I fully support EVs with 10-minute charge times and 1,200km in range that don't spontaneously catch fire and can last 20 years. Once you guys have licked those issues, how about tackling the issue of your EV being sent to the scrapyard after a collision ?

Because I've heard that that is a thing.

It is 'a thing' everywhere—EV, ICE, steam, wooden cart. You crash it, someone, somewhere will be happy to write it off. Either because they can't fix it, don't know how to fix it, can't be arsed to fix it, OR there's more money to be made by not fixing it.

With EVs the proportion of 'don't know how to fix it' is still relatively high, but it will drop as the type becomes established. Same as always.

When you add in all the cameras, sensors, crumple zones, aluminium panels, laser seam welds and giga castings the repair cost skyrockets. Long gone are the days of jigging a steel chassis and pulling it straight and then drilling out a few spot welds to slap on a new wing. If you manage to bend the tesla castings the chassis is done. Added into the mix is that insurance companies are more reluctant to insure rebuilt vehicles as well.

And this is before we get to potential damage to the HV electrics.

Nope not entirely so.

Complexity of electronics and potential risk of damage to batteries is an ongoing problem.

As are the increasing numbers of smart cars packed with cameras and other stuff that're expensive to repair or replace and all positioned in areas that're routinely damaged in collisions.

Why would you need 1200 km in range if it charges in only 10 minutes? Do you have a world champion bladder or are you driving 250 kph?

It would free up charging stations, for one thing

The infrastructure doesn't exist for everyone to have an EV and be needing to charge it up frequently, here in the UK, some 40% or more of housing stock is unsuitable for having a home charger. It's old, has no parking, and the doors are right onto the path along narrow roads without enough room for everyone to even park a car outside their own home because you can only park on one side of the street.

So a car that only needs charging every few weeks and can be done in a very short period of time... is very appealing to people.

Yet the RAC reckons that figure is only 20%...

But the real question is do you really only park at home? Chargers (particularly AC ones) should be ubiquitous... supermarkets, cinemas, restaurants, work places, libraries, hospitals...

If you can charge anywhere, and you should be able to, then range isn't a huge concern.

Besides which 150 miles will do most people for a week (the average UK mileage is ~20/day). That's ~5kWh/day, or 45 minutes of single phase charging - three phase charging will drop that to 15 minutes for cars which support it. Most cars are parked for 23 hours a day, finding a handful of minutes somewhere with a charger really shouldn't be beyond the wit of anyone.

Note that I'm not saying that the chargers already exist... but supermarket chains are starting to put in chargers, and we do have more than a couple of months to roll out more.

I can't work out where I can fit the petrol pump outside my house.

It's interesting that people feel free to store their private motor vehicles on public property but can't imagine it being used to accommodate anything else.

For current vehicles, you are correct. But if you can get down to 9 minute charging times, it makes charging stations viable that aren't too dissimilar to today's petrol stations. Pull up, plug the car in for 10 minutes, pay and drive away. After all, it takes around 5 minutes to park, refuel and pay at the moment with fossil fuel stations.

The problem for EVs has always been slow charging, so needing somewhere to leave your car for a sizeable amount of time to charge - which is a major problem for those without off-street parking available to them. I'm hopeful that this may change things. Of course, you are going to need a hefty electrical supply for somewhere that 30+ vehicles can charge simultaneously at these speeds...

So you can have enough heating to take the coat and hat off and still get somewhere.

The range at higher speeds (70mph) in the winter is only good enough if you can get prompt access to fast chargers and don't drive for too long.

Great round town though, regardless of the temperatures.

So you've never driven anything more recent than a first gen nissan leaf?

- The "can do that for 20 years" is the main selling point for me!

I've heard that if your Hyundai gets some scuffs and scratches to the tray surrounding the battery... it requires a whole new car as they claim there's no way to determine if the batteries are damaged. But don't worry, they'll offer you a cool discount of a few grand on that new car... Warranty doesn't cover things like the car being driven over surfaces that might flick stuff up at the battery cover..... you know... ROADS!!!

I guess... taking the tray off and inspecting the batteries is a skill that is beyond their capabilities.

