- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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‘252 km (157 miles) range’ to save others the same skimming I did
I’ve found people vastly overstated how much range they need. 99% of usage is in the city between home and somewhere else. 250km is perfect if the price is right.
For daily use, sure - but it completely excludes itself as an option for road trips in the US and parts of Canada. There’s a stretch of interstate road near me with nearly a 100 mile gap between service stations.
I know that this isn’t the purpose of this battery, but it’s a valid reason why a lot of people might be hesitant to buy one. Many people can’t afford multiple vehicles for different purposes. You have the car you drive to work with, and if you happen to go on a trip you just use the same thing.
Maybe 99% of use occurs within constraints that this battery can handle, but if you can only afford one vehicle, then this is still a pretty suboptimal option. That being said… it could still be cheap enough to not matter. I didn’t see any mention of price in that article.
If 99% is covered by this then cover your last 1% by renting a vehicle has that ever occurred to you ?
I agree with your logic. It makes perfect sense to rent a vehicle for edge cases.
However, I disagree that you’re going to encourage mass adoption by asking people to change their lifestyle. A large amount of the US population views their vehicle as more than a tool to get to and from work. It’s an extension of their personality. Road trips might be part of that personality.
They’re sold on the marketing ideals of luxury, comfort, or adventure. They buy accessories for these vehicles like roof-racks for their luggage or campers/trailers to help them travel across the country while keeping that comfort of home. Tens of thousands of campers are still sold in the U.S. every year and EV’s are a nonstarter for towing more than 75 miles.
No one enjoys renting an unfamiliar Honda CR-V where the seat doesn’t feel quite right for long periods of time, there’s something sticky on the shift handle, the previous driver smoked in it, and you hear a plastic creaking sound coming from the back seat. You can’t quite figure out from where and it’s driving you insane.
Until EV’s can match the convenience and capability of ICE vehicles, adoption is going to be limited.
If we can’t convince people that we need to change habits then we are doomed anyway, switching to BE cars is not a viable solution we need to increase public transportation and cycling anyway
average american has two vehicles. Its literally not even a lifestyle change: one EV, one hybrid or gas vehicle will cover 100% of normal use cases. EVs have lower maintenance costs and longer predicted life spans and don’t waste as much energy in stop and go traffic. They are superior commuter vehicles.
The problem is vehicle fleets. Trucks and busses will be hard to replace effectively and they mostly need longer discharge cycles and ranges.
A solution to this would be an extra expansion battery that you could buy or rent as an add-on only when needed.
…or rent a vehicle with the fuel savings from driving your EV most of the year, and skip putting a couple thousand km on your car over a long weekend.
This is what I do.
If we’re going all in with expansion packs we should add a rumble pack as well 😏
or don’t buy city car for intercity trips. Get li-ion powered cars or wait for them to make model with bigger range.
Just use Communauto for those once a quarter out of town trips.
It seems to me that car in the article is relatively small city car. I can imagine that building bigger car with inter city travels in mind would also include an improved range.
Most of the pollution problem is in cities with lots of vehicles. EVs dont do as much for their purpose at the hindredth meridian where the great plains begin…driving down a cordoroy road, weeds standing shoulder-high
Exactly. We have two cars, and we only need one to have any kind of range. The other is fine with 250km/150mi range, but it needs to be relatively inexpensive to buy and repair. It’ll just be for a daily commute and around-town driving, no expectation for long-distance.
It doesn’t need space for people or stuff, just 2-4 passengers is plenty. It’ll strictly be for commutes and small trips to the grocery store and whatnot, the other car can be used for larger trips.
That’s not bad if the price is right.
I’d be willing to buy one for ~$5-8k.
5-8k for a car in this day and age? That’s the price of a scooter
Lmao $5k for a brand new car. You’re dreaming mate
Who ever said brand new?
Might want to brush up on your reading comprehension, ‘mate’.
It’s a post about a new vehicle, when you talk about “buying one” it’s clearly inferred you’re buying from the factory.
Also, there’s no need to be a complete dick. It’s not a good look for you
No, it’s not inferred at all. The vast majority of people buying cars buy them used.
