I’m still of the suspicion that the fast charging is detrimental to the life of the battery. In that sense, they are now designing a car/battery without longevity of the hardware in mind. This is wasteful. People need to learn patience and planning. If you want to road trip with an EV, well you best plan your trip well and sleep over.
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This is really shitt journalism at the best by a writer that is clearly both ignorent and incompetent.
4C - 15min… What capacity would this be, what charge voltage etc… 
Clouwnworld
ChiefclownGroetnis
Sometimes when one speaks to the masses, you don’t give “maths”. They don’t care.
If I want to nitpick … 248 miles after 10 minutes charge at 4C … What weight of the vehicle? Flat or mountain roads? And THE most important one … driving at what speed? With aircon/heater on, or not?
The core “message;”, there may be a batt out there, that they can maybe do 4C charging …
Will only really see once it is in production and sold to the masses … when we have eyes on the accompanying T&C’s.
Baby, bathwater …
Well this will probably not be for the masses locally but for example in China, where electric vehicles are used for most taxis, this will be a hit.
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It is… but not as much as it used to be, because cars now have active cooling on the pack. They can cool the pack to prevent it from deteriorating too much.
Still, in a few years, I’m willing to bet the proverbial granny car that was only ever charged at home… will be significantly more sought after than the one that constantly did long trips and fast charges. Even now, owners of the i3 report that frequent fast charging does degrade the battery more. At least, the Kwh estimate from the BMS is affected more by it.
Great Scott on youtube is running such an experiment on cellphone batteries. However, no active cooling, so there’s that.
(It looks click-baity, but that seems to be the current trend. I really like his stuff.)
Cooling is tricky though. Can you really cool the heat generated at the cell level or do you have to wait until it reaches the chassis? In which case you cool the chassis and then some cells will inevitably be hotter/colder than others… Similar issues you run in with computers. The average temp of the CPU tells you little of the hottest spot on it, especially if you heat it up fast, and that is likely where your failure will be eventually.
So I’m sure it is better than without active cooling, but I also agree that you’d be better off buying the granny’s i3 that charged slowly, and was discharged slowly, than buying the 30 year-old hedge fund manager’s that was doing the aforementioned at much higher rates.
Yes, and then “they” say clamp the batts … so you have all the casings pressed tight over the entire bank, one big “heatsink”, and then you cool the bottom, sides, and top only.
Versus not compressed, spaces between the cells, so no heat transfer between the casings.
EDIT: On a moving battery, yeah, the cells have to be non-moveable, or the busbars need to be flexible, or one can cause more drama.
Aaargh … my head hurts.
Good news on the taxi front – for a change
Julia Evans reported here about a South African first. Transport boffins at Stellenbosch University have built South Africa’s first electric mini-bus taxi, with partners including Oxford University. This article from partner GroundUp explains how important taxis are as transport for workers in the Western Cape, to understand what a game-changer this could be. Taxis transport 15-million commuters a day and while that raises questions about how passenger rail has been decimated, the first electric-powered taxi is a good news story. One of the ways to ensure renewables move from being an elite solution towards a mass solution.
Damn, clever … as per Julia Evans reporting: SA’s first electric taxi is ‘a stepping stone’ for lagging EV industry
Imagine the first mass EV’s is taxis, and public busses in SA.
Man, that would be so cool.
Read this again … remember I said I want to have a diesel/electric … that I asked why not convert existing cars to EV’s? That a Co in France does it already …
This makes so much more sense:
One day, I’m gonna win the lottery and have my “Diesel/Electric”. Watch me.
Bugger … post it here as it has a direct bearing on EV’s in due course, maybe.
Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc&ab_channel=SustainableMineralsInstituteUQ
Minerals to be discovered as well as new Oil/Gas deposits. Funny thing is the scarcer the commodity, the higher the price, so previously not viable deposits can now be mined. Also, we as a people, can go back to more primitive energy sources, like candles in SA, the new improved and more reliable source than Eksdom…
This narrow view people always take is a letdown, new things can be discovered and breakthroughs achieved. There is also Nuclear.
EnergiekeGroetnis
Exactly, as they say : necessity is the mother of innovation
I burst out laughing …
The reporter did say in the full article:
Reminded me of:
Ja whenver that word consensus appears……
But whatever, we can produce fuels from another renewable sources like biomass, being veggie oils and other things like corn and potatoes or wheat, things like diesel and alcohols…. So there is that.
DronkwordGroetnis
They do make an effort to cool between the cells. Tesla’s pack has water lines running between the cells to cool them.
There is also this article of Dutch students doing the same thing.
Does mean more complex, with bigger chance of leaks.
The new system in the model Y, where the heat pump can move energy between any two places… makes a lot of sense though.
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That youtoob vid the guy produced, still Swiss cheese. Take the 4 week claim for battery storage capacity we need to survive winter, BS. Conveniently not mentioning the grid here. About a week should be ok, together with other existing sources like hydro/nuclear/gas/wind/sodium and other parts of the grid where it may not be snowing/raining/overcast may well be enough. So even here the numbers are not solid, in the least.
Groetnis
One topic I am in agreement with, the overall viewpoint that is, we ain’t gonna replace fossil fuels anytime soon, and not by 2050 nor 2150…
DisndroomGroetnis
Toyota, the world’s biggest carmaker, halted operations at 12 of its 14 factories in Japan due to a system failure. The company is investigating the issue, but said it was unlikely to have been caused by a cyber-attack. Last year, when Toyota was forced to shut its Japanese plants for a day, it lost the output of 13,000 cars.
PS: I wonder how many of those cars are EVs/hybrids…
Hybrids maybe, EV’s by Toyota are so few I expect them to be almost 0 that were not made…
GroenGroetnis
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