Electric Car Goes 375 Miles On One 6-Minute Charge

thecarchik writes with this quote from AllCarsElectric: "We all know that battery packs are the weakest link in electric vehicles. Not only are they heavy and expensive, but they take a long time to recharge and on average can only provide around 100 miles per charge. A German-based company has changed all that with a new vehicle capable of driving up to 375 miles at moderate highway speeds. ... It doesn't end there. The company responsible for the battery pack, DBM Energy, claims a battery pack efficiency of 97 percent and a recharge time of around 6 minutes when charged from a direct current source. Unlike the small Daihatsu which was heavily modified by a team in Japan earlier this year that achieved a massive 623 miles on a charge at around 27 mph, the Audi A2 modified by DBM Energy was able to achieve its 375 miles range at an average speed of 55 mph."

Comments

How long does it last?

[rossdee]

How many charge-discharge cycles will this battery last, and how expensive is it?

Re:How long does it last?

[mail2345]

Don't forget the recharger, which might be expensive or inefficient.
The manufacturing process could also pose a problem, it might require plenty of energy and/or release waste.

Re:How long does it last?

[davester666]

Forget manufacturing. It's incredibly expensive to build your own personal nuclear power plant just to be able to charge your car in six minutes!

Re:How long does it last?

[wierd_w]

Thankfully nuclear powerplants tend to be subsidised by the local energy cooperative, and are a shared expense of typically upwards of several thousand simultaneous users.

The major hurdles to the manufacture of one tends to be getting zoning permits, construction contracts, and DoE and AEC certifications for design, construction, and operation. Hurdles to operation, such as sourcing fuel rods and waste disposal come later.

That said, my area is already powered in part by the output of a local fission plant- the WolfCreek nuclear plant, so at least for this potential customer of an electric vehicle, that particular prerequisite is already met.

Re:How long does it last?

[c6gunner]

It won't be "several thousand simultaneous users" if they're all charging their cars in 6 minutes. It'll be more like .... I dunno, 5?

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people struggle with this? To provide the charging current needed to charge in 6 minutes, all you need is a charging station that is topped up by the grid but uses a large battery (of batteries). The peak current to charge the car is taken care off by the batteries and the average daily usage at the station is supplied by the grid.

Similarly, you could have a small charging station at home that consists of a battery similar to what is in the car and a trickle top up system that take 24 hours or more to charge off the low current house supply.

No rocket (or nuclear) science needed!

Re:How long does it last?

[MoonBuggy]

Now to totally suck the humour out of that post:
Call it 1GW output for a reasonably sized nuclear plant. A reasonable estimate for the efficiency of an electric car (according to Wikipedia) is about 15kWh/100km; after converting to more usable units, the 600km capacity means the battery holds 324MJ. A 6 minute charge time gives a 900kW transfer rate, or about 1,100 users per nuclear power station.

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

and not every single person is going to be hitting this sucker at once though.

besides, are there even 1100 gas pumps in even a city the size of new york?

Re:How long does it last?

[MoonBuggy]

This is, however, trading reliance on oil as a fuel source for reliance on lithium as a storage medium. Admittedly that's more conducive to recycling, but while I'm no expert on batteries, I'm pretty sure it's not trivial to turn a dead, degraded cell into a shiny new one.

It's a shame we haven't managed to get particularly far with hydrogen as a storage medium - it can be produced straight from fossil fuels to ease the transition, and then produced directly from water once we get the power generation infrastructure up to scratch. No reliance on a non-renewable power source or storage medium.

Re:How long does it last?

[ls671]

Then, sadly, you would waste energy through heat dissipation twice instead of once.

Re:How long does it last?

[blueg3]

It takes 4-6 hours to use up that energy, though -- assuming you're constantly driving. That gives you far more users per power station -- just a peak capacity of 1100.

Re:How long does it last?

[Shakrai]

A reasonable estimate for the efficiency of an electric car (according to Wikipedia) is about 15kWh/100km; after converting to more usable units, the 600km capacity means the battery holds 324MJ. A 6 minute charge time gives a 900kW transfer rate

900,000 watts eh? That makes me wonder just how practical this would be outside of the lab. You'd need a really high voltage or a really thick cable to transfer that much wattage into an automobile. The American Wire Gauge only goes up to OOOO according to this table. A OOOO conductor is 0.46" thick. Even that insanely heavy cable only goes up to 300 amps. You'd need 3,000 volts to deliver your 900kW on such a cable.

Re:How long does it last?

[blueg3]

A charging station sees enough short cycles that they might as well use a bank of capacitors instead.

Re:How long does it last?

[c6gunner]

Ok, let's say those figures are correct. Now let's assume that the average nuke plant has about 25% of it's output used for other means - a conservative estimate. That means we're down to 825 cars. That's ok for a city of maybe 10,000 people, but anything larger is going to cause serious problems unless you create an infrastructure that regulates how many vehicles can charge at any one time. Which would turn the entire process into one giant-bidding war; kinda like the old warez FTP sites, only far worse. I can just imagine a million people all standing beside their cars, constantly hammering the grid to try and beat the que.

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

They do need platinum for the fuel cell though, it's needed as a catalyst for the reaction I think...

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

The home batteries don't have the same size/weight constraints as portables. So you don't have to use lithium. Though you will need something that discharges quickly if you still want the 6-minute charge time... then again, the *home* stations probably don't need to do a full charge in six minutes, since you're probably not driving 300+ miles ending at home and needing to leave again 6 minutes later.

Re:How long does it last?

[hardburn]

Doesn't matter. Your house wiring couldn't take it. At US standard 120V, 900kW would need wiring that could take 7500A. Even with a doubled circuit of 240V, you need 3750A. The highest rated circuit breakers in my house cut off at 30A.

Re:How long does it last?

[interval1066]

According to the article these batteries power warehouse equipment (forklifts, presumably) for up to 30 hours on a charge, and have been in use for years. Ok, so they've been kept a secret for all this time?

Re:How long does it last?

[camperdave]

Why do people struggle with this? To provide the charging current needed to charge in 6 minutes, all you need is a charging station that is topped up by the grid but uses a large battery (of batteries).

Nevertheless, you'd still need wires the size of train rails to get that much power transferred in that short of time without melting.

Re:How long does it last?

[jamesh]

This is, however, trading reliance on oil as a fuel source for reliance on lithium as a storage medium. Admittedly that's more conducive to recycling, but while I'm no expert on batteries, I'm pretty sure it's not trivial to turn a dead, degraded cell into a shiny new one.

It's a shame we haven't managed to get particularly far with hydrogen as a storage medium - it can be produced straight from fossil fuels to ease the transition, and then produced directly from water once we get the power generation infrastructure up to scratch. No reliance on a non-renewable power source or storage medium.

Doesn't have to be batteries. Flywheel storage would be a perfect solution to this problem - replace the underground fuel tanks with a flywheel storage bunker and spin it up when there is energy to spare.

Re:How long does it last?

[Jeremi]

It's incredibly expensive to build your own personal nuclear power plant just to be able to charge your car in six minutes!

True... but it's totally worth it.

Re:How long does it last?

[mirix]

0000 is usually represented as 4/0, and spoken as "four aught". Can't say I've ever seen it written out as four zeros before, for that matter. In open air, for short cycles, I'd think it would handle 500A or so, though.

Anyway, there is wire bigger than 4/0, but it uses a different system. 1000 MCM is good for around a thousand amps IIRC (though this is unrelated to it being '1000' MCM - It just means it is 1000 thousand circular mils) [again, probably more in open air and intermittent duty]

But I'm thinking the GP made a false assumption with the 900kW thought - the summary says this is based on an Audi A2, which is *teeny*. Considerably smaller than a VW golf, and the body is (almost?) entirely aluminium.

Re:How long does it last?

[Jeremi]

[Hydrogen has] No reliance on a non-renewable power source or storage medium.

You're definitely going to need a storage medium for your hydrogen, or it won't be your hydrogen for very long. That means either a very large, very heavy high-pressure container, or some sort of chemical that bonds to the hydrogen until it is needed.

As far as "reliance on a non-renewable power source" goes, you can use your electricity (non-renewable or otherwise) to charge a battery, or to make and compress hydrogen gas. Barring a scientific breakthrough, charging the battery is much more efficient.

