BMW EV achieves 1000km in range using Dual-Chemistry batteries
forbes.comThis took a few reads to parse. There are two kinds of batteries: (1) a low-density LFP that has a great lifetime, (2) a simulated manganese using Nickel manganese cobalt that has a poor lifetime but great density. The former cycles frequently for short trips, and the latter recharges it during the long ones.
That's pretty clever.
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.
Considering that you can’t even change the 12v lead-acid battery in a BMW vehicle (ICE nor EV) without paying the dealer for programming, or some extensive hacking, I don’t hold out much hope for modular replacement.
Reminds me of how some SSDs do wear levelling, where they treat cells like they're one bit while the drive's empty and go up to four bits per cell as it fills up, with a speed penalty.
You need more LFP to carry the weight of the manganese battery though (increasing cost), and all the extra weight can affect driving dynamics. Maybe both the cost and weight increase are minimal but that’s what came to mind. It’s a great idea though.
Yes, to get more range you need more batteries, and those increase your weight meaning you need more batteries. But those increase your weight, so you need even more batteries. The tyranny of the rocket equation.
Not really specific to this dual-chemistry though, the same holds true for normal EVs and for gasoline-powered cars.
It is a bit different from the rocket equation. The impact of weight on energy consumed per mile in a car is not particularly large. You can add hundreds of pounds and the impact will be negligible.
At least if you have regenerative brakes. Otherwise weight matters in stop and go traffic quite a bit.
Are there any EVs without regenerative brakes? As soon as that technology matured, given how much geopolitics is about energy, it's surprising to me we didn't mandate it's usage.
With EVs, they all have regen, but also, efficiency for range purposes primarily matters at highway speeds. There isn't a lot of stop and go there.
True, but the difference here is that the second battery isn’t even used most of the time, and if it was it would die quickly.
But is that really substantially different from somebody keeping their gas tank always at least half full, or making normal short-range trips with the long-range version of a Tesla?
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.
> But is that really substantially different from somebody keeping their gas tank always at least half full, or making normal short-range trips with the long-range version of a Tesla?
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).
EVs already have far better driving dynamics than gas cars... doesn't seem like what designers should be optimizing for, or what the average consumer will care most about.
“Far better driving dynamics than gas cars”? No way. Go throw a BMW 3-series around some corners and compare to the Model 3 - you will feel the weight of the batteries. I would have said compare to a Porsche but that’s a different price range.
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.
You're comparing a sports sedan with a pretty normal sedan there. The fact that the model 3 can compete in the same league at all with the BMW has to do with the lower weight distribution caused by those batteries. It's not as simple as you're trying to make it sound.
I drove a BMW 3 series quite a bit (around Denver and then to Colorado Springs and back) and found the handling disappointing compared to my 3. Also, Googling “<model> weight” gives me a range of 3,862–4,048 lbs for a model 3 but 3,582–4,138 lbs for a 3 series. Since the battery pack is between the wheels, the weight balance of the model 3 makes it handle better.
The average people don't buy BMW or Tesla, they buy Honda CR-V. And they'll appreciate 500mi range far more than being able to take turns fast
Zero people drive 500 miles in a straight line on a daily basis though, so cornering ability is more important than 500 miles of range, especially when most gasoline cars (several diesels do) don't get that much range in a single tank. The biggest change for EVs is the ability to charge the car at home, though, so you wake up every morning with a full tank of "gas". An EV with only 50 miles of range would do great for most people if they had home charging given how many miles "most people" drive in a day.
I don't work for BMW (or Honda, or Tesla) though, so what do I know.
Almost no public road driven at the speed limit would even come close to testing the cornering ability of a car mass produced in the last few decades.
If people have to choose between being able to drive 500 miles with good enough handling and 200 miles with razor sharp sportscar handling the vast majority will pick the 500 mile car. Handling has long been good enough, most people don't get anywhere near what even their basic econobox can do.
Not even driving through Norway's or Switzerland's mountain roads has made me ever factor the cornering ability of a mass produced car into the equation. It doesn't matter outside of places you are putting a car's dynamics to its limits, the only place I know you should be doing that is on a race track.
