Cars, Batteries & Range Craziness

There are things electric cars are just amazing at. Driving around cities; quiet, swift & efficent There are things electric cars are rubish at. Long distance uniterupted driving, making wroom wroom sounds

The things electric cars are worse at is quickly shrinking, in a manner that hards to catchup to Wasnt that long ago that I watched a video using 100 wh/kg as some sort of peak! The true numbers nowdays are up to 300 wh/kg for massproduces, and closer to 500 wh/kg for more bespoke / limited run work

And this wh/kg I think catches the crux of the issue quite well. Batteries are *heavy*! Worse, as you strap more and more of them onto a car you also need the upgrade suspension, the structure & everything else to handle the weight. Which, in turn, makes it heavier!

So, less batteries is better and cheaper. But also lower range. So there is a big focus on range, if you can get away with shorter that would be much better

How much range?

This is were everyone and their mother get their panties in a twitch. There is good data for averages and typical use of cars and those ranges are so tiny that electric cars can easily do them today. Both in buying cost (batteries cost money, but electrical engines are far simpler & cheap!) and running cost (yes, even if running on coal power electrical cars are incredible efficent)

So, no problem?
Ofcourse problem!
*Most* of the time you dont need range, but sometimes you do and then you *really* do!

You can jump along from charger to charget but the density of charging stations is not quite there yet (coming soon TM), and you would need to stop every hour / couple of hour with a small battery. The loading speed is not dependent on the size either, so no matter the size the speed to charge from 10-80% is the same for the same type of battery (10-30min for modern ones)

So... give up? Not quite, we do already have car and we do know *their* range. Here however we have the major problem. Those have *not* been optimised for range. Efficenty, yes! Quitness? Sure! But range? Not as such

Fuel tanks are cheap, easy to maker large so no one really cares and just slapp one on that seems about right
Batteries are *expensive*, *heavy* and we want to think carefully about how much of them to stick to a car

If you demand fuel tank ranges from electrical cars you get missery! Expensive, lumbering cars that no one wants
Doesnt stop people thou

My Car

It's 13 years young, a tiny two sitter with two theoretical bakseats (they are there but not for any human I have ever meet)
And a correspondingly dinky tank. No one talks about theses cars as having *short* range, it wont even show up as an interest if you try to find information about them

From top to fuems it get's a bit above 500km once in a summers day (only time I ran until I could no longer see the fuel gauge)
Translating that into batteries? A good electric car, in nice weather, can get about 150 watt per km. So 150 w/km * 500 km = 75 000 watt, or as kilo is another word for thousand, 75 kwh
For a small car that is a heafty battery, but remember; No Optimisation. It got other things going on so they did not have unlimited space but also squezed one in that no one would complain about

If I had to live with 60kwh? Sure, don't now if I would notice the difference.
50kwh? Still would say yes
40kwh? Now it's starting to hurt
30kwh? No

Batteries

I have been talking very generally, let put some numbers to all the talk
Here is an excellens source and I'm going to talk about two types of batteries: BYD Blade Prismatic cell & Tesla 4680 cylindrical cell

To simplify I'm going to use these two batteries as stand in for two different types; LFP (BYD Blade Prismatic cell) & NMC (Tesla 4680 cylindrical cell)

Their name is a machup of their main components, but is more usefull to look at their properties

(note here that this cost is ONLY the material cost, to get a rough selling price multiply by two)

There are other differences; LFP is more affected by cold, NMC lasts for about 1500 charge cycles while LFP last for 4000. But here we will focus on these attributes

Putting in different size of batteries then show the tradeoff that exists

Smaller is much better, if you can live with the range

Charging

Yes, as I bring my gas car home I always plugg it into my own homemade fuel station. Always ready for a long days drive when- oh sorry, gas cars dont work like that! Let me try again
When I bring my gas car to the gas station I always take deep breaths to really *FEEL* the enriching fuems- oh, right. I hate that part. Only takes minutes but by God they are not fun!

What I'm trying to get at here is that elecric & gas cars are *different*. They have their own pros & cons
That's not to say that one or the other is much worse for *some* people in *some* sitations. But since it isn't an apple to apple comparison that will always be soo

Charging times for electrical cars are bad, yes. Never ones bring it down to 10-30min for a 10-80% total charge, but that's still quite suboptimal compared to a gas car (and that is IF you can find a charget that can do it)
But my gas car never starts with a full tank of gas! (the dream!) And I can't sit inside my gas car while its filling up

The Future

Electric cars, easy. They are cheaper now from a complete ownage cost perspective, and that is while everyone is starring at the apocalypse that is the much much cheaper and better Chinese cars! No one expect that to reverse, just become more so

Wroom wroom sounds can be made by speakers, slow charging can be lived with (especially 10min!), and all this for a price in the future that will be less than a gas car in every metric (buying, running & maintainance)

Most people go from point A to B, they do not have a religious connection to their car. In the same way that most don't have to their dishwasher

The Future is Electric (although no one can of course tell you exactly *when*)