Hey! Sorry for the weird heading. I live in a country where EV’s are everywhere and I keep hearing debates about the need and possibility for range increase. Today I overheard a discussion between two people about batteries in the near future.
Person A argued that the range increase and battery improvememts in EVs have been so great the last 10 years and this is indicative of it being a technology that will just keep on improving – and we just have to have some patience before the batteries and range will improve even more.
Person B argued that while thats true, a lot of the range improvememts now aday are due to more aerodynamic cars and that seeing as a battery is a chemical process, we are closer and closer to hitting the limit of batteries without any significant scientific breakthrough.
Im fairly uneducated in this field and find it hard to evaluate whos right. Person Bs arguements seemed more trustworthy, but it doesnt mean that hes right.
So my questions are: Who’s “right” and why? Will batteries in EVs keep improving significantly or have we already seen the biggest improvememts?
Thanks a lot in advance!
In: Chemistry
the answer to your asked question is no. with current technology we are at max range. range increasea come from new technology
the answer to the question you actualy want to know is “we dont know” the future is hidden and we wont know if better technology is possible until we have it.
but the likely answer is “yes” there are a lots of promising directions batteries could go in the near future
Multiple battery technologies are proven to work in a laboratory but are not yet producible on large industrial scales. Those will propel EVs far beyond current possibilities, like very fast charge times. One of these are solid-state cells. Those can have between double and quadruple the storage per weight of a lithium battery.
Aerodynamics also can not explain the increase in range in the last years as aerodynamics play far too small a role on low speeds and the drag coefficient of a 2012 Tesla S was 0.24 and that of the 2022 Lucid Air 0.197. That doesn’t explain how the car gets more than double the range.
Secret answer C: the range of a typical EV is already way more than the vast majority of people need for their daily lives. The amount of attention we spend on range anxiety is way more than is warranted.
It is very hard to predict the future. We can only extrapolate from the past. But this does not tell us if there is a major breakthrough right around the corner. Firstly the aerodynamic performance of car have not gone down that much. In fact depending on how you measure it the aerodynamic drag on cars are just going up as the cars are getting bigger. It is true that the coefficient of drag goes down, although we have pretty much gotten it perfect for the last ten years. But the coefficient of drag is only about the shape, not the size, of the car. You can easily decrease the coefficient of drag by increasing the size and increasing the drag.
As for battery technology this is often measured in energy density, how much energy a single kilogram of battery can hold. And for lithium ion batteries the energy density have gone slightly up but not significantly. The battery cells you got in your 20 year old laptop is pretty much the same as the battery cells in your new electric car. There are just slight improvements, nothing revolutionary. The big difference though is the price of batteries. While lithium ion batteries were so expensive that we could only afford small ones for laptops and cell phones, and for small batteries in hybrid cars, we can now afford large battery packs in fully electric cars. The main difference between electric cars with different ranges is the size of their battery. And due to increased weight you need to more then double the size of the battery to double the range.
We are therefore reaching kind of an impasse here. In order to increase the range as much as possible electric cars are becoming heavier and heavier. We now see electric cars being sold weighing more then three tons. And the range is not increasing much with the weight since heavier cars need more energy to overcome tyre friction. While we are still seeing some improvements in the technology there is nothing on the horizon that will make the range improvements sustainable. Instead what we might be looking at is more charging stations and faster charging. Today you might have to stop for 10 minutes every 3-4 hours to charge the car but if we can reduce this to less then 5 min it would be far more convenient to take long trips.
We may be nearing the limits of significant (2x or higher) improvement to EV range with Lithium Ion batteries. The cost, weight and size have gone down due to some improvements in chemistry and assembly, but I doubt they can go a whole lot further.
However, there are dozens and dozens of promising new chemistries for batteries being developed. All it takes is for one of those to come through in the next decade to give us that next big leap in range. Also, they are working on a lot alternatives to remove the “rare earths” and more expensive elements from batteries which could alleviate some of the social and environmental concerns as well.
