EV Batteries Are Dangerous to Repair. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway
scientificamerican.com
Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry
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Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry
The whole repair thing should made super easy if we want EVs to succeed.
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".
no that's communism
No one lives in completely unregulated capitalism. Well, not willingly anyway. That kind of anarchy happens when countries collapse. But normally you quickly get a drug/war lord taking over setting their own (unfair) laws & regulation.
It's a constant battle of over/under regulation, regulatory capture, etc. But that's how it should be in a dynamic world.
God forbid that they concentrate on the quality of the basic vehicle instead.
Yup.. If you can't compete add tariffs.
But you know gubmint regjuleshons are stifling innovation.
Make all cars rechargeable with a single charging port. And that port should be USB-C
like 50 USB-C cables tied together to output enough of a charge lol
The highest available now is 240 W, so with 50 in parallel you get 12 kW. Fast chargers go up to like 300 kW but at home 12 is good enough actually.
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.
That's 50x smaller than an EV battery. Being able to drive once every two months doesn't seem practical.
Where did you pull that 1440Wh number from? The battery in my plug-in hybrid is 20kWh, and that's still small compared to a full EV.
Ah shit, I googled the number but it looks like I got the number for a battery in an internal combustion engine car, apologies. I'm an electronics person, not a car person
Understandable. Just for the sake of comparison to a smartphone 120W fast charger, level 1 EV chargers (which can still take days to fully charge a completely drained EV) will generally deliver between 1000 and 1500W. Level 2 (the fastest you'll typically see installed in people's homes) range from about 7kW to 19kW. Level 3 fast chargers typically operate from about 60 to 250kW and unlike level 1 and 2 which deliver AC to the car to be handled by the vehicles internal rectifier/charger, level 3 delivers DC.
1.44kWh Is roughly 7-10km of driving, depending on the car and weather. In 12h that's an absolutely useless amount of power for anything other than small e-scooters and short-range e-bikes.
Can't wait for all power cables to just be USB-C. I dream for the day where I can charge my phone with the same plug my induction stove uses.
If USB-C isn’t powerful enough, I’ll settle for a Lightning connector.
The one in / from back to the future should be sufficient.
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
Looks like for some Ioniq 5's it's 60k - more than a new car.
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.
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.
There's a lot of ways to tackle this issue. You could have a couple of standards (think AA vs AAA batteries). Or you could make the packs smaller and more modular so different applications can have more or less of them.
No, they'd not need that. In fact, I'd say it's desirable for them to not have that.
Same voltage, yes, same cooling system? Not exactly. They'd just need to have cooling system hookups in the same place.
Loads of things like that have existed in the automotive industry. In fact, that's one of the biggest features of the big 3 automotive manufacturers is having standardized parts shared between one another.
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.
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.
that's not what the top comment was talking about. this is replacing the whole battery, not cells within the battery. it doesn't help with reparability at all.
Standard and swappable battery packs? Yes. All the skateboard style vehicles or ebikes have battery packs that can be removed and replaced.
Making that automated could be nice but isn't necessary to get the benefits of a standard. A standard forces pack producers to compete with one another in terms of quality and price. It makes it cheaper to install new batteries. And it makes it possible to upgrade your cars range with newer packs. With an EV, you won't need to get a new vehicle hardly ever if getting new packs is relatively affordable and easy. Further, the worn packs still have value so swap locations will be incentivized to pay you for the pack they remove.
The notion this needs to be part of a giant battery swapping network to reduce charge times is silly. 10 to 15 minute charge stops are already very short and all you need on most cars for the next leg of a journey. It also introduces a lot of complexity. Like, what if I want or need a 100kWh pack but the standard is 80kWh packs? What about pack wear? Who's in charge of pulling the degraded packs? And what do we do about someone putting in a pack with fake capabilities? You have a situation where you are cycling parts worth well north of $10k. That's a mighty tempting target for theft.
A standardized battery is still a really good thing. I just don't think it needs to be a part of road trips.
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.