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Samsung’s 20-year-life EV battery runs 600 miles on 9-minute charge
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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I posted about this a week ago. The battery pack will likely be around 150kWh (Nio has a solid state battery car that will be produced that can do 577 miles on a 150kWh battery). The 9 minute charge is from 8-80% (according to the marketing material I dug up) so it is 432 miles of charge in 9 minutes. Considering fast charge costs like $0.50/kWh currently, I'm guessing most people will not be charging up that entire portion unless they are planning on driving for a long fucking time...after they have already been driving for 9-10 hours.
But that charge rate would have to come from a charger that can output much higher than current ones. The highest output you are likely to find is 350kW which would take 18 minutes to charge that 108kWh. So while this battery can charge that fast, you are not likely to be able to find a charger with that high of output for a few years. Still great to be able to get a couple hundred miles of range in 9 minutes. Solid state batteries supposedly have a quicker ramp up period and can take the full output for a higher percentage of the battery.
Your math checks out.
Charging a 600 mi battery in 9 minutes would require a charging station that can output somewhere north of 1.2 MW.
We need major upgrades to the electrical grid as well as doubling our electricity generation capacity for charging stations and vehicles like that to be common place.
Honestly, we do that. Almost every year we drive for 13-14 hours to visit my parents, which is something like 900 miles. We usually do 300-400 miles then refill gas and grab some fast food. We usually stop twice on this trip, sometimes three times if someone has an emergency. We also do some shorter 600 mile+ trips as well (in-laws and sibling are just over 600 miles away), and frequently drive ~200 miles, so we usually have 1-2 road trips each year.
Current EVs that get something like 200-250 miles per change would require at least four stops, and 30min or so per stop, which would add at least 2 hours to the trip. That turns a one-day drive into a two-day drive, and probably three days if charging stations aren't readily available. For the shorter trips (just over 600 miles), we'd still need to recharge at least twice, which adds more than an hour to the trip.
So I'm absolutely interested in this kind of range. I don't need 600 miles, but 400-500 would be good. Until they're affordable, we're sticking to our ICE family car, though we're planning to exchange our hybrid commuter for an EV.
That's a long day in the car, too much for me. Any road trip over about 350 miles gets me pretty exhausted and sick of being in the car. So I'd be OK with a 300 mile range and stopping overnight at a hotel with a charger nearby for trips like that.
I grew up with it. Almost every year we'd drive 800-900 miles to visit family, and almost always in one day. We've done it in two before, but honestly it's more of a pain to get everything unloaded and get the kids to actually sleep in the hotel that we just drive all the way through. We arrive exhausted, but it's one long day instead of two.
That is the case for some people but cases like that are pretty rare. There is no way I could do a drive like that. Current EVs are fine for the vast majority of people but there is the rare family that makes 900 mile trips once our twice a year. For those instances like yours, I'd suggest renting an ICE one or twice a year if you wanted to switch to an EV for your larger vehicle or get a plug in hybrid.
Definitely swap out that commuter car. A used Bolt is pretty darn cheap. I did some math and replacing our Prius C with one would save $1200/year in gas costs. And then there are oil change costs that you save and a few others.
Yeah, I've been looking at them, and it's something like $13k, which is definitely in the reasonable range of prices, especially since I can probably get $5k for my current car.
However, I'm worried about battery issues. People claim it's fixed, but I'll be parking mine in my garage and there's a lot of flammable stuff in there. So I'm a little hesitant. I don't need to ever fast charge it since I only drive like 200 miles per week (and never more than 100 miles in a day, usually like 50), so trickle charging should be totally fine. If I can confirm that, I might just do the swap. Or maybe I'll get a Leaf, which is in a similar price range used.
Our gas and electricity costs are pretty low ($3.50/gal and $0.12-0.13/kWh), so even at $13k, the Bolt would still need ~10 years to pay back for itself (and that's not counting the opportunity cost of investing that money). I'm still tempted based purely on the convenience factor (never needing to go to a gas station again), but it's not a slam dunk yet. If the car dies, I'll certainly replace the commuter with an EV though, I would just rather avoid the hassle of listing and selling my current car.
From a purely climate perspective, it's probably better for me to replace our family car. We get ~20mpg, and hybrids would get 30-40mpg, and a plug-in would get emissions-free for most of our around-town trips. That car is only used for very short trips (<20 miles) or long trips (>200 miles), with almost nothing in-between. But those cars are super expensive right now, so I'm watching the used market to see if I can score a deal.
If you will EVER need to fast charge then the leaf is going to be more annoying because it has CHADeMO and not CCS
Get the bolt unless you're certain that'll never be a problem even once, it's seriously not worth it anymore
Source: longtime happy leaf owner who hates CHADeMO as it cannot be easily converted to CCS like NACS can
I can't think of a reason I ever would, it's going to charge in my garage 100% of the time, with the only exception being if my company installs charging stations. But they're about the same price used, so maybe I'll just go for the Bolt. I just need to do a bit more research to see if the battery issues happen when doing level 1 charging, since that's what I intend to do in my garage.
I would advise against a Leaf, especially used. Nissan was great at getting a popular, cheap EV out the door but they have completely stagnated since then. The Leaf's big issue is that the battery is air cooled. That's fine if you live in Hawai'i where the temperature is in the 70s year round but places that experience heat will see a severe degradation in range relatively quickly. It's not unheard of fire a 10 year old Leaf to only get maybe a dozen miles of range. There is also the fact that it uses CHAdeMO instead of CCS for fast charge. They have finally started to make adapters but they are $1000 and are not officially supported.
If you are indeed worried about a Bolt battery, you could always park it outside. There is not a catalytic converter for thieves to rip off so being out of a garage is not a big issue in that regard.
