It has plenty of reasons to be inaccurate. They may be exaggerating the promise of LFP or overplaying how many secondary parents there are.

I mean one would take the ad with a grain of salt

If it gets people to pull the trigger on engaging with the firm - it’s likely to embellish how massive the changes are of these patent lapses

> Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures

LFP charging in cold has pretty much been solved by adding a heater to battery pack.

> (Sodium-ion) prices won't reach LFPs for another 10-15 years (unless you believe hype, not actual analysts).

Given CATL is scaling sodium-ion production to to GWh scale next year, it sounds like they are betting for a much shorter timeframe.

The small handful of sodium batteries that are currently available retail all seem to have rather bad roundtrip efficiency compared to LFP and voltage drop starting at a high state of charge.

Also LFP prices dropped enough that shipping cost from China became a significant part of the price. This will be even more of a factor should the less energy dense sodium batteries ever reach the promised $30/kWh.

> Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures

I do all of my charging way above 0K. :-P

I think CATL is promoting a hybrid pack of LFP and Sodium that would give you the cheapness and density of LFP, but with maybe 30% Sodium that you could use for a quick partial charge, and could also be used when the car is cold-soaked. Once you drive for a while, the whole pack gets warmed up and you can use the LFP.

If it's suitable for sedans it's actually more suitable for SUVs. SUVs require less power per cubic feet of space. So there is more space available for them, even if they take more energy overall

I am not sure honestly about the negative temperature. Sure it can be a problem in extreme colds but most of the world does not live in those climates.

> Unless you want to charge in negative temperatures

Doesn’t the thermal management system of the battery packs handle this?

I think it is fairly likely that sodium catches LFP in the ~5 year timeframe since sodium has a lot more promise for grid scale storage since it has no expensive materials.

The issue I’ve heard with sodium-ion is that the voltage curves make the power electronics much more expensive for a given efficiency/power level.

[https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/sodium-ion-battery-ev...]

Lithium’s curve is nearly flat, which allows for a pretty easy consistent power production (albeit nearly impossible to tell state of charge!) since you only need to target a pretty narrow voltage band.

Overall, that means sodium-ion has to be even cheaper to be competitive, and it makes even less sense in areas where power density matters like electric cars, as you’ll end up with far less power and/or needing much heavier motors and more expensive electronics to compensate when on the lower end of charge.

I don’t want to think of what it would cost to do a 100kw buck-boost power supply that can handle +- 25% (or more!) voltage differences. In reality, I don’t think anyone would try.

I wouldn't equate solid state batteries with fusion power. Solid state batteries do exist and work well, they are just very expensive. Meanwhile fusion power is still entirely within the experimental stage and there are no fusion plant prototypes that can produce power at any price.

It’s always 20 years away until it isn’t. Self driving cars are…I guess they are here already. AGI? Well, we have to move the goal post on that constantly.

Solid state batteries seem to work, but the price of prototypes is very high. Samsung says they will soon be shipping earbuds and watches with solid state batteries, but the cost is too high even for phones. Xaomi showed an $800 phone battery. Mercedes has one prototype car with solid state batteries. Honda has one motorcycle. EHang has one flying car. Nobody seems to be past one-off demos.

Solid state batteries and fusion might in the end suffer from a similar economical problem. That they turn out to simply be too expensive.

Does look as if ssb are close.. Esp Japanese ones.

[delayed]

In the last year, the number of times my car owning friends have not been able to make it to an event because their car is broken is surprisingly high. While I have never not been able to get somewhere because public transport is not working. If the train is down I can take the tram, if somehow both of them are down there will be replacement busses scheduled.

And if somehow everything stops working I can book an uber which is still massively cheaper than owning a car.

The Scottish Government provides free at the point of use bus service for under-22s. I wish we could have had that 25 years ago when I first moved here. As it is, it's an ideal way for the teens to get around and makes it the sensible option when taking children into the city during the daytime.

Driving is prohibitively expensive for young people, and in the UK you can't drive cars on public roads until you're 17.

> Then it doesn't work for whole categories of people (families with small kids, etc) especially because it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.

That's bullshit. My whole childhood I went everywhere by train and bus. You can walk the last mile if the bus stop isn't close enough to where you need to go.

I know some (embarrassingly rich) countries are incapable of designing a halfway decent public transit system, but the problem isn't with public transit itself.

I take my small kids on public transit often. Why can't kids ride a bus or a train? Don't we even have special forms of mass transit for little kids (school busses?)

How are cars better with little kids? If I'm in the car with my kids and one kid suddenly really wants a snack, there's nothing I can do. They're strapped in the back, I'm in the front driving. On the train, I just grab a snack from my bag and give them a bite. Or if they're bored I can play with them, etc.

> it fundamentally just can't do the "last mile", pretty much ever.

I live in a suburb in North Texas. I walk out my door with the stroller and my kids. There's a bus stop super close by that can easily load a stroller (all busses are wheelchair accessible). I take that to the train station or the bus goes to the library or several other parks and rec centers. The train stops a very short walk to several museums, the convention center, the airport, the zoo has its own train station, the hockey/basketball arena has its own stop, etc. And this is all in an area where the mass transit isn't even that great.

