Just in case -> BYD Co. Ltd. is a Chinese manufacturing company headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, founded by Wang Chuanfu in February 1995. Perhaps someone can comment on quality of these batteries compared to the current car batteries Tesla uses?
So Tesla's Li-ion batteries are going to have a significantly higher mass energy density - these are around 150Wh/kg vs 230Wh/kg that Tesla can currently muster. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that LiFePO4 handles 100% charges and 100% discharge, so in practice the protections on Li-ion means you can only really get 190Wh or so out of them every day, significantly narrowing the gap.
However, these are going to be ~4x cheaper for the same capacity, and are much safer, so some weight might be gained, but they won't take more space, possibly less space because they are prismatic.
To give you an estimate on the possible cost savings, BYD has it's own EVs, and the one they are releasing using these batteries costs 20 000$ before subsidies for 51kWh.
LiFePO4 also has much higher durability - that means that you can get away with more efficient pack designs, and probably that they can handle much faster charging.
Adding to this info - LiFePO4 batteries are far more chemically stable and therefore need no cooling system. I have LiFePO4 home backup batteries and they are completely passively cooled.
I highly recommend Will Prowse's channel who extensively covers batteries, solar panels, invertors and other home solar stuff: https://www.youtube.com/c/WillProwse
I've ordered twice, and plan to order another 5kw soon
After having 2 unbranded circuit breakers fail on me. Everything else will be Blue Sea, or Victron. They're the most expensive, but they feel as high quality as they are expensive which makes it worth it. Especially considering the alternative is explosions followed by fire.
Victron is bullet proof. I've seen their inverters used aboard working vessels for decade after decade without so much as a glitch. Highly recommended.
Looked them up and for LiFePo4 batteries they seem to charge several times the eBay prices. What could they possibly be offering at that premium, given that it's almost certain they don't make the batteries themselves?
Victron isn't exactly a bargain basement supplier, the people that buy their stuff depend on it for their lives. Their quality control, spares supplies and longevity are second to none, that goes for chargers, inverters and battery systems. If you're not worried about having power, having your inverter fail when you need it most, have your batteries in an outdoor enclosure of their own then you can skimp on all of this, probably cheapest option would then be to use reclaimed batteries and some cheap Chinese sine wave (for some definition of sine wave, most of them are 4 bit modified square wave that are run through a large transformer to smooth out the curve) inverter. That way you get a lot of bang for your buck, and even if the inverter ever dies you can just get a new one.
But when you are putting together a system that simply needs to work and that outputs clean power then you have very few companies that are that well supported. I've used Xantrex, Sunpower, Victron, ABB and a bunch of noname stuff. I'm sure there are plenty of others. The only one that comes close in design quality is ABB, Xantrex used to be good but it has gone down tremendously in the last decade and a half, the remainder I will never use again.
They're already top balanced grade A cells versus grade B cells. They're also the cells used in industrial mining, so they're able to tolerate vibration and movement.
> Why buy something that might explode from a trustworthy business, when it's cheaper out the back of some dudes car.
IIRC one of the main advantages of LiFePo4 batteries is that they can't "explode" under the normal circumstances. And if they buy batteries in China anyway, then why not buy from China as well? I'd understand 20-30% premium, but not 200-300%.
Think 'hospital', certified power, military, off-shore (vessels, platforms, emergency power and so on).
For a system that is bullet proof and where there are very strict requirements it makes sense to spend that money, for your homebrew system it likely doesn't, but you can pick up their inverters for a good discount at the various surplus auction sites with some regularity and that's the best of both worlds: great quality at a reasonable price.
You're opening a whole can of worms in trying to decide what LiFePO4 batteries to buy. There's tons of options, prices have been dropping precipitously this year across the board.
The first question to ask yourself is if you want the comfort of a high quality warranty or would you like the cheapest possible price per kWh?
In my RV, in May, I went with somewhat high-end Battleborn Batteries. They have a great warranty, which has come in handy as one of the batteries I bought experienced an issue and needed to be sent in for repair. They paid for shipping in both directions.
That being said, nowadays even just a few months later, I might decide to "self-insure" given how good the cheaper batteries have gotten.
Advice on legitimately adding this to your house in a DIY manner? Or is it the kind of stuff you 100% need to hire licensed folks for legal reasons? I built offgrid systems for boats but now I'm considering doing my house.
Enphase has a self installer certification program that I used to DIY the design. I still hired a licensed electrician for the physical installation, though.
Absolutely, it's a big part of why they're cheaper.
I just wish I could actually get them for reasonable prices in smaller quantities. I have to pay a 3-5x premium for LiFePO4 batteries. I'd love some at a reasonable premium for my ebike :)
Ah yes, that complicates matters considerably. And true, Li-Ion is still a better price (and higher density to boot). But it's worth monitoring this because at some point there will be a crossover.
Indeed there will be. In North America, batteryhookup.com has A123, Headway and CATL cells at a pretty okay price. The CATL cells still aren't worth it IMO, but the Headway LiFePO4 cells can push a ridiculous amount of current, something like 200A from a single cell.
eBike batteries are as unique as all of the power tool ones so that they are all different. what's your approach to housing and connecting your DIY battery for your make/model?
i just recently became an eBike owner as well, and a second battery pack is 1/3 the price of the bike.
I built my own ebike. I can basically make the battery pack into any shape I want. Right now I run 14s10p 18650s - it cost me 200$ to make and it has as much capacity as 3000$ worth of Bosch powerpacks.
Secondary battery packs are so expensive because of DRM and lack of interoperability. I could make for 100$ a battery pack that Bosch sells for 900$. You're really not paying for the cells.
Power tool batteries aren't really unique either btw. The shape is slightly different but they're all just 2p-3p 18650s with basic slot connectors.
I don't care what is on the inside of the battery itself if the shape of the battery doesn't fit what I want to use it. I'm pretty sure this is everyone's definition of unique battery per vendor.
Well you should - the fact they're pretty much electrically identical means that you can confidently buy off-brand batteries if they have good cells and that adapters can be possible.
I think you're missing the point focused on your point. We all understand the internals are probably coming from the same factory line. The problem is that they don't connect universally. As someone up the chain elsewhere stated, if the markets can be forced to use the same USB charging port, there should be a similar regulation for these kinds of things as well. Whether that's a universal battery shape/connector for tools, eBikes, whatever. We've unified things like 110v mains plugs, 220v mains, etc.
The fact that they do all use the same internals makes this even more egregious.
I have KunTeng controller and disply, with a GS Motor hub drive, pushing 2.5kW peak right now with a 1.5kWh battery pack.
The motor itself is capable of 6kW+peak power with a bit of statorade, but my battery and controller aren't up to snuff
I'm personally pushing 60kph :) But it's pretty scary at those speeds even with the best tires I could find and pretty good disc brakes, so I'm generally at 20mph or under.
I'm planning a 4kWh battery eventually... but not yet.
It's a super budget build for now - a BTwin Rockrider 520 with a battery from salvaged modem packs and an overvolted KunTeng controller and a hub motor. It's super fun though and I've done over a 1000km on it which is very nice.