You can’t get an EV at the same price as a ICE Honda CR-V, so that’s not an apples to apples comparison.
I dunno. Honda doesn’t offer an electric CR-V, but they’re coming out with the Prologue, which is slightly cheaper than the comparable Passport.
Passport: $43k Prologue: $48k - $7.5k tax credit.
Tax credit shouldn’t be included as it is inconsistently hard to get, and not available across all markets.
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.
Ignoring tax credits, EVs were cheaper to comparable ICE vehicles when I did my calculation earlier this year after factoring fuel savings. But that is, admittedly, going to depend on the individual person's driving habits and fuel prices in their area, as well as their electricity prices. We drive a decent amount, our fuel prices are high, and our electricity prices are low, so we were close to the perfect combination of factors for EV. That is likely not the case everywhere.
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.
Why not? Environmental effects of carbon aren't accounted for in the cost of an ICE
You're cherry picking data. Consider the original roadster and it's competitive again.
The one with less than 250mi of range?
Yes
Mercedes achieved a 1000km range with a regular 100kWh battery by making an extremely efficient car with a drag coefficient of only 0.17 [1]
This is a one off concept with fake doors. Think Volkswagen XL1 but even more ridiculous.
The unfortunate thing with the whole drag-coefficient game is it ultimately results in fish-shaped cars and zero unique designs.
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.
I would argue that the real suffering is caused by climate change displacing communities and killing people in frequent natural disasters.
> fish-shaped cars and zero unique designs
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...
The LFP is also super cheap, and the NMC are expensive (C in NMC stands for Cobalt which is $$$). You can get 1000km in range with any chemistry, probably even lead-acid if you make it heavy enough. NMC life is fine, but it's just expensive/impossible to get. Tesla et al are trying to pass off LFP as acceptable, almost all Chinese EVs have LFP, but it's super heavy (F stands for Iron, which is heavy). Might be OK if it's flat where you live.
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!
A 1000km EV range is not news. Aptera is winning the 'range war' with a 1000 mile (1600 km) EV. And recent battery news should be taken as 'new ice cream flavor discovered' announcements. What is the actual interesting bit of news here? Their proprietary BMS doing DC to DC seems somewhat trivial.
Aptera hasn't delivered a car yet.
Neither has Our Next Energy. There is no news here.
I watched a youtube video on this recently, and I believe that they never mentioned battery lifetime in it. This article said that one of the chemistries only lasts a few hundred cycles, but, because of the use pattern of the dual chemistry is "expected to last the lifetime of the vehicle".
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.
How do the charging times compare? That’s the deal maker/breaker for long road trips greater than 500 miles, or shorter trips where you use all the accessories, encounter lots of hills, etc not possible on a dynamometer.
This. I've done 4 3000km road trips in an EV. I never went more than 200 miles between charging sessions because my family and I need to eat, sleep and toilet. So more range wouldn't have made the trip any quicker. Faster charging would have.
Add a bit of margin and I believe that 300 miles is the point at which charging speed becomes more important than range.
But if you’re at something like 600 miles that’s basically the maximum most anyone is willing to (or should) drive in a day (10 hours at 60mph average), so that means you can use destination AC charging instead of DC fast charging because you now have 8+ hours of sleeping time instead of wanting to keep your break time under 20-30 minutes or so.
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.
Good point. But we didn't always have destination AC charging; sometimes we were charging overnight on 120V instead.
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.
Still, a 10 hour AC charge would get you a sizable chunk of that total range and eliminate a stop that where must charge at for at least one day of your trip.
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.
Assuming that you mean your family is 500-620 miles away, are you saying you'd drive that far without stopping? At the minimum you'd think that'd require 2 10 minute bathroom breaks, and if that was enough to add 300 miles of range to a 300 mile car it wouldn't slow anybody down.
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.
Of course I would stop multiple times, but it would improve the trip if I didn't have to stop in some of the obscure places where many EV chargers are located and instead stop at normal rest stops along the highway. That's supposed to be a short term issue as charging networks expand but truthfully there hasn't been very much movement in that regard.
