Actually, not really. For one, no serious manufacturer currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't meet the most basic of the mentioned criteria.

Secondly, some of these, like storing at a low/high state of charge or high/low temperature performance are nowadays managed by the BMS - models that don't have that are already not competitive. The reason is that energy density already crossed the threshold at which some of the capacity can be spared for this purpose.

To me the more important question to ask than any of these is: is there a process in place to manufacture the batteries at scale?

That is what ultimately makes or breaks an emerging battery technology.

A range of 745 miles means ten hours of driving in the best of circumstances without a stop. I cannot imagine wanting to drive for ten hours without stopping. I cannot understand why EV manufacturers are putting such large batteries into cars, especially when I hear how much heavier they are making them.

When I stop with an ICE car during a road trip it’s for 15 minutes max and I know I can do it basically whenever I want. With an EV, you have to carefully plan your road trip around fueling.

There's an intuition that the minor additional flexibility gas cars give you on a road trip makes the experience better, but in practice I think it's worse.

So the whole issue is that on very, very long drive you might lost 15min. That not the end of the world.

The weight issue, however, should be talked about more. I don't think filling highways with 10,000lb minivans with the acceleration speed of a Corvette is an improvement on the whole.

But they aren't. The "minivans with the acceleration speed of a Corvette" exist today in the ICE world and are very few and far between because of price. You can buy a Lamborghini Urus that does 190mph, or a Range Rover Sport Turbo, or BMW X5. But those cars are all 6 figures++ so very few people can afford them.

Sure, a Rivian R1S can do 0-60 like a Corvette, but Bob down the corner isn't spending $100k on a car, so the ones that accelerate like a Corvette will be exactly as ubiquitous as a Corvette.

Meanwhile the fastest/heaviest Kia EV9 does 0-60 in 6.0 seconds, and weighs 5,700 lbs. Both a far cry from the numbers you're concerned with. Meanwhile a Chrysler Pacifica weighs 4,300 lbs, so the differences most people imagine are GREATLY exaggerated.

The vast majority of the "the vehicles are too fast and too heavy" are scare tactics by oil companies. The F-150 tips the scales at 5,500 lbs and nobody is worried about them "ruining our roads". Please don't buy into the nonsense.

In this source, the increase in car weight seems quite minor over the last 10 years:

https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-... (fig ES-3)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/660493/us-light-duty-veh...

Your link does not support your claim of a 77% increase, but this better source pegs it at 80%, so I suppose that's about right: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

That said, the rate hasn't gone up if you look at a 30-year timeframe, but it's a worrying trend nonetheless. It's a bit confusing though because I think you'd want to look at this per-capita. The absolute numbers show a 10-year upward trend, and the per-capita numbers are only split out by age group and show that same 10-year upward trend except it hasn't gone up at all for people under 20, which seems surprising.

But I remain confused because the 10-year weight increase is very small, less than 10% or so, so it is not clear to me that increasing vehicle weight is the most important factor. IIHS mentions road design and front-end design, but not weight as key factors.

For example, it's well known that EV range decreases by 20-30% in cold weather and a recent study is claiming about the same loss in hot weather. And on long drives you tend to be more heavily loaded than normal, also cutting a few percent off actual range. Further, you need a reserve in case you get stuck on the road for some reason. Also you need a further reserve to ensure you can make it to the next next charger should the next charger be unavailable for some reason. And the advertised ranges are in better-than-average driving conditions at slower-than-average speeds, so you lose another few percent there as well.

All these derates stack which means if you want to ensure low stress in an EV you might have to derate the advertised range 50% or more depending on charger density for long drives when you decide to purchase. ICEs also need derating, but 25% is usually lots and ICEs tend to have much longer ranges to begin with.

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/gas-powered-cars-lose-driving-r...

1. Do you have any memory of when SUVs went mainstream? Who'd have thought single women would want to pay the vehicle and fuel premium to commute so inefficiently. Of course men as well.

2. Americans are addicted to options that remove limitations out of anxiety over those limitations, even when the extra cost is very low ROI. Look at data plan, buffet, etc. preferences

Americans are addicted to features, lifestyle and luxury (actual or perceived).

It takes mere minutes to refill a tank, and there are gas stations everywhere throughout the country. It's quick, and incredibly easy. Far faster than EVs, and far more common that EV charging stations.

As a result, there's really no value in tanks that are that much larger, there's no range anxiety because even going long distance cross-country you're never that far away from a place to refuel.

I'm comfortable doing long distances in one day and even I would be taking 20+ minute breaks every 300km (200mi) or so. The current state-of-the-art long range EVs are plenty good enough with range and charging speeds, assuming a reliable charging network.

