Featured Wow!

Call me once it's available. By then, our 2030 model year will have over 100K miles on it.

 

these things are great in the lab. then comes mass production and cost

 

Yep... That's what Elon always says... Basically he explains that the challenge of affordable mass production is so huge that the creation of a prototype is so much less than one percent of the total effort that it in effect is zero effort compared to successfully executing mass production.

 

I remember several years ago there was a prototype battery that could power a laptop for 24 hours. 10 years or more after that announcement, there are still no laptops with 24 hour battery life.

Likewise, since electric cars became more popular, there have been several prototypes of batteries that can do amazing things: charge faster, give incredible range, and now last longer. But there’s a very long way between a prototype and a product the mass market can buy.

Don’t get me wrong - I’ll be thrilled if solid state or lithium air or this battery technology do make it to market, but I’m not holding my breath about it.

 

I hope it gets out of the lab. But with those specs why would you want it in a Prius Prime?

Mike

 

Yup, but Apple is getting close at 17 hours of video playback and 14 hours of wireless web browsing on the 16" MBP with the M1 Pro CPU. Then again, that's more a function of extreme efficiency along with a fairly large battery.

 

the increase from the longest lasting laptops having 4 hours of battery life to 18 hours of battery life has been a slow and measured process of improving battery capacity and also improving power efficiency of the components. I would guess a similar process will take place with electric cars that will eventually allow most to have the range of an average gasoline car (around 450 miles) and be capable of fast charging a reasonable number of miles in 5-10 minutes while having as long of a lifespan. And that process is likely to take far longer than the 3-5 years estimated by the battery company in the first post.

 

I would be happy with a 300 mile range with a 5-10 min recharge.
Or a 450 mile range and a 20-30 min recharge.

But either of those is going to take most of a decade. Primarily because the new/improved cars might be for sale but the thousands of fast-by-todays-standards chargers already deployed and not likely to be upgraded. Note that Tesla v3 superchargers tend to just be added to what they already have.

Mike

 

An early adopter, I bought:

• Used 2003 Prius with initial 49,000 miles - this car taught valuable lessons including how to achieve the original 52 MPG before the EPA 'fixed' their protocol. Yet I soon found 52 MPG worked both in town and highway by driving the original EPA protocol with a few, specific tunings. That Prius achieved +270,000 miles until I could not repair a hydraulic brake pump and the crank shaft oil seal had started leaking, another end-of-life symptom.
• Used 2014 BMW i3-REx with initial 6,000 miles - the 72 mile EV range turned out to be a blessing that in contrast to a new 2017 Prius Prime with 25 mile EV range soon became driveway sheet metal art. The Prius Prime was traded in for a new 2019 Tesla Model 3 Standard Range Plus that after 3.5 years and ~81,000 miles remains my daily driver. I will drive it until the wheels fall off ... then put them back on and drive some more. As for the 2014 BMW i3-REx, it is my wife's daily driver car and she loves it.

Bob Wilson

 

It surprises me that it's not an article by The Electric Viking, he has a game-changing battery every other day.

 

You got to build that click/watched list somehow ......
.

 

Fake news. They get paid by the click

 

Now you got me saying wow, lol