The article starts off making it sound like a 745-mile vehicle is ready for showrooms and then mentions at the end that the battery will be going into hybrids. That makes sense - SS has the potential to radically lower battery cost but in the short term probably it will be the reverse. Also Toyota has some pretty good arguments that hybrids (not including plug-in hybrids) are a better use of available battery capacity if your goal is to reduce CO2 as quickly as possible.
I wonder whether a 745-mile battery that charges in ten minutes makes sense long term. We may in the short term see one come to market but i would give it less than even odds. If it does, it’s almost certain to be way too expensive for me, even if the battery itself is cheap. It’s good PR though.
It would be like putting a 30-gallon tank in a Corolla, except from a weight perspective, the tank is full 100% of the time. Even though an SS battery should be much smaller and lighter for a given capacity, the big battery would reduce range because of weight and drive up price a lot. It would also reduce cargo space - that’s noticeable in our Tucson just by going from a hybrid to a PHEV with 33 miles of range (you lose 15 cubic feet of interior space).
That said, there is the real-world range problem. Ideally for lifespan you mostly keep the battery between 20 and 80 percent, maybe going 10-90 on long drives. So that lops off 150 miles right there. Then say it’s very cold out or very hot and you lose and 30% or 225 miles.
Now your real word range is under 400 miles or so and in that worst case scenario that is in fact close to a gas vehicle. So I guess the idea of the 745-mile battery is that it provides range similar to an ICE vehicle in a worst case rather than quoting best-case range (as per RCs post in tidbits today). That all assumes SS batteries have the same pitfalls as current batteries with respect to temperature effects and depth of discharge limits (do they?)
The other argument in favor is that, as Torben says, upgrading the grid to allow 5-minute charges for 300 miles of range is going to take longest in the places you care the most (remote areas where you are driving lots of miles at a stretch).
Capacitors only help if the charging station spends a lot of time idle so the capacitor can charge slowly while waiting for the next impatient driver.
We had a post on here saying that the power demands of a single truck plaza would be the same as a town of 18,000. In the US, the major highways are dotted with such plazas and often with no high-voltage lines for many many miles.
Those lines are expensive and we are not making much progress on building them. Planet Money had an episode on how hard that is to add capacity to the grid especially in areas of low population in the US. Under current practice here, a new project has to pay all upstream and downstream costs incurred on the grid to add that capacity. So if the new juice in the region requires massive transformer upgrades, the new project pays the cost. So the story was a about massive wind farm project that was going to cost $1.2 billion to build, but the connection fee to the grid was going to be another $875 million even though they chose a location right near a 345 kV line. So the connection fee almost doubled the cost.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1176462647The backlog on even getting a project evaluated to see how much it will cost to connect is something like two years.
All that to say that I don’t see 5-minute charging coming to long-haul highways in the US anytime soon, regardless of battery tech. And so that might create a temporary market for super long-range batteries in some very high-end vehicles that will likely be loaded with every other luxury feature and priced accordingly. So even if battery prices plummet, my guess is that the super long range car will remain very very expensive if available at all. That’s already how it is with Tesla. If you want the long range, I think you still have to buy the dual motor and other upgrades.
But if you can sell a vehicle as absurd as a Hummer EV, it seems like there should be at least that market for a 745-mile sports coupe.