You’re just desperate to justify your assumption.
I’d pay $15-20, depending on how well it worked.
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Lol
Perfectly usable for urban travel in Chinese cities
And recharging times?
Hold up, they solved the energy sink issue with the salt batteries? That’s wicked. There were physicists arguing with each other that the power you put in couldn’t be gotten back out.
That is the case with every energy storage though in some cases it’s more pronounced.
We’ve only got a stated range out of this (252km/157mi) but there are a lot of factors where this could do well. Sodium batteries should be cheaper, so it’d be great if that translated to the final sale price. Depending on charge times and where you live, this could be a perfectly practical vehicle. If it doesn’t degrade like lithium batteries, then that’d be even better. Might make for a great secondary vehicle (or everyday driver, depending).
I’m expecting to see dual battery EVs in the not too distant future. A Sodium battery for the primary that gets the most charges and discharges which can be easy and cheaper to replace. Beside that a Lithium battery which would only be drawn from after the Sodium battery was exhausted. This way if you’re doing shallow discharges for your “around town” driving then charging at night, and deep discharges for longer road trips where the energy density of Lithium shines.
Lithium batteries dont like being stored fully charged they will degrade over time.
So only charge it to 80% and pretend 80% is 100%, like iPhones do. Why is that a concern?
Or you could just use all of the space for a sodium battery and fully charge it as it won’t need long term storage in that state.
This is a solved problem. Most EVs won’t let you charge it to the actual 100% level or discharge it to 0.
I’m still dreaming of seeing EVs with flexible battery space, which users can fill according to their needs.
Like a car comes with space for 10x 10 kWh slots.
If 20 kWh serve your usual needs, the other spaces remain empty.
And if you plan longer trips and don’t want to recharge each 100 miles, you put in additional batteries. Those batteries don’t need to be owned, but can be rented.
Ideally there are lots of battery rental stations, where you can get charged batteries and instead of recharging the batteries in the EV, the rent’n’swap stations recharge them.
During (EV) wise low use times, these stations can provide a buffer to the energy grid.
…one can dream…Do not encourage businesses to rent more necessities to us.
You’ll own nothing and be happy happy happyyyyy
Id sooner reenact the french revolution by myself than allow neo feudalism to take full control.
The good news is there’s only 8 of them, the bad news is they have robot dogs with machine guns on their backs
Then buy it. No need to rent it then.
The main focus was on flexible energy packs not on the renting, although I’d find it convenient if done right.You have far more faith in capitalists to do the right thing than I. They’ll put this shit behind user hostile DRM the same that Disney does for drink refills.
Idk about renting, sounds like ass.
A core charge would make more sense, like swapping propane tanks you get a discount for having the empty core with you.
Wpuld you rather purchase an 80 kWh battery, alrhough you need most of the time only 20 kWh or purchase only 20 kWh and rent/swap some batteries when needed?
I’m no talking about renting all battery capacity the whole year, just the extra capacity for the 2-4 weeks in the year when long-distance rides are in the mix.
You know, putting and removing batteries would be a very tedious task and I really doubt that many owners will bother with it.
It wouldn’t be necessary very often unless you’d want to take advantage of swapping instead of reloading.
also it’s not a trivial task to engineer for swapable EV batteries, doing so comes with a whole host of disadvantages / compromises that don’t make sense for most (I guess) consumers right now. It’s not very different from the phone battery issue, except on a huge scale and with much more severe consequences if things go wrong
Yes, you need to make the puncture proof, they are a fire hazard if stored at home, they degrade over time and if left empty long enough might not even work, etc.
The enginnering part is for sure one of the reasons we don’t see that idea in the wild (yet?).
The fire hazard at home and degradation when stored full or empty (speaking of lithion ion based batteries here) go away if you lean on the rental approach.
Wouldn’t it be nice to save investment and weight by using the required amount of battery capacity while still being able to extend the range of your car easily when needed?
