VW solid-state battery retains 95% capacity over 1,000 charge cycles in lab testing

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 438 points –
VW solid-state battery retains 95% capacity over 1,000 charge cycles in lab testing
techspot.com
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These the guys that notoriously violated emissions standards and created software to hide the fact from testers? Some pretty spectacular claims you got there. Would be a shame if someone... doubted your reputation.

And let's not forget that they had to create Electrify America which they treat like a red headed step child. They are really invested in EVs. /s

Every car maker did, VW took the blame but the whole industry was lying

Sauce?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

The list of manufacturers who cheated is long.

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

` From 2014 onwards, software which manipulated air pollution tests was discovered in vehicles from some car makers; the software recognized when the standardized emissions test was being done, and adjusted the engine to emit less during the test. The cars emitted much higher levels of pollution under real-world driving conditions. Some cars' emissions were higher even though there was no manipulated software. Scandals relating to higher-than-reported emissions from diesel engines began in 2014 when the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) reported discrepancies between European and US models of vehicles. This began with the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Independent tests carried out by the German car club ADAC proved that, under normal driving conditions, diesel vehicles including the Volvo S60, Renault's Espace Energy and the Jeep Renegade, exceeded legal European emission limits for nitrogen oxide (NOx) by more than 10 times. ICCT and ADAC showed the biggest deviations from Volvo, Renault, Jeep, Hyundai, Citroën and Fiat.Researchers have criticized the inadequacy of current regulations and called for the use of a UN-sanctioned test called Worldwide harmonized Light vehicles Test Procedures that better reflects real-life driving conditions. The test only came into force in 2017, with critics saying that car firms lobbied fiercely to delay its implementation due to the high cost of meeting stricter environmental controls.Conservative Internal Market spokesman Daniel Dalton – who led the legislation through the European Parliament – described the previous regulations as "at best patchy and at worst ineffective." He further said that his latest 2018 report introduced a strong, transparent system to ensure cars are safe and meet emissions standards.

Since 2016, 38 out of 40 diesel cars tested by ADAC failed a NOx-test. `

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Did those guys not get fired?

Oh dang, apologies to the hive mind. Volkswagen bad, evil employees, actively attempting to destroy the earth, cannot be deterred or corrected. We good now?

Do you really think the people in charge and responsible for that decision are the ones who got fired? Do you really think that's how accountability works in giant mega corporations?

Yeah, I actually went and looked it up and found that many of the executives responsible resigned or got fired, and some went to prison, but let's not let that interrupt our circle jerk.

Not only that, a lot of the board ended up in prison, which didn't happen for the other automakers that also had illegally high emissions (all of them).

VW was pretty much the only automaker who got held accountable for their crimes, and took the wrap for everyone both in terms of the law and public opinion.

Some others broke emissions standards by a much greater amount (cough, FIAT-Chrysler cough Toyota cough Hyundai/KIA).

VW has a rich legacy of lying their asses off to every single human that will listen. VW is not a credible source of information about VW.

They're probably using the guy who set the Tesla truck's range

Given that this is VW, I'll wait until someone else verifies this.

"No, no, we only cheated that one time, it's in the past. Let it go. We've had our one lie, now we're perfectly honest!"

I hear what you're saying, but they invested tens of billions in this technology, and they were apparently the first to solve the dendrite issue that prevented SS batteries from being produced to scale. I'm confident they've figured it out. We'll have to wait and see.

Imagine being on a project too big to fail. Someone might have felt inclined to tinker with the data. Happens in the science community, could happen again here.

Plus VW produced SS equipment at scale in the past, but they don't like to talk about it.

So, they are heavily invested in this being a success, both financially and for the prestige of being first? To the point of likely costing someone a lot of money and maybe their job if they hadnt produced results?

The kind of situation where they would be tempted to tweak results a bit, perhaps?

Given that we’re talking about batteries… Remember what phone and laptop manufacturers say about their batteries?