That's one very mean bike. I think I have enough steel in one leg to keep me off rides like that but consider me impressed that you are taking that into traffic. Is this street legal where you live? You'll be doing wheelies if you are not careful :)
How much does the whole thing weigh? Mine is at 29 Kg, and that's with only a 500Wh pack, I figure about 6 Kg/KWh so by the time I'm done building the new pack it will be around 40 Kg in total or so.
Well, any bike will do wheelies if you have the knack for it :) But if you're wondering, no it doesn't do power wheelies - I can definitely feel the weight shifting back though.
I haven't weighed it yet, but:
The bike itself is 15kg. The battery weights 48g per cell, so at 140 cells (14s10p) that would be 6.7kg, but I'll round up to 7.5kg for the wiring, mounting, etc...
The motor and controller and screen are around 11kg or so. The hub motor is very very heavy!
Summing it all up it's around 35kg. Sounds about right from hauling it around.
It's not technically street legal, no. But I'm far from the worst offender - a lot of people ride what's basically a 125cc with a hub motor on the end, and they're sold everywhere, so I'm never going to get in trouble for it.
Very neat, and nice to have a fairly high voltage setup like that, mine is only 36V nominal so it needs pretty fat wiring to not lose a bunch of power on the way to the motor (that was the first thing I fixed, the difference was noticable, both in range and in power).
35 Kg is doable, as long as that battery doesn't run dry!
Mine really isn't pleasant if you end up without assist, it's doable but I really hate it, especially uphill. Can't wait until I have that pack ready, but I'm not going to hurry it, I'd hate for it to fail halfway or so, and that's a lot of tinkering to be done still (and a lot of welds...). But the batteries are already here, the balancer as well, I have a BMS from a scrapped pack and a good idea of what the housing should look like, if my test pack works I'm off to the races, then it is mostly straight up assembly and otherwise I'll need to re-think the way the BMS is hooked up.
I've actually pedaled without the battery but with the motor in place.
Let me tell you, the added weight is nothing... On a hub motor when you don't have a connected battery, say because the BMS tripped as you ran dry, the motor converts a signficant amount of your kinetic energy into electrical energy and then to heat. You can really feel it cogging. I could swear the two weeks I ran it without a batteris saw my thighs get significantly bigger!
Thankfully in my city there are plentiful subway stations with elevators, so when I did run dry once, I was able to pedal my bike into the subway and take it home.
You've found a nice way to add a workout I think :) Mine is simply un-driveable for any distance without support, it's not a hub motor but a mid motor and there is a whole pile of gears that are driven as well as the motor itself. It's like trying to sail with the anchor out.
Couldn't tell you. The website doesn't list that level of detail. It's a 750W motor. It took me 6 weeks after ordering before it shipped due to "global supply chain" blah blah excuses.
It is serving me quite nicely without those kinds of mods. I'm not looking to set any speed records. Just needed something to help me get up the damn hills when I have a load of stuff. It does that better than hoped, so I'm happy.
Neat :) Bafang is one of the larger suppliers. Keep an eye out on the temperature of the FETs in your motor controller, that tends to be the weak point for more powerful motors, 750W is a lot of power for an e-bike, mine only has 350 but it is 'street legal' and insured, if I would hack that it would become a liability. Since I have an e-bike my car has hardly moved.
Do you have a link for your bike? Mine is a Riese & Mueller 'Charger', a 2016 model.
The battery pack is quite anemic (500 Wh), so I'm building a much larger one, I do 130 Km round trips with some regularity (twice per week) and it takes two of those fully charged to fully discharged; and then recharged at the destination which is effectively murdering them, hence the need for a larger battery. A single pack has about 35 Km range. I want to be able to do the trip one-way on 80% full to 20%, which I've worked out to about 1000 Wh plus some reserve. The pack will likely be 160 cells, which is pretty heavy for an e-bike, but the frame has enough room for this.
Currently figuring out how to hook it all up and how to fool the controller in the motor to believe that my oversized battery is a genuine Bosch product without letting out the magic smoke from the toy level balancing unit in the BMS.
Sorry, totally forgot to provide a link to it [0]. I bought a cargo version specifically to use as a total car replacement. It has a 300lb capacity, so that's the why of the big motor. I wish I had done it sooner. I've only had it a couple of weeks, but I've already used it for trips to the hardware store, grocery trips, firewood (i'm sure some people laughed at that), and all sorts of stuff I'd have never attempted on a pedal bike.
Ah! Now I get why you have those power requirements, ok. Indeed, you'll need a good sized battery to keep that moving for any duration. We have a 'regular' pedal bike, a Christiania older model cargo bike, it did duty for the last six years as child transportation, every day, rain or shine and still runs great (and we are not even the first owner), just basic maintenance. They're very useful. I've been toying with the idea of electrifying that one too, but the arrangement is going to be quit tricky (likely: two front hub motors, it's a trike).
Why motorize the front wheels? Wouldn't a larger moter in the back, similar to the one I have, be easier. Motorizing 1 wheels seems much more simple than 2 to me. Couldn't you get into a situation where one wheel is slipping or sticking compared to the other requiring different logic for current being applied to each?
Thank you for thinking along, all your points are valid and have been considered, there are fairly obvious drawbacks to doing it this way but simpler options are - alas - not on the table.
This is the bike (image ripped from an ad, not that bike but the exact same model):
So you can see that in the back there are no options other than to either completely change the frame or to go for a single speed and neither is feasible. I could maybe expand the space between the forks in the rear so a wider hub with a motor + cassette would fit but that risks cracking the aluminum frame.
The bike has a rear hub that is geared, so there is no space there and this being a cargo bike means that an after market mid-motor can't be placed (it would run right through the middle of the main spar. That leaves the front wheels for the electric drivetrain. I'm not afraid of slipping or sticking, electric motors tend to be pretty well behaved in situations like this, the difference in speed between inner and outer wheel in a turn will be readily absorbed by the motors and discarded as heat, and they won't be overpowered to the point that they will start turning independently, each motor will run at a leisurely 125 Watts or so. The one situation where that might happen is if one wheel comes off the ground but in normal use that should never happen.
This is the kind of kit that I'm eyeing to do this conversion with:
If it comes down to cutting/modding the frame, I guess it is time to start looking at other options. The one thing I've noticed is that the gearing seems unnecessary while using the motor. With pedal assist, starting from a dead stop is quite simple. I'm sure that there necessity will be obvious if I ever find myself without power in the battery, so I'm guessing removing the gearing is a non-starter
One of the people using this bike has a knee injury so gearing is an absolute must and that is the same reason why we are looking to convert the bike to electric drive in the first place.
I have used a bike with single gears and I currently run my own ebike with a single gear - it's really not that bad if you are in shape. I have pretty strong legs though so ymmv.
Hey, I've done something similar with a Lenovo battery. If you're willing to scrap a battery pack, it's definitely doable by reusing the electronics. You should add your own BMS though. It's fine to run them in parallel for the balance wires, but connect the phase wires to your own BMS. It should work :) I recommend Daly BMS's, they're not too expensive and they kept my 1.5kWh pack in balance and protected it from a few accidents.
That's exactly the plan, with one very small modification, I'll be adding a 1A balancer that gets triggered on the 'charge' signal, and I'll replace the balance wires to the original BMS with a laddernetwork of resistors to fool the old BMS into thinking it is still seeing a nicely balanced pack.