I expect dragging around 120 lbs extra fuel for 100k miles does become noticable on the bank book, you'd be surprised.

Sure it's a small market (most Australians live in their state's capital city), but there needs to be some consideration for those that need serious range. The issue is frequently mentioned when talking about banning ICE vehicles.

Toyota Landcruiser's with auxiliary fuel tanks (over 240 litres) are the workhorses in outback Australia.

In a case where you're trying to get emitted CO2 to zero, you'd probably prefer to just subsidize ethanol and renewable diesel to manage super-long haul to get their - too many tractors and other equipment we also need to run.

In hindsight I think it's an obvious technooogy: the conplexity of the combustion generator is pretty low, doesn't need gearbox, pistols, cylinders and whatnot. And the fuel tank still gives good range NY recharging the battery.

Got a Kicks with this tech, and so far it has been pretty good for both city and the road (5 hr drives to the beach!)

Here's a nice page explaining the system -- a serial hybrid. https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHI...

According to the page, you can't plug in these vehicles, is that right?

Chevy Volt was conceptualized as a serial hybrid iirc, but the engine drives the powertrain at higher speeds so it's not a pure serial hybrid. Mazda has a rotary engine based serial hybrid / range extender out or coming out too I believe.

They have cost challenges - because if you want to drive one at a constant 80 mph on the freeway, you need at least ~50 horsepower of gasoline generator, ~50 horsepower of generator ~ 50 horsepower of generator inverter, ~50 horsepower of motor, ~50 horsepower of motor inverter.

Turns out all of that costs and weighs a lot more than just 100 horsepower of gasoline engine for a similar size car.

Cars like the BMW i3 with range extender undersize their gas engine and generator to save money and weight, yet are getting sued because in worst case conditions (driving up a mountain heavily laden), sometimes the car runs out of battery power and has to rely on gasoline alone, leading to a top speed of only 20 mph - not really usable!

I also don’t see why 50 hp is a good target. The oldest Model S cars can drive on the freeway (at moderate speed) using maybe 25 kW (33 hp). So a 25 kW generator would allow indefinite freeway driving at moderate speed. But almost no one does this except maybe long haul trucks that trade drivers.

IMO the right way to think of it is: a 25 kW generator will almost fully recharge the battery in under 4 hours. If you drive uphill or fast for two hours, and you run that generator, you have an extra 50 kWh. If you want to drive 10 hours (shudder), that’s an extra 250kWh — you should avoided about three long charging stops, so maybe one actual level 3 stop gets you there even if you drive moderately fast.

And you can stop for the night (or sightseeing or whatever, as long as you park outdoors), and you’ll be fully recharged afterwards. I would appreciate a 5kW onboard generator for this purpose!

Nobody is putting much R&D into new engine designs.

Lots of countries have laws saying an engine in a car can't be running without a driver present.

For all those reasons, tiny range extenders on large batteries don't tend to exist.

Instead you get moderate or large range extenders paired with smallish batteries (ie. total range 50 miles). And they still have trouble if you drive fast, heavily laden, up a hill, on a hot day for more than the battery capacity.

To add: you can always run the engine at its most efficient rpm, getting the most out of every liter of fuel.

I’m 100% certain the market could exist. Probably the difficult part is car manufacturers supporting it and possibly some engineering problems (low probability of problems I think).

There are lots of pluses to not having a transmission, and always running your engine in a narrow, tuned, power band

Are you sure? That sounds like Mad Max to me :)

It’s a problem of charger infra, not range. We’ve already solved range.

You actually believed them? Tesla, that has a long track record of lying about what they can do, when they can deliver etc? That is facing major competition from every established car manufacturer who are all shipping vehicles with similar range to Tesla?

If they could release a car with double the distance/capacity they would. It would be a huge competitive advantage that no other manufacturer (except _possibly_ Toyota, if the article is to be believed) can match.

Tesla increases distance ideally by increasing efficiency. Their cars consistently score the best/lowest Wh/mi for their weight, by doing things like designing their own heat pump instead of traditional AC and resistive heating.

Because EV production is virtually always constrained by battery production, the number of cars you can sell is typically your battery production capacity (MWh) divided by your battery capacity per vehicle.

Their inherent efficiency combined with the Supercharger network to support longer trips lets them produce more cars at a lower cost / price.

This is just basic physics not a conspiracy theory.

It simply doesn't make sense to massively improve distance.

I don't think Toyota would qualify as a serious manufacturer of battery cells. Has Toyota ever manufactured battery cells before? Not battery packs, but battery cells.

