500 kWh Battery

[Big Earl]

I think the fella was messing with you. If somebody can ever produce a Tesla-pack size 500 kwh battery, then we will be living in a very different world. Petroleum would be used for fueling ships, train locos and some aircraft, but nothing else.

What a world we live in.

 

[Rowan256]

@ssiegler

The worst thing about this story of a 500kWh battery is this: even if one assumes that the battery technology in question has good enough numbers of power and energy and weight and cost to fit in a car, it still makes more sense from mathematical optimisation to have less:

• If the battery has 500kWh and can charge in 20 minutes: Why not nerf it to 200kWh and have it fill up in seven to eight for 600-800 miles range, like a petrol/diesel car, and have less degradation to boot?
• If the battery is cheap enough at 500kWh: Why not reduce to 200-250 kWh to increase production efficiency, over what is really going to be a very small, relatively speaking, marketing advantage of the increased range from 600 to 1500 miles?
• If the battery can only provide the power at 500kWh: Then why not increase contact area and cooling at expense of energy density? This is a fact common to the majority of battery chemistries: energy is a result of optimum chemistry, but power transmission is due to mechanical facts such as surface area, conductance preventative heat transmission and cooling requirements. Hence discoveries of Lithium-ion leading on to higher power, lower energy, longer lasting variants: LTO, A123's iron-nanophosphate types etc.

And don't get me started on charging tech and how long it would take a household to charge.

I don't care how much of a optimist or fanboy or expert these people say they are. It is genuinely too much capacity in terms of relative physical fact, alone, that is, regardless of hypothetically having no trade-offs, and possibly resulting from any lack of tradeoffs. Batteries are an all in one source: energy and power per weight. It is so much, it is actually turned into a disadvantage.

To be particularly damning, there is already a type of vehicle that could utilise this same shitty to an even greater extent: internal combustion.

Yes, your average Audi or BMW sedan could well have no transmission to the back and a 400-500 litre tank stuffed in the equivalent area to a Tesla (Yes, the back seats and boot remain free. Don't think I'm falling for that fob-off comparison.) which would give 5,000 miles of range.

And last time I checked, the ability to traverse the Sahara Desert is not exactly an extensive market.

This story is nonsense.

Therefore, the story is ended.

It is a dead story.

The story has been.

It is an ex-story.

End of story.

If you carry a caravan, the energy you use is usually over 3 times as high while driving on electricity. and on top of that, you usually drive about 700km a day (450 miles). In that case, having a 500kWh battery isn't that bad at all.

 

[WannabeOwner]

If the battery has 500kWh and can charge in 20 minutes: Why not nerf it to 200kWh and have it fill up in seven to eight for 600-800 miles range, like a petrol/diesel car, and have less degradation to boot?

Well .. I think it will happen. Cars will have batteries far bigger than people need (day to day), and therefore all the too-little + too-late money that Government is spending on subsidising country-wide car charging infrastructure will turn out not to have been needed [to anything like that extent]

If batteries are "cheap enough" people will buy next-size-up to avoid range anxiety and/or to avoid recharging. My wife has done more than 25,000 miles in her car, she has only ever charged at home and at work ... for any longer-journey she's taken an ICE. No, I don't know why either ... she's Supercharged often enough when with me ... maybe she's a sample-size-of-one ... maybe not.