Why Electric Cars Have Stalled

It doesn't matter what the results is, if you read the Maxwell data sheet carefully, there is a 10 year life of the Ultracap.

 

well ultracap technology has been panned pretty consistently amongst most of the scientific community, but no one is willing to explain why so many companies are working the technology.

eestor may have announced the technology (originally around 2004) but since then, there is reports of progress in the technology from several different companies so eestor is not the only company who thinks there is something there. and yes, Zenn is there because they invested in the company and i am sure that is the major reason why they are in so well if anything pans out.

as far as expense. i think that is the whole point of eestor's product to begin with. ultracaps are not new... but the current ones are heavy and expensive, hard to control (especially with controlled discharges) etc.

the new one is supposed to be much lighter with a much higher power density, higher breakdown voltage to prevent thermal breakdowns, with the capability to put very high current levels in for quick recharges, etc. the manufacturing process is supposed to enable them to crank em out with high tolerance levels at a very cheap price... so ya, it does sound like a wish-list more than reality, but they only really have to hit a few of the above points.

even if the power is not as high, or even 1/10th the predicted level (they were talking a 54 KW cap) if we can charge even 5.4 KW in 5 mins, that would still be an awesome step forward...

so we see.

 

Will this answer be different for non engineers?

Easy there big fella. It is *great* that you are an engineer. Really. And it turns out that some non-engineers have as much of a - if not a better - grasp of reality.

The sort of reality that says we can safely round 1 million charge cycles off to "unlimited" in the case of a vehicle. Yes, we can pick nits, but here in the real world, we don't count the nits very often. I'm currently driving a car with a pack rated at 5,000 to 10,000 cycles. The car has proven to go 150,000 miles before degredation is noticed. So... I can comfortably say that a million cycles is the same as infinite.

Now... this says nothing about the caps in question - if they can deliver what they say. On that, I agree with you.

 

All the negative stats above, and all the positive stats above, are all just so much hot air, because the EEstor ultra-cap does not exist yet. The negative stuff (ultra-caps cannot do this or that) is hot air because it's talking about the best capacitors today. The whole point is that these new ones are supposed to break new ground. But all the positive stats are hot air because they are claims based on theory because as far as anyone knows, EEstor has not yet assembled a capacitor.

So we do not know if the kind of performance they are claiming is possible. We do know that several companies are working on it, and there seems to be no theoretical reason for it to be impossible.

A typical car is good for 100,000 miles. Maybe a Toyota is good for 250,000. If a battery pack (pardon, an ultra-cap pack) is good for 300 miles and 500,000 charge cycles, then its lifetime is 150 million miles. That's 600 car lifetimes! Buy one pack and your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkid will still be using it in her car. Even just 100,000 charge cycles means the pack would last as long as 120 Toyotas.

We will not know what these things can do until somebody builds one. Assuming somebody can.

But Zenn's and EEstor's claim that they'll have a car on the road in 2010 rings false, given all the testing that needs to be done, and the fact that they don't yet have a factory, and as far as we know they have not actually invented the capacitor yet.

 

well, i guess its a waiting game now... but as far as prototypes, they are supposed to be out there... old news now, but Zenn announced that they were testing the new drive train months, no... days, no....ok... it was HOURS ago.

TheStar.com | Business | Electric car firm posts 52% rise in revenues

...Clifford noted that the company now has working prototypes of its next-generation powertrain, and is testing components for cars that would be capable of highway speeds.

 

With normal maintenance the average car made to day has a useful life of at least 250,000 miles. The problem is once a car's value starts to fall owners stop doing maintenance and at the end even minor problems result in a car being scrapped.

Replacing components like shocks, struts, brakes, bushing, etc is normal though can be expensive. What happens is someone looks at the KBB value for their 10 year old car and sees that it is only "worth" $1000 and doesn't want to spend $500 to fix the brakes or replace the shocks and struts. They unload it on a dealer who has to decide if they are going to sell it for scrap or pay to send it to a wholesale auction. Since it cost the same amount to ship a $20,000 car or a $1000 car at some point the car goes to a scrapyard or junkyard.


Of course the owner is looking at the wrong number. The car is only "worth" $1000 if they sell it. If they pay the money and fix the car they can continue to drive it. It is almost always cheaper to fix the car then to replace it unless the unibody is damaged. Instead the owner traders a car for a car monthly car payment. They would rather pay $300 a month then spend $500 to buy another 50,000 miles of working brakes.

 

52% rise in revenue, but still 7 million dollars in losses.

I am presuming that "power train" does not include the energy storage. And they will still have to crash-test the car with whatever form of energy storage it uses. That means building a number of units exactly like the production model and crashing them under carefully-controlled conditions. That's got to take a year at least, based on Tesla's development trajectory. But they cannot start until they have the ultra-cap packs. And I don't believe those will be available soon enough to get all this done for 2010.

Look at Aptera. They seem to be the most serious prospect out there, and they've had working, driving, prototypes for a couple of years now, and still don't have a release date. And that's without the government-mandated crash testing.