Re:How long does it last?

[ooshna]

Your assuming that in a city of 10,000 people over 8% will be charging at a time. With the charge time of 6mins I highly doubt that.

Re:How long does it last?

[fyngyrz]

Most will not drive that distance in a day, so your math is FAR too conservative.

Re:How long does it last?

[HuckleCom]

I'd like to see any of these 'battery depos' handle a few northern winters. In order to handle a 6 minute charge it's practical to assume there's optimal ambient thermal temperatures.

Re:How long does it last?

[mysidia]

This is, however, trading reliance on oil as a fuel source for reliance on lithium as a storage medium.

Technically... I think oil is just a storage medium as well the only real fuel source is the sun. Oil = storage medium for energy from the sun created by the decay of organic plant/animal materials over millions of years.

I suppose the advantage of lithium is, the lithium isn't really destroyed or combusted in the process of using the stored total energy; there's no gaseous release from the battery itself.

Instead the battery degrades when the cell itself becomes damaged, usually by the electrodes/plates corroding over time, or by things crystallizing on the electrodes.

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

We can make batteries (really long-lasting and robust batteries, at that) from nickel and iron, both of which are very common. The only reason we would ever need lithium is if the battery happens to be light. So we could use lithium batteries in cars and use nickel-iron in the charging station and anything else we need batteries for.

Re:How long does it last?

[gandhi_2]

My gas station bans for hammering!

Thanks for the mIRC memories. (:

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the current grid infrastructure cannot support this high load. Current systems expect (and rely) on diurnal loads. Also utilities are trying to figure out how to charge you extra for this inconvenience. Power systems circuits are not as simple to change a micro-electronics.

i.e. It is a lot more complicated than it seems.... that's why my graduate education is being funded! ;)

Re:How long does it last?

[__int64]

Indeed, recharger indeed. Inefficient or expensive we are not sure. It could be either.

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've still got to dump the power into the car at a rate of around 2MW. (25kW * 8hr = 200 kWh. charges in 1/10 hr = 2,000kW)

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

...or capacitors. No idea if caps are also dependent on lithium...

Re:How long does it last?

[strack]

you are of course wilfully ignorant of the fact that while your car effectively makes about 60kg of fuel dissappear every other week, a lithium polymer battery is only about a couple hundered kilograms of recyclable lithium. once. over the entire life of that car and all the cars the recycled lithium will go into after that. and electricity is a hell of a lot easier to transmit than hydrogen,

Re:How long does it last?

[mestar]

Also, don't forget the accountants. Sometimes the slack off, so you require more of them for the same job.

Also, janitors.

Re:How long does it last?

[mestar]

"Ok, let's say those figures are correct. Now let's assume that the average nuke plant has about 25% of it's output used for other means - a conservative estimate. That means we're down to 825 cars."

I don't understand this step.

Re:How long does it last?

[amorsen]

You can't economically bring 1MW to each home at this point, and when the car is at home you rarely care whether it charges in 6 minutes or 6 hours. You are probably enjoying that it can charge at home at all, because most people don't have a petrol station in their garage. At home you slow-charge, at the "petrol" station you fast charge. There will be a limited number of fast charge stations, just like there is a limited number of pumps today.

Re:How long does it last?

[AGMW]

Ok, let's say those figures are correct. Now let's assume that the average nuke plant has about 25% of it's output used for other means - a conservative estimate. That means we're down to 825 cars. ...

That means we're down to 825 cars for any given 6 minute period. There are 240 such "6 minute periods" per day, so if everyone with one of these cars religiously (fully) charged the muthers every day there'd be capacity for approx 200000 cars (198000 actually, but we're using wet finger math(s) so please forgive the rounding up). We could easily halve that number and still be happy with 100000 EV's in a city!

Let's now assume that those 825 people don't drive 375 miles every day, so don't have to have their 6 minutes in the sun every day. My daily commute was somewhere in the region of 60 miles (30 each way), suggesting that those car owners may only be charging up once a week? (as per my Electric MGF friend) ... so could we have 500000 EV's now? :-)

Let's also assume that whilst it is possible to charge in 6 mins it can also be done overnight and there may be some cost-benefit and/or battery life benefit for doing so ...

If we also factor in the concepts bandied about where such EVs are left connected to the grid and the grid can request power to be fed back into the grid to smooth out demand spikes (with suitable payments to the EV owner, and the proviso that the vehicle will retain an owner specified charge sufficient to drive it - though with the 6 min quick charge that might be less of a problem anyway!) ...

Re:How long does it last?

[Torvac]

a few days ago an unverified source said ~300k€ at the moment for the batteries.

Re:How long does it last?

[somersault]

anything larger is going to cause serious problems unless you create an infrastructure that regulates how many vehicles can charge at any one time. Which would turn the entire process into one giant-bidding war; kinda like the old warez FTP sites, only far worse. I can just imagine a million people all standing beside their cars, constantly hammering the grid to try and beat the que.

I doubt people are going to have the necessary hardware to charge that fast from home. I think the place you're most likely to get a fast charge is at a gas station. Then it's just like filling up your car, albeit 3-4 minutes slower.

Re:How long does it last?

[mvdw]

I can just imagine a million people all standing beside their cars, constantly hammering the grid to try and beat the que.

What, like they do at gas stations?

Re:How long does it last?

[Stooshie]

It also says DC power. I don't think any major country has supplied DC power since about 1903! So there is extra inefficiency in a transformer.

Re:How long does it last?

[Shikaku]

Yes

Re:How long does it last?

[cyclomedia]

Hook it up to your hot water tank, or heat your greenhouse with it

Re:How long does it last?

[jabuzz]

At 20USD per kg lithium can be extracted from sea water in a near inexhaustible amount 230 billion tonnes

Re:How long does it last?

[AGMW]

Ok, let's say those figures are correct. Now let's assume that the average nuke plant has about 25% of it's output used for other means - a conservative estimate. That means we're down to 825 cars. ...

Er, no. It means were down to 825 cars in any given 6 minute period. It is usual to find 240 such 6 minute periods in any (Earth) day thereby allowing for approx 200000 such EV charge events (198000, but as we're using wet finger math(s) please excuse me if I round up at this point). I would suggest we could comfortably halve that number and be ecstatic about 100000 EV's driving around a city! Hell, 50K EV's would be brilliant!

What's the average commute I wonder? I furthest I ever had to commute was about 60 miles (30 each way) so I'd have to charge one of these suckers up (less than!) once a week if it was my car, and the same for my Electric MGF friend too. We could probably assume that most people's commute (or 'daily drive' for the non-workers) is (considerably) less than 375 miles anyway. If we plump for once a week we can multiply up the (already halved!) 100000 accordingly ... 500000 EV's. Hell, even if we go for 50000 a day that's still capacity for 250000 a week!

Also, the article says the vehicle can be charged in 6 minutes but it doesn't say it has to be - what's the betting there'd be a cost benefit (and maybe battery life benefit) from charging more slowly, like in 6 to 8 hours overnight, for example.

If you finally factor in the ideas about keeping such EVs which are not currently in use attached to the grid and allowing the grid to request power back to smooth out power use spikes (with suitable payments to the EV owner, and the proviso that the owner can specify a minimum level on the vehicle in case they need to drive it - but if it only takes 6 mins to charge it that becomes less of an issue!) we could see the Max Load requirement for a city actually be lowered because the city grid can pull power from the EVs that are not in use (have hookups at places of work and other car parks maybe too?)!

That it seems too good to be true is another issue, but it sounds bloody good to me!

Re:How long does it last?

[AGMW]

Ok, let's say those figures are correct. Now let's assume that the average nuke plant has about 25% of it's output used for other means - a conservative estimate. That means we're down to 825 cars. ...

Er, no. It means were down to 825 cars in any given 6 minute period. It is usual to find 240 such 6 minute periods in any (Earth) day thereby allowing for approx 200000 such EV charge events (198000, but as we're using wet finger math(s) please excuse me if I round up at this point). I would suggest we could comfortably halve that number and be ecstatic about 100000 EV's driving around a city! Hell, 50K EV's would be brilliant!