This is the balancer (not a BMS, just an active balancer):
What's neat about this one is that it uses two supercaps as a chargepump so it can rebalance quite effectively without producing a lot of waste heat or wasting power (of course you waste some but a small fraction of a resistance based balancer, which just burns off the power in the cells that are highest voltage).
I'm building a small test pack (20 cells) right now, and if that works properly I'll scale it up eight fold for full range. It will still plug into the standard charger and I'll have a switch that will allow the pack to be charged to 100% capacity in case it is needed for an even longer trip.
It's a good idea to take care to balance the cells. That said, 1A of balance current is very overkill.
I actually ran tests as I was curious. I cycled my battery 10 times at 1C. The parallels only went 0.03v out of balance, over 10 hours of discharge and 30 hours of charge. That's at the top end, so really I had what, 0.5Ah of imbalance, over 40 hours of non-stop use in the very worst scenrio. So the 40mA of balance current from my BMS is actually enough even in the worst situation.
In reality you'll be doing at most one battery cycle a day, maximum two, so you'll actually be needing only 4 mA of balance current!
Because of that I decided that the 40mA was all that I needed and I didn't add any really heavy duty balancing circuit. The one that came with my BMS was more than enough, even though like you I was quite skeptical at first.
So I think you should keep it simple. If I were you I'd solder the balance wires of both BMS's as parallel and go on with my day knowing that whatever I'll throw at it, it will stay balanced. Plus there is less that can go wrong :). But then again, I'm not the one not to enjoy some overengineering
The thing is that when you have as many cells in parallel as we do, for you probably 15?, the imperfections between each cell really do balance out and even with the pretty knackered cells I went with it will stay in balance.
Yes, 1A is overkill, 100 mA would be plenty (and likely still too much), but the Bosch BMS has maybe 1 mA balancing capability and that's too little for a pack that size so I decided to throw in something beefier and this was the smallest one that had bluetooth out so I can monitor it, a pack that gets unbalanced too much is a good indication that something is wrong, for instance a weld that's not done well, or a cell that is on the blink. Those things are best caught early with homebrew packs of this size, you really don't want to have a battery fire.
A good, new pack stays within a few mV over a whole charge/discharge cycle. The reason is that if you start off with a balanced pack the laggards during discharge will be the first ones to be topped off so it all balances out in the end modulo the difference in internal resistance, and this leads to the various cells dissipating a bit more or less heat (as well as the cells on the inside of the pack being better isolated). That's cumulative and over a longer number of cycles you'll see the pack drift more and more out of balance.
So it's not so much a matter of me being skeptical as it is knowing the exact limits of the Bosch BMS and the fact that if the pack ever goes out of balance more than that that it will brick the BMS, and that's a nuisance, coupled with the fact that this particular balancer had some more useful features.
16 cells in parallel, and you're right that the cells tend to self balance to a large extent. But it's also a really good way to monitor the pack so it's dual duty for me, wear monitoring (which has safety implications) and balancing all in one for less than $100, which on the total cost of this project is quite doable. The cells I'm using are $6 a piece (Samsung E35s, 3450 mAh) and 160 of them is already quite the outlay.
Ah, if the cells going out of balance even slightly will brick the BMS, that is something else. In that case "lying" to the BMS is a good idea and at that point you might as well add your own balancer.
AS for the battery fire, that is why I suggest using a second BMS and running the phase wires from there - a good BMS such as the one I use will cut off the power when there is an even slight imbalance, which is my cue to investigate it and avoid a battery fire :) - while that second BMS would handle the balancing.
But paying for 6$ cells, my oh my, that does make it worth it :) I paid all in all 70 cents a cell and even then I was quite skittish :P
Yes, second BMS is included as well, it has a whole bunch of safety features and will be in series with the Bosch one so that it gets first say in cutting out. Though likely the whole Bosch BMS would evaporate if that pack ever shorts out through the BMS :) But that one didn't have the ability to actively balance the pack (which I don't know if I'll ever need but better safe than sorry, once sealed I'd like to keep it sealed, there is a lot of rain here), and it didn't have a bluetooth hookup possibility. Especially in the beginning I'll be monitoring that thing like a hawk, I'm a pretty good welder but spotwelding with rickety gear by hand is a thing that I'm not 100% confident about and it won't take much to mess that up.
70 cts / cell?? Wow. Consider me somewhat jealous, that's an absolute bargain. But better keep a good eye on them then, a FLIR isn't a luxury, it is a good idea to keep an eye on the cell temperature using a FLIR while charging, bad cells will stand out immediately (as well as later on, when they are possibly warmer than their brothers and sisters around them which should be at ambient fairly soon after you stop charging, that's a good indication of a partial short in a cell). I've already spotted some bad apples like that which when checked out on a reference charger seemed to be perfectly ok. It also helps to spot bad welds, simply load up the pack and look at the interconnects, any bad welds will be higher temp because of their increased resistance.
Hmm, why are you putting the Bosch BMS in series? Is it going to turn off unless it detects a load? I'd simply not connect it's phase wires, but it's possible the Bosch magic won't let that work.
Thankfully I didn't have to spot-weld. I used cells from modem batteries, so they were already spot welded - I was able to very rapidly solder to the spot welded tabs which already had some spots to run balance wire through, and the batteries were connected to each other 3 by 3. Then I was able to solder the "balance" wires which were quite thick at each cell to put them in series and it worked fine.
The pack as it is now does not heat up at all. That's to be expected I guess because I'm charging it overnight quite slowly and I'm not really drawing more than 1C.
I had multiple cells that I threw out - I all ran them through a balance charger and fast-charged then fast-discharged them. Any cell that got warm, out of balance, or didn't hold the expected capacity was thrown out. I ended up disposing of 25 or so cells, but I had order an extra 46 anyways so it didn't matter.
It also helps that I let the cells aside after a full charge for a week or so simply because of the balancing process. Any cell that self-discharged I knew wasn't good. No FLIR yet but I'd love if :)
If you think 70 cents per cell is good, batteryhookup has 35 cent cells at the same time... They were in worse condition at a pretty low capacity though so I passed on that.
The Bosch BMS is a pretty clever little device, it governs not only the charge discharge cycle but also keeps track of the state-of-charge, and reports the remaining capacity in % to the controller via a CANBUS link, which - annoyingly - also features as auhtorization to release the motor, using some challenge-response system that to date nobody has managed to crack (though some people spent a lot of time trying to do so). So you can output voltage from the pack all you want, without the proper authentication your motor will not turn.
So that's why you really need that Bosch BMS. Then the bad news: the Bosch BMS is on the edge of what's safe, the FETs are underpowered (just a hair under rated maximum current and voltage), not cooled, there is a 40V Schottky diode there which regularly operates at or even slightly above it's ratings, there is a single chip DC-DC convertor which also isn't cooled properly and which tends to blow. So I don't particularly trust the Bosch BMS from a safety perspective, I've seen a whole bunch of these now (about 15) and a good number of them had blown up. And that's with the standard battery. The one that I'll be hooking up to it is four times more powerful. Any short circuit protection in the old BMS is going to be terribly undersized so I need something in series with the Bosch BMS to ensure that if there ever is a short (say in the motor) that it's the battery that gets disconnected well before the wiring goes and I simply do not trust the Bosch BMS not to fail 'closed' in which case the whole thing will turn into a giant fuse. That's the kind of scenario that I can really do without.
