I’ve always said that about one of my big reasons for buying an EV several years ago. By the time I’m in need of a replacement battery, it will be better in virtually every way - safer, faster to charge, higher capacity, lighter, and (potentially) cheaper. The first replacement battery might not be much of an improvement, but my 3rd might be light-years ahead.

I would be curious if this technology would be viable in other devices as well. I’d like 40% more energy density in my cordless drill and/or laptop please.

Would be good if this soon becomes a drop in replacement option for older EVs that are nearing EOL on their batteries and require new ones anyway.

Can’t wait for carmakers to fight tooth and nail to avoid making this a possibility for aging vehicles.

The concerns for range anxiety are well founded too. I had to rent a car the other day, and the only thing they had available was a Tesla model 3. Aside from the issues Teslas themselves have, the 90 miles I had to travel became an immediate concern because it was in a rural area and the town I went to literally had two chargers, and they were privately owned.

The 280 miles I was quoted as range quickly became 170, despite turning off the heat, not charging my phone, using cruise control at 3MPH below the speed limit, and changing all the settings I could conceivably find to turn down my power consumption. I wound up having to beg a private owner to let me use their charger because what would normally be a simple trip became a massive chore. My other option was waking up hours early to drive to a town 40 miles away where they had a super charger and leaving from there, also just barely making it back to the rental car return.

The time to charge the Tesla on a 220v charger btw was over 5 hours from 48%. Absolutely none of my experience matched that of the advertised and it’s completely turned me off electric cars until they can start fixing some of these issues.

It would be useful for electric bikes and things that you could feasibly own alongside a car and use for 90-95% of trips.

Or, here’s a crazy idea, for the one week each year where you actually need the range you rent a Honda Civic and leave your EV at home.

“Save the planet? Sure, but only if it doesn’t slightly inconvenience my leisure activities or make me wait a bit longer.” This mindset perfectly encapsulates why we’re in such a mess: an astounding commitment to personal comfort at the expense of the planet’s future. It’s like saying, “I’ll help fight climate change, but only if it’s on my terms and doesn’t affect my ski trips.” Because, obviously, ensuring our convenience is far more critical than addressing a global crisis. It’s this precise “me first, planet later” attitude that’s steering us towards an ecological disaster, yet here we are…

A microwave oven? According to some YouTube videos, Apple had this tech in their phones years ago.

I saw that video by Veritasium I think. That just was tenacious.

Ok, maybe it’s possible that they aren’t using a very focused electron beam, but usually when scientists think about using an electron beam they mean something inside of a machine like an SEM or e-beam lithograph. These only operate on small areas.

If an unfocused beam (and therefore lower energy density) can be used, then this could likely be scaled more easily. Even if a focused beam is needed, scaling may still be possible, but will likely require additional developments to create that process.

All of the beams in my house have electrons

I’m using mine right now.

You mean Tesla?

Well, there’s a lot the article doesn’t address. I can say this with complete confidence, even as someone who hasn’t read the article

Edit: don’t freak out, I eventually did read the whole article. Every word. And I was right.

You’re certainly not the only one but you’re also being grossly irresponsible. Sufficient breaks are essential for staying attentive. Not stopping for five or six hours is just asking for disaster. Just think about what you’re going to feel like if you killed someone because you fell asleep at the wheel.

Edit: and as per usual, lots of downvotes but no counterargument

You’re not the only one. Most people try to make as much distance as possible between stops.

We need more data for everyone to see.

We need to see what the average vehicle owner does with their vehicles.

Because the people who use their cars they most need the best experience, but they used the vehicle differently than the majority of people.

Evs need to be released on different models for different styles.

If you only travel with people that need constant breaks, then there no reason needing a 15 to 20 minute break frequently can’t be made to work with a lower range vehicle if you only need to do long trips a few times a year or less. The savings of having that vehicle the rest of the time should be made to more than offset any special needs that aren’t needed often.

There’s other options to explore as well. Like it’s easy to find example of vehicles with multiple gas tanks. If you need an extended battery there should be a trailer like attachment that extends the range of your vehicle. Make towing something get you better range because the thing you added towing is extra “fuel”

I’m sure there are technical problems that will need to be addressed or solved and it might require car companies to change designs about to make it seams but it’s very doable

If there are reliable and fast chargers every 50 miles you’ll have several choices in that 300-400 mile range and we already have plenty of cars capable of that. The goal is not to have everyone stop at every charger. But to allow more people to drive how they are most comfortable and maybe even enable more cars to road trip.

Exactly. Ideally in cities and surrounding suburbs we would want public transportation and no cars. Cars should really be reserved for the more rural places anyway.

Let’s take the absolute worst case I could find for North America: in Quebec between Matagami and Radisson there is a 620km (390mi) distance between gas stations. This exceeds the range of many ICE cars, but let’s continue. It gets real cold up there, and there’s a few days out of the year where it’s well below 0F. To account for the cold, let’s increase that distance by 40% to get to about 550mi.