What's the average commute I wonder? I furthest I ever had to commute was about 60 miles (30 each way) so I'd have to charge one of these suckers up (less than!) once a week if it was my car, and the same for my Electric MGF friend too. We could probably assume that most people's commute (or 'daily drive' for the non-workers) is (considerably) less than 375 miles anyway. If we plump for once a week we can multiply up the (already halved!) 100000 accordingly ... 500000 EV's. Hell, even if we go for 50000 EV's a day that's still capacity for 250000 a week!

Also, the article says the vehicle can be charged in 6 minutes but it doesn't say it has to be - what's the betting there'd be a cost benefit (and maybe battery life benefit) from charging more slowly, like in 6 to 8 hours overnight, for example.

If you finally factor in the ideas about keeping such EVs which are not currently in use attached to the grid and allowing the grid to request power back to smooth out power use spikes (with suitable payments to the EV owner, and the proviso that the owner can specify a minimum level on the vehicle in case they need to drive it - but if it only takes 6 mins to charge it that becomes less of an issue!) we could see the Max Load requirement for a city actually be lowered because the city grid can pull power from the EVs that are not in use (have hookups at places of work and other car parks maybe too?)!

That it seems too good to be true is another issue, but it sounds bloody good to me!

Re:How long does it last?

[AGMW]

Ok, let's say those figures are correct. Now let's assume that the average nuke plant has about 25% of it's output used for other means - a conservative estimate. That means we're down to 825 cars. ...

Er, no. It means were down to 825 cars in any given 6 minute period. It is usual to find 240 such 6 minute periods in any (Earth) day thereby allowing for approx 200000 such EV charge events (198000, but as we're using wet finger math(s) please excuse me if I round up at this point). I would suggest we could comfortably halve that number and be ecstatic about 100000 EV's driving around a city! Hell, 50K EV's would be brilliant!

What's the average commute I wonder? I furthest I ever had to commute was about 60 miles (30 each way) so I'd have to charge one of these suckers up (less than!) once a week if it was my car, and the same for my Electric MGF friend too. We could probably assume that most people's commute (or 'daily drive' for the non-workers) is (considerably) less than 375 miles anyway. If we plump for once a week we can multiply up the (already halved!) 100000 accordingly ... 500000 EV's. Hell, even if we go for 50000 EV's a day that's still capacity for 250000 a week!

Also, the article says the vehicle can be charged in 6 minutes but it doesn't say it has to be - what's the betting there'd be a cost benefit (and maybe battery life benefit) from charging more slowly, like in 6 to 8 hours overnight, for example.

If you finally factor in the ideas about keeping such EVs which are not currently in use attached to the grid and allowing the grid to request power back to smooth out power use spikes (with suitable payments to the EV owner, and the proviso that the owner can specify a minimum level on the vehicle in case they need to drive it - but if it only takes 6 mins to charge it that becomes less of an issue!) we could see the Max Load requirement for a city actually be lowered because the city grid can pull power from the EVs that are not in use (have hookups at places of work and other car parks maybe too?)!

That it seems too good to be true is another issue, but it sounds bloody good to me!

Re:How long does it last?

[JSlope]

I think the charge stations will have some local storage of electricity, be it super-capacitors or flywheel based systems like http://www.beaconpower.com/ and those charge stations in the morning will be starting slowly charging their energy storage and even having a sign of how much energy they have (can they quickly charge only a light car or a truck) similar to battery sign on mobile phones or notebooks, the same size current gas stations show prices. And when you see that some charge station is full you go and charge there, if it's empty you go to the next station.

Re:How long does it last?

[SwedishPenguin]

Platinum or Palladium for the fuel cell isn't exactly lying around in droves in our streets either..

Hydrogen is a pain to store and transport, you have to build an entirely new infrastructure for it. We already have that infrastructure for electricity, though we obviously have to increase production and install new wires for charging stations to get enough juice, but its minimal compared to what's required for hydrogen storage and transport.

Not to mention that the electrolysis is only about 50-80% efficient, and the fuel cell can only convert about 50% of the energy stored in the hydrogen into electricity, for a total of 25-40% efficiency from the power source to the engine. Which means even more electricity production would be required.

I Am Not An Electrical Engineer, but I can read. These values are from Wikipedia articles on Electrolysis of Water and Fuel Cells.

Re:How long does it last?

[SwedishPenguin]

Platinum or Palladium for the fuel cell isn't exactly lying around in droves in our streets either..

Hydrogen is a pain to store and transport, you have to build an entirely new infrastructure for it. We already have that infrastructure for electricity, though we obviously have to increase production and install new wires for charging stations to get enough juice, but its minimal compared to what's required for hydrogen storage and transport.

Not to mention that the electrolysis is only about 50-80% efficient, and the fuel cell can only convert about 50% of the energy stored in the hydrogen into electricity, for a total of 25-40% efficiency from the power source to the engine. Which means even more electricity production would be required.

I Am Not An Electrical Engineer, but I can read. These values are from Wikipedia articles on Electrolysis of Water and Fuel Cells.

(Already tried posting once but it apparently failed, excuse me if this leads to duplicates)

Re:How long does it last?

[ppc_digger]

unless you create an infrastructure that regulates how many vehicles can charge at any one time

Like a limited number of refueling stations? If recharging only takes six minutes and needs special equipment (thick cables, giant power transformers, etc.), people probably won't charge their cars at home.

Re:How long does it last?

[Lumpy]

If it's like a LiPo battery, not may at all. LiPo batteries doe very quickly and have a charge/discharge cycle life measured in low 100's. Mostly because even a correct charger for them cant detect the exact charge full point and overcharge them. causing the damn things to go POP!

I had several liPo batteries for a robotics setup and the special $590.00 charger... it still blew up batteries and the manufacturer knew this they replaced 5/8th of my cells TWICE due to being popped by the charger. I have cince moved away from them due to their high unreliability and low life expectancy.

Re:How long does it last?

[somersault]

More expensive and inefficient than drilling for oil, refining it, and sending trucks around the country to fuel stations?

Presumably most people (ie the ones who aren't millionaires) wouldn't bother with a high powered recharge station at home, at least not for the first few years, so the recharging stations will get a lot of use to offset whatever waste that was incurred while making them. Combine that with nuclear and especially renewable energy and I'd think things get a whole lot more efficient overall (even if the renewable sources themselves aren't very efficient, they're basically "free").

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can use a modified version of the existing system, but instead of dispensing fuel you dispense electrolyte. Basically you exchange your flat electrolyte for newly charged stuff that's ready for immediate use.

Re:How long does it last?

[Jeffrey_Walsh VA]

1100 simultaneous users. For six minutes at a time, thats 264,000 users per day. With a week between charges thats 1,848,000 users.

Re:How long does it last?

[e70838]

it may be worse because people tends to have similar schedules. They will charge at the same time, just before going to work. You know, the Murphy's law, ...

Re:How long does it last?

[MacGyver2210]

They don't specify how the battery is connected for charging. There could be multiple lines needed for this fast charge, they could have a local power resevoir... Hell, it could be a huge bank of capacitors they're using for all we know.

The two largest generators in the US produce over 3.99 Trillion kWh of power. I think given how slow this is going to take off (inevitably) we'll manage the power load. Even when that generation is split among 2 million people, each person can use 1.9 million kWh for themselves.

Re:How long does it last?

[flyneye]

To help you understand what is really going on here and make further calculations and queries please refer to the chart on this page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_triangle

Some call it the project managment triangle, but I think of it as "The law of reasonable expectation".

I would venture to say that since it is fast and good it will not be cheap.

Re:How long does it last?

[willy_me]

The American Wire Gauge only goes up to OOOO according to this table.

When a thicker wire is required one typically runs multiple conductors. The reason for this is that when one goes beyond 4/0 the cable becomes far too difficult to handle.

Re:How long does it last?

[dimeglio]

Call me an eternal optimist but I think this is actually a great news story. Let's start eF1 racing as races tend to provide continual improvement and innovation.

Re:How long does it last?