On more than one pack that I've opened I've found evidence of small fires, typically BMS balancing wires that shorted out (there are no fuses there, obviously) and that could have ended quite badly. The wires from the pack to the motor are substantially thicker so then the question is what cuts out first: the BMS or the wires. I simply want to play that as safe as possible and aim for the disconnect to happen fast enough that the wiring doesn't light up.
Another option is a very fast fuse in line with the battery terminals, that's definitely a possibility as well (and easier to mount and less chance of it in turn breaking than yet another BMS in series). Anyway, work in progress and to be continued, nice to find someone on HN who has a lot of knowledge about this!
Waiting for a while to see if there is a self discharge is a very good method to spot flawed cells before you assemble a pack but such defects can also develop at a later date, so please do keep a good eye on your pack, especially if - as I suspect - you are using reclaimed batteries, you can't be 100% sure that they have never been deep discharged.
Safety is one of the main reasons why I decided to go with brand new high capacity brand name cells, yes, it's a lot of money, but even so, the whole thing will cost about as much as a 600 Wh commercially available pack for this bike and have more than 3 times the capacity (and a better form factor to boot, and will last a lot longer).
So the real danger from cells that have been deep discharged is dendritic growth as we both know.
Yes dendrites could develop later on. But the process of dendritic growth is quite slow and gradual.
Because of that, before the cells start getting too hot and threaten thermal runaway, what will happen is that the pack will run out of balance faster than the 40mA my BMS can balance. And shortly after my BMS will trip protection and I will be safe. This is actually why BMSs have a lower balance voltage - 1mA is of course not enough but they tend not to exceed 50mA so they will catch damaged cells very early removing all the risk.
The TL;DR is that damage is relatively limited during deep discharge even to 0v. There is plausibly possible capacity degradation but it not very different from accelerated wear and tear, though the authors did not detect any.
What is really dangerous though is discharging a battery pack to 0v - when that happens it's easy for some cells to gain a negative state of charge, which is when the nasty stuff that actually causes fires and damage happen.
Copper dissolution according to this paper in more modern batteries does not even really happen until -12% state of charge. Indeed in modern higher capacity batteries they found no detectable damage at all until -12% soc.
Because of that, I am very confident from my setup - the risk of internal short circuit is incredibly low given that I know that the cells were always in balance, and any slow-forming internal short circuit will trip the protection much before there is any fire risk.
It's very interestinf though from reading the paper that the deep discharge risks essentially disappeared at 0v from pure coincidence as capacities increased though, I'd have expected somewhat the reverse :)
Interesting information. Agreed that in an unbalanced pack deep discharge is really dangerous, but, and this is where that copper in solution comes back to bite: the bulk of the fires happen during charging, which is when the copper comes out of solution, I'm not quite sure what 'modern' means in this context but all of the batteries that I've seen so far (Samsung, LG, Sony) caution in their MSDS against deep discharge both from a functional risk as well as from a safety perspective and there are a number of pretty knowledgeable people online who are on the record with their reputations at stake cautioning against this. There is some distance between 'paper in nature' versus 'people building high capacity Li-Ion packs for industrial applications with currently available materials', I'd rather follow the latter than the former when it comes to safety!
Agreed that your setup is pretty safe though, especially if you have already cycled the pack many times and see no deviation between the cells.
I've figured out the layout, it - unfortunately - won't be possible to put the pack in the frame triangle, there are too many details that will become messy, space is constrained, mounting options are limited and wiring the pack would be a nightmare with a lot of odd groupings of cells which would have a lot of potential for mistakes, so I'm going with the 'boring' option of making a rear carrier based box that will house the battery. A port at the bottom will connect a cable with a custom made plug from an old pack to the port on the bike, which can then still do double duty to charge the pack.
From a center-of-gravity perspective it's not ideal, but it does allow boosting the pack to a full 200 cells in 10S20P configuration, which should be more than enough to do my runs and have room to spare. Can't wait to get it tested :)
I've been using a rear carrier battery too on my bike. It's pretty bad for the center of gravity. I will be building a middle mount for it in the next month. I will caution against it for a heavy pack - it does become a safety issue when the battery is heavy. What happened to me twice is that in suboptimal conditions - rain or dirty roads - it's VERY easy for the front wheel to lock up under braking and for you to lowside. If possible a split between the frame and a rear rack is definitely preferable.
>I'm not quite sure what 'modern' means in this context but all of the batteries that I've seen so far (Samsung, LG, Sony) caution in their MSDS against deep discharge both from a functional risk as well as from a safety perspective and there are a number of pretty knowledgeable people online who are on the record with their reputations at stake cautioning against this
Basically by modern they mean higher capacity than the ones in the 2006 study that found dendrites at 0V - those were early 2000s era tech, shoddy 760mAh cells. They found that the higher the specific capacity, the higher the resistance to Cu becoming dissolved.
As far as constructor experience I do agree with you, it's preferable to avoid it. Though one factor is that people with extensive commercial experience will probably have had to work for very cheap, low capacity 1600mAh cells that are definitely more prone to this, and quite old arrays. I definitely recommend against it too, it just seems to me that it won't result in a fire anymore. I wouldn't take the risk though with a cell I know was discharged to 0 or beyond.
I've seen the aftermath of a battery fire, trust me, you don't want to go there. It's a small price to pay on my end and even if the effect is just psychological that's worth it to me :)
I should do a write-up on battery pack failures, I've collected a small mountain of data on this, it might be useful to others.
Many thanks for the rear carrier information, this is something I will have to really deal with somehow, the frame gap on this bike is just too bloody small and I don't want to permanently alter the bike in case I want to sell it. I've done quite a bit of cycling with kids on the back so I'm used to having a lot of weight there (and one on the front too, total bike weight in excess of 130 Kg), but it's something that will have more effect the faster you go.
What's definitely out is an off-side pack or to have it split across the carrier bags, that's asking for trouble, both from a mechanical point of view and an electrical one (you'd be running quite a few wires between the two sides). At least a carrier one is going to be centered on the bike.
Cells are arriving tomorrow, for now I've decided on a 10x20 grid (so a few more cells ;) ), 21 x 41 cm plus some room in front to house the BMS. the box will be fairly low, about 90 mm altogether so that should help keep the COG low, the carrier is rather low on this bike so on the whole it might not be that bad. I'll be sure to be extra careful with wet roads and I categorically refuse to cycle when it's icy (I have a bunch of steel in one leg from a previous accident so falling again is really not an option).
At least my adapter works, so I won't need to butcher the bike wiring harness.
If you want to take this out-of-band: jacques@modularcompany.com
> This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that LiFePO4 handles 100% charges and 100% discharge
I don't think that's quite true. LFP cells have a minimum voltage; they may survive being discharged to zero, but it probably isn't a good idea for long-term longevity. (I'm currently working on an EV conversion that uses LFP cells, but I haven't actually done durability testing or anything like that, I'm just going by what people recommend.)