I mean, US Cellular had a free battery swap program for a while. If you were a subscriber and your phone battery was low, you could go into any store and they’d swap you out for a fully charged battery for free. I presume they just ate the cost of damaged or degraded batteries as part of it. I only used it a couple times, but it was kinda nice.
Interesting idea. I hadn’t thought of that possibility!
The economics of an undegrading car battery are interesting.
It’s looking like these batteries will allow electric cars to be comparable to an ICE car in terms of price and cheaper to run.
So people will buy them as it makes sense. Then run the car until it falls apart then they will have a very large battery effectively for free. Does that get placed in a new car? Converted into home storage? Grid storage? Cheaply recycled?
252km is 3 days worth of commuting for many people I know. For me personally it is one and hald days of work, moving around in a diesel beast. I would go stupid giddy if I was handed one of these for a daily work driver
That’s a perfect range for me. If it’s relatively cheap and charges reasonably well in the winter, I’ll buy it.
We currently have two cars:
- hybrid sedan - only used for commute (50mi round trip) and around-town trips
- minivan - mostly used for long trips, or when my spouse needs to take the kids somewhere while I’m at work
A lot of my neighbors have a similar setup because either one person doesn’t work or works at home, but they often need to use both cars simultaneously. If it’s priced well, it’ll sell well.
The main problem with existing EVs are that they either have far too little range (e.g. original Leaf w/ 70 miles range), or are way too expensive because they try to get too much range (200+ mile range). That higher range is kind of necessary because of degradation, whereas if the battery were cheaper to replace, more people would be willing to buy something with lower range and replace the battery after a few years.
Question to anyone who might know more: would sodium based batteries be better than lithium ones for the environment, in terms of recycling or disposing of it?
In case they are indeed better, would they be better because it’s better to use less lithium in general (so if you use more sodium based ones, you use less lithium) or would they be also better because their own disposal is “nicer” (as in less toxic) for the environment?
Well, Sodium is the 6th most abundant element on Earth, so there’s a lot more of it and the extraction process is probably far more environmentally friendly.
Since Sodium batteries are so new I don’t think we have data on the toxicity, disposal or recycling avenues yet.
They’re actually old tech. They just could never match lithium.
They’ll shine as standing storage more so than mobile applications. Home storage will benefit greatly from their improvements
If they can get industrial scale it could also allow energy grids to capture excess power instead of wasting it. Could yield massive efficiency increases being able to reclaim some of that loss.
That’s very interesting. If they can be used at home or in cars that don’t require batteries with a very large capacity, then that would be really good to counter the scarcity of lithium (and hopefully, help the environment too)
It was a light bulb moment to me when I realised toxicity is at least somewhat correlated with abundance.
Like lots of metals can be toxic but something like iron is so common you could just throw it on the ground and while certainly not ideal it’s far from a major problem. The environment is very good at dealing with iron.
Interesting! So it would make sense to have tons of sodium batteries for all purposes for which one doesn’t need maybe higher capacity or performance as I understand lithium batteries offer
Instead of thinking “capacity” by itself, thing of “capacity for the given space” or rather “density”. So Sodium batteries can be equal capacity as Lithium, but the equivalent capacity Sodium battery will be significantly larger. In applications like storing overproduced wind or solar electricity for use later, we don’t care how big the battery is. However, it a moving vehicle where every square centimeter and every kg changes the performance of the car, those density differences can have a real impact.
The main idea here is that we won’t run out of raw materials very easily when using stuff that’s relatively cheap and abundant. Well at least the ions are. Who knows what the anode and cathode are made of. Probably the usual materials; otherwise they would have mentioned it. If they still use cobalt in the cathode, you can’t really avoid the ethical questions that come with it.
Producing all the other materials can be rather energy intensive depending on the method used, so it depends. If you buy your metals from a country with hardly any environmental regulation, you can be pretty sure they don’t give a dingo’s kidney as to how many trees are chopped down and how many puppies are thrown in a furnace to get the next shipment of metals delivered.
Also, the electrolyte could be more or less harmful to humans and the environment. As far as the environmental impact is concerned, these batteries probably come with all the usual issues. Currently there just aren’t any perfect solutions commercially available. Regardless, this seems like a step in the right direction IMO.