[John Meacham]

It is quite trivial actually, the lithium isn't consumed, deposits develop and the (cheap) electrolytes degrade, it is a simple (relatively) chemical/mechanical process to clean the lithium and rebuild the cell. Not something you do in place, but every 5 years or so you get your battery exchanged. Less work than replacing your tires or shocks. And since you arn't buying any more expensive lithium, it probably won't be that much. Lithium is certainly a fully recyclable resource. And it is a whole lot cheaper than the Palladium that is the best bet for hydrogen storage at the moment.

Re:How long does it last?

[Pharmboy]

The other point is that in order to charge in 6 minutes, the thing must be on a 100 amp circuit. You can only move so many electrons using a 230v/15a circuit, no matter how advanced the battery is.

Re:How long does it last?

[timholman]

Why do people struggle with this? To provide the charging current needed to charge in 6 minutes, all you need is a charging station that is topped up by the grid but uses a large battery (of batteries). The peak current to charge the car is taken care off by the batteries and the average daily usage at the station is supplied by the grid.

Maybe the reason why people struggle with it is because they actually do the math.

Let's assume the local gas station just around the corner fuels around 200 cars a day over a 16 hour period. It decides to switch over to an all-electric recharging system. Furthermore, let's assume the customers all drive fast charging electric cars that require 1 MW for 6 minutes. Just to make it interesting, let's also assume the charging is completely lossless.

So, that former gas station would need to supply 1E6 * 6 * 60 * 200 joules every day to recharge those vehicles. Over a 24 hour period, it would be pulling 833 kW from the mains to trickle charge the battery array at the station, or 3472 A @ 240 V. A modern nuclear power plant can supply 1.1 GW on a continuous basis, so that means the entire output of that nuclear power plant, if devoted to charging electric vehicles, would be sufficient to supply 1,320 converted gas stations.

Now assuming that the average driver refuels his vehicle once a week, that means that those 1,320 refueling stations are sufficient to service 1.85M electric vehicles. There are estimated to be 251M passenger vehicles in the U.S. alone, so we only need to build 136 modern 1.1 GW nuclear power plants just to keep those vehicles running.

But of course, I assumed lossless energy transport, storage, and charging. Realistically, the entire process may be 50% efficient if we are lucky. So actually we need to build 272 brand new nuclear power plants, and that local converted gas station will be pulling an average of 1.67 MW from the grid.

Now frankly, the total added generation capacity is not that outrageous. The U.S. electric generation capacity is about 750 GW, so adding an extra 300 GW is expensive, but doable. On the other hand, efficiently supplying a continuous average of 1.67 MW of electric power to every gas station in the U.S., including those in remote areas and on remote roads, is a complete pipe dream unless someone comes up with room temperature superconductors.

Electric vehicles will work fine if they are trickle-charged nightly from home mains, and used for short commutes each day. But for long-haul trips, or fast refueling of large numbers of vehicles, nothing is going to replace chemical fuels anytime soon.

Re:How long does it last?

[AGMW]

Apologies for the multiple postings. I posted it and re-visited the page and it wasn't there so I posted it again! Several times!!

Re:How long does it last?

[bobaferret]

2500 cycles before degradation according to their youtube video.

Re:How long does it last?

[tom17]

Now the electricity companies can start making more money when they upgrade home services (on a request basis) to 200A 3-phase [regional high voltage, ~300-500]V 'industrial grade' power. I'm not up on 3-phase, how much power would 200A @ say, 500V give?

Is it as simple as 3*200A*500V=300KW? (I know, still not enough.

Re:How long does it last?

[tom17]

I imagine you could have large supercapacitor banks at the home charging station to store up the required energy over time, ready for the 6min 900KW burst. That would make this do-able on existing infrastructure.

Re:How long does it last?

[tom17]

I wonder if there is a device that would only allow electricity to pass in one direction. If there was, I could envision a small array of these devices set up in a kind of diamond pattern, such that AC going in could end up as DC coming out. Granted, the DC would still have the peaks and troughs of the AC, but maybe that could be 'smoothed' out with some kind of intermediate electricity 'buffer' if there is such a thing.

Interesting.

Re:How long does it last?

[zevans]

Parent is spot on, good summary.

I'll just add that we should also factor in the electricity that is saved in NOT refining and distributing petrol for those 500,000 EVs.

Re:How long does it last?

[cnaumann]

It would typically take me a whole week (168 hours) to drive the 375 miles to use up that much charge.

Re:How long does it last?

[Smidge204]

That matters if and only if you expect to recharge your car at home in 6 minutes from nearly depleted to nearly full.

The main mode of operation for electric cars is destination charging: You plug it in when it's sitting unused for extended periods of time. The theoretical 6-minute recharge would require special facilities, but you probably would need to use that option infrequently since the car should be fully charged every time you leave home.
=Smidge=

Re:How long does it last?

[Smidge204]

900kW... at what voltage?

I can shove 900kW through a 4/0 cable real easy if I'm allowed to use a few thousand volts.
=Smidge=

Re:How long does it last?

[jbuck]

why not call it 1.21GW?

lemme do some math here....... ok.

that comes to 1 time traveling user per nuclear power station.

Re:How long does it last?

[Dcnjoe60]

The article states that it is using the same types of batteries packs that are currently used in electric fork lifts in modern warehouses. As such, they should have a large charge-discharge cycle range and not be terribly expensive as they aren't new technology, but existing technology.

Re:How long does it last?

[zevans]

On the other hand, efficiently supplying a continuous average of 1.67 MW of electric power to every gas station in the U.S., including those in remote areas and on remote roads, is a complete pipe dream unless someone comes up with room temperature superconductors.

There's your answer right there! See also: Ringworld.

Re:How long does it last?

[DigiShaman]

With that kind of current draw and storage, your "capacitors" would most likely be flywheel based. Pentadyne is one such company that sells flywheel electric storage for many industries. At least, that's what a Google search brought up.

Re:How long does it last?

[rufty_tufty]

I know Americans are stereotypically quite large people but how large do you have to be to be too large for an A2???
As for the performance remember that energy consumption of a vehicle will over average terrain be proportional to its wind resistance not its weight.

Bearing that in mind, what kind of use case for a vehicle requires even half the performance demonstrated here? (assuming a larger car would have at most twice the wind resistance) If you're going on long continent crossing journeys the range of the car and time taken to recharge it is greater than how often you should be stopping for a break so that you aren't a hazard to other road users.
And that's assuming that this technology doesn't scale, i.e. that twice as large a car could just have two of these battery packs giving the same recharge time.

Re:How long does it last?

[operagost]

In North America, 230V 30A and 40A circuits are pretty common for electric dryers and ranges. While charging your car in 6 minutes at home would be expensive, most people with at least 200A service could probably have a circuit that supports a 1-2 hour charge time installed with little trouble.

Re:How long does it last?

[rufty_tufty]

Last figures I saw for the UK had transport consuming approximately as much energy as electricity and domestic heating combined. So I'd say your estimates at number of new power plants is about right that you'd need approximately double the number of power plants if you want them to supply transport and electric.

Why is this a bad thing though? What's wring with getting rid of the power plants from under the hood and putting them together into a more efficient centrally managed resource?

Oh and energy consumption wise, averaged over the nation it doesn't matter if you trickle charge the car over a 24 hour period or charge it in a nanosecond, assuming constant efficiency for both methods the number of power stations needed is the same. The goal here is to get the power source from a gas burner under the hood to central/renewables generation elsewhere and surprise surprise that means you need LOTS more central generation/renewable, but none of this is news.

Re:How long does it last?

[bberens]

Most will charge overnight because presumably the infrastructure will be upgraded to bill them less money if they charge slowly overnight.

Re:How long does it last?

[operagost]

Not to mention that the idea of people driving for hours, then charging up, then driving again 24 hours a day is a bit silly. Most houses built in the last 20 years have 200A service, but they almost never max it out and certainly not 24 hours a day.

Re:How long does it last?

[tibit]

Not a tranformer, but a power converter. A good one should have ~95% efficiency, so it's not that big of a deal.

Re:How long does it last?

[tibit]

You're only partially correct. At the powers we're talking about, you can't have a simple rectifier followed by a buffer capacitor -- the peak current would kill the power distribution system.

