It leverages the fact that most people make a large number of short trips, and a smaller number of long trips.
Also if it's modular enough, this design could allow replacing one or the other battery if the user does lots of short trips, or lots of long trips.
Also could let the manufacturer do market segmentation, e.g. a high performance model with no LFP, and both parts of the "high-performance" chemistry - and a base model that's 100% LFP.
Not really specific to this dual-chemistry though, the same holds true for normal EVs and for gasoline-powered cars.
Between EVs and crossovers we're suffocating in this current era of uninspired automotive design where it seems like mfgrs take a single car model, open it in Photoshop, resize by 50/70/110/130%, slap on new badge and call it a day. Audi & Subaru are some of the worst modern offenders here.
While the EQXX and the Aptera EV [1] may both be fish shaped, they show quite a range of design variation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_(solar_electric_vehicle...
When the sodium batteries come out, it will be a similar story, sodium having an atomic mass of 11 vs. lithium's 3.
Anode-free is an interesting new direction, will be interesting to see if they can address the dendrite growth (dendrite growth causes short-circuit, thermal runaway and fires several months or years into service life and is notoriously hard to test for, because you might need to test for a decade under all sorts of conditions in order to see if dendrite growth occurs).
If you have the cash, NMC is certainly the better tech. If you want a cost-effective EV, the Chinese have figured this out already (LFP). Mixing them, well, it's somewhere in the middle!
I really hope this turns out well, but given the current lack of specificity, I'm going to guess that overall pack longevity is going to be the Achilles heel of this battery.
Always happy to see people trying innovative new ideas though. Most of them won't work, but we can only find the ones that do if someone tries it. Hope this one turns out better than I fear.
Add a bit of margin and I believe that 300 miles is the point at which charging speed becomes more important than range.
This is why I want my first EV to have a range like that. I’ll be able to the next place I’m sleeping without having to worry about whether I am going to encounter a half-broken Electrify America station that’s going to keep me sitting in a Walmart parking lot for 45 minutes of my day.
However that is nice because it means you can do 3 300 miles trips and only charge at home when the price is right. That is the most relevant part to me.
One thing is article doesn't mention is the average speed. I looked at a few EV in the constructors websites and most range in the spec were calculated at ~30kph. This is my average speed in the flat on a bicycle when not even riding hard! While it is pertinent in an urban context where average speed is not much higher it isn't when we are discussing long trips.
> the new rules also mandate simpler charger payments. As-is, some networks require subscriptions or app downloads. But under these rules, customers must be able to pay with cards or contactless devices, and prices must be displayed to the customer.
You never need to touch or see your credit card or phone at any time before, during, or after the charging process.
Guess what kind of EVs work this way already.
Next, make the vehicles cheap enough by some means that we adopt electric vehicles faster.
Considering I charge at home I actually save time overall vs filling up my old diesel in daily driving so stopping every 2 - 3 hours is fine for occasional long trips. Also I spend about 1/5th per mile too.
Most people coming from an ICE get hung up on the range however. They think they need something that does what they have already.
Joking aside, though, that's a tough problem. It's just an awful lot of current.
621 miles
>The Gemini pack also includes a proprietary battery management system and DC-DC converter to enable the NMC cells to replenish the LFP cells as they get depleted.
If you're driving this theoretical 600 mile vehicle you can't charge it overnight on AC anyways. A level 2 charger is typically 10kW or 40amps. A 600 mile battery is likely at least 200kWh, a 20 hour charge at 10kW.
Selfishly, I have family in this range where it would be nice to get all the way to their house without needing to charge. I would probably pay to have a decent AC charger installed in their house. Spend the weekend there and I’d leave with a full battery, and never touch a DC fast charger.
We have a >300 mile range on our car. You can recharge that over a long weekend on 120V; no need to install any extra equipment.
I.e. plan to charge with 50% or more remaining, and have a low probability option to skip a charge and drive to the next destination. Then, your plan has to adapt as you may have to stay there longer than intended to wait for this much larger charge deficit to be recovered.
If this large capacity battery didn't have charge speed limitations, perhaps the mitigation could be to take a detour to a fast charging station and then return to your planned route.
Which is weird because I think these are the guys who did a Michigan demonstration of range last year, a classic Midwest long miles to drive state for any travel
Also the notion that rail is cheaper over long haul for people transport might be incorrect. Self-driving (highway self driving is much easier than robo taxis) EVs, and roads are cheaper to build and more flexible than rail.
Rail wins only on really high congestion or very large loads.
Also, 18mph on a bike is hard for almost all people that aren't athletes. I'm a former Ironman triathlete and I know the range of performance for heavily trained athletes.
But yeah, doing range calcs at those speeds is ridiculous, unless you are discussing a pure commuter car use case.
So I'm underlining that in places like flyover country you can't do that.
When I am at home, I plug my car in and it goes on my monthly power bill. This is where the convenience matters.
Try to plan a trip from Atlanta, GA to Miami, FL. You aren't in a Tesla and your charging stops must always include a restroom. I think it might be legitimately impossible.
It's not like a gas car where you can just not plan anything at all and expect to find a place to stop to fuel your vehicle that has a restroom and convenience store all in the same place. You will instead expect to be in places that aren't really designed for short stops like Walmart/Costco/shopping mall parking lots. A 5 minute stop turns into a 20 minute charging stop plus a second stop to use the restroom or get hot foot.
The status quo is that you pay more for an EV and get a worse experience than the people who are paying less.
Note: I’m a big fan of EVs. I’m just saying that handling is one of their weaknesses until battery density gets a lot better.
I don't work for BMW (or Honda, or Tesla) though, so what do I know.
If your concern is trackability, then I'm pretty sure you can buy pre-loaded credit cards that are as anonymous as cash.
If you are concerned about convenience, it sure seems to me that swiping a card is easier than buying gas with cash is.
-edit- Oh you mean the Tesla thing. That's a nah from me dawg. I don't mind having the option, but having that as the _only_ method of payment is _incredibly_ anti-user.
Everyone already tried selling EVs with smaller batteries. The might be more efficient on paper but they don't sell. Turns out that trips people take once in a blue moon are still important to them, so a battery tuned to making that possible once in a blue moon sounds very useful.
A gallon of gas weighs around 6 pounds. A car usually has less than 20 gallon capacity. Keeping it half full would mean you keep 10 gallons which is 60 pounds. Even if you kept it full all the time, it is 120 pounds. That is going to be a lot less than any sizable battery ( theTesla Model 3 battery weighs around 1000 pounds).
Passport: $43k Prologue: $48k - $7.5k tax credit.
Checking Honda dealership near me, g there are configured CRVs that can be driven off the lot for $35k, without even considering that you can almost always haggle for good dealer markdowns on ICE cars but not EVs.
For me, that ended up being ~$100/month which was decidedly more than the increase in monthly payment. And that's ignoring that the savings continue beyond the end of the payments.
It's also ignoring used vehicle prices. When I looked, and again, in my area, the difference in price between used vehicles was larger than in new.