The new CATL Qilin batteries are already producing cars at 140kwh delivering now, capable of 1000km or 621 miles [2]. A Tesla model S long range has 100kwh. This is with a Qilin battery at a density of 255 Wh/kg, but the expected density is 500Wh/kg [1] as they ramp up production and efficiency. This means we should expect around 1000 miles per charge over the next few years. There are other battery technologies on the 5 year horizon that bring another doubling. I would expect this translates into a few things: lighter cheaper cars with less batteries, cars that can travel long distances with faster charges (due to the battery being more depleted and not being charged fully on each charge), and long range trucks - and at the current thresholds electric aviation is practical and economical. Now we just need to create more electric potential!!
> There are other battery technologies on the 5 year horizon that bring another doubling.
I'm curious about these. Are you referring to silicon anodes, or metallic lithium anodes and solid ceramic electrolytes and "improved separators"? (I can't find much about the improvements.)
Or other improvements, say in cathodes, or cell design (say reducing the mass of anode and cathode contacts), packaging or pack design? I thought LG's wireless within-pack BMS comms was a clever way to reduce volume, weight, and copper requirements.
There are lots of incremental improvements possible, but getting from 500 to 1000 Wh/kg is a big ask.
> Now we just need to create more electric potential!!
The less-solved problem is essentially political: building more transmission grid. That involves landowners...
Limited range has been one of the biggest factors keeping EVs out of my hands.
I regularly have to drive a ~400 mile route. Usually a few times a month. In my 9 year old compact SUV, I am able to do that trip with ~1/4 of a tank left, even when it's packed full. I generally do it without stops.
I look forward to the day that EVs can get similar ranges to ICE vehicles. (And more so, truly self-driving cars, so I can do something better during that time! Unfortunately it's a route without any real public transportation and I often have a load.)
I was only a little concerned buying a Tesla Model Y with "300" mile range. I travel between Los Angel And San Diego frequently and there are a good number of charging stations to be sure. But even though the car tells you to keep between 20% and 80% charge, almost cutting the effective mileage in half, the extra stops just aren't that bad. What's true of lithium ion batteries is that the emptier the battery, the significantly faster the charging rate. So I can skip the stop on my route, but usually I just pull over when the percentage gets pretty low for maybe 20 to 30 minutes, and if I start pretty low, I'll easily get 30-40 percent charge increase. It's really not that painful, and at least in California, they put the charging locations near restaurants and coffee shops and malls so I can take a little break on those long trips. Sure, a car with 1000+ mile range sounds great. But driving a car that heavy with batteries sounds unnecessary and nearly all people are making far shorter trips to e.g. the grocery store 10 miles away and the little dinky trickle charger I use at home is more than adequate, I almost never have to do what ICE cars do on a regular basis, stopping at all the dirty gas stations, my car is usually more than charged over night.
When I first started doing it frequently, an extra 20-30 minutes wouldn’t have bothered me much. After doing it so many times so often, it’s become tedious and now I just want to get it done quickly and I am intentional about my fluid intake for the day to avoid stops.
My next vehicle might be a plug-in hybrid, something like the RAV4 Prime. Unless I can cut out the long trips or these long range EVs actually come out.
Very few people can drive 400 miles without stopping to go to the bathroom. A 10 minute bathroom break can add enough charge to let a 300 mile EV go 400 miles.
400 miles is only 5-6 hours (or less) of driving. I’ve done these long-haul routes many, many times with quite a varied set of passengers and there was almost never a bathroom break required. People use the bathroom when we stop for fuel.
You are aware that a single 20-30 minute stop for charging, stretching your legs, etc. with most modestly priced EVs would easily get you there, right? You get a car with e.g. 300 mile range. You top it up midway from 20% to 60-70% in something like half an hour and you arrive with plenty of range left to do whatever. Plug it in at night and drive back the next day. No big deal. The future is now.
You are paying a very steep price for not taking that break. And not just financially. From a road safety point of view; you should consider taking that break in any case. It's the decent thing to do for other people on the road. Stretch your legs, have a coffee, eat some stuff. Anyone driving that kind of distance non stop is going to be tired, unfocused, and generally not a safe driver. Also, it's not great for your body. There are many good reasons to take a break on such a long journey.
I go on a road trip with my better half. Load car in the evening before. Walk up, make coffee, and leave.
Find out last gas station we can make it to.
Stop, I start to fill up. Better half goes to use the restroom.
She comes back, cleans the dead bugs of off the windshield while I go use the restroom.