They are also ramping up clean, cost-effective methods for battery recycling for when the first great wave of battery retirements hits around 2030. We should be ready for it.
All in all I have yet to hear a good argument against transitioning to EVs based on the limits of batteries. Most people could swap their car now for an EV and be just fine. But they are still expensive. The new Chevy Equinox EV is supposed to come in at under 30k after incentives, though.
The best argument against EVs is that we should be reducing reliance on cars overall, which I agree with. In most towns, transit should be improved and we should walk and bike more.
There are technologies like solid state and metal-air batteries that could be major leaps in battery performance, so Person A is probably closer.
However, at the moment batteries are still very expensive and very heavy. So realistically we are more likely to see lighter and more affordable EVs with range numbers similar to what’s available today, rather than bonkers range numbers. As charging infrastructure rolls out, there’s less of a need for huge range numbers and most people aren’t gonna spend an extra $10-20k for a car that goes 700 miles instead of 350.
Motors and aerodynamics have some small improvements to be made.
There is an extraordinary amount of money going into development of new batteries. Not just squeezing the last bit of performance we can out of Li-Ion / Lipo, but other battery technologies. BYD are shipping a car with Sulphur-Ion batteries now. NASA has put a huge amount of R&D into their SABER batteries.
Globally, many companies (car manufacturers and battery manufacturers) are working towards new battery chemistry which is less flammable, less reliant upon rare earths and chemicals which are in short supply, and most importantly lower cost per KWh and longer (cyclic) battery life.
A 2x improvement makes most of the range problems with EVs go away. A 10x improvement makes battery-powered aircraft a viable prospect. It’s not inconceivable that, in the next decade, we’ll see big improvements.
Beyond that, charging infrastructure is the other big thing. That will come, because an increase in EV ownership provides a business-compatible (i.e. profitable) reason to put charging points in left, right and centre.
It will come. Sooner than a lot of people think, an EV will be a desirable alternative to a petrol or diesel engine car.
Batteries won’t get much better in the future (in terms of energy/mass), because lithium is already the 3rd lightest element in existence, and the only lighter ones (Helium and Hydrogen), are completly unsuitable for battery chemistry.
There are certainly a few more percent to be sqeezed, but there aren’t anymore improvements of the size that switching to Lithium was.
With solar, wind and EV industries you have unprecedented levels of investment in battery and other energy storage technologies now. More than have ever existed in the world before.
Electric cars were viable – and the first cars were in fact mostly electric – but lost because they just didn’t have the battery technology at the time. Only heavy, relatively low capacity lead-acid was available to them. Hence EVs lost their opportunity to their oil-based rivals.
Now we have lithium technologies, EVs are not only viable but mainstream. You can literally go and buy one today and drive it for almost everything you do, from a bunch of manufacturers. Not only has electric come back, it now has the technology for almost everybody to utilise it. All that’s happening at the moment is subtle improvements and mass production and as that happens – and will be boosted by a ban on ICE cars somewhere between 2030 and 2035 depending on where you live – the amount of people with one will mean (somewhat enforced) market saturation in under a decade.
And the batteries are improving, and even shared between a multitude of other technologies, including grid-level applications and now have almost every car manufacturer will be willing to invest billions in a better battery. At least until they exceed everyone’s ordinary demands.
And batteries are evolving all the time, but it’s small and subtle, and only some improvements are commercialisable, but with the materials and technology we have nowadays there’s still room for improvement.
And the best thing – if we were to discover a radical new “petroleum” product that’s somehow more energy dense, we’d probably have to redesign every car on the planet before it could take advantage of it. Much like the E5-E10 transition happening across Europe. Only more modern cars are able to use it.
But if we find a new battery technology – we can pretty much retrofit it to almost any car in some fashion. So although “major” chemistry changes (Lead-acid, Ni-Cd, NiMh, Li-ion, Li-Poly, LiFePO4, etc.) are few and far between you can actually already find lead-acid being replaced with LiFePO4, NiMh replacement batteries that are Li-Po, and so on. And “Li-ion” batteries have come a LONG way since the first time I ever encountered one.
