New EV Batteries are Making Electric Cars Cheaper and Safer (msn.com) 52
The Washington Post looks at a new kind of battery that "could make American EVs cheaper and safer, experts say."
If you bought an EV with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, you could expect lower car payments, less fire risk and more years of use out of your car — but you wouldn't be able to go as far on a single charge as you could with the nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries commonly found in American and European electric cars. That trade-off has made LFP batteries the go-to choice for standard-range EVs in China, helping to make electric cars more affordable and limit pollution. Now, American companies are starting to build their own LFP batteries to catch up to their Chinese rivals... But there are plenty of barriers for U.S. companies that want to adopt a technology dominated by Chinese firms. Tariffs and tax credit restrictions have made it too expensive for most American automakers to import LFP batteries from China, and national security concerns have made it hard for American companies to partner with Chinese battery makers to build factories in the United States...
Although American scientists invented LFP batteries in 1997, U.S. automakers didn't invest in the technology. Instead, they bet on NMC batteries because they have longer range, a big concern for American EV buyers. "Everyone in the West thought LFP was a nonstarter five or six years ago," said Adrian Yao, who founded STEER, a technology research group within Stanford University. "We really did have a myopic focus on" range, he added. That left the door open for Chinese companies to perfect LFP batteries, which have a few advantages. Instead of pricey nickel and cobalt, they use iron, which makes them 20 percent cheaper than NMC batteries, according to the International Energy Agency. While NMC batteries can be recharged up to about 1,000 times before they go kaput — which is enough to put 200,000 miles on most EVs — LFP batteries can last two or three times as long, according to Moura. Plus, LFP batteries' chemistry makes them less likely to catch fire and easier to extinguish. An NMC battery, on the other hand, is so flammable that "you could put it underwater or in space, and it'll keep burning because the oxygen it needs to keep the flame going is embedded within itself," Moura said.
That safety advantage is key, because Chinese firms figured out they could pack LFP cells closer together inside a battery pack without risking a fire. That meant they could cram more energy into LFP batteries and nearly catch up to the range of NMC batteries. Last year, the Chinese battery giant CATL made the first LFP battery with more than 600 miles of range. Since LFP batteries are made from common materials and last longer, they also have a smaller environmental footprint than NMC batteries.
Ford used LFP batteries in its Mach-E sedan (2023) and F-150 Lightning pickup trucks (2024), according to the article, "while Rivian began using them in the basic trims of its R1S SUV and R1T pickup truck this year... American LFP factories are slated to open this year in St. Louis and next year in Arizona." And an environmental engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley predicts LFP battery factories in the U.S. will "grow quite rapidly over the next five to 10 years."
Although American scientists invented LFP batteries in 1997, U.S. automakers didn't invest in the technology. Instead, they bet on NMC batteries because they have longer range, a big concern for American EV buyers. "Everyone in the West thought LFP was a nonstarter five or six years ago," said Adrian Yao, who founded STEER, a technology research group within Stanford University. "We really did have a myopic focus on" range, he added. That left the door open for Chinese companies to perfect LFP batteries, which have a few advantages. Instead of pricey nickel and cobalt, they use iron, which makes them 20 percent cheaper than NMC batteries, according to the International Energy Agency. While NMC batteries can be recharged up to about 1,000 times before they go kaput — which is enough to put 200,000 miles on most EVs — LFP batteries can last two or three times as long, according to Moura. Plus, LFP batteries' chemistry makes them less likely to catch fire and easier to extinguish. An NMC battery, on the other hand, is so flammable that "you could put it underwater or in space, and it'll keep burning because the oxygen it needs to keep the flame going is embedded within itself," Moura said.
That safety advantage is key, because Chinese firms figured out they could pack LFP cells closer together inside a battery pack without risking a fire. That meant they could cram more energy into LFP batteries and nearly catch up to the range of NMC batteries. Last year, the Chinese battery giant CATL made the first LFP battery with more than 600 miles of range. Since LFP batteries are made from common materials and last longer, they also have a smaller environmental footprint than NMC batteries.
Ford used LFP batteries in its Mach-E sedan (2023) and F-150 Lightning pickup trucks (2024), according to the article, "while Rivian began using them in the basic trims of its R1S SUV and R1T pickup truck this year... American LFP factories are slated to open this year in St. Louis and next year in Arizona." And an environmental engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley predicts LFP battery factories in the U.S. will "grow quite rapidly over the next five to 10 years."
