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
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.
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