Fixing car and e-bike batteries saves money and resources, but challenges are holding back the industry

  • Lophostemon@aussie.zone
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    11 months ago

    The whole repair thing should made super easy if we want EVs to succeed.

    1. Make all batteries use an easily swappable set of standard cell sizes.
    2. Make battery controllers standardised and swappable.
    3. …. Er… that’s it.
    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      But that will never happen because the EV manufacturers couldn’t charge ridiculous amounts of money for proprietary batteries.

      • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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        11 months ago

        That why we need regulators. The market doesn’t magically deal with “Tragedy of the Commons”.

          • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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            11 months ago

            No one lives in completely unregulated capitalism. Well, not willingly anyway. That kind of anarchy happens when countries collapse. But normally you quickly get a drug/war lord taking over setting their own (unfair) laws & regulation.

            It’s a constant battle of over/under regulation, regulatory capture, etc. But that’s how it should be in a dynamic world.

            • Otter@lemmy.ca
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              11 months ago

              I think they’re being sarcastic, but it’s annoying in its own way to repeat the lines that barely anyone actually believes

              • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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                11 months ago

                There are no shortage of those who really believe that nonsense. In the UK, we literally had a pair of these loonatics running the country and economy for a few months. They tanked the pound in their short time before their own party pulled the plug under pressure of markets and donors losing money.

    • LazaroFilm@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Make all cars rechargeable with a single charging port. And that port should be USB-C

        • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
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          11 months ago

          The highest available now is 240 W, so with 50 in parallel you get 12 kW. Fast chargers go up to like 300 kW but at home 12 is good enough actually.

        • theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          11 months ago

          I’ve been surprised by USB-C. I recently bought a Xiaomi phone and it takes like 10 minutes to charge with the charger that comes with the phone (and it still works with the other ones). It’s 120 watts

          At that rate it’d still take 12 hours to charge a 1440 watt hour battery, which isn’t the hour or two that people are used to with superchargers these days, but actually surprisingly servicable.

          • willis936@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            That’s 50x smaller than an EV battery. Being able to drive once every two months doesn’t seem practical.

          • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            Where did you pull that 1440Wh number from? The battery in my plug-in hybrid is 20kWh, and that’s still small compared to a full EV.

            • theblueredditrefugee@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              11 months ago

              Ah shit, I googled the number but it looks like I got the number for a battery in an internal combustion engine car, apologies. I’m an electronics person, not a car person

              • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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                11 months ago

                Understandable. Just for the sake of comparison to a smartphone 120W fast charger, level 1 EV chargers (which can still take days to fully charge a completely drained EV) will generally deliver between 1000 and 1500W. Level 2 (the fastest you’ll typically see installed in people’s homes) range from about 7kW to 19kW. Level 3 fast chargers typically operate from about 60 to 250kW and unlike level 1 and 2 which deliver AC to the car to be handled by the vehicles internal rectifier/charger, level 3 delivers DC.

          • DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz
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            11 months ago

            1.44kWh Is roughly 7-10km of driving, depending on the car and weather. In 12h that’s an absolutely useless amount of power for anything other than small e-scooters and short-range e-bikes.

      • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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        11 months ago

        Can’t wait for all power cables to just be USB-C. I dream for the day where I can charge my phone with the same plug my induction stove uses.

    • buzz86us@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again allow… cars with CATL or Nio battery swap cassettes into the US… It is so dumb that there are different battery setups for every manufacturer … In a Nio I can swap batteries for less than a pack of beer… Why not do that instead of this current BS system where you have only one pack and once that is done it is $10k

      • cogman@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Every EV has this already. What they don’t have is a standard. Not shockingly, every EV manufacturer will argue why theirs should be the standard.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          Honestly if the department of defense adopts any EVs for troop transport it should come with a forced standardization. Just hand wave it as being for national security and the fact a lot of countries will probably adopt the standard, that should do the trick.

          • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            They probably won’t. Unless it will cut costs and allow for speed of refilling/recharging. Maybe in another 50 years. And only if one of the big firms tries to sell them something. Lockheed or Boeing or so on. The problem is troop transport needs to be fixable by a shop of people ranging in age from 17 or so to around 25. Inexperienced people. In a fair few cases with hand tools. To even remove a battery from an EV right now you need a lift of some kind and something stable to drop it onto. You can’t carry that into the desert. Certainly not onto an aircraft carrier. And we’re awhile away from building it into war ships, even smaller ones. The output and range would have to be reliable. A pilot can’t rely on a bingo that doesn’t accurately tell him if he has enough fuel to get to the target and back.

        • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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          11 months ago

          I’m not so sure.

          Are we talking about the same thing, there was a recent Tom Scott video on it.

          Basically you drive your NIO into this machine and it removes your battery and replaces it. Then it charges your old one and next time someone drives in they may get your last battery. Since and repeat.

          • cogman@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Standard and swappable battery packs? Yes. All the skateboard style vehicles or ebikes have battery packs that can be removed and replaced.

            Making that automated could be nice but isn’t necessary to get the benefits of a standard. A standard forces pack producers to compete with one another in terms of quality and price. It makes it cheaper to install new batteries. And it makes it possible to upgrade your cars range with newer packs. With an EV, you won’t need to get a new vehicle hardly ever if getting new packs is relatively affordable and easy. Further, the worn packs still have value so swap locations will be incentivized to pay you for the pack they remove.

            The notion this needs to be part of a giant battery swapping network to reduce charge times is silly. 10 to 15 minute charge stops are already very short and all you need on most cars for the next leg of a journey. It also introduces a lot of complexity. Like, what if I want or need a 100kWh pack but the standard is 80kWh packs? What about pack wear? Who’s in charge of pulling the degraded packs? And what do we do about someone putting in a pack with fake capabilities? You have a situation where you are cycling parts worth well north of $10k. That’s a mighty tempting target for theft.

            A standardized battery is still a really good thing. I just don’t think it needs to be a part of road trips.

          • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            that’s not what the top comment was talking about. this is replacing the whole battery, not cells within the battery. it doesn’t help with reparability at all.