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.
This increases the stakes that your destination charger is available too, right? I can see having a large range is good for anxiety, if and only if you keep it in reserve.
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.
Well, I really think 500 miles is too high of a lower bound, but when you reach 1000 km, it stops mattering again. This is about how long you can travel before stopping to rest.
At this kind of mileage in a day you just really need to question your decision making skills if you are living in a country with a decent railway network.
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.
Have you lived in the Midwest or mountain United states? There won't be good rail there ever. The need for a 500-600 mile range (especially for the pickup truck drivers that tow) is far more apparent.but so will the routine nature of using the long range and dropping the lifetime of this battery scheme.
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.
Looks like you missed the "if you are living in a country with a decent railway network."
A lot of times that is codewords for eyerolling about the US reluctance/, inability to build mass transit.
So I'm underlining that in places like flyover country you can't do that.
This would do that trip without a charge stop, so it doesn't really matter? Even if your trip is 1000 miles, surely you could find 30 minutes to stop along the way?
BMW, build a charging network. That’s really the most consequential thing for drivers.
But don't forget to make it app only, because we don't want to build charging network which would be actually useful.
https://electrek.co/2023/07/11/europe-passes-two-big-laws-to...
> 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.
Five years late.
I completely agree that chargers need to have simple payment methods, but doesn't the largest public network (Electrify America) already work this way? Yes they have an app, and you can get cheaper prices if you pay their subscription, but you don't need to use it. You can just pay with no account using the card swiper on every charge point, I'm pretty sure.
I’d rather not swipe a card or use an app.
As opposed to what? Paying with cash?
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.
It’s not the only way to charge; you could instead charge a Tesla at non-Tesla stations where you swipe a card. But for the Tesla way, why is it anti user? It’s not like they are monetizing your location data. Sure they could in theory but they bend over backwards pretty far not to gather private data in general. I suppose if they got purchased by another company maybe? But I don’t see that happening.
The UI should be: you plug in and it gives you power and your credit card pays automatically. Done.
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.
Nah. When I am taking a road trip, the last thing I want to do register an account for some random charging network I'm never going to use again (because I'm in a different part of the world). I just want to pay for my power and move on, just like I can pay for food or anything else on the trip.
When I am at home, I plug my car in and it goes on my monthly power bill. This is where the convenience matters.
If it's an international network, you'll probably use it again and it's probably not "some random" charging network. Agree about home convenience though.
But I need to put this credit card info into a car which I don't really own and then my "butt" starts randomly buying FSD. No thanks.
Haha ok. My car doesn’t have my credit card info and never has, but to be fair it is in an associated account, so your point still applies.
Building it is not enough. Need incentive to maintain the network.
Next, make the vehicles cheap enough by some means that we adopt electric vehicles faster.
This seems like cool technology, but I can't help but to believe that people are concentrating on the wrong problem. Range is important up to a point, but the more important problems to solve are 1) a recharging infrastructure that makes it so that EVs don't need such huge batteries in the first place and 2) recharge speed needs to be at the level of plug-in, use the bathroom, un-plug and go.
Recharge speed is there already. 20 mins is enough to get 2 - 3 hours worth of driving. We just need more of these fast chargers rather than lots of slow ones.
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.
Well I guess that depends on how long you stay in the bathroom.
Joking aside, though, that's a tough problem. It's just an awful lot of current.
> 1000km
621 miles
540 nautical miles
49710 chains
About 200 leagues
Around 2187 Biblical elbows.
133 German miles.
3.3 light-milliseconds
3.240756e-11 parsec
4968 furlongs. Some of us use the FFF (furlongs, firkin, fortnight) system.
9524 football fields
587262 smoots
And just 608 miles in the article
Where are the no title change police on this one?
How did they manage to mix powers from two batteries? The voltages to the bus bar usually has to be kept close for a battery pack to work, usually.
TFA
>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.
uhhh, more public transport please!
Public transport can be powered by batteries too