Any new battery technology news needs to be taken with a grain of salt. They are highly likely over-hyped and the actually realized products will have more problems than the current established tech initially.
Sure. I’m in no rush to replace my car with one of these, but it’s a great thing that this technology is already in production. With these actually going into real cars that people can buy and drive, we’ll get more data so that any serious issues will hopefully be identified and addressed in the next generation.
What kind of salt?
Sodium-ion.
Sooo… It’s a salt truck?
It’s a salt in battery
Volkswagen: Stop hitting yourself… Stop hitting yourself.
But you can’t stop hitting youraelf because Volkswagen has you by the wrists and is usng them to make you hit yourself with your own hands over, and over again.
as much as any other electric vehicle out there
Unfortunately the page is behind the yahoo consent tracker and my DNS resolver by precaution refused to connect.
Where is the sodium coming from?
My diet, probably
Low blood pressure gang unite 🤜
The ocean?
Nope. Mining. Soda ash (sodium carbonate) is one of the best raw materials for these
I hope not, because salt isn’t a renewable resource. And who the hell wants to fight the auto industry for something we need for food?
We had a shortage in Canada… but after looking into it, it appears to have been caused by a labour strike. LOL
Yes, it’s abundant. But it is still a finite resource that needs to be mined/harvested, and what will that look like when the EVs are running off sodium-ion batteries?
Bit better then when we mined coal or lithium since it’s so abundant we don’t have to fck up whole regions for it to get to the little bit here and there. Desalination makes sense, dried death salt lakes also seems logical etc. Salt is everywhere. People are even building artificial “caves” with salt for others to go breath salty air inside.
A lot of desalinization plants just release the salty brine back out to sea, it’s actually an ecological problem, so finding another use for it might convince them to capture and separate that for manufacturing uses.
That would be a really nice idea!
Bro we will need to do desalination plants to supply people with water, there will be more than enough salt and you can’t dump the salt back into the ocean anyway
The ocean could uhhhh use some less salt.
Fresh take.
No. Salt take, make fresh. 😁
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
this is plain stupid. sodium is far far more common in the earth than lithium. if you’re worried about sodium not being renewable, then by that logic you should stop using lithium batteries right now.
Yes, I understand. I already posted that I was under the impression that we have shortages of the stuff, since we had shortages in Canada. But it was due to a labour dispute, and not a lack of resources.
And yes, I think we should reduce our use of lithium batteries, or at least only use recycled lithium.
It comes from stars.
Stars probably
Before clicking I knew it would be Chinese
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These ones look pretty normal to me. I think there are a few options now that look like regular cars. The only difference usually is they don’t have a front grill because they don’t need one.
Yeah, my guess is that it’s the lack of a front grill that makes them look goofy to people. You’ll get used to it.
What are you on about lol, this literally looks like a normal subcompact car.
VW up in production since 2011 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Up
Skoda citigo
https://webapps.skoda-auto.sk/Cenniky-a-katalogy/cenniky/Skoda_Citigo_cennik.pdf
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The Volkswagen Up (stylized as Volkswagen up!) is a city car produced by the Volkswagen Group since 2011. It was unveiled at the 2011 International Motor Show Germany (IAA). Production of the Up started in December 2011 at the Volkswagen Plant in Bratislava, Slovakia. It is part of the part of the New Small Family (NSF) series of models, alongside the SEAT Mii and Škoda Citigo which are rebadged versions of the Up, with slightly different front and rear fascias. The SEAT and Škoda versions were manufactured in the same factory, before being withdrawn from sale in 2021 and 2020 respectively. Production of the Up ended in October 2023. A battery electric version, called E-up, was launched in autumn 2013.
Have a look at the Cupra Born, looks awesome and is a great car. Already 18 months old as a design.
They don’t need a a front opening to the radiator, that might be why you find them strange.
Agreed, just give me Jeep Cherokee/Wagoneer and id be happy. Bonus if it has the same interior and no shitty tracking bs.