On top of that, these are solid state batteries, not your usual Li-ion batteries with a liquid electrolyte. This is the first time I’ve heard of a large well known company announce they’re using solid state batteries.

That technology has been under development for decades, and it has been applied in some very special devices before, but maybe now it’s finally the time to start large scale production.

Toyota has been telling us solid state batteries are coming soon since … 2012ish 😀

We’re still waiting

Finding the right materials has been really hard, but the next obstacle is scaling up the production. As long as we’re talking about small scale production, these batteries are going to be really expensive and only suitable for very few products.

VW is suggesting that they have solved both of these problems, which obviously makes me a bit skeptical. However, I don’t think it’s impossible, but I’m saying it’s really hard. I would have expected to see some luxury products use SSBs first before seeing them in main stream brands.

Never gonna buy a volkswagen purely because of that BS, I guess it helps that most of their cars are expensive junk that is always breaking and expensive af to fix and maintain like lots of german cars...

Quit being American for one second please, it'd be great.

Do they magically make Volkswagens more reliable in other countries then?

I guess so because I have never heard anyone complain, it's only people from the US who complain about them.

and usually the complaints are "there's barely any space to work on them!" but also Americans are way more susceptible to buying brand new cars for little to no reason. It takes a lot more to sell a big/new car to an average person in Europe.

It’s literally that most VWs get pretty mediocre reliability and maintenance scores at least in the US. There are certainly very reliable VW models of certain years, and people certainly get good examples of a model that will just go be forever but also… there are a LOT of duds. At the end of the day it just comes down to the fact that German car makers (as well as American of course) can’t really hold a candle to a basic Honda civic or Toyota camry commuter car. They go forever, there are VERY few models and model years that need to be avoided, and they just don’t break down even if you don’t baby them like a car enthusiast would.

In the US there is a subset of people who get obsessed with German stuff just being nicer than stuff from other places, those people tend to be really really insufferable people and from my American perspective it has always annoyed me that Japanese cars just annihilate German cars in how well engineered they are to just work for years with no bullshit and yet there is still a very strong cultural association with German = well engineered in the US that I think is utterly unwarranted. This mindset is also reflected in how much repairs cost to do, German cars are seen as nicer so of course mechanics will charge more. It is cheap as shit to get a mechanic to repair your beater Camry.

I drove a Honda Fit (Jazz in Europe I believe?) for most of my life, there wasn’t any space in that thing to work on either and I have met tons of Fit owners who love the shit out of their car in the US. I easily could have gone for a VW hatchback but honestly the Honda Fit just utterly destroyed the VW options along every practical metric including maintenance, reliability and usable interior space. Was my Fit as fun to drive as a nice VW hot hatchback? Heck no but at the same time the steering was precise and lively.

Look I am not saying Americans aren’t loud assholes who make stupid decisions, I agree with you there I hate my country lol. I think there may be real differences between maintenance and parts cost and maybe even quality control for US sold VWs versus ones sold in Europe so maybe we aren’t talking about quite the same thing really?

We're probably not, I've spent a considerably long time in the US lately and the "German" cars here are entirely different in the first place. The only similarities are the rare VW Golf you see every now and then, even a Jetta is extremely weird to me. They seem to just be American cars with a German name.

My man. I don't know where you get you b grade VW from. Here everyone drives them for the longevity

Unless things have changed in the last 3 or 4 years Volkswagens consistently come out pretty badly in reliability and cost of maintenance ratings. So do most German car brands.

I know people love their German cars but they suck at actually being cars, sorry?

Ok, VW tested it. Now can we have someone else test it so we can get honest results?

Maybe a real honest American company, like Boeing

I hope they try turning the wheels a bit while they do their testing, I'd hate to have another diesel emissions scandal involving explosive batteries and their efficacy.

The diesel emissions scandal is nothing to worry about as a consumer. The details matter - what they did was make the cars more fuel efficient by adhering to European emissions standards, which weren't legal in America.