This new battery tech is done in another subsidiary that is also co-owned by Toyota and Panasonic.

For Toyota to build up its own end to end manufacturing of battery cells is something quite different.

Its doable, as Tesla has shown, but its not easy. Specially with a new technology.

No - this is dishonesty by some battery/car manufacturers. They say "Our car can drive 300 miles", and "our car battery will last 10 years/100,000 miles", but the reality is that if you actually drive it 300 miles on each charge, you'll only be doing about 30,000 miles before it no longer meets your needs.

Instead car manufacturers say things like "only charge to 85% to prolong battery life" and "under 15% charge is for 'reserve capacity' use only".

An honest manufacturer would only advertise the amount of capacity you can actually use day to day, rather than the capacity that is there but you really shouldn't use unless you want your battery to die young.

Toyota do this. In fact, all PHEV manufacturers seem to do this: they keep their batteries between 15% and 85% and only advertise this range.

Insofar as they advertise it at all: the battery size in eg a Prius prime is buried in a footnote, and the range - miles/km - is what’s advertised, and is real, and corresponds to the 15-85.

I guess it is more important in a PHEV to never fully charge not discharge their batteries: most cycle from full-ish to empty-ish much more than a BEV. And so it is more logical for them to publish their 15-85. But the honesty is refreshing; BEV numbers feel disingenuous to me.

I ignore all breathlessly excited battery “breakthrough” headlines, but I ignore any from Toyota less!

Is that something they do, or do they expect users to be aware of these thresholds?

The Silicon Valley style of “fake it till you make it” business is dishonest.

And is lapped up by all the mass media contributing to Musk building a brand to rival Mercedes while spending $0 on advertising.

It's quite something, isn't it? You don't have to like it either. Seems that a lot of the USA really does. P.T.Barnum and all that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA

There is nothing more to say about the 'glorious Tesla driver assistance system'. It can't even do basic tasks with super slow speed, no moving objects and all time in the world.

https://www.sae.org/blog/sae-j3016-update

To me, the distinction between level 4 and level 5 seems abysmally stupid as well - how could you leave out the pedals and steering wheel if the car can’t operate by itself under all conditions, meaning level 4 = level 5. Maybe I just don’t have the IQ to understand what the industry academics and practitioners are conveying here.

Also see Tesla's site (buried in the support pages, rather than the marketing copy):

> FSD Beta is an SAE Level 2 driver support feature that can provide steering and braking/acceleration support to the driver under certain operating limitations. With FSD Beta, as with all SAE Level 2 driver support features, the driver is responsible for operation of the vehicle whenever the feature is engaged and must constantly supervise the feature and intervene (e.g., steer, brake or accelerate) as needed to maintain safe operation of the vehicle.

https://www.tesla.com/support/recall-fsd-beta-driving-operat...

My gas car has a 42 litre tank, if i wait until the light has come on and the gauge is on (and then drive another 20km past that), I can only get 38.5 litres in.

I only know this because a motoring journalist filmed himself riding the same model dry.

Traditional hybrids had all these details. Most plug in EV’s only show 15-85% as 0-100 because you have a fall back for range extension. Many EV show the full range because you might daily drive just fine on 15-85% while charging at home and want to take the occasional long trip or use 0-15% capacity if a charging station is down etc.

Also, charge cycles become less important as range increases an EV with a 220 mile range is noticeably worse at 180 mile range where a 440 mile EV sees 1/2 as many charge cycles and is still perfectly useable with a 360 mile range.

Pretty much. There's a catalogue of EVs here:

https://ev-database.org/

Where nominal and usable capacity is stated. Currently even Tesla includes a few kWh of buffer capacity.

State of charge in li-ion batteries isn't a straightforward thing anyway. 4.2V used to be considered 100%, but nowadays some chemistries allow for going up to 4.35V safely - doesn't sound like much, but it translates to ~15% more capacity.

On the flip side, I agree that the "100%" mark should be the mark that people regularly charge to, people don't leave empty space in the tank for fun.

Why? It's not common to use your cars full range every day. Most people I know drive <100km on most days, and use the full range of their car maybe twice a year when they go on vacation.

Why would manufacturers advertise worst case numbers if they are not representative of the average consumers needs?

If they advertise their cars for business use, they probably should put some more detailed info somewhere. But if you advertise your car to commuters, it makes sense to use numbers that the average commuter can expect.

Just inform the customer instead of doing the advertising mumbo-jumbo.

