Most of the time these battery tech announcements will mention capacity and recharge. They are typically very silent on discharge rate and this announcement is no exception. Discharge rate is an important feature for high load applications like cars. Given that this is still lithium ion I would expect good things but it would be nice to see some high discharge data.

I was under the impression that discharge rate scaled fairly reliably with recharge rate. Is that not the case?

Not that I've seen. Charging rates usually scale with capacity. Discharge rates vary greatly.

Generally given a battery chemistry and manufacturing technology, the charge rates and discharge rates are given in units of "C" which means it allows 1A charge/discharge per Ah capacity of the battery. For instance, the lipoly batteries I got for my combat robot last year were 20C discharge, and 1C charge, and had a capacity of 1800mAh. This means I can discharge at 36A, charge at 1.8A. While true, the charge rate doesn't scale with discharge rates directly, for a given chemistry, it does.

I wouldn't be so sure about it scaling directly even within the same chemistry. Batteries can be manufactured for different purposes. I've seen 10C, 20C and even 40C discharge rates in lithium ion polymer batteries. But the charging rate usually stays under 2C.

Personally I don't really care too much about charging rates. My battery powered vehicle would be parked overnight. But I do like acceleration. And that's where discharge rates (and other problems) become an issue.

That's why I added the "...and manufacturing technology" part at the end. What I've seen is that a company will have a whole line of cells of varying capacities all at the same discharge "C" rating.

To be honest, I'm too worried about discharge rates, since we use them in combat robots, which are designed to last 3 minutes (which ends up being 20C continuous discharge rate). If you consider that you want at least 2 minutes of "full throttle" power over the course of a charge of the batteries, the capacity of them must be enough that the maximum current would be 30C, otherwise the batteries would be dead from just the hot rodding. Being that you're driving more than the 2 minutes of full throttle, I'd suspect that any batteries with enough capacity for an hour drive would have enough discharge rate to support what you needed to do.

mmmm electric cars... 10x the range of current cars... thats what... cross country in one charge? can anyone argue with that? Ok fine 10x is not cross country... but it is 2000 miles per f-ing charge!

I'd rather have 200 miles and lighter/cheaper(? at least in terms of environmental costs) batteries.

Just as with gasoline-powered vehicles, I would like to have the choice of many different options.

Well, for energy storage and conversion in gasoline powered cars you only have option. Gasoline stored in a tank and combusted in an Otto cycle engine.

I don't think that people's driving behaviour is divergent enough to support multiple battery chemistries in the long run.

I was thinking I can choose between cars that have different capabilities (small or large, big tank or small, fast or slow) even if the core tech is the same.

In environmental costs, I'd much rather have FeNi chemistry fully explored. Nickel iron batteries can be abused by under and over charging, short circuiting heat, cold, vibration, and other effects and still last decades.

Jay Leno has an antique car that still has a working FeNi battery. I think it needs topped off with distilled water every so often. The electrolyte is KOH so it even acts as a preservative. The only problem with the reaction is it's slow to charge and discharge.

Why is it that people have so many diverse opinions that aren't fully informed when it comes to energy??

It may have one benefit, but 30 seconds on wikipedia informs me that it requires 5 times the mass and 20 times the volume of lithium ion to give equal energy output. Which makes it a complete non starter for anything mobile.

FeNi batteries are a wonderful storage medium for things like solar cell chargers in a house, or a wind turbine setup. I never said this is going to be the next watch battery tech.

And also, the fact is that the first cars were electric: they used various chemistries. And as I said above, Leno has a still working car that uses a NiFe battery: Cheap materials, low maintenance, not heavy metal (and nontoxic to boot).

In fact the original recipe indicated making potash, putting it in distilled water, and filtering out the physical chunks of ash.

Forget electric cars. I'm building an Iron Man suit.

Can you imagine how long it would take to charge a battery that could power a regular sized car for 2000 miles?

Even at 220v/30amps it might take a few days,

Why the downvotes? Shouldn't the capacity of our wires also be a limiting factor?

I would say robotics is another super exciting application, especially humanoid robots.