As a car buyer I'd have preferred to have the more efficient car with the EU legal emissions than the "fixed" ones that followed.

You see, those regulations are for cars, what we are seeing here are bodyworked, paired, single command, fully mothorized bycicles... it's not the same

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

The Volkswagen emissions scandal, sometimes known as Dieselgate or Emissionsgate, began in September 2015, when the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice of violation of the Clean Air Act to German automaker Volkswagen Group. The agency had found that Volkswagen had intentionally programmed turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines to activate their emissions controls only during laboratory emissions testing, which caused the vehicles' NOx output to meet US standards during regulatory testing. However, the vehicles emitted up to 40 times more NOx in real-world driving. Volkswagen deployed this software in about 11 million cars worldwide, including 500,000 in the United States, in model years 2009 through 2015.

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Why would anyone want this bot? If I'm summarizing wiki and include a link, why does a bot need to do it again but worse because it doesn't summarize the relevant part.

Sorry. The bot has no way of really knowing if you already summarized it or not. I'll make sure to add an opt-out functionality soon if you no longer want the bot to reply to you.

Edit: done, pm the bot "optout" to get opted out.

Agreed. This is the first time I've seen it. I guess I'm just going to have to block it if it starts to become a thing.

Even though this VW is fully electric, the transmission will still find a way to blow up.

I’ll never understand why there’s a transmission in a fully electric. Put four pancake motors at the wheels. Easier to cool, smaller motors, redundant power.

A shit ton of unsprung mass, crap ride quality.

Transmission isn't for low end but high end rpm. 4 separate motors doesn't help if the motor can't spin fast enough.

There’s no way a typical BLDC/ACIM can’t spin at the tire’s RPM. If you’ve got a 16” tire then at 100mph you’re spinning at roughly 1000rpm; these motors typically spin 3.5x that fast.

These are lies. The report stated that it held 100% capacity over 100.000.000 charges, but VW knows no-one would believe them, so they adjusted their numbers to look more realistic. /s

/s not necessary. They’ve messed with numbers before and just got a slap on the wrist. Why wouldn’t they lie again?

Still no news on QuantumScape's factory actually going into large scale production.. so still... lab results..

Yeah, I'm always remiss to get excited about battery tech that isn't entering mass production. Until then, it's just something that might be cool in 20 years, but probably not.

Really need to hand it off to other makers. VW is just scandal. It lies on its emissions reports. Has a history of abusing workers. All round a shell of it's former self

Sadly, VW has never strayed far from their roots.

They've always been just a little scummy on the business practices side of things. More than a little scummy during WW2...

They do sometimes have good engineering. Which means fuck all in the face of management who want to cut corners and cheat to make more money.

the 1.4 introduced somewherein the 2000s was their last "good" engine. newer models just suffer from downsizing, constant engine problems after around 80K km.

buy a used honda or a toyota. might even be fuel efficient if you buy a prius for cheap and replace the battery.

or, you know... buy a small car. the 1st gen aygo easily does 40-50mpg and cost 10K BRAND NEW. but then toyota made it a crossover which uses more fuel and is almost 20K.

Their diesel engines are great. At almost 100k miles on my diesel jetta and no issues whatsoever.

160K km is indeed quite an amount, my 1SZ-FE Yaris has done just over 100K now, and similarly has had zero incidents after 20 Years and me being it's 4th owner. doesn't use oil, doesn't burn coolant, no unusual rattles, everytime we change the oil it's still very translucent.

they don't make them like they used to, not even the toyotas.

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Do any companies have morality

I think the bigger a corporation is, the more shitty things it had to do in order to reach that status.
There are some good companies with a moral code, but they'll never become competitive with the big dogs in our current capitalist system.

From what I've seen, some family owned ones do, as they're run for the long term (rather than by CEOs with an average tenure of less than 2 years and who thus are fine with damaging long term prospects for short term profit boosting as its the latter that dictate the size of tbeir bonuses) so don't want to damage the name of the company and sometimes are even run in a way that reflects the owner's morals and principles.

