Japanese firm believes it could make a solid-state battery with a range of 745 miles that charges in 10 minutes
They have been “claiming”/ “announcing” this breakthrough since 2017 repeatedly. They STILL haven’t figured out how to mass produce it affordably to making it meaningful. They keep pushing out the date for when it will arrive for many years now.
- Release statement claiming breakthrough
- Attract investment money
- Run out of money
- Release statement claiming breakthrough
- Attract investment money
- Run out of money
Repeat until product is complete or no one will invest.
Since Toyota is way ahead with hybrids but behind with EVs, this would be a way to tell the public, “wait, don’t buy a competitor’s EV, because we’ll have something 100x better in a year or so.”
I hope I’m just being cynical, because solid state batteries do sound awesome. I wonder was the weight difference would be
Oh fuck off with that charging times.
Assuming this battery will be 150kwh (which is a conservative estimate for such a range)
Let’s ignore even heat loss So you need to 150kwh in 10 minutes, wish equals to 900kw of immediate charging speed.
Now imagine 20 of those power inputs connecting/disconnecting on a local power management substation.
Not fucking gonna happen.
Even if the power load on the grid was doable, heat dissipation is also a huge problem. Current DC fast chargers max out at 350 kW (in theory, my car supports charging at that rate but the best I’ve seen in real life is around 190kW), and the liquid-cooled cables are already heavy/bulky enough to give some women and older folks a hard time. I can’t imagine a practical way to handle 2 or 3 times the current without making the cables something like 6 inches in diameter and weighing a couple hundred pounds.
I’ve wanted to believe in breakthrough battery technology so many times and been let down. I’ll wait until it hits the market before getting excited. Even this article is pretty vapor-ish:
The world’s second largest carmaker was already pursuing a plan to roll out cars with advanced solid-state batteries, which offer benefits compared with liquid-based batteries, by 2025.
Then a little further down:
The company expects to be able to manufacture solid-state batteries for use in electric vehicles as soon as 2027
I’m waiting for the,“By 2030 we’ll definitely be able to use these batteries in our 2035 models. You’ll see this in 2040 and the sky will open up with sunshine and birds will sing.”
Yeah, chuck in on the pile of “battery innovations” that get announced but never come out. It’s a large pile.
Hydrogen is the future.
Why do you feel hydrogen is the future?
From my understanding, it’s more of a fuel than a storage medium so they kind of play different roles. On top of that, I thought it’s currently pretty difficult to store outside of pretty extreme conditions and the best way to create it at the moment is by burning fossil fuels (natural gas).
I’m not an expert, so let me know if I got any of that wrong!
TL;DR: You’re correct, in my professional opinion.
The catalyst in most hydrogen fuel cells are still too expensive and have a limited life. Hydrogen will mostly be sourced as a waste product from oil and gas extraction (though it could be done with clean electricity and electrolysis), that’s why oil and gas companies are becoming so interested in pushing hydrogen (see the successful “clean” natural gas campaigns, but depending on how you measure it natural gas can result in more emissions than coal and is just a bunch of greenwashing. Same would happen with hydrogen in my opinion). Additionally, we’d have to build out an entire hydrogen delivery infrastructure that serves only that purpose. We’ll just end up with commercial fuel stations like we have now. Fuel cells (for many fuels) can make sense in very remote applications, or industrial applications where specific waste gasses can be turned into supplemental electricity right on site.
Battery-electric on the other hand is much more flexible and fits into our existing infrastructure better. It’s not just power dense batteries for cars; it’s (maybe gravity) batteries for communities, safe and long-lived (maybe salt) batteries for homes, better batteries for our electronics. Research in one area can support improvement of the others. They all connect to the same electricity grid so the energy can be shared among applications. Batteries play a role in decentralizing and democratizing energy (today you can put PV on your house, charge your car or home battery, use your car to power your house in a power outage, etc). As mentioned we can use greener and cleaner batteries (even completely non-chemical) in some applications, and one day we can hopefully get to the point of using ultra- or super-capacitors in place of high-density chemical batteries. In the mean time we have batteries that work and are getting quite affordable, we can transition to this solution now without waiting for a miracle breakthrough, then continue to iterate the technology over time.
