EV Batteries Are Dangerous to Repair. Here’s Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway

flango@lemmy.eco.br to Technology@lemmy.world – 245 points – 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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Jacking Up a Car Is Dangerous. Here's Why Mechanics Are Doing So Anyway

M.O.N.E.Y.

Yep. Other than thrill seekers, the only reason any business does something is for the money. If you can go, "Hey, you don't need to spend $12k on a new battery pack! Bring it down to Bubba's Batteries Bazaar and we can fix it for less!", you will get business.

Yeah, thats pretty much it. Doesnt VW repair or recycle their own batteries?

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.

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.

The whole repair thing should made super easy if we want EVs to succeed.

  1. Make all batteries use an easily swappable set of standard cell sizes.
  2. Make battery controllers standardised and swappable.
  3. …. 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".

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.

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.

The problem with this is that every vehicle would need to be built around the same battery pack dimensions

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.

have the same amp-hour rating

No, they'd not need that. In fact, I'd say it's desirable for them to not have that.

same voltage, same cooling system

Same voltage, yes, same cooling system? Not exactly. They'd just need to have cooling system hookups in the same place.

I seriously doubt that would ever happen as nothing like that has ever existed in the 120+ years of automotive history.

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.

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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.

We should all strive for this level of rigor when understanding sources of articles online.

The world would be so much better.

Because that's literally a mechanic's job.

I loved how Renault solved this for the Twizzy (and other cars). You bought the car. You leased the battery for something like 50 euros a month. (Probably more now).

Sure, that sounds expensive, but I suspect it worked out less than replacing the battery after a decade.

Suspect it also helped resale value. The most expensive repair to worry about for a second hand buyer, is the battery. Making that a lease removes that worry entirely. You know exactly how much it's going to cost.

Of course, having to pay that monthly lease fee for the battery, does make it more obvious that electric cars aren't necessarily that much cheaper to run than an ICE.

I've got enough subscriptions in my life. 50 euros a month would be 6000 euros after 10 years (figure a couple years more than the 8-year warranty in the US) that could be put towards a refurbished battery if the car needed one at that point. The reality is, on a 10-year-old car, a little range degradation isn't a huge deal, especially if that car is being driven around town and can be charged nightly. I'd rather own the things I buy, and not pay to be tied into yet another monthly bill.

Plus imagine if you crash or sell the car after 5 years and then lose $3k for nothing.

Somehow I only now got a notification about this. That brings up an interesting point: would you be financially liable for a battery damaged in a crash? I would imagine insurance would cover it, but you're paying your premium based on that value, only to have to give a big portion of any claim payment back to whoever you're leasing the battery from

We have an BMW i3. 8 years old. Battery is fine. But car is written off now because the inverter failed. 11k€ repair. Worst part is that due to BMW software locks it’s almost impossible for third party repair to work on the car. Any replaced part needs to be “blessed” by BMW.

That's the bullshit we should be focusing on. And not only in the EV space. See John Deere

whatever happened to Teslas distributed powergrid? Now that was a game changer, offloading the cost of the battery entirely could have made EVs actually affordable.

It's up and running for the Powerwall, on some grids anyway (it works in my state - but depends on having an agreement with the grid).

The thing is there needs to be coordination between your battery and the grid - you don't to drain your battery every night, they only last about 4,000 cycles.

If every home in the state had a Powerwall, then maybe it could help provide baseload power but the reality right now is all it can do is help with temporary disruptions, for example keeping the grid up when a cloud passes over a major solar farm.

They're in the planning stages of doing Vehicle to Grid or V2G power. Right now though, it's just for standalone batteries. This isn't just Tesla by the way - when it comes it'll likely be for most EVs.

EVs are still much cheaper to run than ICEs though. Yes the battery is an expensive replacement but maintenance is still much cheaper because they don't have gearboxes, clutches, turbo chargers, catalytic converters, particulate filters, spark plugs, engine oil, timing belts, head gaskets, cylinders, exhausts, etc. etc.

It's cheaper, but not that much cheaper. Anecdotally, my current car is 8 years old and has cost me roughly 400 euros a year in repairs and servicing. Manual gearbox is fine and should outlast the car.

Also, if I do a simulation for extended warranty and servicing (8 years/210k km) on the manufacturers website for a petrol car and for an equivalent electric car, the difference is roughly 600 euros per year. I suspect that'll be down to the battery. Traditional car the costs are spread over a longer period. Electric the battery or whatever sneaks up on you. The whole thing becomes doubly annoying when you factor in high electricity prices, meaning (sometimes) fuel costs are lower than electricity costs.

To be clear, electric is the future, it's a good thing they'll be banning the sale of new ICE cars here in the foreseeable future, and an electric car almost certainly is cheaper to run. It's just not _that _much cheaper. I assume prices will come down when they're forced to start making more of them and competing with the Chinese.

Danger, Danger, High Voltage!

Although it annoys me that mechanics consider even 400V "high" voltage. HV is supposed to be 1,000V, minimum.

400V is dangerous though. The traditional 12V is not.

Absolutely, but 400V isn't as dangerous as 1,000V. IEC standards have already established all of this, above 1,000V is HV, below 50V is ELV and generally safe. Automotives have come in and labelled anything above like 24V as "HV", which is just silly.

Support right to repair. You wouldn't have to deal with this shit.