3) Buy a cup of coffee.
4) Instead of plugging in your laptop you covertly plug in your car.
5) Profit! (for you)
Same difference, isn't it?
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If it is anything like my laptop, it'll start off at 300 mile range and slowly decrease to about 150 within a year or so.
-matthew
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So for now, you'll need to rent a car or use some other transportation for road trips.
Or, more likely, the idea will flop and people will continue to use a transportation method that fills all their needs. Gas/Electric hybrids do that. They offer good range/economy, and are still flexible enough to be able to use for pretty much any road trip that another car can do.
Any car that can't be refueled both quickly and at common locations, is not likely to perform very well (in the market place) IMHO.
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Any car that can't be refueled both quickly and at common locations, is not likely to perform very well (in the market place) IMHO.
I've got to disagree there. While I certainly think that gas(unleaded, diesel, ethanol)/electric hybrid will be the most popular choice for single people. I think that in multi-car families there will likely be only one car that is a hybrid and the others will be all electric (they will be cheaper). It's estimated that 85-95% of all driving is done within 30 miles of your home. This means that all electric cars become reasonable at 100 Miles per recharge. Ideally I would like to see ones that can get
Diesel electric hybrids is where (Score:2)
I still thi
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That's pretty easy actually: pack a generator and some gasoline with you, and you're all set.
but what about road trips? (Score:2)
1. Rent a car for said road trip out of the savings on $4+/gallon gasoline - for a road trip diesel will probably make more sense than gasoline. Diesel engine vehicles can beat hybrids on highway milage.
2. Fly or take a train instead
3. Rent a trailor with a generator(maybe a small, high efficiency diesel?)
In the longer run, it shouldn't take too much work to install charging booths at restraunts. With a 300 mile range at something like 75mph, you can schedule chargings around reasonable meal sto
Just Rent A Car (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the huge bonuses associated with electric cars is reduced maintenance. There are no timing chains to break, no radiators to leak, no oil to be changed. Electric motors are highly reliable and very easy to fix. In the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" they discussed that the dealers did not like the electric cars at all because of the tremendously lowered need for maintenance and repair. (Of course the mechanics loved them because the cars were easy to work and and the mechanics didn't end up covered in oil and grease all the time)
If you really do a lot of extended road trips, you should get a gas car or hybrid, but for everybody else the electric car + renting a gas car occasionally would be the much better choice.
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The Tesla Roadster has a liquid cooled radiator. They tried making the car air-cooled, but the motor and batteries would heat up too much.
Cooling is going to be required on most electric vehicles that meet national highway safety standards, because those standards require cars to be so crash resistant that they usually weigh quite a bit. hauling that extra weight means needing more power / energy, which requires cooling.
Who killed the air-cooled car? Ralph Nader
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How about a gas-powered engine trailer [dansdata.com]? A tiny little engine generator that you tow along for those long car trips. Like diesel-electric locomotives, your car is powered by an electric motor. Give it decent range for the typical commute and them some, and the
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You're absolutely right -- electric cars are only suitable for 97 percent of our driving.
(Oh, and electric infrastructure is more pervasive than any other, *including* gasloline. The infrastructure is called your local utility grid).
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Are Batteries Evil? (Score:3, Insightful)
These batteries are probably recyclable but it isn't cost effective, based on what I rad. So, the potential to recycle is there but are people actually going to do it?
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Go troll some place else.
Re:Are Batteries Evil? (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh-huh. And then we replace the coal plant with a nuclear plant, or augment it with wind power, or whatever, and your car magically becomes more environmentally friendly without you having to do anything!
This is the beauty of the plug-in electric car. It decouples transportation from the source of power. So when a better source of power comes along, you don't have to replace the entire fleet of existing cars to benefit, which would mean overcoming a huge amount of inertia.
Re:Are Batteries Evil? (Score:5, Informative)
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Most people will, yes. Since most people won't be changing the batteries themselves, you can just mandate that mechanics recycle the batteries (and fine them heavily if they don't) and mechanics can just charge the customer the recycling fee, if any.
-matthew
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The only reason NiCD and NiMH end up in landfills so much is that they're used and disposed of at home - most people can't be bothered to take them in somewhere to be reycled. Same with liIon.
An electric car battery, even a hybrid battery is such that you're taking it to a store to be replaced - and they'll have enough to haul them over to the recycling facility
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Why only then? What good does it do to depend on corn based ethanol, for example, if you have to cut down all the (rain) forests to grow it? Really, you DO have to worry about what is environmentally friendly BEFORE you find yourself dependent on it.