I would agree that switching will likely not make a ton of sense for you. Thankfully in my state, they offer a rebate for EVs on top of the federal credit so a used EV for us would pay for itself in about 5 years.
I'm not worried about theft at all. My neighborhood is really boring and my city has one of the lowest crime rates in the area, with most of the crime happening on the other side of the city. It could happen, but I doubt it.
The bigger reason for the garage is climate control. It gets pretty cold in the winter (5-15F is common), and the non-insulated garage generally keeps it above freezing. That should help with the battery, as well as avoids having to scrape the windshield.
Yeah, if we had that, I'd probably jump on it. But there's a bigger chance that my vehicle registration tax will increase to offset the lack of gas tax than a rebate happening.
Another issue is that a lot of our energy comes from coal, so switching to an EV wouldn't be a a dramatic as other areas in terms of carbon footprint. I'm considering getting solar (about a 10-year payback period if I DIY), but I'll need to also replace the roof when I do, so I'm putting that off as well.
Anyway, I want an EV, but as you said, it probably doesn't make sense for me. But I do like the idea of never having to refill my commuter, which I currently need to do almost every week.
You know, with charge times like that I wonder if roadside attractions will become more popular again.
Maybe I should start on the next worlds largest rubber band ball now.
Well most people are not needing to add over 400 miles when they charge up. That might be the case once a year for occasional families but most will be looking to add half that which is not much more time than it takes to fill up with gas. It might cause charging stations to offer more amenities. Or maybe the government could get off its ass and make it okay to put them in at rest stops, there wouldn't be much of a problem at all.
Does fast charging reduce the lifespan of a battery like this? The headline is bothersome because my suspicion is it won't last 20 years if you fast charge all of the time and whatnot. I realize that's not a typical case but it's good to understand the trade-offs.
The chemistry is substantially different, so we'll probably have to wait until scientists run some tests to get a more precise set of parameters that affect degradation. I expect failure modes like dendrites are basically impossible with solid-state, but electrode cracking is still possible. There might even be new and exciting ways they can degrade! Regardless, this is still great news.
Engineering Explained has a good summary: https://youtu.be/w4lvDGtfI9U (Piped link: https://piped.video/watch?v=w4lvDGtfI9U)
There are already some charging stations in Germany offering 400kW. Still 16 minutes though. 800kW is just insane. CCS is currently capped at 500kW, so you would need MCS which is planned for trucks.
If you do the math, the common standard plugs simply can't do the charging rates that would be required here. You'd need a whole new plug design on top of all new chargers.
It's also silly and unnecessary. We should focus on getting more chargers out there, not chasing a fast charge time goal. If you plan your route out a bit, 20-30 minute charge times every 2-4 hours are fine for the vast majority of people.
https://wumpus-cave.net/post/2024/03/2024-03-30-ten-minute-ev-charging-wont-happen/index.html
According to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_62196 the standard was updated in 2022 to support up to 1500V and 800A. If this can be achieved simultaneously it would be 1.2MW.
Whether it is necessary or realistic is another thing, but seems to be achievable without even changing the plug.
Fucking hell, imagine the requirement of a couple of megawatt substation for fast charging, urban power planners must be shitting themselves.
Replace the gas stations with that stuff and have a charging network distributed around parking areas.
Urban probably isn’t too bad, if it’s a proper city they already have power for the infrastructure of subways, lighting, and large buildings.
Where it’s going to be tough is putting these in the ‘burbs or the large areas of mostly vacant interstate. There’s just no infrastructure for them to build off of, and EV charging infrastructure is already one of the issues holding people back from more widely adopting them.
Many rural areas honestly would not be too bad since power plants are usually out there. Those generally tend to have pretty decent power infrastructure. It might be different in other states though. Here in Washington dams and wind farms tend to be pretty far out of town.
That’s fine if you’re lucky enough to have a power plant nearby, but they aren’t exactly evenly scattered about for the benefit of building EV charging infrastructure.
lol, I am picturing buried thorium salt reactors at charging stations in the boonies.
Yeah, just the random added load equivalent to 80-100 houses per car, any time between 5am and 9pm would be enough to send local suburban grids into a spin, especially in summer evenings when there's peak loading already underway. A lot of infrastructure would need to be beefed up to make it reliable.
We have an EV that charges on 110v current. It’s not fast, but plugged in the previous evening it will be ready to go by morning. Not a huge draw on the grid off household current. Obviously, just like you point out, more EV will increase demand…but charging off 110v overnight isn’t going to be as demanding as a “gas station” for EV that all want fast charge for people that maybe don’t have charging access otherwise.
I imagine there would have to be some sort of organized system to pick charging time slots via the local electricity provider in order to keep the grid stable. EV owners could certainly get an electrical timer or via the EV manufacturer app to set a charging time.
Yeah if you've got home charging it's not a real issue. We use 240v here in Aus so you can pull quite a bit out of domestic outlets before having to get serious and generally overnight charging to top up the day's commute would be fine.
So it wouldn't be a fast charger on every street, and you could always enforce limits by time of use pricing to put a dampener on peak loads.
I just wonder if utility planners might get caught with their pants down on this one. Like, could you say 5 years ago chargers might run to 800kW?
I’d say grid planners everywhere are under serious strain. The demands for air conditioning in public and private spaces are getting higher, the number of household electronics is climbing along with data centers constantly consuming ever more amounts of electricity…now we add EV charging to the mix.
Yeah, I’d say they haven’t been able to keep up.
I think in some years it's considered a common requirement. Just compare it to pipelines. Electricity is way more easily transported and still we built tens of thousands of [preferred unit for distance measurement] of tubes on to the landscape.