I'll speak for myself here. Once a car is old enough that there's a risk that a breakdown may leave me stranded, I'm willing to shell out for a different car. Okay, there's always some risk. Even a Prius can break down. But statistically, at a "certain" age, this becomes a lot more likely.

But of course my point in bringing this up was that even at the extreme end of car longevity, an ultra-cap pack good for even 100,000 charges (when 500,000 to a million was cited) will outlast so many cars that the capacitors will be operating long enough for the human race to have evolved wings.

 

This may be the case Daniel with most people who buy new cars but there are a lot of people out there like me who have only bought used cars and we then drive then until they no longer meet our needs or they are in our assessment no longer reliable. So while you might only drive a Toyota for say, 100,000 miles the next owner could put another 200,000 on it or it could take 2 owners to do that. Either way, if you can achieve 100,000 cycles and charge the batteries every day the batteries will last nearly 300 years. I guess there might be a market for second hand packs for solar powered off grid homes.

 

well as usual, Zenn press releases are as close to useless as can be. it specifically says that there are prototypes of the ZENNergy platform. that platform is the eestor energy system. so i would have to think they go hand in hand.

the problem we have here, is that eestor is also doing high level military applications with Lockheed and there is much more progress there, but those applications provide power on a much much smaller scale (they are talking like cellphones and laptops that only have to be charged once a month and such) but because of the "secrecy", there is not much in announcments there either

we are also dealing with eestor which is a private company and who simply does little or nothing as far as press releases from them. its almost as if Lockheed, Zenn and another company whose name escapes me right, got together and made up this eestor and there is actually no real company. all the info about eestor is given 2nd hand. do a search, its always Zenn or some other company that tells us what eestor is doing, not eestor telling anyone what they are doing.

if they are doing what they say they are doing, ok, i guess i can understand the secrecy, but they are getting patents left and right, so sooner or later they are going to want to advertise and press is the best and cheapest way to do it.

 

That's a great point. A car can be worth $1000 to a new buyer but a lot more to the current owner if it can continue to substitute for another $25,000 expense. Can you imagine the car sales drop if people kept the old girls going instead of indulging in the new car smell phenomena...?

 

ya, on paper that is right... put money into a beater to keep it running.

we had a 1988 Corolla. great car, at least for the first 220,000 miles. problem is, my SO was driving it. it required checking and topping off oil regularly which she did not do. it also had the heater start to work poorly (everytime you turned it on, the fan blades were hitting something so it made a terrible racket. took it apart. cleaned it, etc. put it back together, but that only lasted about 2-3 weeks and started back up again.)

the tranny started going on it to where 2nd gear became a hassle. as you all know, on a 5 speed manual, life without 2nd is very doable.

but, all in all, its the little things that started to compromise the safety of the occupants and when one of them is my 21 month old son, all of a sudden, the price of a new car seems like chump change (also, i sure as hell was not gonna drive that thing!!)

all in all, the right thing to do is maintain the car so it never got to that point, but that car was well on its way out when i met Linds so oh well. like i said, it did the job and did it well, but all things come to an end.

we ended up giving the car to her dad to drive since he at the time was doing a one way 25 mile commute in a 4X4 F-150. he drove it daily for 2 months and the radiator went out. so looking at tranny and radiator etc. it was time to retire it.

 

Let's not forget the tinkerers who *love* to get their hands dirty and will cheerfully spend a weekend repacking bearings, adjusting the rear drum brakes, replacing brake lines, etc. With your own "free" labor, the actual parts cost is much more reasonable, especially when a vehicle is old enough or popular enough to have a thriving aftermarket industry behind it

Consider the 1983 Ford pickup at my hobby farm. It was always in the family, and always well maintained by us. With a bit over 528,000 km, the rear main seal is starting to leak again. There is also a bit of seepage on the rear axle pinion seal

Otherwise, the only royal PITA was the crap Ford radiators and water pumps in that thing. Finally saw the light and put in a high quality, performance water pump in the early 1990's, no more leaky water pumps. Found an aftermarket "universal fit" 5-core rad, put that in, no more header tank leaks

Cylinder head gaskets also appear to be a weak point on that vintage Ford V8. A common mistake is reusing the factory bolts, which are torque-to-yield. I didn't wait for the head gaskets to blow, once I noticed seepage I put in a high quality set of Rol gaskets and ARP head bolts. That was around 300,000 km ago

The Ford C6 automatic is just about bulletproof, assuming reasonable maintenance. Keeping the band properly adjusted helps, so does putting in an aftermarket vacuum modulator that can be adjusted

However, for the average person who has to pay a mechanic to fix their car, once the car turns into a money pit, the car owner has no choice but to peddle it off and get a newer car

 

that s true, then there is also the car that everyone beats on and no one fixes. i also have a 1990 F-150. dont know how many miles is on it. odometer broke around 2003 at 180,000. it has dual tanks but the switch broke around 1998 or so, give or take a few years. replacement part was $250. so i took off the tank that was not being used, sold it for $70 and now we only have 16 gals instead of 32... we make do.

because the mileage on it sucks (it does have fuel injection) no one drives it on a regular basis. it is currently parked at my sister's house and is shared amongst 4 different households. it does not get used a lot but does make about two monthly trips to the dump.

the passenger door lock is broke so it cant be opened from the inside if locked and no, pulling that little knobby does not do anything. all it needs is the little teeny weeny piece to connect them. between us, we have tried probably half a dozen options, none of which lasted very long, so we simply do not lock that door any more.

also, once my nephew was out and about, locked the keys in the truck, so he ended up breaking the lock on the back sliding door to get in (yes at the time, he was small enough to get in that way!!)

the thing is not worth anything. so it will be driven occasionally until it dies.

