This horseshit again? Physical product available for independent analysis, or it didn’t happen.
It’s not like the Chinese are famous for lying about the specs on things they manufacture or anything. Every week we hear about some Chinese company poised to “revolutionize” the EV with pie-in-the-sky range figures and yet the market continues to remain resolutely un-revolutionized.
And as usual, this article harps on “range” as if that’s not an easily fudged figure. The real numbers we need to see are watts per volume, or watts per mass. And number of charge cycles tolerated, and how many before it loses what percentage of capacity. Any idiot can claim to make a 1,300 mile, 2,000 mile, 5,000 mile, 1,000,000 mile battery pack – just make the pack bigger, or the vehicle lighter, or both. That tells us nothing meaningful whatsoever about the battery chemistry itself. Advertising us what hypothetical ranges someone thinks a pack made of these “could” build is meaningless. We could build a 1300 mile battery pack right now with LiFePo cells if we wanted to, via the simple expedient of filling a dump truck with the things.
Thank you for typing out my brain squiggles.
Well, Toyota seems to be promising something around 700-800 miles range with solid state lithium battery tech, but as you say, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding isn’t ready yet.
My guess is it’s just a car with a battery 5 times bigger than their comparison vehicle, can’t do over 30, go up a hill, or pass any safety standards.
Or it’s fictional.
Shit I already have one up on the Chinese. I have invented an all electric rocket capable of boosting humans into LEO.
The real numbers we need to see are watts per volume, or watts per mass
You have to chase it down, following the link to electrek.co, but then it says: “the prototype cells house an energy density of 720 Wh/kg”
(of course, I’m just stating what is claimed, no idea how true)
If that’s true, 1300 mile range isn’t the big deal. Going much over 400mi is pointless if we build proper charging infrastructure. Use wh/kg advancements to reduce weight, nor increase range.
The big thing is that we can build fully electric airplanes with that kind of wh/kg.
Big if, though. Batteries have been improving by 5-8% per year, and while we’re not close to theoretical limits yet, this would represent an unprecedented leap all at once. That claim needs more to back it up than a press release.
Chase it down? It says 720 Wh/kg in the thumbnail image.
You’re right, I didn’t see it! I just saw a bunch of chinese writings, which I cannot read, so didn’t bother trying to read even the only thing I could 😅
Battery density has been improving steadily for the last three decades.
Battery costs keep falling while quality rises. As volumes increased, battery costs plummeted and energy density — a key metric of a battery’s quality — rose steadily. Over the past 30 years, battery costs have fallen by a dramatic 99 percent; meanwhile, the density of top-tier cells has risen fivefold
…
With regards to anodes, a number of chemistry changes have the potential to improve energy density (watt-hour per kilogram, or Wh/kg). For example, silicon can be used to replace all or some of the graphite in the anode in order to make it lighter and thus increase the energy density. Silicon-doped graphite already entered the market a few years ago, and now around 30% of anodes contain silicon. Another option is innovative lithium metal anodes, which could yield even greater energy density when they become commercially available.
What’s more, the Chinese market is both the leading producer and consumer of battery technology. So its weird to reflexively doubt that a Chinese firm would release a new higher-efficiency battery design.
Given that this is a prototype, its entirely unclear if the model is cost-efficient to mass manufacture or efficiently scalable based on available resources. But I’m hard pressed to discount the claim on its face simply because its got “China” in the headline.
Racist see China did something good and have to go out of their way to shit on China.
I think you are seeing this as racism when it is just some old good skepticism about a country that is famous for faking everything.
Maybe they really done what they say, or maybe it is just some proof of concept that need to be ported, if possible, to a viable product stage or maybe it is just a fake, we will see.
Famous for faking everything is western propaganda
Its not even like “China” invented a new battery tech. It’s some battery plant in China which is the place where most batteries are created that’s innovated on a design.
There are battery plants in Atlanta, Georgia and Heide, Germany who are pursuing similar advancements. They just don’t have the money or the manpower equal to their Chinese peers.
Exactly. It’s like an article I saw about some new internet tech that was “X times faster than broadband”. Broadband is a type of transmission using multiple frequency carrier waves to transmit data. It ain’t a speed.
Wh/kg or yes maybe volume Wh/cm^3…
The only other thing I’d care about it charge speed. Maybe it doesn’t last as long but I can fully charge in 10 seconds? Yeah I’m interested. Hell I’ve never had a car yet get the estimated miles per gallon on the sticker. It’s all bistromathics as far as I’m concerned.
Instead of this we need EVs that aren’t fucking massive.
Need battery space also SUVs/crossove s hold more people. And EV busses will be great as well.
Why do you need it to hold more people when most trips are with one or two people? Also, most families tend to have two cars, so they don’t need both to be big.
Also, most SUVs hold the same as a sedan: 5 people. And they don’t hold more stuff, generally speaking, because they lose so much space being higher up. If you want to carry more people, look at minivans.
People buy SUVs because they’re higher up, not because they’re better at much of anything.
Kids
I have three, so I think I can definitively say an SUV is not necessary with kids. We had a Prius until the third one came along, then we got a minivan, but only because my brother was getting rid of his. We now want to downsize because we rarely have more than just us in it, but it’s frustrating because many of the SUVs have less storage space than our Prius.