The transit doesn't go everywhere we want to go. I agree that's the biggest pain point. But I truly don't understand the logic that it's bad for kids. My kids ride often, and they love it. What kid hates trains?

If it's just the free market then why do we need to regulate single family zoning across the United States? And why can't the suburbs pay for their own infrastructure?

A lot of people prefer living in financially affordable environments, and in a functioning market, dense towns/cities will always be more affordable unless you literally work on a farm.

Everyone prefers to live in a giant sprawling mansion (with personal private forest) in the middle of the CBD. But preference is useless data unless it includes their pricetag preference too.

Suburbs are dense enough to support transit as proven in a small number of cities around the world (mostly not English speaking). However suburbs can only support great transit, since anything less and driving is enough better as to be worth it.

NYC has a real cost problem. Digging a tunnel costs a lot - not anywhere near what it costs in NYC. You can also build bridges over the top for a lot less than digging a tunnel. Modern subways should be 100% automated saving the cost of a driver. (I keep hoping we see self driving buses since drivers are the large share of the costs)

Also, to add to the “ideology”: it is bad to rely on other countries for fossil or uranium fuels.

>> an ideologically driven push for renewables

> Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?

The basics of economics are:

  - market price is a function of supply and demand
  - storage costs money
  - distribution costs money.
  - perishable goods a finicky in highly volatile markets
  - CAPEX costs money
  - businesses will try to maximise the difference between price and costs

Just the other day I read news that in Germany perfectly well functioning wind turbines are being turned down because they have reached the end of the phase of guaranteed KWh prices. So are the owners crazy and throwing money away? No, they simply do the business calculations and if the math doesn't play out, they simply remove them and build new ones with new subsidies.

The latest auction from the German gov for a new field in the baltic sea didn't even find one bidder.

China is doing lots of renewables but they calculate it down to the penny.

So yes, as you say "Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity". To generate yes. But you need lots of CAPEX to store it and to distribute it. And you can not work with a 95%ile. You need 100% in any developed economy.

Despite marginal cost pricing it not interesting for investors without subsidies.

>Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity

Only if you don't include the huge cost of storage for when it isn't windy.

Chiming in as Australian with no context on European situation. AFAICT the key drivers of cost inflation are to do with reconfiguring the electric grid to transfer power efficiently and reliably from plants that produce renewable energy. However, the grid is set up to do so from non-renewable sources. And you want to do it while smoothly operating the network. This is extremely hard. Doing so quickly therefore elevates prices. That’s the rationale I could imagine being the case in EU markets.

more like "it's bad to fry the planet so we will destroy our economy for 0.001% impact while the real impacters continue to advance and leave us in the dust"

So you buy a battery for your tiny grid island and pay a little more so that you can also use for a drive? Or perhaps not even more, because the standalone battery is less mass market item.

Truly an interesting change, considering how much of the ICE market used to be hand-me-downs from more industrialized countries. I guess proximity to those is now a hindrance to the renewable revolution, because places with less access to hand-me-downs have a market (and mindset!) for low-priced new cars that never existed in places flooded with second hand cars? Will the upmarket-first kind of BEV ever work in that way?

> Ethiopia is going a lot further and has actually banned ICE car imports last year. They want to reduce the amount of fossil fuel imports on their balance sheets.

My understanding is that they are more concerned about oil shipping as they are landlocked and the situation in the gulf of aden is less than ideal.

If that’s Octopus Intelligent Go, then it will also give you the 7p rate outside the normal nighttime slot if the car is charging and their algo calculates they can do it.

Renewables definitely help and I think the UK is doing quite well there but it's a little disingenuous to not even mention the price cap that the government has imposed!

The US would just ban them with some regulation like we do with most foreign competitors

500? thats just 5x10x10, even the bigger cell vapes would result in a tiny battery to power a house...

That's 730k households in a year. Cool but since these batteries will probably die within a year, then you are only able to cover 1.5 million people or so. I am not against it, but 1.5m in 8b is a drop in the ocean.

I say as an electrician that car batteries have limited use. Chinese residential batteries can be installed by me alone. Even 40-60 kWh modular ones. Car battery needs forklift and every model has different interface. Economically sourcing used cells to build batteries also makes no sense. So either recycling or repair to continue using it as car battery.

Sorry we handicapped ourselves and are now complaining about a competitor? Seems silly. The west made this tech unusable. I was building ebikes in 2006/7 and A123 was entirely unavailable unless you went and salvaged power tool packs.

They never became available at a competitive price, and then China bought the rights....

Now I can buy them in bulk as a consumer for 1/15th the price.

Our system is not meant for innovation by small players or consumers. We want tech easily locked away behind a contract.

The total lithium battery patent licensing market is estimated at less than 600 million USD a year. This is approximately nothing, given that the overall battery market is estimated at about $200B.

The pace of innovation is furious, and companies are treating patents more as a way to ensure MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) rather than as a tool to get income.

I think we'll start seeing the first large lawsuits once the losers start realizing that they lost the innovation race.