You need a power factor correcting (PFC) circuit -- essentially a rectifier followed by a "small" capacitor that only supplies the ripple current to the step-up converter. The step-up converter generates a constant DC voltage by boosting the unipolar (pre-rectified) AC; it is designed so that the current is instantaneously proportional to voltage. The average current is then proportional to the demand on the load side. A PFC is then followed by a step-down converter that provides the charging regulation (voltage or current, as desired). There are designs where the PFC is integrated with the final inverter, all using one switching transformer core.

Re:How long does it last?

[tibit]

AFAIK, and I'm not a grid engineer or anything like that. The nuke plant needs a bit of its own power just to keep going, it also needs to provide a bit of its power to other parts of the grid just to keep everything in sync. You basically can't utilize 100% capacity of one plant that's in the grid. You need to share the supply with other sources in the grid. Now if every plant in the grid is either nuclear or hydro, then of course all your power will be nuclear-sourced, just not coming from any one particular plant.

In an "all-nuclear" grid you still need hydro plants for energy storage and load buffering throughout the day. Nuclear plants are best run at constant power, the time constant for power change is IIRC measured in "summer afternoons", let's say there are three afternoons per 24h ;)

Re:How long does it last?

[JTsyo]

Or a superconductor.

Re:How long does it last?

[Amouth]

my mains draw in my house is 240v at 200A and i have a 100A running to a sub panel..

not sure where you got 900kw .. 600km range 15kWh per 100km means ((600/100)*15) = 90kWh 90kW/240v = 375A to charge in 1 hour.. to charge in 6m? 375*(60/6) = 2,250A at 240v.

so while i agree that 6min isn't going to be normal for your average home - at 375/200max = 1.875h so basically 2 hours.. and then look at the average home's usage cut that down to a safe 100amp max or even maybe 150amp if you have a smart box for disturbing.. it comes up to 4h max.

now flip this 6min to be useful.. we look at public charging stations - just like gas stations - but placed near substations .. where 2.4-33kv isn't hard and you cut it down to

90kW/2400v = 37.5A or 90kW/33000v = 2.72A

now - the real question is.. do i trust the random joe at a gas station talking on his cell phone and screaming at his kids wile smoking and trying to eat a bigmac to properly hook up a 2.4k volt connector? No i don't.

yea we can try to make them idiot proof - but then they just come out with a dumber idiot

Re:How long does it last?

[tibit]

I don't even know who and WHY the heck came up with the idea of "hydrogen economy". It's entirely unfeasible and pointless. Hydrogen, other than liquid hydrogen, is an absolute pain to process and transport. I somewhat like it only because in case of a vehicle fire it's much safer than gasoline, but it'd need to be stored in liquid form in low pressure insulated tanks. Vented, no less. Handling cryogenic liquids is no fun, and if you drive off with the fill line still attached you're likely to severely damage the filling station (read: enough spilled liquid to ignite and burn and melt a few nearby pumps).

The oft-touted fact that exhaust it water is pretty much irrelevant, because everything else is so much more problematic. It's like arguing that having a coal power plant burning dirty brown coal is good because there's a water desalination and purification plant hooked up to it -- look ma, it's plenty of clean water coming out! Yeah, right.

Re:How long does it last?

[wwbbs]

You my friend would be incorrect. New York, New York, USA. I believe just shut down there DC grid a few years ago. It had powered a lot of the skyscraper's elevators etc. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/off-goes-the-power-current-started-by-thomas-edison/

Re:How long does it last?

[GameboyRMH]

Brilliant! We should call these theoretical electricity blockers "electro turnstyles" and the buffers "zap smoothers"

The whole arrangement could be called an electro turnstyle bridge with a zap smoother!

Re:How long does it last?

[tibit]

What kind of a fucked-up design was it that didn't have pressure sensors in each and every cell? Engineering fail. The manufacturer deserves nothing less than losing money.

Re:How long does it last?

[GameboyRMH]

Forget the cable, go to a few hundred thousand volts and you just need a couple of lightning rods! Wireless charging!

Re:How long does it last?

[human-cyborg]

Actually, the ~600km range car was from Japan. The car in question now has a range of 375km. So 15kWh/100km would mean a battery capacity of 56.25kWh, or 202.5MJ as you put it. My current energy rate is 11.796 cents per kWh, so that's ~$6.64 to 'fill the tank'. Not bad.

Still assuming the 15kWh/100km, it would cost me $1.76/100km.

My first vehicle was a 1990 Ford Aerostar minivan (god I loved that thing). It had a 79L tank, and would get a maximum 600km of all highway driving, if I went easy on it. So roughly 13L/100Km *cough*. Noticed gas was sitting at $1.068/Litre this morning, so that would be $14.06/100km to drive it today.

Re:How long does it last?

[Stooshie]

Wow, nice link. My mistake.

It must be very rare though. I thought DC was really inefficient to provide.

Re:How long does it last?

[Amouth]

i regularly drive to see family - door to door it is 128 miles.. making most EV's not usable - this would work as it has the ~300 mile range a normal car has.

as for the "how large do they have to be"? i don't know about the A2 but i drive an MG Midget.. and i know a lot of people that can't get in/out of my car.

interestingly i drive it on the 128 mile drive all the time .. at >30 years old it gets >35 mpg.. and while yes it is small and lite - it is made from steal not aluminum - weighs less but not much less than a mazda miata and it also not nearly as aerodynamic as any modern car..

as far as i'm convinced the increased fuel efficiency of modern cars is more a sham than anything else.

Re:How long does it last?

[SiChemist]

Every battery powered vehicle requires DC to charge it. If it doesn't appear to require DC then the transformer is in the vehicle.

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't shove watts through a wire, moron. AND STOP SIGNING YOUR POSTS.

Re:How long does it last?

[human-cyborg]

The highest rated circuit breakers in my house cut off at 30A.

Did you check the really big one at the top of your circuit panel? I'm sure it's a lot more. You house does actually have 240V service, that what powers electric heaters, ranges, and dryers. The 240V runs over two wires, each running at 120V opposite phases. So when you take a voltage across the two lines, the difference is 240V. Wall sockets and light fixtures use one of the two wires, and the neutral, which causes it to have a voltage of 120V.

Just called my power company, and they said that a 200A service is common these days in newer homes. But you're right, and it's still not 3750A. Assuming (from an earlier post) that the battery can store 56.25kWh of energy, and a typical house can have a maximum draw of 240V * 200A = 48kW, it would take 1 hour 10 minutes to charge your car. Assuming that you have everything else in your house turned off :) They also have a 400A service in my area, so you could reserve 200A for your home, and 200A for a charging system. It's doable.

Re:How long does it last?

[TrisexualPuppy]

some kind of intermediate electricity 'buffer'

Indeed. We have such instruments in our laboratory. I suggest that you visit a library and read some texts covering the topic of electrolytic charge condensers. These units are capable of storing vast quantities of charges and may be employed in such a "voltage buffer."

Re:How long does it last?

[mangu]

I don't think any major country has supplied DC power since about 1903

For distribution, maybe, but DC is widely used for power transmission

Re:How long does it last?

[RogueWarrior65]

Precisely. My mechanic told me that hybrid vehicle packs cost about $5000 and neesd to be replaced every three years or so. At that rate people will be more likely to blow it off and run only on the gasoline side. But I have another question to add: What's the self-discharge rate of this battery? How long can it sit before you've pissed away all that stored energy. Gasoline can sit for years. Granted you'd probably use it but if the battery drains in a couple of weeks, forget going on vacation and leaving your car at the airport. And then what about those of us who live in the boonies and don't have access to this sort of high-end charging station? It's a bit like not having cable or DSL or 3G. And then there's another problem: Electricity is a public utility. Gasoline and diesel distribution is not. Not only are you locked into a single source which means there is no market competition to keep prices down, you also open the door for government to restrict or ban your access. It's been said that rests on four boxes: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. I've also read that there is a fifth box: Moving. Freedom also includes freedom of movement. Totalitarian regimes restrict that movement. Without the ability to buy electricity from whomever you want or to generate it yourself which is probably impossible in this case, your movement can be restricted.

Re:How long does it last?

[Teancum]

Forklifts, if they use batteries at all, are typically lead-acid batteries. Yeah, that is a ground-breaking technology there. I could see a bank of lead-acid batteries powering a fork-lift for a maximum duty cycle of 30 hours, with the typical being about 24 hours between charges.