-matthew
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Oil isn't going to just disappear all of a sudden. It will just get progressively more expensive. The solution is to get people using electric/hybrid cars ASAP so that we have more flexability in where the energy comes from. Burning hydrocarbons (whether it is grown or pumped from the ground) is a dead end. And once you cut down the rainforests to grow co
The Cold (Score:3, Interesting)
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That's why it's taking so long for these electric cars to go into mass production. Bring them in too soon and the planet will be too cold for them to work properly.
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How quick they are to forget hydrogen... (Score:5, Insightful)
...in 1899!!!
Heat (Score:3, Interesting)
Seems a bit odd they would be used in cars.
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How do these things handle short trips in freezing weather?
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Seconded (Score:2)
It's either that, or they start making EV's with a kerosene/gasoline/propane heater option.
Another thing I would like to know is how well these batteries function in freezing and sub-zero conditions, since chemical batteries have a reputation for performing poorly when cold. In such a case, you might need something like a battery pre-heater to get any decent performance out of it
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Um, well, if the electric engine doesn't produce enough heat to warm the cabin (a positive feature I'd say), then it would be trivial to just create a simple electric heater you can turn on when you want heat, and it would heat up nearly instantly because it doesn't have to warm up an entire engine block before hot air starts coming through the vent.
Total non-problem.
Re:Heat (Score:5, Informative)
Quite well, actually, speaking as an electric vehicle engineer.
A simple resistive water heater for cabing heating uses about 2000 watts on average, and perhaps 4000 watts worst case. Compared to a typical road load of 20,000 watts, it's obvious that the cabin heat makes a difference, but it's on the order of a 10% reduction in range.
In the future, electric vehicles will use heat pumps (basically a bi-directional air conditioner) that will reduce the cabin heat energy budget by at least a factor of 3. The air conditioner in AC Propulsion's eBox vehicle uses about 700 watts worst case, and less depending on duty cycle.
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Lithium cells do not explode. Cell fires (a la Sony laptops) were a manufacturing defect, and not heat-related. The lithium cells in cars use a different cell chemistry, about which I guarantee you know nothing. Cars, like the aforementioned Tesla, closely control battery temperature to prolong the life of the battery.
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The cabin of a car with direct sunlight with the windows closed can reach air temperatures upward of 130F with surfaces exposed to sunlight temperatures close to 200F.
Its highly unlikely that the battery of any electric vehicle will be located in the passenger cabin, or exposed to the kind of temperature extremes one would find in the cabin when the car is left in direct sunligh
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And what happens next... (Score:2)
I wonder when it will happen this time.
I'm sure it's Bush's fault. Somehow.
There is no free lunch (Score:3, Interesting)
The electricity to charge all those batteries has to come from someplace. all you are doing is shifting the the consumption of fossil fuel from one place to another. The energy required to manufacture these batteries in VERY large quantities has to come from someplace as well.
Last time I checked there are not many rivers left to damn up for hydro so the juice has to come from someplace and since fusion power isn't quite ready for prime time you are going to have to build a hell of a lot more power plants to transfer the power generation from a facility on 4 wheels to some very big stationary ones.
That being said, you can gain a hell of a lot of efficiency because large power plants do much better then the internal combustion engine, but they still have to burn something, either that or be prepared to have a big nuclear power plant coming to a neighborhood near you.
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Where do I sign up?
By all accounts, even considering transmission losses and such, even coal power is cleaner than gasoline engines, and has fewer carbon emissions.
But yeah, if this keeps up we're going to need to build a lot more power plants. And I'd like to see them be cogeneration type plants - capable of exploiting even what's currently waste heat.
Re:There is no free lunch (Score:4, Informative)
What many people fail to realize is that using gasoline is hardly a direct way of powering cars. There are two important components that go in a car: gasoline, and motor oil. The distillation of gasoline uses an enormous amount of energy that we do not account for when arguing against electric vehicles. 19% of the pump price of gasoline is the cost of refining (distillation, cracking, reforming, etc.). So, no, we are not merely shifting the consumption of fossil fuels from one place to another. In effect, having all-electric vehicles would mean 20% of the electricity used is from nuclear energy, ~10% from renewable sources, minus the energy used for refining the gasoline, and the energy saved due to the efficiency of power generation and the efficiency of the electric motors. As for motor oil, this is also a component handled by the petroleum refining industry. Its manufacture is very energy intensive and there is a large market for it. Remember all those signs you see around storm drains that tell you not to dump your motor oil there? Guess what, it turns out motor oil is pretty bad for the environment. When people bring up the argument that electric vehicles have batteries that need to be replaced every so often, well internal-combustion vehicles have motor oil that needs replacing every 4000 miles.