How far would a semi-rig... (Score:1)
...connected to a trailer packed full of batteries could go?
Re:How far would a semi-rig... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's actually an interesting question and I don't know why you felt the need to post as AC to ask it.
With rockets trying to reach orbit, there's something called the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation. As you want to lift more mass you need exponentially more rocket and more fuel because you have to take the entire journey's worth of rocket with you (though rocket stages reduce this problem to make launching from Earth practical up to a certain mass). You have to lift all the new rocket and fuel and THAT needs more rocket too. At some point you're adding rocket and your performance gets worse, not better.
The same would apply to a long distance EV that couldn't recharge. The further you go, the more battery you need, and the more battery you have the more charge you need to move it. Eventually you'd have a vehicle too heavy to even get started rolling. In more practical terms, if you were trying to carry a coast-to-coast load across Canada or the US, if it's possible at all, I'd bet your effective cargo capacity would make it useless anyway.
It'd still be fascinating to see someone do the math and graph the results.
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The equivalent calculation would be based on steepest hill gradient. The very same problem that freight trains on the railways are bound by.
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While that's a good point, I only deal in spherical cows when discussing theoreticals.
Hills vary based on route, it introduces too many variables and eventually you're talking about what might as well be an infinite number of possible answers (though you could limit to best, worst, and average case).
Steepest hill gradient (Score:3)
Steepest hill gradient - that sounds like a calculation that wouldn't be figuring out range, but total power required. Would that be correct?
By all reports, EV semis are beasts power wise - more efficient motors tend to be bigger and more powerful. So Semis end up with beastly sized motors, very efficient, but also powerful enough to haul them over hills easily.
Then there's regenerative braking when going downhill, so hills wouldn't cost as much in mileage as it would a diesel semi, I'd think.
For range th
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It'd still be fascinating to see someone do the math and graph the results.
Engineering Explained on Youtube does as far as I can tell a lot of the math in this video for the Tesla Semi and he does a good job of not making it extremely boring and it covers most of the EV range/weight math in general.
Does The Tesla Semi Make Any Sense? [youtube.com]
Re:How far would a semi-rig... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, we know that a semi-rig can have 500 miles of range with current batteries, the Tesla Semi. Doing some looking, it's currently the longest ranged listed.
It has a 850kWh battery, and can haul 37k kg (82k DOT limit in pounds). They have shown that it can get a real world 500 miles from that, 1.7 kWh/mile, while hauling a full DOT weight compliant load. .186 kWh/kg.
Looking around, 22kg would be closer to the extra batteries we could carry once we deduct the weight of the truck and a trailer for the batteries.
That 850kWh battery pack should weigh around 4570 kg. [torquenews.com]
That's
That means that we could stuff another 4k kWh in the trailer.
That would be 2,353 miles off the trailer, 2853 once you add the integral battery pack.
With a little luck, that's enough to get you from coast to coast in the USA, like Charleston, SC to LA. Mind you, zero cargo otherwise.
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unless we have autonomous vehicles there's no reason to make anything that could drive much further than the driver is permitted to travel without a rest break during which the batteries could be recharged.
Driving teams are a thing, particularly for perishable goods. One person sleeps in the sleeper while the other person drives. Some of them have toilets and kitchenettes, you really only need to stop for fuel. There are still rules about rest breaks but cross country non-stop is totally a thing.
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From what I understand, despite the advantages, most trucking on the road is NOT done by team driving, so it can be addressed later. However, I wasn't able to find any statistics on how common it is.
But there's a solution available for high-speed cargo available too: Simply swap tractors. Takes 15-20 minutes, done right by experienced drivers. Then the driver who just dropped the trailer can go charge up while waiting for a load to come in that is going the other way to get back home with. It isn't don
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As for self-driving (in the sense of not needing a safety driver) cars and trucks, I don't think they will be a common thing in my lifetime, but I'm sure the future holds many things I won't be here for.
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Trucking is low margin and complexity will increase costs. Some increases might be tolerated, while some other traffic may move to rail or air freight instead. In any case any increased costs are pretty much entirely borne by the end consumer so best avoid that as much as possible.
One of the other links had an analysis that an EV Semi could save ~$750k in fuel costs over the course of a million miles.
That alone would justify some complexity if companies are willing to pay more for faster delivery.
Then you have that one of the biggest expenses for a semi is the driver, so if you get rid of them, even for just depo to depo routes, well, another cost saver.