There might be some vehicles like this with more "modern" types of batteries including NiMH and Li-Ion batteries, but I don't expect to see anything more exotic that hasn't been widely used already for applications of that nature.

Re:How long does it last?

[CecilPL]

Brilliant. This device you've described would completely rectify the problem!

Re:How long does it last?

[LWATCDR]

Yea that would be cool but...
But the 6 minute recharge time is fiction. That is the "theoretical" maximum at some time in the future. A poster on a site actually did the math.
"Giving them a very efficient 60kWhr for their 375 mile drive, you would need a 600kW feed to recharge that in 6 minutes. Even off a 14.4kV main, that would require a 40A current."

Wow 40A at 14.4 kv.......
So that would take about a 3" cable and the rectifier you describe would be an impressive beast to say the least.
  So what we are talking about isn't that far removed from a set of jumper cables for a nuclear aircraft carrier or the Starship Enterprise.

Re:How long does it last?

[Teancum]

I know of some power distribution lines that do some direct current power transmission between facilities and then convert that to AC when put into the local power grids. It isn't nearly as uncommon as you'd think, but you are correct that most power available to ordinary consumers is alternating current.

Re:How long does it last?

[postbigbang]

Which is why you use a fat darn capacitor or other store-and-forward method to balance the grid. Imagine huge caps under the spot where gas pumps are. Gigafarads waiting to dump their load of electrons into your car's stash.

Re:How long does it last?

[IorDMUX]

A 6 minute charge time gives a 900kW transfer rate, or about 1,100 users per nuclear power station.

Here's the point, though: Your power plant runs all day, while the charging only takes 6 minutes.

In this case, if we assume that each user charges twice per day, then the one power plant can support 270,000 charges per day, or 135,000 users charging twice per day.
Now, if you worry about people not playing nice and charging their car at 4:00 AM to spread out the load more evenly, there is a straightforward technical solution: Have the charging stations draw power over the course of the day to charge up batteries or supercapacitors in, say, a 12 hour cycle, then dump the power to the car in 6 minutes. You already need a specialized station to do the AC/DC conversion, why not put some charge storage in it, too?

And here's the big point which many people are missing: You only need a 324 MJ charge if you completely emptied the battery! You would need to regularly drive 600 or more miles per day (assuming you drive at faster speeds and with less efficiency than this tweaked car) to require two full charges. If your average user only drives 50 miles per day, your users per power plant capacity jumps to over 3 million.

Let me throw out one more number, too. The average home uses between 920 - 1000 kWh per month depending on which reference you look at (or 1300 kWh, if you live in TN). Driving 50 miles per day and charging daily would add an extra ... [drumroll] ... 225 kWh per month. Not a bad tradeoff to eliminate burning the 60 gallons of gas you would have used, that month.

Re:How long does it last?

[Teancum]

What is scary to think about here is that these will likely be installed into "petrol stations" (gasoline stations to you insensitive Americans). Arcing electrical conduits with presumably high voltages and current draws to facilitate these kind of recharging centers for electric vehicles seems to be precisely what you don't want to have anywhere near extremely flammable liquids (gasoline, ethanol, propane, or even compressed natural gas). It seems to me that this may require setting up a whole independent network to get something like this going with some legislated distances between the charging areas and where petroleum distillates are being dispensed.

Fueling stations in their varieties usually wouldn't mind a minor add-on to expand their customer pool or to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but it would be interesting to see how these kind of charging stations might be set up.

One thing I have seen, however, is hotels, restaurants, and some other "tourist friendly" venues that are beginning to offer at least a 110-volt 30-amp circuit to their customers for use with electric automobiles. This isn't a big deal, draws comparatively little current anyway, and if you are staying in a hotel your vehicle can be fully charged when you wake up in the morning after a night in the hotel, or top off the charge while you are eating at a restaurant. It won't be fully recharged from being "empty" in six minutes, but it will get the job done without requiring some heavy gauge wiring to make the circuit work and is more likely to be what you will see including perhaps some "coin-operated" outlets at public parks where you can pay for just the access to the outlet.

Re:How long does it last?

[mcgrew]

Transformers don't convert AC to DC, they change voltages up or down. Rectifiers change AC to DC.

Re:How long does it last?

[Teancum]

I'm curious about what kind of energy losses come from a flywheel energy storage device? I am presuming that the purpose of this is to smooth out the power demand at a "refilling station" rather than to power individual vehicles. For some details, there is this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage#Uninterruptible_power_supply

Re:How long does it last?

[boristdog]

2500 X 200 miles per charge (average) = 500,000 mile lifetime.

Fairly respectable, I'd say. I have yet to make a car last 500,000 miles. Maybe they could make it so you could swap your old battery pack with only 1000 charge cycles on it (200,000 miles) to your new car, thus lowering the cost of a new car.

Re:How long does it last?

[tompaulco]

I'll bet your house doesn't run off DC either, which means you need to waste a lot of electricity converting it to DC to power the charger.

Re:How long does it last?

[geekoid]

the transfer rate is for 6 minutes, not an hour.

Re:How long does it last?

[burnin1965]

Only if you were dumb enough to design the quick charge system with an interconnect based on wires. It is likely a real engineer will design the system with bus bars.

Re:How long does it last?

[geekoid]

I bring a MW into my home.

Thatesper month. Where you talking about 1MW an hour? in 6 minutes?

Re:How long does it last?

[crabboy.com]

Google "full-wave bridge rectifier" if you didn't get it.

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

Real engineers would arrange those mystical devices in more of a rectangular fashion, which would make their schematics to be easier to read : )

Re:How long does it last?

[tompaulco]

The world's largest capacitor bank cost 10 million Euros (about 14 million U.S. Dollars) and can store about 1/6th of the power necessary to charge that car's battery. It is housed in an area the size of a typical U.S. house.

Re:How long does it last?

[burnin1965]

While the build out of power plants may sound scary it is important to keep it in the context of reality, people are not going to change from gasoline cars to electric cars over night not even within a few years. The build out of power generation will only need to grow with the demand.

And the issue of long haul trips and fast charging is also bogus because the same trickle charge that works at home would also be implemented at the station in the form of storage. Assuming recharge stations would need instantaneous demand from the power distribution system is like assuming gasoline stations must rely on an instantaneous supply of tanker trucks to refill cars. Obviously the gasoline refuelling stations do not use on demand tanker trucks, they use storage, and the same goes for recharge stations, they will need storage facilities engineered and installed.

Re:How long does it last?

[didroe84]

Super conducting cables?

Re:How long does it last?

[burnin1965]

More expensive and inefficient than drilling for oil, refining it, and paying for a multi-trillion dollar military with air craft carriers, predator drones, tanks, humvees, body armor, etc. to maintain "national interests"?

Re:How long does it last?

[geekoid]

YOur math seems finelyou assumption are way off.

Why o you think 50% would be lucky? modern power line loss is around 7%.

Refueling average would be closer to 10 days.

And what would be wrong with building 136 Modern nuclear power plants?

Why wouldn't they build 1.8GW plants instead of 1GW?

And considering Gen IV plants can yield 3 times that with the same amount of material, It's not really a problem.

Re:How long does it last?

[Yogs]

Right now gas stations have obvious peak times during rush hours. Obviously, nothing so ridiculous as everyone going at the exact same time, which is the best fit to your blurb, but still, high demand times nonetheless. And if we were talking about energy delivery comparable to how and when we gas our cars, I agree you'd have a problem. However, most people will get most of their juice at home overnight, which while increasing electricity draw, doesn't demand a bigger power station than we have now.

Charging stations will predominantly serve road trippers, and there's categorically less of that sort of traffic, and from my experience on the road, the "fill up" times are much more random and better distributed than on a day with a 9-5. These charging stations would need a lot of juice and possibly some special handling by the grid, but there wouldn't have to be such a huge number of these, so I think the challenge could be dealt with reasonably well.

My major concern isn't what the consequences would be if electric vehicles became ubiquitous, but whether this, like so many other stories promising great things for electric cars right down the road, will turn out to be mostly hype. The charging time statement is pretty incredible, and deserves scrutiny... how can you charge so fast without generating a ton of heat?