There is one EV on the market right now with a 516mi range, the Lucid Air. So it can’t quite make it under the absolute worst case conditions that, even up there, will only happen for portions of the year. Many ICE cars would also fail to make it.

This problem is completely overblown. The 1,994 combined population of those two Canadian towns will have to wait. Literally everyone else in North America will be fine if we just get our charging infrastructure better.

Oh, and ICE cars lose gas mileage in cold weather as well. 15% lower at only 20F. So ICE cars that could barely make that trip under warmer conditions probably couldn’t under the extreme cold of this exceptional situation.

You just need a charging station every hundred kilometres or so, that’s perfectly doable even in sparsely populated areas. In fact, this kind of infrastructure is far easier to roll out than gas stations.

Not a 3 minute stop. A whole 15 minutes. Assuming you have a charging station nearby anyway.

I always find it amusing how people go through such mental contortions to justify not buying an EV. If you don’t want an EV, just don’t buy one. Nobody cares.

Or just getting on a plane to go somewhere far, rather than spending three days of your already limited vacation driving past corn.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

I live in California, so the infrastructure is likely more built up here, but I regularly make trips from the SF Bay Area all the way to San Diego or Las Vegas just fine. On a shorter 2.5 hour trip, I could see it being annoying, but a couple charge stops on an 8 hour trip offer a nice time to take a break to grab a quick bite and carry on. Just my two cents.

That’s not how this stuff works. I never sit in my car waiting for it to charge. Sometimes I’ll charge while shopping. Plug in the car, do your weekly grocery shopping come back, drive off. When you use a level 2 (shower) charger, you leave the car and come back after a couple of hours. It obviously depends on the available infrastructure in the places you normally go to. Takes a bit of planning and a bit of forethought. But it’s really not rocket science.

This research was focused on the lithium battery anode. Ideally we could just put a chunk of lithium in there but the stripping and deposition chemistry doesn’t work well long term. Modern batteries use graphite instead. But of course you waste a significant amount of cell volume and weight with all of that carbon, and the potential is lower than Li metal. Alloying Li with silicon gets you properties more similar to Li.

So this paper talks about their efforts to make LiSi more viable as an anode. They gave it a coating to protect it from electrolyte side reactions and created a new gel electrolyte formation reaction. The capacity they report isn’t remarkably higher than what’s out there now since the cathode is the heaviest part of the cell.

As to the results I do have to say 60% capacity retention after 200 cycles is not nearly good enough for real world use. And I have no clue where they got the “1000 mile range” headline from.

Refueling takes 5 mins max, recharging right now takes 15-20 mins if there is a super charge station.

Diesels.

It’s not 1000km. You lose 30-40% range in the cold. And charging cadence is typically 10-80%, not 0-100%, so you lose another 30% on road trips. Now your 1000km EV does 420-490km between chargers. That’s around three hours on the Autobahn at a rather leisurely 150kph, with a 25-40 min stop. I agree with the user above. Affordable 1000km range is minimum before I’ll be buying another EV.

because it has the potential to be sustainable, cheaper, and less explosive. It’s not technically superior as far as energy density goes, but right now batteries are prohibitive in many applications, moreso due to cost than weight.

Better hope donor parts don’t start getting used to by pass security features or this will happen in an instant

I don’t think there’s any need to be snide about this comment. A 2015 Honda Civic is objectively superior in almost every way to a 1967 Corvette, but the 'vette is inherently cooler in a way that the Civic will never be. It’s just nostalgia for a bygone era, that’s all.

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for example? i didn’t think evs had been around that long. there are lots of gasoline engines from 1950 that still run.

I wish my kids would have separate vehicle sometimes. I’m sick of playing eye spy with people that can’t spell.

Yeah it’s not a solution to everything. I imagine the standard “super light” robo taxi as a two seater with the seats facing each other. Without a driver seat you can redesign individual transport to be narrower which improves aerodynamics.

But yeah for families or cargo transport you still need larger vehicles. Or take two. And I also imagine this to be more of a “gap filler” besides public transport or bicycles. It would really require a pretty big redesign of how we live and work to reduce our energy and resource usage to zero.

I too watched veritasium today

Directly via exhaust? It’s a significant number, but maybe not the biggest one. But add manufacturing, oil (or battery materials) extraction and refining, road infra construction and maintenance, emissions connected to suburbanization, microplastic pollution from tires, health and safety impact, and you’ll get a much grimmer picture. LEDs won’t cut it, and cars do not scale to 8B people.

Yeah, the single biggest thing we could do is ban industrial meat production and regulate food production to be more local. But the overall scale of change needed is staggering. We’re not going to do much really.

Consider something like 50% bigger than a podbike.

3000 miles is not something we as a society should accommodate to travel by car. The whole problem is that everyone thinks we can keep doing the same lifestyle just with zero carbon. We simply can’t. We need to change how we live and work.