 

q

It depends how much knowledge his has about the technical properties of electrolytic capacitors. I have worked for a company called Spraque in my early professional career, I feel like I have the qualification to make the statement.

The test conditions of the UltraCap for the cycle test is different from the battery test. The battery test is more or less a constant load discharge mode because the voltage does not drop significantly. The Ultrcap test is a constant current discharge test or varying load test. Reference to fig.6 of the technology.pdf file in post #114.
The number of cycles is not equivalent to the battery cycles IMHO. But both the Ultracap and Li Ion/NMhi battery have a life time expectation of 10 years.
So it is a moot point to talk about the number of cycles to attain 10 years of service life.

I got your point, but for an engineer, 1,000,000 is not equal to infinite. A million is a very large number but smaller than a billion or a trillion.

 

Strictly, a million is not infinite. But if you can buy the thing when your kid is born, and use it every day until you give it to him, and then he uses it every day until he dies, and it's still got 90% of its useful life in it, then we can call it unlimited for accounting purposes. Remember that when we talk about "battery" life, we're talking accounting math, not engineering math.

And you keep insisting that ultra-caps are good for only ten years, but you are talking about existing high-value electrolytic capacitors, and we are talking about a concept capacitor that may or may not ever come to fruition, but about which we cannot yet know any of the specifications.

There is no theoretical reason why ultra-capacitors must be limited to a ten-year life.

 

We actually have the engineering skill to make something last practically forever. It's just that it wouldn't be very good for the economy if most of our consumer items were built to last generations

An uncle of mine was a mechanic at Alcoa, Port Lavaca, TX, from the early 1950's to the late 1970's when he retired. He told me many tales of where he worked in the powerhouse, which had giant Nordberg radial engines.

My uncle claimed they were very well built and seemed to last forever. Of course, as a kid I didn't believe these tall tales, and he passed away in the early 1980's. More recently, out of curiosity I looked into this a bit, and discovered that Nordberg actually did make a giant radial 12 cylinder engine for prime power applications

There are only so many of these engines you can build, before the market is saturated. Nordberg disappeared by the mid 1970's, but their engines live on

 

The organic electrolyte used in the Ultracap will deteriorate over time and heat. Imaging how long you can keep a canned orange juice in room temperature fresh. The life expectancy guarantee by the manufacturer is typical 10-15 years. It is different from capacitors made of dielectric material using ceramic or mylar, which have a much longing life.

There is a new type of Ultracap call Li Ion capacitor, which improves the power density to 14Wh/kg, but still way short of the 170-200Wh/kg of Li Ion battery. It is suppose to be in limited production as reported in this article:

Green Car Congress: FDK To Begin Mass Production of High-Capacity Li-Ion Capacitors; Automotive and Renewable Energy Applications

The best application for this high-capacity capacitors is for frequent start and stop operation like hybrid buses to supplement the battery. Transportation buses are big enough to accommodate the size of the capacitor pack and absorb the high cost due to fuel savings for the mileage traveled.


The products that my company sells have a life time warranty, but we are expecting the products will be used by the customer for a mean time of 7 years before they will either upgrade the product or trash them. One of the reason is the electrolytic capacitors used in the power supply has a MTBF of 8 years.

 

You keep talking about existing capacitor types. EEstor claims to be developing something entirely different. If they are scamming, it's all moot. If they're on the level, nothing you are saying about existing capacitors is relevant.

 

i am more than willing to accept a limited charging life. i am using an EV now with batteries that are not supposed to last much more than 1000 cycles... heck, give me the technology right now i will GLADLY ACCEPT 1/10th the capacity...

100,000 cycles will be a compromise i am willing to make!~!

 

You want to talk about something that does not exist in production or eve sampling stage. From the stories I read on the internet, they may have prototypes that have the claimed capacitance. But the obstacles they face from becoming a product are the leakage current and cycle times. Due to the high voltage, 3475V, a number of the capacitors are put in series, it is very difficult for each capacitor to share equal voltage when each capacitor starting to age differently. If one of the capacitor is over voltage, it will cause it to breakdown. There are ways to force sharing the voltage, but they will increase leakage and self-discharge rate.

I hope they have a break through and make it a reality. I love to have a low cost EV.

Edit: Found Eestor patent #7,466,536, the caps are in parallel not serial. I wonder how reliable are the 3KV caps.