Lithium ion and LFP batteries though don't have voltages that are linear with capacity; on an LFP once you're below 2.2 volts or so there's not much left.
I do agree though that LFP cells are pretty amazing if you're a car manufacturer that wants to make a reasonably priced mass-market EV. I think in the near term (i.e. until there's some cheaper/better substitute), they could take over the non-luxury-car EV market and allow the rest of the world outside of China to start seeing pretty good EVs that are price competitive with equivalent ICE vehicles.
That's not quite what 100% discharge usually refers. 100% discharge means from the maximum charge voltage to the minimum discharge voltage. That corresponds to, normally, using up the rated capacity of the cell.
On lithium batteries you'd normally only use 80% of the rated capacity if you want to maintain durability.
Exactly, depending on the make/model that's either 3.0V, 2.8V or 2.5V lowest discharge limit. If you go under that you basically can not longer trust the cell integrity and should dispose of it (no matter what miracle workers on the web say, the copper in the cell will have gone into solution and it can be deposited anywhere at all, but never again in the same spot where it was supposed to be so you are essentially the proud owner of an incendiary with a random length fuse...).
Ah, that makes sense. I guess it's kind of arbitrary (I mean, you could just call 80% full "100%" if that's all you'd use in practice) but it does seem quite useful if the "full" voltage is generally agreed to be in a narrow range and not have a wide range of maximum values depending on whether you care more about absolute capacity or longevity.
The CATL LFP batteries Tesla has been using already have only gone in the SR+ model, because they couldn't fit enough for the necessary range in the LR and P models, so in practice they do seem to use more space.
As far as I know they're not prismatic, they're using the same form factor as the NCA and NMC cells in those models.
I'm not sure it actually says that - it says that Tesla has signed a deal for BYD LFP batteries, and it says that BYD blade battery packs are energy dense, but it doesn't actually link those two and say "Tesla has signed a deal for BYD blade battery packs".
One of the linked articles does report earlier rumours around Tesla using blade battery packs from BYD, but then also has quotes from BYD saying "we never said that".
That saves a ton of space, and if these don't have any cooling/heating requirements that savings will translate into a more compact pack which may offset some of the losses from the reduced density, as well as weight savings for coolant, coolant loops and pump.
They can get away with less safety buffer and cooling equipment and so at the pack level, they can claw some of that mass energy density back. Not all of it, but combined with other advantages, they're quite viable for EVs, and no brainer for stationary storage.
The US doesn't make a lot of this type of battery because there is a consortium of patent-holders who charge enough to make LFP less economically viable that wasn't able to secure all the needed patents in China.
It's amazing how broken of a system it is. The theory is ok but I today's world they don't work. Change the time scale to 10 years at least. Or require active use even better
Patents have a 20 year lifetime. US5910382 and US6514640 have already expired. It might speed up climate mitigation, but it's not strictly required for it to happen.
I am a very minor investor. They quite recently pioneered some very slick flat batteries. The volume/joule is better (not sure about joule/kg), and the batteries could become structural. I find them speculatively interesting.
I can't comment on the batteries, but Shenzhen 4 years ago was full of BYD taxis. They seemed pretty good compared to the ancient diesel VW Passats that were the alternative.
I never tried their KN95s but their surgical masks are pretty great, the ear hook is thicker and softer with better elasticity and the nose metal band felt nice. I wouldn't go out of my way too much though.
For point of comparison, LA had several EV buses built by BYD and literally none of them work anymore despite only being service for about a month or two. In fact, almost every US transit agency that has purchased a BYD EV has had issues with the vehicles, batteries, or both.
So to answer your questions: the BYD batteries will be a lot lower quality than the batteries Tesla currently gets.
As a young(ish) person, I've definitely heard "fyi this is a CHINESE business", but haven't really heard "fyi this is a JEWISH business" or "fyi this is a JAPANESE business".
Are there communicable/generalised messages or stereotypes people are trying to invoke with this sort of thing, or have they always just been intended as slander?
I can't speak to "Jewish", but I can to "Japanese".
It relates to Japan's industrial rise after WWII.
In the 1950s, "Japanese" was synonymous with "shoddy and cheap". The stereotypical import from Japan was an HB pencil.
In the 1980s, "Japanese" became synonymous with "cheap and reliable" -- think Toyota vs General Motors. American manufacturers responded with racism rather than fixing their problems.
There was hysteria in the mainstream media that Japan was going to overtake the US to become the biggest economy in the world. People who see the world in zero-sum terms made idiots of themselves.*
In the 2010s, "Japanese" seems to have become synonymous with "advanced and very high quality". "Japanese capacitors" on computer motherboards, for instance.
And now that the Chinese are here, we've always been best buddies with Japan.
To some extent this same sequence is happening with South Korea and Taiwan, and possibly Israel.
* There's a famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" which goes some way to describing this zero-sum, win-or-lose thinking in politicians. The first few paragraphs read like they could have been written this year.
> There was hysteria in the mainstream media that Japan was going to overtake the US to become the biggest economy in the world. People who see the world in zero-sum terms made idiots of themselves.*
To be fair, the Japanese, through MITI subsidies, slaughtered the US semiconductor industry through the early 80s.
It took a lot of US government funding through VHSIC and the VLSI Project to prevent semiconductors from collapsing completely.
People too often assume that "things will work out" after the fact when sometimes it took great efforts up front to make it that way.
Of course, I'm originally from the Rust Belt of the US, so I have a front row seat to "Yeah, things don't always work out."
It took a lot of US government funding through VHSIC and the VLSI Project to prevent semiconductors from collapsing completely.
What are some specific examples? I don't remember anything like that happening. Japan had Hitachi and Matsushita and Toshiba, but we had Motorola and Intel and NatSemi and TI and countless other dominant players. There was plenty of room in the market for both.
Please remember that the only thing which had any real volume in that time (1985 and prior) period was dynamic RAM. DRAM drove semiconductor process development until microprocessors eventually took over as defining the process capabilities (about 1990-ish).
The US DRAM manufacturers got absolutely destroyed by the Japanese ones. So much so that getting out of DRAM was an existential crisis moment for Intel.
One big point of the crux was scan lithography vs step and repeat lithography. You needed step and repeat lithography to get to the next level, but it was way more complicated than scan lithography. The US companies made the jump--the Japanese ones didn't. The Japanese companies clobbered the US companies in terms of profitability and production.
This is part of the origin of "never be first" in the semiconductor industry.
The US government then stepped in and pumped a massive amount of money behind semiconductor tech to stabilize that. Of course, once step and repeat (and some other related technologies) went online, the Japanese DRAM companies now got slaughtered and basically driven out of business.
Things don't always "just work out" and sometimes the game really does create "winners and losers".
This change in attitudes was dramatised in 1985's Back To The Future.
Doc Brown (from 1955)
(Inspects the failed circuit)
"Unbelievable that this little piece
of junk could be such a big problem."
(Turns it over)
"No wonder this circuit failed, it
says made in Japan."
Marty (from 1985)
"What do you mean doc, all the best
stuff is made in Japan."
Doc Brown
"Unbelievable."