Another thing that bothers me that people don't talk about is pollution. There are two type of pollution: point source and non-point source pollution. The former means that there is a well defined area where the pollutants are being put into the environment, while the latter means the source of pollutants is diffuse and comes from many sources. Pollution from automobiles is non-point; they are everywhere. Pollution from power plants is point; you can point your finger at the building and say "that is where the pollution is coming from." When you shift to all-electric vehicles, you are effectively moving millions of diffuse points of pollution (tailpipes) into a few source locations (power plants). The advantages of this are enormous. With electric vehicles there is no need to worry about the emissions from individual vehicles (that means the emissions testing industry dies), all you need to worry about are the power plants. If the policy makers decide we need better air quality, we just need to fit the power plants with better scrubbers, or carbon sequestering equipment. If there is a development in fuel-to-electricity efficiency only the power plants need to implement it, and the benefits are immediately passed on to the electric car drivers. This is to say that you don't have to retrofit millions upon millions of vehicles with a new technology every time the emission or efficiency standards change. All of this is of course very inconvenient for car manufacturers, the car service industry, and the oil industry in the U.S. and abroad. No wonder the EV1 went the way it did.
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Seriously, I would rather have one in my backyard than live anywhere near a coal fired plant that emits polution, particulates, mercury and... radiation!
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The above is correct. But there are two other factors
(1) In the US only about 1/2 of our electric power is from burning fuels like coal. But even coal, as bad as it is, it is not imported. We expect this trend to improve as other
Electric cars 25 years ago (Score:2)
Tangent (Score:2)
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:4, Informative)
In a crash: they will bend, not break.
How often does a car catch file after a crash? Only very rarely.
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Wasn't that the point of him saying "How safe is that tank ..." ?
Anyway - any technology that stores a lot of energy is going to have some potential (ha ha) for danger. There haven't been that many problems with LiIon batteries when you take into account the number of batteries that exist in the world.
With that said, there's this problem of obtaining lithium which isn't nearly as abundant as nickel. I still like NiMH batteries for EVs, and I'm sure they will give lithium a run for the money (if not for w
Texaco owns the patent! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Considering that the lithium used will eventually be recycled, I don't expect lithium availability to be a major long term bottleneck.
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong. Everyone knows that cars always explode after a crash. Sometimes, though, the explosion happens after the driver and occupants escape to a safe distance.
I've seen it myself hundreds of times, both on TV and in movies.
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I just wish they'd stop making them so that they immediately burst into flames as soon as they come to rest upside down.
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Granted, that's from the opinion of a commuter and occasional traveler - I'm not with Fire and Rescue or anything like that.
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How often do you hear about cars blowing up in a car crash? I mean aside from Hollywood-style movies.
Leaking gasoline my incinerate and burn, but it won't detonate on impact or when getting wet.
Two things I'm not 100% sure about when it comes to Lithium-Ion.
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Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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My wife 'gets it' and isn't afraid to ride with me. Mom's still not comfortable with the whole car-without-a-body-zipping-along-at-70MPH thing.
No, this isn't true (Score:2)
The "fuel" in a battery contains both oxidiser and reducer, exactly like an explosive, and can catch fi
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Rolling Timebombs? (Score:4, Informative)
They are also made from relatively cheap and plentiful raw materials, so I'd expect them to become the most frequently used batteries in electric cars.
Right... (Score:2)
That is when we will see the exploding cars...
Disclaimer: I am *for* the electric/hybrid car, I drive one myself
I doubt it... (Score:2)
At that point, making fake "LiFePo" batteries from old technology will actually be more expensive than real LiFePo. Scammers might still sell you second-rate batteries that don't last long, but the risk of them exploding under your butt will be greatly reduced.
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Re:Why now? (Score:4, Funny)
Or, with an analogy, how will new computers hold up vs the current computers? If something was wrong with the current computers, you would think they should have built the new ones to start with.
(I do realize I'll be hanged for making an analogy without cars in it on Slashdot. But the argument is already about cars! Adding more cars into the analogy would probably cause a pile-up crash or something.)
Recursion! (Score:3, Funny)
It would be even better if you could say that analogy with a LISP.
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I hope your right (Score:2)
1) There needs to be a real change in battery/capacitor technology. Batteries are slow charging, and composed of hazardous materials. They are also heavy and inefficient. They also generate a lot of heat. Exploding laptops come to min
Re:Great News for the Coal Industry (Score:4, Funny)
That's why I recommend a wind generator be installed on every car. That way you can charge as you drive. Ever hang your hand out the car window and think "Wow, if I could just harness this power, I'd be rich!"
-matthew
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However, there's a bunch of caveats there.
1) It depends on the range being what Tesla says it is, in the production model.
2) It depends on new
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Live the dream: (Score:2)
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