For self driving, they're already demoing it in Texas for semis, and there are driverless, as in no safety driver, taxis in SF and a
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One of the other links had an analysis that an EV Semi could save ~$750k in fuel costs over the course of a million miles. That alone would justify some complexity if companies are willing to pay more for faster delivery.
I've said many times if EVs are better (and for many things they are) then they will replace ICEs organically without need of government intervention. That is how it should work.
I'm willing to count Teslas as "common" at this point, because I generally see at least one when I go driving.
Teslas are common here too. Teslas without drivers not so much though. They will become common when people can go to the dealership and buy one. The "self driving" available to consumers now is just glorified cruise control. I suppose if I live to be old and infirm and unable to drive it would be nice to have a car I could just
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Zero people in the truck (Score:2)
On the other hand, a team is still limited to 22 hours/day, a self-driving semi would also only need to stop to refuel. Maybe fully robotic, maybe it pulls up to a charger and a guy pops out to hook up the charger/remove it once fully charged.
That would save a LOT of money on drivers, given that apparently team driving is more than twice as expensive as an individual per mile.
Re:How far would a semi-rig... (Score:5, Insightful)
All good, but one observation: the rocket gets less massive as you use up the fuel. That's not true for an EV. (*)
(*) Well, at least not meaningfully. Einstein would tell us that there's some equivalent mass in the stored electrical energy, but that amount is spectacularly tiny.
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I got closer to 4.6k km when I figured it out.
Looking for differences:
I figured on a bit higher energy - 186 Wh/kg, based off of Tesla numbers, but only 22 tons of batteries (4k kWh vs 5.1k).
The biggest difference is that I used the real-world results of 1.7 kWh/mile, which works out to only 105 kWh per 100 km.
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...connected to a trailer packed full of batteries could go?
African or European?
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...connected to a trailer packed full of batteries could go?
Oddly, the Edison Motors guys haven't really covered that in any of their video's. They're building a hybrid semi, and documenting it all on YouTube. Electric drive, with a battery pack and regenerative breaking, and a large genset in place of the traditional diesel. The regenerative breaking has been mentioned a couple times as particularly good for logging trucks, but no mention of an absolute range, which I'm sure is entire load profile dependent. It apparently is capable of perhaps several hours of
Or, the other explanation is (Score:3)
22 year old USA patents on LFP ran out a couple of years back so it's now okay to freely export LFP tech without a license - Having ignored those patents for national use in the interim.
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The USA patents don't explain why the USA didn't apply some more serious R&D to USA tech.
The reality is a patent license is only as good as its defence. The Chinese started developing LFP tech when the primary patent on it expired in 2017, but two of the other critical patents licensed out by the LiFePO4+C Licensing AG group were simply never contested in China. Additionally the Chinese government has heavily subsidised cathode development for LFP batteries.
Sure China likes ignoring IP rules, but that o
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This is a good explanation, and a good reason to start using the technology.
more /. insights (Score:3, Informative)
'And an environmental engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley predicts LFP battery factories in the U.S. will "grow quite rapidly over the next five to 10 years."/
Really sticking the neck out there. Sure can see how he could become a professor at Berkeley!
I love the pretense about this battery is somehow new or overlooked. It never has been. Furthermore, the technology has improved making it more and more viable. Still, it's adoption in BEVs is based solely on it being cheaper.
Re:more /. insights (Score:5, Insightful)
I love the pretense about this battery is somehow new or overlooked. It never has been. Furthermore, the technology has improved making it more and more viable. Still, it's adoption in BEVs is based solely on it being cheaper.
The "new battery technology" spin is mostly just clickbait. The article is primarily a thinly-veiled political opinion piece about how our current trade policies have resulted in China leapfrogging over us with LiFePO4 battery production technology.
Thing is, we already know this. China has gone all-in on EV tech and in the USA we collectively voted in the last election to keep rollin' coal.
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China has gone all-in on EV tech and in the USA we collectively voted in the last election to keep rollin' coal.
More than that. Based on recent actions from the Puppet in Chief, it appears the US is choosing to actively unmake much of the EV tech work it had previously finished.
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>"The "new battery technology" spin is mostly just clickbait."
Indeed. There is nothing new or interesting in this article.
>"The article is primarily a thinly-veiled political opinion piece about how our current trade policies have resulted in China leapfrogging over us with LiFePO4 battery production technology."
^^^ This. Where "current" means the last several years, minimum.
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>"the USA we collectively voted in the last election to keep rollin' coal."