Because it’s no longer socially acceptable. You should look up the history of dogwhistles about Jewish ownership of banks and financial firms. It usually seems harmless, ex: “hey isn’t this owned by a Jewish person?” which masquerades the deep antisemitistic insinuation that Jews are taking over banking and media
There are some striking parallels between China and Japan, not so many between China and Holocaust victims.
In the 1940s, great industrialized nations vied with each other to see who could commit the biggest atrocities on the other guys. Japan lost out, but once set straight, they began an impressive multi-decade recovery.
In the 1950s, Japan's own considerable efforts, along with help from their former enemies, started to pay off. In the US, we were slow to let go of old grudges, though, and the (understandably) poor quality of Japanese exports was a standing joke. As tuatoru points out, anything that said "Made in Japan" was almost guaranteed to be crap, similar to the outlook many people have towards Chinese exports today.
In the 1960s, Japan's reputation as an industrial power was growing, but they were still mostly seen as imitators rather than innovators, again very much like the Chinese are today. The Japanese took an early lead in areas like solid state electronics, exploiting inventions that mostly originated in the West but weren't being used to their full potential in the consumer space. Companies like Honda and Toyota were also starting to sell a few cars here, but nobody took them seriously.
In the 1970s, the gas crunch hit. People stopped laughing at small Japanese cars and started buying them. There was still a lot of latent resentment towards the Japanese, though, coming from everyone from organized auto industry labor who saw their well-feathered nests falling apart, to WWII veterans whose interactions with Japan had proven too traumatic to forgive and forget. Not to mention anti-Asian sentiment being on the upswing as a whole, thanks to Vietnam and the "boat people" who were, of course, "coming to take our jobs" or worse.
The Chinese aren't selling cars in the US market but you can bet there'd be a lot of prejudice out there in the roads and parking lots of small-town America if they were.
Later, in the 1980s, Japan emerged as a player in computing and data processing, but we all knew that they were culturally ill-adapted to develop good software, so no biggie. Of course, this was just a refrain of 1930s-era prejudices. "They're all nearsighted. No way these guys can fly fighters and bombers." By the 1990s, many young people thought of Japan as the country where the best video games came from, and any notion that they were somehow incapable of writing code was forgotten.
So with respect to China and the US, I think we'll end up as valued trading partners in the long run. It's just a matter of waiting for one irrational prejudice after another to go away. This will take time, but it'll happen... if neither of us does anything stupid.
It's okay to prefer American made products without bringing some kinda racial implication into it. The whole "buy local" movement is simply an extension of this. It's okay to prefer to trade with your local economy.
While we've never been at war with China, it's not infeasible given their attitude towards Taiwan. And there's very real trade-offs with convenience of importing everything vs. the resiliency of having your own supply chains which we saw a small taste of in the early days of 2020 with medical supplies.
We already buy many China-made things including iPhones and we don't bat an eye at the "Designed in CA, made in China" label... but there's a lot of us that feel uncomfortable with yielding our manufacturing base to globalism, not least of which is that it puts you in a bind if you need to stand up to said country when they encroach on more ideologically-aligned democracies.
A principle difference between Japan and China is that the war was followed with the Marshall Plan, which brought Japan a new constitution and elected government. That hasn't happened in China and it isn't obvious that it's about to.
If it's arbitrary, then yes. In this case I don't think it's arbitrary because country of origin has significant ramifications for application of patents, etc.
I don't think so, though perhaps it should more accurately be phrased as a COMMUNIST CHINESE business. That is why people care, because the CCP has an aytpical way of doing business that comes with its own risks and potential problems. It really has everything to do with economics and nothing to do with race/nationality/heritage.
It has a lot to do with jingoism/nationalism, albeit maybe not race explicitly (although I doubt the cultural rift between the two does much to help).
I rarely see the same level of outrage against Saudi Arabian oil (yes, yes, a low proportion of gas in the US nowabouts) or things produced in many other circumstances that are at least as "unfree" as they are in China.
Because of that, I find it difficult to believe that it is based off of some principled stand over governance.
Saudi Arabia selling oil is just them selling natural resources. China selling high tech better than anyone else in the world is signs of the world order changing.
Edit: Personally I am excited that we can potentially have another billion educated people to help solve the worlds problems. I see more and more good things come out of China, so I am optimistic over the potential to trade ideas and not just cheap labor.
Elon has said multiple times Tesla will buy all the batteries from all the suppliers they possibly can AND make their own as fast as possible AND increase existing contracts with Panasonic AND seek out as many new suppliers as physically possible.
If vehicles average 100kWh battery packs, 10 GWh is only 100k vehicles. 50kWh, only 200k.
Global sales in 2018 (of light passenger vehicles) were around 70M. Absent chip shortages and financial crashes, we could expect to hit 100M in three or four years.
Yep, Tesla wants more batteries. And this number, 70M, is why sticking with Nickel-Cobalt is a Bad Idea.
There's a lot more iron and phosphorus available for a lot cheaper; demand for Nickel and Cobalt will push their price... er, very high.
At the latest Q&A Elon said they were not focusing on the energy side of the business because it would require them to not make a number of cars due to being limited on battery / inverter supply.
This becomes exponentially harder as they add more and more power hungry vehicles to their lineup (see Cybertruck / Semi) and market more Mega/Gigapacks to grid operators.
It makes sense for Tesla to try to get as many batteries as possible from as many sources as possible.
Absolutely. They are also going to be a factor in climate related issue mitigation, batteries are relatively compact compared to alternatives such as pumped storage, and can be installed in a decentralized manner.
Whatever his companies are doing or whatever else you don't like about him, he is a brilliant political engineer.
Before Musk bought Tesla, policy-makers in the US and Europe were all "electric vehicles are a nice idea, but simply impractical and unfeasible. So our vehicle manufacturers tell us".
In the short span of ten years, electric vehicles have become mandatory in many Western countries, starting sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, and they are headed that way in many more.
And that is down to Musk. Whatever his--many and grievous--personal faults may be, and whatever else he does short of mass murder, he deserves our gratitude for this alone.
The whole point of energy credits is that slow moving large companies who use bad old technology give money to fast moving young technology who use modern green technologies.
That is exactly what has happened and was a success as a business was created that no longer relies on credits and it has clearly accelerated the advent of EVs.
FWIW Sony sued BYD for patent infringement in Japanese courts and lost. Sanyo sued BYD in US courts and settled mostly on the side of BYD. BYD also managed to invalidate a Panasonic patents.
It seems to me that China bet on LFP, the West bet on Li-ion, and China's bet is pretty successful. You'd be right to say that patents limited LFP in the West, but generally Japanese/Korean firms seemed relatively uninterested in the tech. LFP was very much under-developped until recently and there was a lot of path-dependence and a lot of bets on Li-ion outside of China.
LiFePO4 has lower energy density and it's way more durable. Both properties go against the throw-away culture. (Hand held) Tool industry thrives on selling battery packs - every single brand has its own battery lock-in to boot as well. Phones often get disposed once their battery capacity diminishes.
High time for some regulation here, if we can standardize charger plugs then we can standardize battery packs, the amount of waste on account of all this purposeful incompatibility is staggering. All it would take is an agreed upon form factor, charger and available voltages (say: 18, 36, 48 or the nearest equivalent) and we'd save many, many tons of hard to recycle materials every year.