I wish station wagons were still a thing, specially if it has jump seats. Everything with a similar amount of space is absolutely massive.
China makes those, too.
Could they send some smallish, sodium-ion based cars here? I’d buy one if it had 150 miles range and a cheap to replace battery.
Our weekly “miracle battery that can <insert absurdly high claim here>” give us today.
Never to be heard about again
Every day a new revolutionary battery. Where in reality
Over the past 30 years, battery costs have fallen by a dramatic 99 percent; meanwhile, the density of top-tier cells has risen fivefold
We’ve gone from the most reliable battery being an alkaline through 3 different rechargeable technologies as well. Too bad that research never pans out…
Too bad that research never pans out…
Better performance in driving electronics and huge money saving are the two major reasons to buy NiMH (Nickel metal Hydride) rechargeable batteries. They can be charged up to 500-1000 times and last longer than alkaline or NiCd batteries. NiMH batteries are ideally compatible with most consumer devices such as digital cameras, game boys, CD players, RC vehicles, PDA’s, portable two-way radios, flash units and many more high drain devices. One set of relatively inexpensive NiMH rechargeable batteries can save you from buying thousands if throwaway alkaline batteries.
That was sarcasm.
Ah, I’ve seen so many people insist - with full sincerity - that advances in battery technology aren’t happening.
Me, too, man. Saying the same thing so many times.
The more energy you put in a box, the more explosive it is. EV fires are already a problem so fire depmts are going to have to evolve, and quickly
BEV battery fires are also staggeringly less common than ICE vehicle fires.
People seem to think that my comment was pro-ICE, and it is not.
Maybe not intentionally but it still serves as fearmongering.
It seems like this vehicle comes with (as far as I know) the first solid state battery in a commercial vehicle which is HUGE news if true! I’m slightly skeptical because of this claim coming from the Chinese government, but who knows, it would be a huge boon for all of humanity if they’ve figured out solid state batteries.
The huge benefits we’ll all see are increased capacity so batteries last longer, and INSANELY fast charge times. You could recharge your car to 100% in the same time as it takes to fill it up with gas currently.
Toyota is promising 700-800 miles range soonish (3 years?), and I believe them a lot more than the CCP.
I don’t believe either though, but I do think Toyota is more trustworthy in general. I’ll wait until I see an actual product with independent reviews.
At this point China is more reputable than Toyota when it comes to battery technology.
Toyota has been promising solid state tech “within 5 years” for the past 15 years.
Whereas Chinese companies like CATL and BYD basically make an announcement and then ship products within a year.
Its kind of insane that EV manufacturers are making battery packs out of a lot of individual cells, rather than one integrated unit like this.
Do you want to drive wit 3.7v? 🤣 even the smallest EV have over 3000W, so you would need a bit less than 1000A which would require giant cables
YMMD
Like the other responses, the battery chemistry and design voltage are the major reasons for cell sizes, but also, smaller cells means they can be isolated if necessary.
In a Tesla battery pack for instance, each cell is connected by a single small wire that also doubles as a fuse. If there is an issue with the cell the wire will heat up and break. opening the circuit and separating that battery cell from the rest of the pack. This also means that a failed cell doesn’t take out a significant portion of battery capacity. Other manufacturers do this as well, but not all, and some implement similar capability in other ways. This method functions as a sort of “passive” option since it doesn’t require the BMS to make a decision to remove those bad batteries from the pack, physics just does it and the BMS adjusts to compensate when the cell no longer is connected.
Good battery management systems that handle things like charge leveling individual cells, can mean the difference between batteries degrading noticeably in a few years and the pack as a whole lasting a decade before that noticeable degradation. There are a lot of poor battery management systems on the market, EVs are no exception and if anything they make this issue more noticeable because of the increased usage.
Batteries, being containers for chemical reactions, are subject to the core concepts of chemistry. Namely, that increased surface area increases the speed of the reaction. You could make one enormous battery instead of multiple smaller cells, but you’d never get it to discharge fast enough to make it functionally useful.
That’s how battery chemistry works. Even this, if it is real, is a bunch of individual cells in a bank. There is no alternative; you can’t have sufficient reactivity between dissimilar materials to generate the types of voltages required in a single cell. You need multiples of them in series to hit 200 volts, 400, 600, whatever is required by the vehicle’s drive hardware.
Removed by mod
Lapped by what? Vaporware? Oh, yeah. If we Americans don’t get all our liars organized we’ll never be as good as the Chinese at playing make-believe.
This article is an ad. This thing being described is not actually a product; it does not meaningfully actually exist. It is installed in zero vehicles, and the manufacturer’s claims are completely unverified and, probably, unverifiable. It’s not real. These kinds of press releases get posted all the time. The company is just simping for investor money, that’s all.
Take EVs out of the equation and the ramifications of this tech (or Toyota’s) is huge, if true.
Imagine an electric wheelchair you only had to charge monthly, or that could run on one charge effectively forever.
For some reason this reminds me of a cheap Chinese knockoff rotary tool I got from Amazon which the instructions said: “use until loud bang and smoke. Then replace.”
Most I use don’t give any warning at all, so that’s a step up.