Elon is IMHO deliberately setting out to make unrepairable cars. A simple fender bender? Sorry that's totaled.

He has no desire to mend anything then you can have his latest blandmobile on your drive in a week.

It costs a fair bit of coin to install 250 kW charging stations. For a car that can add 1200 km of range in ten minutes, you're looking at what, 2 MW per charger? How much more will each of those stations cost, especially in remote areas lacking transmission capacity or facilities with a large numbers of stations? I can only imagine how much more that'll drive up the price of DC fast charging away from home.

> what, 2 MW per charger?

Pretty close, yes.

For argument's sake, Let's start at about 5 miles range per kWh of battery.

So 750 miles range ('pollies for using units that hardly anyone knows about any more) is 150kWh. Add in charging inefficiencies so maybe 200kWh into the charger.

To deliver that in 10 minutes is 1.2MW.

5 miles / 8 km per kWh is 125 Wh/km, that's pretty optimistic. For example ionic 6 is around 150 and KIA ev6 around 175. Bigger SUV-ish or sporty EVs are pushing 200. 5 to 6km/ kWh is more realistic.

On the other hand, 1200 km charge in 10 min isn't needed... If you can do a 10 minute topup, 800km is more than enough, that's what a current diesel gets you now. So I'd say you need about 140kWh topup in 10 min, maybe 150-160 considering inefficiencies (I don't think its so inefficient when charging up to 80%). So 1MW would be quite sufficient for these parameters. With 600 km range in 10 min (which I also think more than enough) it would be 750kW.

One other thing, the above range estimates still require gigantic batteries, 120-160kWh and more, which is double current average ones... Costs would need to decrease a lot...

You're adding 30% charging loss?

That's supremely pessimistic 5% isn't unreasonable, and it usually gets better at higher power (or rather worse at lower power).

Total loss from the cable to the wheels will be well under 30% (though into the double digits)

Current chargers are 350kW capable - that's (taking a reasonable 4m/kWh) 1400 mph...

Let's assume 200 miles between stops (since a break every three hours is reasonable) that's 1/7th of an hour, or eight and a half minutes.

Given a break every three hours, I'm likely to need to spend a penny in the local facilities... and the car can easily beat me.

> it is ready to roll out its solid-state-batteries with a range of 745 miles (1200 km) and charge time of 10 minutes by 2025.

Great!

In that case I will delay buying an EV until that battery is in cars.

Oh, and until the charging infrastructure can delivery the aforementioned charging rate. So maybe a little (or considerably longer) time after that.

(Would it be nit-picky to point out that batteries don't have an intrinsic range, it depends entirely in what vehicle they are installed in: an electric scooter or Humvee)

Well these are more likely to see the light of day as this is Samsung who do actually know a bit about manufacturing. It isn't some vapourware from Elon Musk that is perennially at the 'in 2 years' stage.

Is it nit-picky? Yes and worth an upvote.

...equate a Musk-y reality check with a decline in demand for EV's? I would love an EV! I just can't afford one because living in a city like Chicago I have to pay as much for parking as I do for the car. Just because people have stopped buying Teslas because Elon has picked the wrong horse in the race to test the limits of free speech doesn't mean we don't want them. We just want them to be affordable and not finance wing nuts that take things out of context for a living.

Can we please stop using the name Musk for Tesla related things. Why not just say Tesla, I think most people couldn't give a shit about E. Musk. What is important is how Tesla are doing.

Where I live, Teslas are quite easily the largest number of EVs driving around, they are expensive so I can only imagine that they are reasonably good cars, otherwise people would be spending their money on alternatives.

So if we see that Telsa is not doing well and no-one else is sky rocketing I can presume it is reasonable to use Tesla as an indicator.

Maybe your neighbor still bought a Tesla after the X free speech clown show, but mine did not. I think if you look at the demographics of those that used to buy Teslas and those who are buying them now you will find some interesting signs of people voting with their wallets.

"Maybe your neighbor still bought a Tesla after the X free speech clown show"

Do you honestly believe that the majority of EV buyers take into account E. Musk's politics when weighing out the benefits/inconveniences of buying their next car.. If you do then it's time to get out into the fresh air for a while, the online forums/tiktoks are definitely not what keeps the world ticking.