Market listed companies or even private ones with lots of "investors" as owners (such as the bigger startups) almost never have any morality or, in the case of the latter, reflect the typical morality of the kind of people who are good at getting investors, which tends to be the in the area from the "flexible with the truth" salesman all the way to outright fraudster.

Investment nowadays is pretty short term, amoral and fickle, and this ends up indirectly leading to overwhelmingly certain kinds of personalities ending up leading companies and certain management styles being used, both high on the more sociopath end of the spectrum.

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Volkswagen was literally founded by the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler himself was heavily involved in designing their first car lol.

Half the companies operating in Germany today were started during Hitler's reign, borne out of his policies.

Can you source that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen

It's common knowledge? It's literally the second paragraph in its Wikipedia article. Volkswagen means "the people's car" and was founded so that people in Germany could afford a car.

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

Volkswagen (VW; German pronunciation: [ˈfɔlksˌvaːɡn̩] ) is a German automobile manufacturer headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1937 by the German Labour Front under the Nazi Party and revived into a global brand after World War II by the British Army officer Ivan Hirst, it is known for the iconic Beetle and serves as the flagship brand of the Volkswagen Group, the largest automotive manufacturer by worldwide sales in 2016 and 2017. The group's biggest market is in China, which delivers 40 percent of its sales and profits. Its name is derived from the German-language terms Volk and Wagen, translating to "people's car" when combined.

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen

Founded by the German Labour Front, the Nazi party’s national labour organization.

In 1934, with many of the above projects still in development or early stages of production, Adolf Hitler became involved, ordering the production of a basic vehicle capable of transporting two adults and three children at 100 km/h (62 mph). He wanted a car every German family would be able to afford.

It soon became apparent that private industry could not turn out a car for only 990 ℛ︁ℳ︁. Thus, Hitler chose to sponsor an all-new, state-owned factory using Ferdinand Porsche's design (with some of Hitler's design suggestions, including an air-cooled engine so nothing could freeze).

The beetle having a rear mounted air cooled engine was Hitler’s design.

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

Volkswagen (VW; German pronunciation: [ˈfɔlksˌvaːɡn̩] ) is a German automobile manufacturer headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1937 by the German Labour Front under the Nazi Party and revived into a global brand after World War II by the British Army officer Ivan Hirst, it is known for the iconic Beetle and serves as the flagship brand of the Volkswagen Group, the largest automotive manufacturer by worldwide sales in 2016 and 2017. The group's biggest market is in China, which delivers 40 percent of its sales and profits. Its name is derived from the German-language terms Volk and Wagen, translating to "people's car" when combined.

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And u have a bridge to sell you! Here, right here in my pocket, but before I show you you gotta pay up!

Seriously, these new battery tech articles are just insane, Google is trying to push at least 5 different ones at me every day in this Google News drawer crap on my phone which, obviously, cannot be uninstalled or even disabled.

It's all scam.

It’s still a car.

Yes and we all know that, and it is good. I would like to buy one for myself too. EVs are an overall good thing for everyone.

But imagine the implications for PEVs

STILL A CAR

A PEV is not a car

It is a couple tons of armored sofa that takes more space than it needs to, crushes the road, kills deer and human alike.

Sounds like a car to me.

PEV here apparently refers to "Personal Electric Vehicle", which includes e-scooters, e-bikes, etc. They are indeed not cars. DDG somehow tells me they mean "Plugin Electric Vehicle", which are cars.

PEV = personal electric vehicle, like an e-bike, scooter, or unicycle. All the benefits of bike infrastructure while letting you go a lot farther and faster without getting sweaty

Noted. ddg gives me "plug-in electric vehicle" when I search PEV. So I misunderstood. E-bike indeed is not a car.

but... INNOVATION! have... to... EMBRACE... INNOVATION. uh, SWEET SWEET PROFI... I mean... INNOVATION!