Bonus points if there would be a mandatory way to replace the individual cells so that only they and not the pack would have to be replaced when and if the cells wear out.
You're implying that there's some sort of conspiracy to keep LiFePO4 out, because it goes against "throw-away culture". If that's true, why aren't we stuck using NiCd batteries today? Surely a battery with memory effects[1] would be even better for "throw-away culture" than lithium batteries than can be arbitrarily charged/discharged for a few hundred cycles?
You dismissed the part where the energy density/capacity/current draw is way better of Li-Ion compared to NiCd or even NiMh. Needless to say that cadmium is toxic and the use of NiCd battery is heavily restricted in the EU.
Eh, not really. It's complicated. For example, one of the major IP holders for LiFePO4 batteries is Hydro-Québec, which actually had it's own EV program in the 90s, but for political reasons mostly it was dropped (can't have a public company compete against the private sector without businesses getting unhappy). So there was actually interest to mass manufacture these batteries, and just like China it was by state companies, it's just that we shied away from that economic model.
Meanwhile private companies had a choice, either they would go with Li-ion which was also patent encumbered but was very mature, or LiFePO4 which was patent encumbered and very immature, so private industry largely went with Li-ion, with the exception of A123, but even without paying any royalties (they sold them without paying royalties for a fair while) they are 10x more expensive than the Chinese ones.
IP right shouldn't even be a consideration when it comes to clean energy.
What is super hypocritical is people who criticize China for environmental issues AND also want to restrict their access to clean energy tech.
Countries other than the US: Please copy the heck out of every invention that is going to help us fix climate change and deploy it at scale ASAP. Don't listen to noisy US patent lawyers. American lawyers think "intellectual property" (i.e. fake property that Mother Nature doesn't give a damn about) is more important than childrens' lives. Thank you.
Oh it's even worse than just IP rights. The IP is held in large part by the Quebec provincial government through Université de Montréal and Hydro Québec. Hydro-Quebec had an EV program, but it was cancelled due to (according to the Hydro-québec engineers I know) political reasons - it would have been a bad look for the state to compete against car companies so overtly.
So now both the motor tech (hub motors) and the battery tech (LiFePO4) took off in China. At least now Hydro-Quebec restarted their EV program, but for buses only.
Tidbit: Flixbus, the origins of FlixMobility which bought Greyhound tried the BYD C9 bus on the Mannheim - Frankfurt route in 2018-2019.
They stopped because of re-occurring partially multi-day outages due to battery issues, which were LiFePo. The press coverage is vague, but explicit in mentioning battery issues.
I assume that tesla did their due diligence and BYD fixed the issues by now.
As I understand it, the "standard range" cars are no different from the long range cars, other than a software flag that allows a greater battery discharge.
So this will complicate the Tesla fast battery swap stations if they ever actually build any of those.
There are a couple replies about why Tesla doesn't still do battery swaps, but none of them got it right:
Back when Tesla demoed the battery swap capability, California's CARB was offering extra ZEV credits for each electric vehicle sold with "fast refueling" capability. Tesla set up the single "battery swap station" in order to comply with the letter of the law and collect a few extra tens of millions in credits. That one station they opened was right across the street from a free Supercharger station, had no capability for automated battery swaps, and was available by invitation only. As soon as Tesla collected its extra ZEV credits and the qualifications changed, the station was abandoned.
This is the same type of thing as the "green" hydrogen-based initiatives. Literally 100% of these are run by fossil-fuel companies that want to get various incentives and credits for green initiatives. Hydrogen is hilariously bad at everything, and makes zero sense to use for any purpose. Yet, it keeps getting pushed and pushed because of these legal fictions.
For cars I definitely agree. I think hydrogen might be used for planes in the future. The future for them isn't going to be electric, so if we want 0 emission planes, there isn't really a viable alternative.
Storage may be troublesome for planes. The high-pressure tanks are heavy, and the low-pressure storage tanks are even more heavy.
Aircraft fuel tanks are just empty unused spaces in the wings and the like, they're practically free in terms of weight.
Also, jet fuel has a nice balance energy per unit weight and energy per unit volume. Hydrogen is too skewed, it is the lightest fuel but takes a huge volume.
For planes, it would make more sense to synthesise jet fuel from atmospheric CO2, or CO2 captured from industrial exhaust.
The battery swap stations were a scam to get subsidies. They aren't any more real than the Cybertruck, Model 2, Roadster, solar roofs, semi, or Full Self Driving.
All Model S did support that capability early on. Because of reports about Tesla on fire Tesla added a shield under the car that made hot swapping no longer possible.
The reality is, as a company they had X amount of capital to solve long distance driving. It was clear pretty quickly that Superchargers was far better and more scalable technology. When they started with Model S they were not yet sure what the better strategy was.
Model 2 is literally a name something that fans made up. Tesla is internally working on a cheaper car then Model 3 (obously) but they have not talked about it more then 'we are working on it')
Solar roofs are deployed literally every week. By what measure are the 'not real'?
The other products are clearly in the pipeline, calling the a scam is dumb. Lots of car companies have announced products that will not be actually build for a few years. What the big deal? Products get delayed all the time in automotive.
1. They built precisely zero stations for battery swaps.
2. Tesla has been promising a car for $35k or less for years now and still does not sell one.
3. The solar roofs exist only to give an excuse to bail out Elon's cousins. Installations are currently lower than 20% of Tesla's projections and are declining rapidly. They are bad solar panels because they are more expensive to manufacture, far more expensive to install, less durable, and less efficient than an ordinary installation. They are bad roofs because they are more expensive to manufacture, far more expensive to install, and far less durable than ordinary roofs.
4. The Cybertruck is a concept. They have made not even a single working prototype. There has been no news since the scale model had its glass busted over 700 days ago. Similarly, there has never been a working Roadster and we have seen no real information in over three years.
5. The Semi is an asinine idea and cannot ever work. Trucks have a weight limit and run as close as possible to that limit. Batteries are heavy. Using our best technology an electric semi would have well under half the capacity of a normal one even for very short trips.
That was their target price before the product launch, must be the first time in history a company didn't hit is project price. For a while they did have a version at that price, that version was supposed to have no Autopilot and few other things were missing. They discontinued that option.
> The solar roofs exist
Oh now they do exist. Don't hurt yourself running down field with those goalposts.
> bail out Elon's cousins
Lol, what nonsense. If it was about that they would have just continued with normal solar panels.
> lower than 20% of Tesla's projections and are declining rapidly
Wrong they are actually increasing, 46% growth in solar YoY this Quarter. And I'm sure that its the first time in the history of capitalism that a company didn't reach the production volume they had planned.
This is a huge growth market and continuing to play in it makes simple sense even if its not a huge part of current revenue.
> They have made not even a single working prototype.
There is literally footage from a prototype on a testing area from like a week ago. And the initial prototype has been driving around all over the place.
> They are bad roofs because they are more expensive to manufacture, far more expensive to install,
They are supposed to be for people who would then put solar on their roof after, of course its more expensive to install. What you should compare it to is building a normal roof and then add solar installation on top of that.
> and far less durable than ordinary roofs.