Demand for all new vehicles is falling. EV or not.

Many of the people who would normally buy a new car every two to three years have decided to keep their current one for a couple of years longer. That then means the people who would have bought that car are keeping theirs, and so on.

The reasons are many, but basically come down to cost and income inequality.

Prices have risen, while many wages haven't kept up - the difference being skimmed off to the multi-billionaires.

The interim result is that mass-market new cars stop selling. Longer term...

"equate a Musk-y reality check with a decline in demand for EV's?"

Quite right. I love the economic fascination with actual numbers and the subsequent higher derivatives of them (rate of change, rate of rate of change etc.).

Demand for EVs certainly isn't declining. Data on sales of EVs from https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/global-ev-data-explorer shows that sales of battery EVs has increased by double digit percentages every year but one (between 2018 and 2019 when growth was only 7%) since 2010. From 2020 to '21, annual sales went up by 135%, 55% the following year and then "only" 30% last year.

What does that mean?

I normally connect the wires to the anode and cathode, so how do I plug this thing in?

To quote a famous philosopher:

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

They only need a cathode because they can use a single bi-directional power cable.

Is that a bit like unidirection ethernet cables for your HiFi?

How about making small ones to fit in phones??

A phone where the battery lasts a week...

That is so last century.

A battery that can provide that kind of range and charge in that amount of time... How big is the battery?

In consumer cars, the largest battery is around 100kwh and allegedly gives up to 400 miles of range. At optimum efficiency, that's in the region of 4 miles per kwh, it also means cars that weigh in the region of several tons.

700+ miles on a charge... and possibly not even a full charge. They've either increased that to 8-10m p/kwh or batteries are about to get a lot larger and heavier to fit in the same sizes of vehicles... and the heavier the vehicle, the lower that real world mile p/kwh will be.

There are lots of variables. Two important ones are volumetric density (kWh/litre of battery pack) and gravimetric density (kWh/kg of battery pack). So different battery chemistries and technologies will store massively different amounts of energy per unit of volume and mass. We already have workable sold-state sodium batteries, as I understand it, but their densities are too low for practical car use, for example.

That's the fundamental measurement, before we start thinking about the efficiency of how that energy is used by the motors and aerodynamics of the vehicle.

GJC

Samsung are mentioning 900 Wh/l.... based on current comparison of energy density to specific energy density, that should be approximately 360 Wh/kg, which isn't that groundbreaking. But it still means a current long-range Tesla battery (approx 125 kWh at approx 250 Wh/kg) weighs about half a ton. With that new type of battery you could get 180kWh from a half-ton battery. So absolutely, range can be increased without increasing mass of car.

Tesla top out at 100kWh in the Models S&X, and around 75kWh in 3&Y, for the record, but I can confirm that their battery packs are somewhat north of half a ton, having just removed the one from my S85. You don't want to drop them on your foot, for sure.

Ah, I suppose the new Cybertruck is around 125kWh? I must catch up on the Munro teardown.

GJC

Was I the only one that read - "37th Electric Vehicle Symposium & Exposition "

As - "37th Electric Vehicle Symposium & Explosion".

I beg to differ. What that should have said is as follows:-

While battery innovation is welcome, growth in demand for affordable EVs is slowing.

The under £25,000 OTR market is ripe for opening up. One of the key factors is the cost of the battery. Get that down to say $50 per kWh and the battery cost becomes much less of an issue.

Sure, the cheaper end of the market won't have these super-duper-fast charging batteries at first but in time every EV will have them.

As for Tesla sales... Relying on just two boring models (any colour as long as it is white or you pay extra) is not a recipe for long term survival. The failure of his Muskness to develop a cheaper car is down to his vanity projects (Cybertruck and Semi). One recent report said that he wants that he has got bored by making cars. He is successful with Starlink and thanks to Uncle Sam, SpaceX otherwise, his track record for failures might soon rival his lord and master Donald 'I did nothing wrong, I don't know her, I never met her' Trump.