Fisker, the company behind a luxury electric vehicle dubbed the EMotion, said today that it is pursuing patents for a battery technology breakthrough that will give cars a 500-plus mile range and one-minute recharging times. The technology is based around solid-state batteries that offer a surface area greater than existing flat thin-film solid-state electrodes, and... READ FULL ARTICLE
How about just buy the M3, MS or MX now and in 5 years (when this new battery tech is available), decide on what to buy next?
Hope everyone caught my sarcasm. Regardless, a claim of charging 500 miles of range in 1 minute requires significant advances beyond battery technology. That current has to come from somewhere....
I think at 1.21 gW it would take far less than a minute. I think the necessary advance we are looking for here is Mr Fusion. Ok I'm done.
Here we go! Amazon has a Flux Capacitor Car Charger: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Capacitor-USB-Car-Charger/dp/B00O2KYGQI
They only have seven charging station for this car and they are located at the largest Hydro-electric generation facilities, unfortunately no one lives near them and you will have to charge at home to get there on a 80 Amp Circuit... I'll wait for the flying electric commuter car.. Watch this all-electric "flying car" take its first test flight in Germany Name Year of completion Total Capacity (MW) Image 1 Grand Coulee 1942/1980 6,809[1] 2 Bath County PSP 1985 3,003 3 Chief Joseph Dam 1958/73/79 2,620 4 Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant 1961 2,515 5 John Day Dam 1949 2,160 6. Hoover Dam 1936/1961 2,080 7 The Dalles Dam 1981 2,038
but the company does not expect to bring its battery breakthrough to market until 2023. So the scenario I have often envisioned is that in the immediate future a vehicle charging network will have to be built ,in fact, overbuilt. It is necessary to cater to the growing number of EVs. And then battery capacity and charging times will improve, rendering the charging network nearly unnecessary.
Okay, so can we talk about charging a 500 mi car in 1 minute? Let's say this vehicle is basically a scaled up Nissan Leaf. Best case scenario, that means it will need a 150kWh battery to go 500mi. My Model X is about 66% efficient at charging, so if I had that size battery and wanted to charge in an hour, it would require 946kA. Let's assume solid state rapid charging is similar. If you wanted to pull that full charge off in one minute, it would require 57 Kilo-Amps at 240V. That's 13.6MW. That's the rough equivalent power draw of 13,000 houses for one minute! But that energy consumed by a 66% efficient charging process doesn't just disappear. It is mostly converted to heat by the charging system and battery. The wasted energy to charge the battery in 60 seconds is 4.5 MEGAWATTS. That's like burning 75,000 60-watt incandescent bulbs for an entire minute. That's a lot of heat. You're gonna need a really good heatsink and some special paint to handle a charge that quick. With specs like that, charging your car would look like this every time:
Hey wanna hear something REALLY funny? Back in 2010, I had $40k to invest. I wanted to invest in Tesla, but it wasn't public (yet). So then I figure Fiskar was a good way to go (at the time I thought both were going to succeed with Fiskar having an edge). They weren't public either, but I saw that the company that developed their motors was public. So I "invested" (somehow in retrospect that doesn't seem like the right word) into QTWW. QTWW used to be "Quantum World Wide" or something like that... looking it up now redirects to "QF Liquidation inc". I think I paid around $4 a share and I see now it trades at $0.0164. I sold at some point for a total divestiture of under $2k. I don't invest any more, having discovered I'm really, really bad at it.
Uh, yeah, even a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that it is utter nonsense. The car would be melted smoldering blob on the pavement 1 minute after you started charging.
Battery enginineers will pay attention, since solid state is considered the cure for so many issues, but be suprised as well. Toyota that is investing heavily in solid state, says it will be ready no earlier than 2020.