Or you could choose to reword that as the ability for people to choose the best technology that works for their needs without being punished/shamed/nagged. And to lower the price of energy, which also translates to lower prices of everything.
Has little to nothing do with coal. Unless you are talking about China, who produces most of their electricity with coal and builds more coal plants than the rest of the world. They account
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If this was a straight forward market choice like Betamax vs VHS then yes but this is clean vs dirty toxic pollution so "carrot and stick encouragement" is required for the selfish knuckleheads out there
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Yup, LFP is really "the readily-available tech that we ignored because of a weird obsession with range", typically from people who drive 5km to work and back each day. Friends of mine have LFP EVs and for the very few times they have to go beyond the range of the batteries they stop off for a coffee and danish while the car refills at a charging station. The rest of the time they drive with zero "fuel" costs (they have solar panels), and who knows when the cars will need servicing or have other problems.
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So, Wh/L is not such a simple objective thing in an a
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It's not new, just new to the USA as it was actually overlocked there. There's no pretence here. Just a basic market analysis which shows a major difference in battery tech between Chinese EVs and USA EVs and what was being researched by either of them.
Mainstream news vs cutting edge news (Score:2)
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I love how outdated this mainstream news summation is already.
Not really? Solid-state batteries are going to be the next generation of batteries, but they're at best 3-4 years away from mass production. Realistically, we can expect them to become a factor for cheap EVs only around 2030. Meanwhile, the LFP technology is available right now.
Another interesting technology is sodium-ion batteries. They are even cheaper, so they're really well-suited for energy storage and very cheap EVs.
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For what it's worth (very little) Toyota claims they'll be shipping semi-solid state batteries in production quantities by 2027 and full solid state by 2030 with ranges from ~700 to ~1000.
They've been talking about solid state for many years but it's only recently they drew a line in the sand with real dates that weren't in some mythical future so there's some hope for this one soon.
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Toyota have been giving dates for solid state for about twenty years. They've never once got close. There's a funny article out there which lists all their claims -- can't find it easily or I'd post a link.
Likely not what's hindering EV adoption in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
Battery technology is only part of the equation, you've still gotta get the average American over the idea that buying an EV amounts to settling for a vehicle with a bunch of caveats and compromises. Winter range loss is a very real thing, and the availability of charging infrastructure is still nowhere on par with the availability to refuel an ICE vehicle. You have to be a lot more aware of your vehicle's charge level and can't just coast into the next exit on fumes, assuming there'll always be a place to fill up. Then you've got residential dwellings where there's simply no availability to charge an EV, such as apartment buildings and condos. For some folks, that aspect alone is always going to make EV ownership a tough sale.
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Winter range loss is a very real thing
Winter range loss is irrelevant for basically 90% of the country. And the few people who do live in the actual cold parts of America will be mildly inconvenienced at best. It's just not an issue as evidence by the fact that Canada (a country for whom the winter range loss is actually relevant for 90% of the population) has a higher EV market share than the USA.
and the availability of charging infrastructure is still nowhere on par with the availability to refuel an ICE vehicle
Availability of EV charging infrastructure is far better than for gasoline engines. Virtually no one can refuel a gasoline vehicle at home. Virtually
Go to an RV show... (Score:3)
If you go to an RV show, you'll find things have changed significantly in the RV world. They're all switching to 12v LiFePO4 battery banks in the 200 - 300 AH range, dropping 120 - 400+ watts of solar panels on the roof, or at least pre-wiring for it. And they're getting rid of the ammonia absorption refrigerators in favor of residential freon units with door locks.
There's a reason they haven't gone that way before. The risk of Li-ION batteries in a mobile house situation was too great. The LiFePO4 batteries are safe enough for their lawyers...
T
SUV (Score:2)
>"Ford used LFP batteries in its Mach-E sedan (2023)"
The Mach-E is not a sedan. It is an SUV. Ford even says so:
https://www.ford.com/suvs/mach... [ford.com]
Ford now only makes a single sedan, the Mustang. Everything else are SUV's, trucks, and vans.
Tariffs == jerbs? (Score:2)
New factories in St. Louis and Arizona? Weird. I thought tariffs couldn't do that, and the silly trumpanzees that believe they might were dupes, listening to a fool. I suppose I thought that because every mention of tariffs is instantly met by a phalanx of "expert" economists and policy wonks professing metaphysical certitude that tariffs are a pure evil, incapable of leading to the slightest bit of US reindustrialization, or any other conceivable benefits.