I come back, she's behind the wheel ready to go.
Total time: ~7 minutes.
You know, current BEVs might not be the right solution for you right now, and that's OK. I love my Model X and wouldn't trade it for the world, however I realize that not everyone in the world has the same set of requirements that I do.
I really do feel that eventually, most of the world will see ICE vehicles for the terrible solution they are, and switch to something better. Just because we've used a technology for a long time doesn't mean its the best we can do.
Currently reasonable driving distances are limited largely by human endurance: you can only drive so far in a single day without needing bathroom breaks, food and eventually sleep, which is when the author of the story recharges their car.
If/when fully self-driving cars ever become practical, there's really nothing stopping the car from driving forever, and that's when fast chargers will again become essential.
What I actually _want_ is a range extended EV: that is
1. Capable of driving ~100km on a charge, with a fully electric drive train
2. A small (~20hp) internal combustion engine + generator able to charge the batteries while driving.
This would allow me to do 95%+ of my trips in full EV mode while keeping the battery quite small, and when I want to go long distance I still can.
Most plug in hybrids are designed with the internal combustion engine as an integral part of the drivetrain which isn't really what I'm after as it means even if you only use the car for short trips you will still sometimes start the engine.
EDIT: I should add to this, the Volt is definitely the closest to what I'm after but it's not available in my country (Australia) and probably never will be.
BMW i3 REx is pretty much exactly as described. It has a 38 hp twin cylinder motorcycle engine which is more than your ideal 20, but even that is known to slowly lose charge while climbing long hills since the engine can't output much power. The engine is not mechanically connected to the wheels.
Interesting oddity of incentives. California's zero emission vehicle rules state that range extended EVs count for more zero emission credit, but to qualify as range extended the gas range can't exceed the battery range. Since i3 had a pretty small battery and BMW didn't want to go to the expense of building a different, smaller tank for the US they shipped the i3 with a software locked portion of the gas tank. You can flash the firmware to unlock the full gas tank (which is still pretty small).
i3 wasn't a huge success. BMW made a bet battery prices would stay extremely high and weight would really matter in an EV. i3 and i8 were experiments to see if they could build cars from carbon fibre re-enforced plastic at scale economically. Spoiler alert: they couldn't. That meant i3 was shockingly expensive to buy and even minor collisions can write the entire car off since even hairline cracks in the CFRP shell can result in catastrophic failure.
Unfortunately for you I don't see any new vehicles being designed to fill that niche. Designing a ground up PHEV is far too expensive, so every manufacturer is just electrifying their existing gas designs and stuffing batteries anywhere they can find a spare bit of space. Since engines give off waste heat for free no one is going to bother making a full heating system just for the plug in version since it would drive the sticker price up on a plug-in even higher (and they are already a tough sell since they get up into full EV range). Combined with the charging network getting better very rapidly and PHEVs are a bit of an investment dead end. They will continue to exist (especially in the EU market), but everyone is putting the absolute barest possible engineering effort into them.
Excellent summary but i bought an i3 (pure electric) in the US in 2014 and it was not shockingly expensive to buy (roughly 1/2 tesla model S) and at 128,000km had only a single service for brake fluid flush.
It was awesome but couldn’t go far enough for an only car once we moved to where mountains were over half its range away.
The good news is that this type of car has been around since at least 1900 with the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus [1] which had a version with a motor to top up the battery.
The bad news is that they haven't been that popular. You might be able to find a used BMW i3 REx in Australia, but it was discontinued in 2019.
That's basically a hybrid vehicle where the engine is not connected to driveshaft. The thing is -- it's more efficient to connect engine directly to the driveshaft when driving at a reasonable speed, as there's no extra conversion of gas to battery charge (generator losses + battery charging losses + battery discharging losses).
Sure, but you need a driveshaft and a gearbox for this to work.
It's worth it if you're using it all the time, but for something only used on rare occasions I'll take the _maybe_ 10% efficiency loss to not lug around the extra weight and have more things that can break.
> 1. Capable of driving ~100km on a charge, with a fully electric drive train
> 2. A small (~20hp) internal combustion engine + generator able to charge the batteries while driving.
I don't think a 20 hp engine is going to be big enough, unless you're talking a microcar.