So, as an ICE car owner, and someone who has been increasingly moving to an all-electric life for years now, including living in all-electric houses, fitting solar panels, etc., I’m actually planning that batteries and EVs and solar will continue to improve and even if they don’t – the current tech is MORE than good enough to be viable even with no improvements over the next 30 years. I’ve been championing electricity over oil for decades, because it’s the one most versatile energy delivery technology that we have, and only storage was letting it down historically.
I’m planning a utility-independent retirement. I’ve bought a house again (deliberately all-electric as a major factor in my purchase) and over the next 20 years I intend to be generating the majority of what I use, and my next car will almost certainly have to be an EV (I won’t have any choice, to be honest).
And as my small solar setup, in the UK, with LiFePO4 batteries will tell you – yes, they are expensive, but boy are they a great technology and easily capable of running my entire household, and a vehicle.
By retirement I intend to have no household electricity bills. No “fuel” bills for my vehicle. And all of that is based on what I have out in my shed TODAY. Not even what will come in another 20 years (and 20 years ago, nobody had LiFePO4 batteries – they were barely being patented in their modern forms by then).
And the beauty of electricity – it doesn’t matter. If fuel cells or whatever new technology takes over, and everyone’s car is already electric-based… there will be a fuel cell made in the shape of the most common batteries. You’ll be able to just swap and go, and it’ll have better capacity than your car was originally designed to have, even if it’s not as great as a “brand new” fuel cell car.
Sorry, but oil was a stupid profit-making, world-destroying distraction. Electricity is the future of just about everything you want to do, and having any vehicle that runs from a self-contained electrical storage technology is going to describe that you’ll have for the foreseeable future, no matter what form that storage actually takes.
Hell, even hybrids – they are electrical cars that generate electricity from burning oil. That’s how they work. The electrical part doesn’t care, and the source fuel is whatever’s easy to obtain today. Even if another tech came along, I can see people with hybrid cars removing the ICE from their car and replacing it but leaving all the electric drive mostly the same.
It’s taken over 100 years but we’ve finally cycled back to common sense with a powerful, versatile, ubiquitous, multipurpose, transferable, convertible energy technology – and the best storage for that at the moment is batteries which are more than sufficient to own enough of to run your entire house.
My house uses 7KWh of electricity a day (confirmed by lots of monitoring over several years). I can literally store that much in less than 7 LiFePO4 batteries that I could literally pick up and carry myself right now (alright, someone may have to help stack them into my arms, but you could do it!). That’s never been viable before.
I can actually see people having far more use from batteries in their home than in their vehicles, because household energy use is actually often less than the vehicular use. And the more batteries, usage and investment we have in them… the more those batteries with improve and someone will be desperate to find the “next” major chemistry to beat even these batteries. Even if it takes 20 years, nobody will care, because LiFePO4 could run your house, and car, today. And we’re nowhere near done with those technologies, or even several prior chemistries, yet and still actively use them in many industries and use-cases to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars of products.
B is straight up wrong.
Battery tech is seeing a massive rate of progress, which is what has made EVs viable only recently. 20 years ago its not the case that EVs were not popular, it was just the case that they couldn’t really be made in a practical sense. Battery tech was barely above golf cart level. Ever since we have gotten better cheaper battery tech every year, with EVs becoming more practical and more affordable. And the progress certainly hasn’t plateaued yet.
It’s not one giant breakthrough kind of thing, it’s thousand different small breakthroughs and improvements adding up over the years. The basic chemistry of li-ion batteries was invented way back in 60-70ies. But you can say that about solar panels or integrated circuits, there is half a century of continuous development to get from basic idea to modern mature product. It’s like comparing Benz Patent-Motorwagen to a modern car, a car is a car, right? No it bloody well isn’t.
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