Re:How long does it last?

[Spoke]

Yep, there's really no point in installing a super-high powered charging station at home. The existing infrastructure to and at most homes won't handle more than 20 kW at most - and even then with significantly lower charge rates, many homes (especially older homes) will need to have some sort of significant upgrade to handle the power.

The J1772 standard allows up to 240VAC 80A charges - 19 kW. Given that your typical EV will travel about 4 miles per kWh, one hour of charging at that rate is good for about 80 miles.

So unless your home happens to be in the middle of a round trip, it makes much more sense to place the high power quick chargers near commercial centers which already have infrastructure to more easily handle those types of electrical demands.

The vast majority if the time, people are driving well under 100 miles per day using about 25 kWh. A 240VAC 3.3 kW charge will take care of that in 8 hours - that's less power than what your typical electric dryer/water-heater/stove sucks down when in use.

If you are going on a longer trip, you probably want to charge a LOT faster than what the infrastructure at your typical house can handle (50kW+) - and when you want to charge, you'll be far away from home. So installing high power quick chargers should be done along transportation corridors where people need that type of functionality most often.

Wherever you have currently have a gas station is probably a good location to consider installing these high power quick chargers.

Re:How long does it last?

[phantomcircuit]

So almost a million miles? Yup that'll do.

Re:How long does it last?

[burnin1965]

I am curious about the self-discharge rate as well, I don't drive much and the lead acid battery in my car can get weak when I finally do go out and fire up the engine.

If you live in the boonies then you have to adjust, an electric car may not be an option for you or you may need to invest in your own scaled down storage system much like many people who live in the boonies already do for gasoline, diesel, propane, etc.

As far as the fear of public utilities, get over it and be careful what you wish for. In the United States much of the power generation and distribution is privately owned but publicly regulated. In the mid 1990s to the early 2000s the "free market" ideology was pushed by an almost religious devotion and the end result was problems like Enron and criminal manipulation of the energy market that created energy price increases based on greed driven market manipulation and the destruction of companies in places like California where price increases and rolling blackouts were caused not by regulation, excessive demand, or any real "free market", no, it was complete manipulation of the market on a level that is criminally insane, i.e. shutting down power generation facilities unnecessarily to create a fake scarcity of supply or booking fake demand orders on distribution to make it appear demand out stripped supply when in fact it did not.

Keep this in mind, you do need to be careful about handing power over to public representatives but by the very nature of a democratic elected republic you can always vote for change, however, once you had the power over to an unregulated and lawless "capitalist" you have no say, you have no vote, you either give in to their demands no matter how rabidly insane or you diminish into obscurity and serfdom.

Re:How long does it last?

[IorDMUX]

2500 cycles before degradation according to their youtube video.

That's... that's incredible. Even if you assume that "degradation" means "absolutely no capacity remaining" (which it probably does not), and a linear decrease of capacity (also pretty pessimistic), that's still enough charge to get 200,000 miles at the very least. Not bad, at all.

Re:How long does it last?

[commodore64_love]

>>>More expensive and inefficient than drilling for oil, refining...

Most EVs run on fossil fuel anyway. It's why ACEEE.org rated the EV1 as no cleaner than a Prius or Civic Hybrid, and less clean than an Insight or Civic CNG. So buying this new EV won't automatically eliminate the drilling/refining.

Re:How long does it last?

[commodore64_love]

>>>How many charge-discharge cycles will this battery last, and how expensive is it?

2nd question - no idea. 1st question - If it's like most batteries it depends how fast you charge it. Quick-charged batteries rarely last more than 6 months because the Heat causes internal damage & shorts. But slow-charged batteries (i.e. over 12 hours) will last seemingly forever. I have NiCds that are over 20 years old and still work just fine. NiMHs probably have a similar lifespan. As a random guess, this new exotic battery likely has similar characteristics.

Re:How long does it last?

[tompaulco]

Non-ethanol Gasoline can sit for awhile, but if you let it sit for years, if may fire, but it will probably reduce the life of your engine. The ethanol crap that they put in gasoline now causes it to go bad in as little as 90 days.

Re:How long does it last?

[Janek Kozicki]

a diode ?

Re:How long does it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's 900,000 miles if a cycle includes charging and then depleting. Considering an average commute of 15,000 miles a year(40 miles/day), that's approximately 60 years. That is assuming one depletes and charges the battery fully every time; even so, 60 years is longer than most people keep their cars.

Re:How long does it last?

[suutar]

The sun is the ultimate energy source for everything (except nuclear, which came from other stars), as best we can tell. I still consider oil to be 'fuel' rather than 'storage', though, because it's already charged, where the other 'storage' techniques start off empty and we have to put the energy there.

Re:How long does it last?

[RogueWarrior65]

I never understood how the free market electric power was going to work. Somebody still has to pay for the infrastructure and you don't get multiple companies running multiple wires down the street. Same thing applies to the cable company. Until satellite came along you had pretty much no choice which was why they were hell-bent on preventing satellite from getting access to local stations. But the free market has triumphed in the end. Not only do you have two satellite companies competing with cable you also have FIOS in some places and internet-based TV now. As a matter of interest, I lived in California during the Enron days and I never once experienced a black out or brown out.

Distribution of fossil fuels (natural gas not included) can't easily be restricted by a runaway government. The fuel companies can buy all the trucks they want. But a government can easily get a court order banning your use of public utilities. They could also restrict the amount of power you're allowed to use which we're starting to see with the advent of smart meters and other devices.

If electric cars are as good as or superior to fossil-fuel vehicles, great. But, if you don't have a choice, screw that noise.

Re:How long does it last?

[RogueWarrior65]

Ethanol is really corrosive especially to older engines and you can't run it through pipelines built to handle fossil fuels. That's one problem. The other problem is using a food source as a fuel means you have to make a choice so you can end up with shortages of one or the other. Non-food crop biofuels are more interesting but the cost to produce is still way too high even with subsidies.

Re:How long does it last?

[MoonBuggy]

375 miles for the German car, so it is 600km. In either case, though, you're absolutely right that the costs to charge are very much in favour of the electric. Between the low fuel cost and government subsidies, it might be worthwhile even with the early adopter overhead.

Re:How long does it last?

[MoonBuggy]

I know - 324MJ/(6 minutes*60 seconds) = 900kW, unless I'm missing your point.

Re:How long does it last?

[burnin1965]

I never understood how the free market electric power was going to work. Somebody still has to pay for the infrastructure and you don't get multiple companies running multiple wires down the street.

I think my post was not clear, the majority of power generation and distribution is privately owned and operated. Investor owned and independent power producers account for 75% of power generation and investor owned utilities own 80% of transmission lines and systems.

The power grid and power plants in the United States are not a public utility.

I have no idea where you lived in California but it is a well know and documented fact that in 2000 and 2001 Enron and others colluded to cause wide spread rolling blackouts in California and this had a significant effect on energy dependent businesses like manufacturing and information services.

The electrical power rationing and market manipulation in California was not caused by the evil government it was caused by greedy, unethical, and criminal corporations.

And if you think the government cannot ration fuel supplies then you are dreaming because it has already occurred.

The fact is that with electrical power generation there are many options for the end user to produce their own energy which cannot be rationed by the government or corporations. Oil based energy can and is controlled and rationed by government and corporations.

Re:How long does it last?

[timholman]

And the issue of long haul trips and fast charging is also bogus because the same trickle charge that works at home would also be implemented at the station in the form of storage. Assuming recharge stations would need instantaneous demand from the power distribution system is like assuming gasoline stations must rely on an instantaneous supply of tanker trucks to refill cars.

Look at my calculations again. The 1.67 MW value is the trickle value. In other words, if a station does a fast recharge of 200 cars per day, it needs that much power delivered to it 24/7.

You can calculate it another way. Refueling 200 cars a day requires about 2000 gallons of gasoline. A gallon contains 130 MJ of energy, so the total energy is 260 GJ. That much energy is equivalent to a 3 MW power plant running at full capacity 24 hour a day.