However, I do not commute with my car. And most people should press their local authorities to develop infrastructure so that they don't have to either :)

If you use a tank full of petrol each day, your car may not last 10 years. If you only do 1 mile a day, every day, it may not last 100k miles.

All mechanical things have usage patterns that are worse than others. You just get used to the tradeoffs.

car manufacturers have been overstating range/fuel economy since the dawn of time. people are tuned to look at those numbers and think "in perfect lab conditions." and no one expects these numbers to be their day to day numbers

False. Nowadays manufacturers include a capacity buffer, so you're not actually fully charging/discharging. Teslas used to have no buffer whatsoever - exactly like smartphones - but they dropped the practice a few years ago.

Case in point: the battery in the Mercedes EQS 450+ has a nominal capacity of 120kWh, while usable is 107.8kWh - that's a 10% buffer - likely on the top end because that's where most of the wear happens.

You can reasonably expect 200,000 miles out of that before range degrades to 80% of the original figure. And no wonder - that's less than 600 cycles assuming highway driving. Consumer-grade batteries last this much, and the ones in EVs are anything but consumer-grade.

I have a 5 year old EV which is always charged to 100% and it’s lost maybe 5% of its range capacity so far. Perhaps it was over provisioned (undersold the actual capacity) but it’s unlikely as it’s a cheap compliance car (that I still love to drive).

Until you realize that Toyota is peddling hydrogen as the future which makes about the least sense of anything you could choose.

It isn’t the the one with fewest infrastructure changes (that would be biodiesel).

And it is the result of stuck about things in terms of the past: we used to power cars by pumping molecules into it, therefore we need another molecule.

Most of our green electricity will start as electricity. So it makes more sense to keep it as that and pump it directly into the car.

Given the choice, why would people still want to have to take their car to a pump when they can simply charge it at home or at work as much as possible?

If my cellphone lasted 5 days without a charge but needed me to go to a special charging station, I would never buy it. I just charge it overnight, or at work, and forget about it.

The problem with electricity is that you can't easily store it. And the only way to do so at large scale will be converting it to molecules. That implies hydrogen.

As a result, green electricity just means a nearly infinite supply of green hydrogen at the same level of cost. That implies nearly free hydrogen for any purpose.

Economically, that all leads to the hydrogen car as the future. You avoid both the weaknesses of ICE cars and BEVs.

This adds up to: 0.750.90.6*0.95=38% efficiency.

With an electric battery car. Its about 75-80% efficiënt in the whole chain. That means you need twice as many wind turbines to run the same amount of vehicle miles. The math just doesnt hold up.

So unless we cannot produce enough batteries or cannot make the grid stronger. Which both are possibilities. Hydrogen cars will probably be a dream. At this point it just doesnt make sense.

You're reading too much pro-BEV propaganda. They're just spreading FUD and trying to stop people from realizing there are alternatives.

It is not FUD or propaganda to say that the fuel cell cars you can buy today (or in the next 10 years) are not even close to 100% efficient. Nor is their round trip efficiency better than BEV. Nor or either of those numbers likely to change over that period.

Meanwhile, no one is looking at compromise solutions. Something like a PHEV or even a plug-in FCEV would solve a lot of these complaints right away. There are ways around these issues even in the real world.

Finally, it's not like 10 years is that long in the car industry. If FCEVs end up matching BEVs in efficiency in 10 years, that's means we're pretty much at the verge of FCEVs taking over.

Now this is propaganda.

You should talk to this other guy who's currently arguing that the current paradigm doesn't matter and we should focus on what will make sense.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36839960

It takes 50% more energy to generate hydrogen than to just use electricity itself. It takes million dollar facilities to generate that hydrogen and turn it into electricity.

Then, it has to be stored at a very high pressure in your car, which has a number of risks. Then, if you have an accident and it doesn't completely blow you up, there can be a fire, in which case you are now on fire but people just think you are a crazy person running around because hydrogen has an invisible flame.

Or, you just use electricity.

In reality, fuel cell cars are literally just EVs, no different than BEVs. There are no fundamental downsides. But since FCEVs don't have the huge need for raw materials that BEVs do, they will be a far cheaper solution. Once you understand the unsustainable nature of BEVs, you'll realize that nearly all cars will have to switch to hydrogen eventually.

And hydrogen is safer than gasoline. This is just more FUD, and is of the fearmongering variety.

Hydrogen will eventually be nearly free. It is just going to be made from excess wind and solar energy and will follow the same cost reduction curve.

How is that different from charging a battery at a super charger? Because it can be delivered via more expensive pipeline or trucks rather than cheaper wires? Heck, it doesn't even store well, you need to keep those tanks cold so the hydrogen stays compressed, you are going to be using more electricity for that.