There are literally videos out-there where in a massive hale-storm you see many people with damaged roofs and the solar roof is perfectly fine.
> There has been no news since
There was 'no news' about a refresh of Model S/X for a long time, they even said its not gone happen. And then it happened. Crazy how companies don't feel the need to update you every second on what they are doing. I guess as soon as company doesn't update you, every project should be considered dead.
There was actually a bunch of news but I guess you decided its a fake product so following it isn't relevant.
And again, they are literally building a gigantic factory, they are LITERALLY ordering tools from suppliers for that factory. IRDA for example has publicly stated they are building an 8000 ton press for the rear under-body of the Cybertruck. There has been some leaked info about Tesla ordering the stainless steal, its actually their own material so they need have somebody make it for them in gigantic quantities.
Literally every indication is that there is a very active program at bringing the vehicle to market, no matter if you like it or not.
> The Semi is an asinine idea and cannot ever work.
Lol you people always come out of the wood work. They are supply constrained, they are not lying about their product line. FSD being the only maybe but I genuinely think they think they can make it work.
It has been 700 days since Tesla & Co debuted the Cybertruck and took pre-orders, with no new tangible updates.
It has been 1,435 days since Tesla & Co took pre-orders charging a $50,000 deposit to pre-order the roadster.
It has been 1,435 days since Tesla & Co announced the Tesla Semi, with no new tangible updates since 2017.
They have legally filed that their system is, and will be for the long foreseeable future, level 2 autonomy, far from "full self driving" of L5 autonony that they advertise and actively market to unknowing consumers.
You can get all that money back if you do no longer want to wait for the product. What's your issue?
> with no new tangible updates since 2017.
They have just installed Megacharger in Nevada. New Test Semi were spotted a couple of time. They are hiring people for the Semi part of the company pretty constantly.
> with no new tangible updates.
Other then building a gigantic factory dedicated for building the car.
> to unknowing consumers.
I assume you mean consumers who are unable to read.
>You can get all that money back if you do no longer want to wait for the product. What's your issue?
I don't love fraud. Tesla loses money on every car it sells and cooks the books by charging for imaginary options. That is cut-and-dry securities fraud.
>Other then building a gigantic factory dedicated for building the car.
Tesla does not operate gigantic factories. They're a pipsqueak.
They would make so much money with a model 2 that they might be able to justify their valuation. I find it hard to believe that they won't eventually build it. Obviously not going to happen until factories are not at capacity with higher margin cars, but it seems likely to eventually happen.
There are affordable electric cars on the market today with better build quality than what Tesla sells for $80k. Someone will make a killing off affordable electric cars. Every indication is it will not be Tesla.
You honestly sound like a short seller or something. Tesla owns the vast majority of EV sales in US and other countries. You act as if other companies will easily catch up on major moats like battery tech/supercharging network/autopilot, but that Tesla can't improve on Build Quality?
You think "Autopilot" is a moat? Every other company has had that stuff for ten years and their systems actually work. Adaptive cruise control ain't new.
And no, I don't think Tesla can improve on build quality. Their cars are fantastically shit. May as well consider Yugo a competitor to Bentley.
"So this will complicate the Tesla fast battery swap stations if they ever actually build any of those."
They aren't planning do battery swapping. None of their recent designs have any provisions for it. That was something they considered early on and then abandon once they advanced their fast charging technology.
They took a half billion in subsidies from California for battery swapping and never planned on actually implementing it broadly IMO. They just met the letter of the rules to qualify, then move HQ to Texas after subsidies run dry and they don't want as much taxation as normal CA small businesses who subsidized them.
They still have a gigantic factory in California, they built a battery factory there and have a huge battery research team in California, they have another research team in San Diago and they just announced building a Megapack production factory in California.
What is it with the endless whining about this decision, by Californians and you. California got exactly what wanted, its leading in EVs. It got a huge number of jobs, including reopening a big plant. Its leading in battery tech. Those companies help fund their universities.
Tesla is one of the few companies mass manufacturing in California at all. They got more then their monies worth.
Tesla even did really fast charging just not with swapping. So I really don't see why people are so upset about this. Swapping was clearly the wrong solution, and Tesla instead invested in a better solution. Thanks to that California has a huge amount of fast charging stations.
It seems to me what it is really about is just finding any reason to be angry at Tesla. If you actually think about it, with a fixed amount of capital, what should they have done, build battery swap station or deploy fast chargers?
Fast chargers aren't fast. Watch the swapping demo they did on stage: it was faster than fueling up with gas. But it was all a show and probably never would have been practical with road wear.
> So this will complicate the Tesla fast battery swap stations if they ever actually build any of those.
I don’t think they’ll ever build those. Huge infrastructure requirement, gigantic overhead, most people don’t take long-distance trips often and when they do a 20 minute supercharge is good enough for people to not really demand a battery swap station.
You also can expand the footprint of “cords” much faster and much farther. Not to mention battery swap stations probably wouldn’t be designed to service other cars, unlike future charging stalls.
Battery swap stations are never going to happen. They make up too much of the cost of the vehicle. Maybe in government public transport fleets or something.
How many % of overall EV are refueled by battery swapping? That is actually a better indicator then saying X company has performed X swaps. Its probably like 0.0001%.
Compare the amount of swap station to the amount of fast chargers.
Battery swap is niche of niche of a niche for cars.
Gogoro is for scooters, I think its pretty clear we were talking about cars.
So it started as "battery swap stations will never happen" but now it's having a whinge that they're not more widely used, and you're not even the person I was replying to.
Still, this kind of back-pedaling and goalpost shifting is entertaining.
It tells me that you're not very knowledgeable about EVs and you don't know what you're talking about. Here's another company rolling out battery swap stations:
Tesla alone adds 3500 new stations (each with avg. 8 chargers) per QUARTER. And that will continue to grow. And that is outside of many companies doing such network.
But yeah 5000 stations in 2025 maybe, how amazing. I know understanding scale is hard.
And the government is subsidizing it in China as well. When they stop some car makers there will also stop.
Wireless charging is a waste of energy, and literally a horrible thing for climate change.
It's as I said. You don't know what you're talking about.
I think you must spend too much time consuming social media influencer "content". They don't know what they're talking about either. It's like mental junk food.
> Tesla has been building them for nine years and still hasn't reached 3,500 stations:
I misread, still 288 a Qarter and that is growing. Compared to 500 in 4 years. These stations have more threw put then any individual swapping station. Literally nothing you said changes anything about my argument.
Tesla is just one company, the simply fact is, battery swapping is a tiny niche and you can deflect as long as you want, its a simple fact.
> 94% efficient
Even 0.1% less efficiency would be a gigantic amount when you consider that we are talking about charging 1-2 billion cars.
How many cars would this power: about 100k-200k cars.
10,000 megawatt hours. A single car today has ~50-100 kwh. An S 85D from 5 years ago used 85kwh, a 3 uses less than that today.
How many cars is this? 10,000 mwh / 0.1 mwh = 100k cars worth of batteries. Tesla is already at 1 million cars per year run rate, at least 1/3 are from China, so 300k are using LiFePO4 (I think all their Chinese-produced cars use lifepo4). That is a lot of batteries but not that many cars on top of what they already build.