PHEVs I'm aware of don't have the battery range you're looking for either. And I don't know what's available in Australia. My PHEV has an 'ev only' mode where it will rarely start the ICE unless you use up the battery, but it's slow to get up to highway speeds without the ICE (it will prompt you when accerator input calls for more than the battery and motor can deliver, and if you floor it, it will start the ICE without you accepting the prompt) and battery range drops sharply at highway speeds anyway. If the battery is charged enough, it already doesn't run the ICE that much at city street speeds, unless you've asked for the heater. In mine, EV only range is about 20 miles, and running in auto after a full charge is likely to use up the battery within 35 miles in auto mode.
20hp should be plenty, since the generator only has to output the average power rather than peak.
PHEVs don't have the range because they're really just ICE cars with batteries for low speed and energy regeneration under braking. For them, electric is still the secondary rather than the primary means of movement.
You would think there was a market for this, given that batteries are still a large part of the price tag for a BEV and a smaller and simpler generator should save on cost and packaging size relative to the duplicated drivetrain required for a true PHEV.
Cheaper, lighter, smaller, safer higher capacity batteries charged using renewable energy in ubiquitous charging points or even electrified roads are a long term solution. But we don't have it yet.
However, we know how to make the kind of plug-in hybrids GP is talking about, we already did. For people who have the occasional long range / frequent short range pattern, unfortunately, today, a gas car is the better value proposition. A small electric-first plug-in hybrid could be a good alternative. Probably not in the future, but some people need a car today, and for most of them, it will be a gas car.
FYI they did sell the Volt in Australia as the Holden Volt between 2012 and 2015, they only sold 246 in that whole time though, so not a lot of choice out there on the second hand market.
The closest thing in a new car will probably be the Mazda MX30 R.EV hybrid coming to Australia in 2024, which is primarily electric drivetrain but uses a small petrol rotary engine to charger batteries as a range extender, but that is a very niche vehicle and the rotary engine isn't particularly fuel efficient on petrol use, but it is small and lightweight compared to a piston engine.
Nissans Qashqai and X-Trail hybrids also use a primarily electric drivetrain with the petrol motor only providing power to the electric drivetrain, similar but not quite the same thing as the motor is in use a lot of the time.
A most sensible idea, first one I see in EV context! The US and Australia are very different but for other places in the west I think fully electric driven for 100 km is to much. The combustion engine would grow along with the weight that grows along with the battery weight. Making the engine and fuel tank larger and would make them and the frame heavier which in turn would ask for a larger battery which asks for more hp again and so the circle continues.
The lower limit seems safety which depends on the other clunkers [allowed] on the road. Solar seems a good way to add weight and strengthen the structure.
Another sound idea is to swap the battery or parts of it. The bigger it is the harder that puzzle gets. I want to see swap while moving tech.
I was hoping there'd be a much smaller rotary creatively tucked away somewhere, but this is a fairly conventional car design & there's a big old engine bay with the rotary taking up a bunch of space.
This is close to what I'm after, though in a smaller car than the MX-30.
Rotaries are a good choice for this since they're very compact, but 74HP still seems excessive to me.
In addition to the BMW there is the Nissan Note e-Power and the Honda Fit/Jazz hybrid -- just off the top of my head. The Note is rated for 800km (500 mi) per tankful, IIRC. I believe the Jazz is no longer sold in AU but there are used imports from Japan, probably.
The thing you want is called a "series hybrid" design.
This the basic idea behind hydrogen fuel cell cars too, only with a fuel cell instead of an engine. The goal is 100% zero emissions with 100% the functionality of existing cars.
It is also why existing BEVs are almost certainly a fad. After all, why will innovation suddenly stop in transportation, and fundamental ideas like low weight and fast refueling suddenly became irrelevant? All signs point to BEVs being an idea from the mid-2000s, and for whatever reason had become stuck in our brain.
This is mad. Only BEVs can be refueled at home, and that is the absolute killer feature. People are obsessed with public chargers but most EV drivers never use them, or at least, only very rarely, on unusually long trips.
I can't put more hydrogen, or gasoline, into a vehicle without getting it from somewhere else.
The killer feature of BEVs is that you never actually have to take them somewhere to charge if you're charging them at home. It's only on long trips that you need to stop.
If you're doing hundreds of km multiple days per week then Hydrogen might make sense, but I'd say that's a vanishingly small percentage of the population. Given that Hydrogen is also _always_ going to cost more than direct electricity, I don't think it's ever going to be mainstream.
The engine would only need to run at a constant speed/load, etc, so this might be where some alternative engine designs, some very compact, could be effective.
