Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry
Jacking Up a Car Is Dangerous. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway
Eh. That’s not really comparable to lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are similar to bombs in that they’re highly dense stores of energy. If something goes wrong and that energy storage medium gets exposed to air, or there’s a failure in a charging safety mechanism, that’s a chemical fire at best, explosion at worse, but no matter what, it’s extremely toxic.
Acetylene and oxygen is also explosive, but you’re still allowed to have it and use it. Battery acid is extremely corrosive and poisonous. Gasoline is extremely flammable. A garage is filled with dangers. If you can’t service a lithium-ion battery in a safe way, you shouldn’t do it, just like you shouldn’t service your brakes if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Lol. A single gallon of gasoline contains approximately 34khw of energy. An EV with ~300 miles of range, will have a battery with between 80 and 100 khw. Or the same potential energy as about 3 gallons of gas.
People are familiar with gas, so it seems safe. But every gas tank is a literal bomb, and that’s just for a car. I have no idea how big the storage tanks at gas stations are, but I’m assuming there’s enough explosive in there to level a couple hundred square feet if one of those goes.
Lead-acid batteries also present a risk of explosion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–acid_battery#Risk_of_explosion
That’s why you attach jumper cables to the dead battery first.
A car sitting 6 feet in the air is also a highly dense storage of energy that could be released at any moment. I do get your point, but there are ways to mitigate the dangers associated with working on a pack, and they’re not as volatile as you think. Being exposed to air isn’t going to cause a cell to explode as the lithium is mixed with other chemicals inside the cell to make it fairly inert. The danger comes from short circuits, whether it be a puncture or bridging contacts with something conductive.
Have you ever attached jumper cables to a dead lead-acid battery?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–acid_battery#Risk_of_explosion
The whole repair thing should made super easy if we want EVs to succeed.
- Make all batteries use an easily swappable set of standard cell sizes.
- Make battery controllers standardised and swappable.
- …. Er… that’s it.
But that will never happen because the EV manufacturers couldn’t charge ridiculous amounts of money for proprietary batteries.
That why we need regulators. The market doesn’t magically deal with “Tragedy of the Commons”.
Make all cars rechargeable with a single charging port. And that port should be USB-C
I’ve been surprised by USB-C. I recently bought a Xiaomi phone and it takes like 10 minutes to charge with the charger that comes with the phone (and it still works with the other ones). It’s 120 watts
At that rate it’d still take 12 hours to charge a 1440 watt hour battery, which isn’t the hour or two that people are used to with superchargers these days, but actually surprisingly servicable.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again allow… cars with CATL or Nio battery swap cassettes into the US… It is so dumb that there are different battery setups for every manufacturer … In a Nio I can swap batteries for less than a pack of beer… Why not do that instead of this current BS system where you have only one pack and once that is done it is $10k
I also saw that video (note $60k CAD about $42k USD). Hyundai is really going to need to figure things out if they expect Ioniq 5 sales to continue because insurers aren’t going to keep paying out $60k every time someone drives over some road debris and customers aren’t going to be happy about insanely high insurance bills or paying more than the MSRP of their brand new car to replace a single component.
I wonder if the prices are due to Hyundai having supply chain issues and designating every pack toward new vehicles.
I heard NIO has this technology already and are looking to standardise it.
Every EV has this already. What they don’t have is a standard. Not shockingly, every EV manufacturer will argue why theirs should be the standard.
Honestly if the department of defense adopts any EVs for troop transport it should come with a forced standardization. Just hand wave it as being for national security and the fact a lot of countries will probably adopt the standard, that should do the trick.
The problem with this is that every vehicle would need to be built around the same battery pack dimensions, have the same amp-hour rating, same voltage, same cooling system, etc. I seriously doubt that would ever happen as nothing like that has ever existed in the 120+ years of automotive history.
I’m not so sure.
Are we talking about the same thing, there was a recent Tom Scott video on it.
Basically you drive your NIO into this machine and it removes your battery and replaces it. Then it charges your old one and next time someone drives in they may get your last battery. Since and repeat.
This was posted to one of the communities I sub to a day ago: https://spectrum.ieee.org/flow-battery-2666672335
This would probably be the best option if it takes off.
Is it money?
Is it money? I bet it’s money
Mostly it’s money for the consumer. I have a Prius so it might be a little different. But when the hybrid battery goes out costs something like $7,000 to have it replaced. A mechanic in town will repair it for $1000.
Now my car isn’t worth $7000 so if I had to replace the battery then I would just get a new car and this one might end up in the scrap heap. In getting it repaired I have gotten something like 6 more years out of it, at least, and that’s a pretty significant environmental savings.
And that’s essentially what the article is saying.
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Interesting.
First of all apparently ublock, no script, or some combination of my add-ons kept me from seeing the message and I’m able to view the entire article.
Even more interesting is this text at the end of the article-
This story was originally published by Grist, a nonprofit media organization covering climate, justice, and solutions.
So this source basically spun an article from Grist and put it behind their paywall.
Following the link from Scientific American, the first line of the Grist article is-
This story was co-published with WIRED.
It’s clowns the whole way down, yaaaaar.
