First sodium-ion battery car in general production holds the potential to revolutionize EVs forever

Looking forward for both vehicles and home/industrial storage solutions on large scale so we can get over the constant oil war that USA drags us into every 10 year.

Throw this into the pile of 500 mile 10 second charging battery articles that have been around since 2010.

You stated the energy/mass of the Na-ion vs. LFP, but what about energy per volume?

I'm waiting for the solid-state revolution to buy my first EV. A revolution that Tesla isn't invested in and will be made obsolete thereafter.

Honestly I'd buy a car with sodium-ion; even with the current lower energy density. I don't necessarily need a lot of range. All I need a car for is commuting and errands; and a cheaper car has more use to me than extra range I don't need.

10 seconds is a stretch, but BYD was able to get some meaningfull % in five minutes and full charge in 9 minutes

Tesla uses NCM for their cylindrical cells.

Why wait? These things always bring out the driving gods demanding a 500 mile range and charging in 5 minutes but the reality is that EVs are just so much better to live with in most use cases. I’ve had EVs since 2017 and would say we really reached a tipping point of practicality a few years back.

People in China drive short distances and public chargers are everywhere.

Salt wars will change us for sure. At least salt spills will be less damaging to sea life.

I expect we'll see lots of cheap cars with 30-45kwh batteries which are entirely sodium ion. And in cold climates automakers will start selling hybrid 80:20 split of lithium / sodium so the cold performance is better and it cuts costs a bit.

If / when solid state arrives it's likely going to be stupidly expensive for several years and exclusive to aeronautic and other niches that will pay a premium for it. And even if a viable tech were announced in the morning it would be years before actual batteries started rolling off a production line.

Yes but it's a chicken and egg situation. No charger network is going to splurge on the cost of a 1mw charger just because BYD has a car which can charge that fast. It has to be an industry trend and a standard that justifies the investment.

Military drones will get the cutting edge tech.

hold my beer pleb

LFPs don’t achieve 241 Wh/kg yet. That’s NMC. Think the second gen BYD blade battery get come potentially up to 210 Wh/kg. Sodium batteries can compete with older LFP chemistries. That all changes when you operate in very low temperature. Then sodium has a higher density. There is also the much improved cycle life. The challenge is to find enough niche markets for now to get up production scale to make use of the fact that raw materials are much cheaper. We could see prices less than half of current LFP cells.

Unless the R&D was done by a consumer product company with the intent of releasing a product to consumers in less than two years - aka Toyota.

But just wondering, wouldn’t it still maintain a much faster rate rate longer in the same charger compared to current models? So my model 3 starts off at a hefty 180 or so kW of charging but then quickly drops down. I imagine this BYD vehicle would keep 250kW for most of the whole, no? It might not be 9 minutes but it still might be much much faster than current cars on the same network, no?

😂 Toyota.

Yeah it's so hilarious that the world's largest automobile manufacturer spends heavily in R&D for products. Ha ha. Har har.

Makes sense for the battery swapping. Cheaper to produce, and you can make a lot more and have more stations and batteries set up at more locations.

Isn't 241Wh/kg LFP little optimistic? As far as I know mass production LFP are around 200Wh/kg.

I looked at mass because it is usually the more the 'limiting' factor in EV design; as it influences how strong the other components have to be. But in this case it seems like volumetric efficiency will be around 375 Wh/L, while for NMC lithium it's 82% more with 643 Wh/L, so yeah that might be an issue.

The spice must flow...

Thanks. So not only do you need more Na-ion battery for the same energy capacity, but it takes up a *hell* of a lot more space.

I would too. The problem is a lot of people have way overblown range anxiety, despite 99% of their driving simply being around town and ending at their own home every night.

This will make home energy storage for solar systems far more affordable. It may even be cheaper for utilities to operate than peaker plants.

Yeah that's the killer app. It will require much less peaker capacity.

You do. There's way too much hype around sodium ion batteries at this point for the automotive and general portable power markets. They're really best suited for larger stationary power projects and grid level applications and even then LFP batteries are a way more mature technology with a lot more momentum behind them.

It would be interesting to do a study on range anxiety and how much of that comes from unfamiliarity versus previous bad experiences. I dated someone who had one of the early Nissan Leaf’s. At the time I was in San Diego, and on paper, it should have been able to go anywhere in town, but from her place there was a long, gradual incline for miles. Coming back, you could really coast for a ways without the range dropping much but leaving, you could see the range decreasing far more rapidly than the distance driven, which added a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Even now, with my partner having a Tesla that is infinitely more accurate and reliable. It’s hard to get fully passed that first impression of an EV. I know those early leafs had much different technology that contributed to that issue, but I remember reading a review of the hummer EV and the reviewer stated that the unpredictability of the range estimate was the most anxious he had ever been with a vehicle and quickly traded it in, so there may still be people that have only recently been developing first bad impressions

Energy density is like the main issue. Range is already terrible you plan to cut that in half?