A pipeline is cheaper than a wire at moving energy around. About 10x cheaper in fact. This is just another example of BEV FUD. BEV companies just make shit up to demonization the competition, and often times the exact opposite is true.

Again, whether or not your dead doesn’t change the fact that the tank will explode, not just burn.

The system as a whole is not leak-proof. All you need is a leak in a contained area, like a garage.

[0]: https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/exclusive-hydrogen...

In the latter case I sympathize; I feel the same about the failure of swappable-battery tech, which would have given us the best of both worlds. Charge at the point of generation or at least at a point of efficient distribution, deploy instantly at the point of use.

And either way, I envy your ability to generate an enormous quantity of posts without getting rate-limited.

And FYI, the anti-hydrogen argument is a generic anti-green, anti—progress viewpoint. It is easily described as outright Ludditism. It’s pretty obvious the critics are totally wrong, and likely just Tesla fanboys or investors.

Wrong. It is the only technology in current existence that actually makes sense. Everything else is unsustainable and eventually has to be abandoned.

Just like the trend with hydrogen, where things are going absolutely no where and the waste majority of car makers who just 5 years ago were still betting on hydrogen have systematically dropped it.

Even the most hydrogen crazy Toyota expects its global hydrogen sales to be about Tesla production in a month in 2030. And those are optimistic numbers.

But don't let the real world prevent you from believing in easy to produce 100% efficient cars that can be fueled for free. Just keep living in a fantasy world, just stop spreading the lies in HN.

Note that BEVs were selling in the thousands only about a decade ago. FCEVs could easily reach the level of sales of BEVs in a short period of time.

The other point is that FCEVs don’t have the resource limitations of BEVs. They can easily exceed current levels of BEVs without serious trouble.

Your problem is that you are closed-minded and stuck in the past. You think that EVs are the future, but that it can only be one type of it. That the world will shift towards a 100% BEV monopoly and that no other type of EV can sell in any number. You can’t even make a coherent argument why this even is. If you want see an example of a person brainwashed by propaganda, that is it.

A battery is a box of minerals with electrochemical reactivity, i.e. it can catch on fire if something goes wrong. More energy from the battery means more minerals, which means higher cost. More reactive chemistries can reduce mineral inputs, but tend to be more expensive or less stable.

Tldr; there are no quantum leaps available for batteries. If Toyota has a giant range EV it's either really expensive or it's a research vehicle staying far away from consumers.

This is a fundamentally false understanding of battery innovation.

> More reactive chemistries can reduce mineral inputs, but tend to be more expensive or less stable.

Less stable, sometimes but not more expensive.

What a BMS can do, depends on what the underlying cell alows or doesn't.

> I'm only a layperson and this list is what I came up with just a few minutes of layperson thought.

It seems like they've been stewing on the list for the greater part of a week, at least.

I won't claim more familiarity, but...

- How frequent/difficult is required maintenance? Recall that old lead-acid batteries often needed distilled water added to their cells.

- Does it need access to air - either supplied to it, or to vent gasses? That introduces a whole host of issues, even if it's not venting (say) hydrogen gas.

- How much does performance degrade when its only cycled through part of its charge/discharge range? Recall the NiCad batteries of yesteryear.

- What are its waste, OSHA, HAZMAT, and other environmental & safety issues? Those apply all the way from the raw materials mines to the final disposal. Which includes accident scenarios - fire / flood / whatever in a facility with many batteries (or parts thereof), one-off car crashes, and things more interesting. "Disposal" includes cases such as "abandoned in a pole barn".

(BTW - kudos for specifying "How available are ...", which covers a far longer list of real-world supply issues than "What is the (current) price of".)

The fact that the chemistries are changing and diverse is the most difficult thing from an End-of-life perspective. A lot of businesses born around recycling todays battery (lots of lithium and cobalt relatively speaking) are not economical on some of the newer chemistries (looking at you Li-Fe) because they cheapened out the expensive elements.

1. What is the 1.0 for distance, and model of car doing it

2. What is the expected multiplier for said new technology

3. What is the life expectancy curve for the new tech

4. is it any worse/better than the old battery on safety. I'm just not that worried about battery fires other than if newer tech is more apt to do it. I've been riding around sitting on gasoline tanks for decades now and it can't be much worse for safety.

Some of us remember prior generations of battery breakthrough claims like eestor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor

Amazingly they are still around although they have rebranded and are now chasing some other unlikely scheme. It seems there is a limitless supply of suckers for these OTC deals, regardless how borderline their claims or history.