Am I the only one who only cares a little bit about range beyond 300kms and doesn't care about range at all beyond ~600 kms? My biggest problem with electric is there is a 15-20k price premium in my market right now over equivalent gas vehicles and I tend to buy vehicles and drive them into the ground over 15-20 years so if I buy electric I am 100% getting stuck with a fairly expensive battery replacement way before I usually get hit with an engine or transmission or other large problem in a gas vehicle, so life expectancy is way lower for my lower yearly kms spread over a long time period use case.
When are the sodium ion batteries (or some other tech) that is both dramatically cheaper and likely durable enough to take battery replacement off the table as a risk for 15+ years of the vehicle's life?
Isn't those batteries the unfamous silicon anode batteries going into mass production? (rumors said they did work around the "significant size increase" issue at mass production scale).
Readit News
1 https://electriccarsreport.com/2023/05/zeekr-starts-delivery...
2 https://www.catl.com/en/news/6015.html
I'm curious about these. Are you referring to silicon anodes, or metallic lithium anodes and solid ceramic electrolytes and "improved separators"? (I can't find much about the improvements.)
Or other improvements, say in cathodes, or cell design (say reducing the mass of anode and cathode contacts), packaging or pack design? I thought LG's wireless within-pack BMS comms was a clever way to reduce volume, weight, and copper requirements.
There are lots of incremental improvements possible, but getting from 500 to 1000 Wh/kg is a big ask.
> Now we just need to create more electric potential!!
The less-solved problem is essentially political: building more transmission grid. That involves landowners...
I regularly have to drive a ~400 mile route. Usually a few times a month. In my 9 year old compact SUV, I am able to do that trip with ~1/4 of a tank left, even when it's packed full. I generally do it without stops.
I look forward to the day that EVs can get similar ranges to ICE vehicles. (And more so, truly self-driving cars, so I can do something better during that time! Unfortunately it's a route without any real public transportation and I often have a load.)
My next vehicle might be a plug-in hybrid, something like the RAV4 Prime. Unless I can cut out the long trips or these long range EVs actually come out.
You are paying a very steep price for not taking that break. And not just financially. From a road safety point of view; you should consider taking that break in any case. It's the decent thing to do for other people on the road. Stretch your legs, have a coffee, eat some stuff. Anyone driving that kind of distance non stop is going to be tired, unfocused, and generally not a safe driver. Also, it's not great for your body. There are many good reasons to take a break on such a long journey.
Find out last gas station we can make it to. Stop, I start to fill up. Better half goes to use the restroom. She comes back, cleans the dead bugs of off the windshield while I go use the restroom. I come back, she's behind the wheel ready to go. Total time: ~7 minutes.
That's 350 miles of range we just put in.
Can your EV do that?
I really do feel that eventually, most of the world will see ICE vehicles for the terrible solution they are, and switch to something better. Just because we've used a technology for a long time doesn't mean its the best we can do.
If/when fully self-driving cars ever become practical, there's really nothing stopping the car from driving forever, and that's when fast chargers will again become essential.
1. Capable of driving ~100km on a charge, with a fully electric drive train
2. A small (~20hp) internal combustion engine + generator able to charge the batteries while driving.
This would allow me to do 95%+ of my trips in full EV mode while keeping the battery quite small, and when I want to go long distance I still can.
Most plug in hybrids are designed with the internal combustion engine as an integral part of the drivetrain which isn't really what I'm after as it means even if you only use the car for short trips you will still sometimes start the engine.
EDIT: I should add to this, the Volt is definitely the closest to what I'm after but it's not available in my country (Australia) and probably never will be.
Interesting oddity of incentives. California's zero emission vehicle rules state that range extended EVs count for more zero emission credit, but to qualify as range extended the gas range can't exceed the battery range. Since i3 had a pretty small battery and BMW didn't want to go to the expense of building a different, smaller tank for the US they shipped the i3 with a software locked portion of the gas tank. You can flash the firmware to unlock the full gas tank (which is still pretty small).
i3 wasn't a huge success. BMW made a bet battery prices would stay extremely high and weight would really matter in an EV. i3 and i8 were experiments to see if they could build cars from carbon fibre re-enforced plastic at scale economically. Spoiler alert: they couldn't. That meant i3 was shockingly expensive to buy and even minor collisions can write the entire car off since even hairline cracks in the CFRP shell can result in catastrophic failure.
