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Prototype Battery Powers Tesla Model S For 752 Miles On One Charge
- Thread starter JimmyB
- Start date
What if the recharge took days, or the battery catches fire, or that the battery dies in a year or two, There is much more to an EV car battery than a one time maximum run for mileage (although I am amazed it did this on a very cold day). Tesla could probably do that today one time with their current technology. Interesting though. Good to keep the competition in the technology.
That’s cool.
Keep in mind that if you drove a Model S Refresh at 55mph you’d probably get over 500 miles range now.
Keep in mind that if you drove a Model S Refresh at 55mph you’d probably get over 500 miles range now.
Partially agree. This is more than an announcement. Is also more than a single cell.
Seems similar to the return trip of Lucid air of a couple of years ago…
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
My take on this is:
This is exactly what the model S was built for. Prototyping battery technology. Think of the implications of a bolt-like battery fiasco to Tesla in 2017. Catastrophic, but possibly survivable. But imagine the same scenario but with the 3/Y having been built in tremendous volume for the past 3 years. Company ending.
To that end, you need a platform where you can test out your battery platform in a huge array of environments. Ideally, you find a whole bunch of chumps to *pay* for the privilege of being part of this beta test. You want some hot, some cold, some abusive, some silly, some insane, etc, you want to find all the corner cases before you turn on the volume production. That, dear friends and chumps, is us and the S. Conservative and expensive (original 85 packs); adventurous and spicy (the 90 packs), eventually the "yeah, this is probably the right recipe" 100 packs; we ran them through their final rounds of product validation, "helping" tesla find all the bugs in their battery technology. Just look at how easy it is to swap a pack on the S and how it's not so easy on the 3 and the Y....
So, good for someone else just using the S as a platform for prototyping their battery.
Hopefully in the long run I'll be able to buy one of their packs to put under my car? Probably not; as people have said, making a prototype is hard, but making a mass produced, supported by a warranty, driven everywhere from moab to saskatoon, well, that's another dimension of hard.
Good luck the world needs it!
This is exactly what the model S was built for. Prototyping battery technology. Think of the implications of a bolt-like battery fiasco to Tesla in 2017. Catastrophic, but possibly survivable. But imagine the same scenario but with the 3/Y having been built in tremendous volume for the past 3 years. Company ending.
To that end, you need a platform where you can test out your battery platform in a huge array of environments. Ideally, you find a whole bunch of chumps to *pay* for the privilege of being part of this beta test. You want some hot, some cold, some abusive, some silly, some insane, etc, you want to find all the corner cases before you turn on the volume production. That, dear friends and chumps, is us and the S. Conservative and expensive (original 85 packs); adventurous and spicy (the 90 packs), eventually the "yeah, this is probably the right recipe" 100 packs; we ran them through their final rounds of product validation, "helping" tesla find all the bugs in their battery technology. Just look at how easy it is to swap a pack on the S and how it's not so easy on the 3 and the Y....
So, good for someone else just using the S as a platform for prototyping their battery.
Hopefully in the long run I'll be able to buy one of their packs to put under my car? Probably not; as people have said, making a prototype is hard, but making a mass produced, supported by a warranty, driven everywhere from moab to saskatoon, well, that's another dimension of hard.
Good luck the world needs it!
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
Getting close to rated isn’t impossible, it just takes a lot of patience and dedication…
But you’re straight up talking 25-30% over that.
Miracle battery announcements come every month. But the noticeable thing is that they are usually trumpeting just one specirfication:
1. Huge capacity (energy density)
2. Huge life cycle
3. Really fast recharging
These things always have tradeoffs with some of those other things, as well as temperature performance, cost, production consistency, availability of materials, etc. etc. It's frequently possible to knock one of those aspects out of the park and make press releases and headlines with it, while several of the other specifications fall off a cliff and are in no way reasonable for real world use. Finding a good balance of these things that makes the product really useful is hard.
1. Huge capacity (energy density)
2. Huge life cycle
3. Really fast recharging
These things always have tradeoffs with some of those other things, as well as temperature performance, cost, production consistency, availability of materials, etc. etc. It's frequently possible to knock one of those aspects out of the park and make press releases and headlines with it, while several of the other specifications fall off a cliff and are in no way reasonable for real world use. Finding a good balance of these things that makes the product really useful is hard.
airborne spoon
Active Member
I never got range anxiety in my tesla and I routinely get down to 2-4%. I did however, get range anxiety in my motorcycle after driving the Tesla so much, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it to a gas station in the next 30 miles when I flipped on my reserve. Also I got anxiety in a U-Haul when I was driving across the country and the thing was on E for quite a while and I didn't see a gas station anywhere. but never once in the tesla was I concerned on running out of juice.
ElectricIAC
Good-Natured Rascal
That is cool, but the article states that the battery is 203kWh, which means it's not anymore efficient than a stock Model S... they just put a much higher capacity battery into it.
Tesla Model S Goes 752 Miles on Startup’s Battery Swap
The Michigan startup's unique battery was tested twice, and both times it clocked over 750 miles.www.thedrive.com
The other thing is... it says their battery has a normal traction battery plus an additional range extender component with a "more radical structure". My guess is that they abandoned the cylindrical cells, but those provide protection against thermal runaway.
It's possible this battery might not have the same safety constraints that Tesla's actual battery must abide by.
Tesla considers much more than just range in their batteries. They could make the current battery go even further than 750 miles. They could make it charge fully in 10 minutes from 10%. They could make it last longer. Tesla is trying to factor in a battery that will last a long time, charge quickly, be safe, have a long range, and make the car quick. These are all give and take areas -- extending range may decrease battery life, charging quickly may also shorten life or risk fire, etc. No one has the experience of Tesla at optimizing their batteries to do everything well, and this is one area I feel Tesla will excel for many more years.
That's the hope. I for one expected greater 3rd party support, retrofit improvements, and greater sustainability to keep these vehicles in use for longer and while we haven't reached my expectations over the last 4 years, I hoping that it'll happen one day. I think the issue was that there's so much to invest and learn for a such a small niche market that it was too much for a company to invest in such a small potential market with the lurking issue that Tesla could also freeze them out or undercut them in cost and coverage. Now that Teslas are pretty ubiquitous, the issue seems to be inventory and Tesla's on-the-fly production revisions leaves a lot of puzzles to solve for the 3rd party mechanic/electrical magician.
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