Unfortunately for you I don't see any new vehicles being designed to fill that niche. Designing a ground up PHEV is far too expensive, so every manufacturer is just electrifying their existing gas designs and stuffing batteries anywhere they can find a spare bit of space. Since engines give off waste heat for free no one is going to bother making a full heating system just for the plug in version since it would drive the sticker price up on a plug-in even higher (and they are already a tough sell since they get up into full EV range). Combined with the charging network getting better very rapidly and PHEVs are a bit of an investment dead end. They will continue to exist (especially in the EU market), but everyone is putting the absolute barest possible engineering effort into them.
It was awesome but couldn’t go far enough for an only car once we moved to where mountains were over half its range away.
EU engines can enable something like 'hold state of charge' which allows for the ICE to maintain the 75% charge.
That way you don't end up at 10% where the engine just can't maintain the charge at all.
The bad news is that they haven't been that popular. You might be able to find a used BMW i3 REx in Australia, but it was discontinued in 2019.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche
It's worth it if you're using it all the time, but for something only used on rare occasions I'll take the _maybe_ 10% efficiency loss to not lug around the extra weight and have more things that can break.
> 2. A small (~20hp) internal combustion engine + generator able to charge the batteries while driving.
I don't think a 20 hp engine is going to be big enough, unless you're talking a microcar.
PHEVs I'm aware of don't have the battery range you're looking for either. And I don't know what's available in Australia. My PHEV has an 'ev only' mode where it will rarely start the ICE unless you use up the battery, but it's slow to get up to highway speeds without the ICE (it will prompt you when accerator input calls for more than the battery and motor can deliver, and if you floor it, it will start the ICE without you accepting the prompt) and battery range drops sharply at highway speeds anyway. If the battery is charged enough, it already doesn't run the ICE that much at city street speeds, unless you've asked for the heater. In mine, EV only range is about 20 miles, and running in auto after a full charge is likely to use up the battery within 35 miles in auto mode.
PHEVs don't have the range because they're really just ICE cars with batteries for low speed and energy regeneration under braking. For them, electric is still the secondary rather than the primary means of movement.
You would think there was a market for this, given that batteries are still a large part of the price tag for a BEV and a smaller and simpler generator should save on cost and packaging size relative to the duplicated drivetrain required for a true PHEV.
However, we know how to make the kind of plug-in hybrids GP is talking about, we already did. For people who have the occasional long range / frequent short range pattern, unfortunately, today, a gas car is the better value proposition. A small electric-first plug-in hybrid could be a good alternative. Probably not in the future, but some people need a car today, and for most of them, it will be a gas car.
As far as I'm concerned, a 95% reduction in emissions is a big win, and a 95% reduction in 5 years is better than a 100% reduction in 30 years.
The closest thing in a new car will probably be the Mazda MX30 R.EV hybrid coming to Australia in 2024, which is primarily electric drivetrain but uses a small petrol rotary engine to charger batteries as a range extender, but that is a very niche vehicle and the rotary engine isn't particularly fuel efficient on petrol use, but it is small and lightweight compared to a piston engine.
Nissans Qashqai and X-Trail hybrids also use a primarily electric drivetrain with the petrol motor only providing power to the electric drivetrain, similar but not quite the same thing as the motor is in use a lot of the time.
The lower limit seems safety which depends on the other clunkers [allowed] on the road. Solar seems a good way to add weight and strengthen the structure.
Another sound idea is to swap the battery or parts of it. The bigger it is the harder that puzzle gets. I want to see swap while moving tech.
I was hoping there'd be a much smaller rotary creatively tucked away somewhere, but this is a fairly conventional car design & there's a big old engine bay with the rotary taking up a bunch of space.
The thing you want is called a "series hybrid" design.
1. Nissan e-Power: https://carbuzz.com/news/what-is-nissan-e-power-and-why-cant...
It is also why existing BEVs are almost certainly a fad. After all, why will innovation suddenly stop in transportation, and fundamental ideas like low weight and fast refueling suddenly became irrelevant? All signs point to BEVs being an idea from the mid-2000s, and for whatever reason had become stuck in our brain.
I can't put more hydrogen, or gasoline, into a vehicle without getting it from somewhere else.
If you're doing hundreds of km multiple days per week then Hydrogen might make sense, but I'd say that's a vanishingly small percentage of the population. Given that Hydrogen is also _always_ going to cost more than direct electricity, I don't think it's ever going to be mainstream.
I drive 1000km so rarely I'd be happy to tow a small trailer that's simply an extended range battery that you can hire for the journey.
When are the sodium ion batteries (or some other tech) that is both dramatically cheaper and likely durable enough to take battery replacement off the table as a risk for 15+ years of the vehicle's life?