Unfortunately, people have no appreciation of just how much energy is contained in chemical fuels. It makes the energy content of lithium batteries look tame by comparison. Large scale electric recharging is simply not feasible unless the recharging station is right next door to an electric power plant.

Re:How long does it last?

[mjwalshe]

most places don't have a dedicated 1MW DC feed and putting that amount of power in in such a short time is going to result in some tragic and gruesome accidents.

all it needs is one bad short and peoples limbs are going to be blown off

Re:How long does it last?

[timholman]

YOur math seems finelyou assumption are way off.

Why o you think 50% would be lucky? modern power line loss is around 7%.

7% is the power line loss. Then you need AC-to-DC conversion of the power, and a current control regulator that can handle thousands of amperes of current. That's probably another 10% loss. Then (unfortunately), the recharging of the battery itself generates significant amounts of heat within the battery, as does the discharging process. (Ever noticed how hot your lithium laptop battery gets?) Assuming that you had 100 kW of waste heat during that 1 MW fast recharge, you'd cook the battery, the car, and the occupants inside it unless you provide some means of refrigeration of the battery during charging, adding to even more loss.

It all adds up. You can quibble over the exact numbers, but the energy loss will be significant throughout the entire charging / usage cycle.

Refueling average would be closer to 10 days.

Okay, so assuming perfectly lossless recharging and a refueling cycle of 10 days instead of 7, we're still talking about 600 kW delivered on a continuous basis to every refueling station in the U.S. That's 2500 A @ 240 V, and that's a best case calculation. Of course, there's no way you're going to shove that much current through a 240 V power line - the I^2R losses would ruin you. So instead, you'd need a 10 kV high-voltage transmission line to each and every station, to drop the current to 60 A. How practical do you think that would be?

And what would be wrong with building 136 Modern nuclear power plants?

Why wouldn't they build 1.8GW plants instead of 1GW?

And considering Gen IV plants can yield 3 times that with the same amount of material, It's not really a problem.

From my viewpoint, there's absolutely nothing wrong with building that many nuclear power plants. I only wish we had started 20 or 30 years ago. I'm as pro-nuke as you can get, but even I can't see adding that much nuclear capacity over the next 20 years. Too many people will fight it.

But my point remains. We are not going to replace chemical fuels anytime soon. Electric cars will have their place, and I for one would love an affordable plug-in hybrid. But there's simply no way that we will switch over to an all-electric vehicle fleet anytime soon. You cannot argue away the numbers, or the laws of physics.

Re:How long does it last?

[burnin1965]

Perhaps I am misreading you but it appears from your post that long haul travel will not be feasible due to the demand on remote recharge stations that do not have the necessary power distribution to support the charging. My response is that remote stations will be able to provide recharging by storing up energy when they are not recharging vehicles and I will add that the demand on a remote recharge station will not be the same as the station in an urban area that recharges 200 cars per day.

And again, this idea that it is infeasible because the demand requirements are too big is bogus because there will not be an over night transition to electric cars in the same way that there was not an over night transition away from electric cars in the early 1900s when electric cars were more practical than gasoline cars.

And I actually do have an understanding and respect for the energy density of liquid fuels, it is today virtually unbeatable as a means of storage. However, it is not necessary to match or beat liquid fuel energy density for electric cars to be feasible, they need to match cost, convenience and purpose performance (driving from point A to point B).

We don't really have a significant electric car market, actually we don't have an electric car market period, but already the prices of some viable cars are starting to look possible for an average car buyer and if breakthroughs like the one noted in the article are real then the energy density difference becomes less of an issue due to the combination of the new battery capabilities and the already significantly better energy use efficiency of electric cars over gasoline.

Re:How long does it last?

[somersault]

Sure, but it does get us closer to getting rid of fossil fuels, as vehicles are one of the main consumers of fossil fuels. Electricity can be converted from many sources, it definitely seems a smarter route to go than bio-fuels and the like. The power stations eventually should all be nuclear, maybe they'll even get some fusion reactors going..

Re:How long does it last?

[RogueWarrior65]

Sure the lines and plants are privately owned but they are regulated by governments. They can still get a court order to shut off your power. I saw a copy of one plastered on a nearby foreclosed home. They can't get a court order to prevent you from going to joe shmo's gas station and paying cash.

As far as Enron goes, no argument there. They sucked. I just know that in SoCal, I never experienced a black out. Sure, Enron was greedy but they weren't the only one. And the California legislature had to agree to buy that power. Why they locked themselves into such a restrictive contract makes you wonder if they were on the take too.

I also grew up in the 70s during the oil embargo and gas lines. Two points here: 1) We should be exploiting our own resources far more than we are so that geopolitics plays less of a role. 2) Fuel can sit in storage tanks for a long time. We don't have any way to store the electricity we generate so you can't plan for a disaster.

As for generating your own power, great but people who don't have a place to put solar panels or a windmill can't do that. You live in a condo or an apartment? No green energy for you. You don't have southern exposure, no solar for you. And even then, can you afford to generate wattage you need to run this charger system they're talking about?

Seems like there are too many impracticalities and unanswered questions to jump into this with both feet.

Re:How long does it last?

[Bigjeff5]

Ahem.

"WOOOOOSHHH!!"

Re:How long does it last?

[ooshna]

Yeah but its just like going shopping. You learn that trying to go grocery shopping right at the begining of the month is hectic. (with people getting food stamps usually around them (me being someone who does) or getting paid around then) so you wait until its not as crowded. Chances are these quick charge areas will be at gas stations and not at your own house so if you see a crowded gas station you either wait your turn or find a less crowded station just like its always been.

Re:How long does it last?

[Bigjeff5]

Somebody never heard of "batteries".

Which is funny, because the article is about some really cool batteries.

(Since you probably still don't get it, you trickle charge the batteries, then quick-charge the car from the batteries. No nuclear power plant required.)

Re:How long does it last?

[uninformedLuddite]

I have a bridge i would like to sell you

Re:How long does it last?

[amorsen]

Please hand in your geek card. Or at least learn the difference between power (in W) and energy (in J or Wh).

Re:How long does it last?

[amorsen]

1MW is less than 1 wind turbine. Adding a dedicated 1MW feed really isn't a problem, as long as you don't want to do it to homes.

Yes, there will be the occasional accident. It is impossible to get 100% safety when dealing with the kind of power that cars need. It should be possible to make it no less unsafe than current fuel stations, at least.

Re:How long does it last?

[hidave]

Yeah, when I first heard about this car and its miracle battery, I told someone about the charge current requirement, and of course they aren't electrical engineers, so their eyes just glaze over. MaybeTFA was supposed to say 6 days instead of 6 minutes charge time.

Re:How long does it last?

[hidave]

Such facts are not relevant to electric car discussions, which are mainly fantasy and wishful thinking.

Re:How long does it last?

[tibit]

Oh boy, I did get the joke, just that the joke was half-assed. Mmkay?

Re:How long does it last?

[tibit]

Admittedly, now I don't really know who are you replying to: there's plenty of posts here that are replies at one level above where they below. So no offense.

Re:How long does it last?

[haruchai]

I've seen reports that claim we have enough economically viable lithium for 2 billion electric cars using current technology.
Even if they're off by a factor of 10, we've nothing to worry about for a couple decades.
As for the existing batteries, when they degrade to about 70-80% of original capacity, which takes years, they're no longer suited for automotive use but they still have years of useful life, as utility storage batteries.
So, for a new battery made today, it may be 8-15 years before you have to worry about recycling it.

Maybe we'll have a fuel-cell breakthrough for cars by then, but let's not wait when we have viable option TODAY.

Re:How long does it last?

[mjwalshe]

the main trouble is at this level of power input in a short time there are no minor accidents. Like a senior professional engineer near us the other day was out inspecting a bridge and his metal tape acidentaly hit a rail powerline - the poor guy lingered horribly maimed for several days beofre dieing.

Re:How long does it last?

[sjwt]

WTF? Can you economically bring a gas station to each home??

When can I buy one?

[fractoid]

It's wonderful to see these new claimed technologies, I just wish they'd actually make some of them available to the public sometimes.

Re:When can I buy one?

[blueg3]

They do, it just takes a while. Engineering is time-consuming.

Re:When can I buy one?

[wierd_w]

No, the engineering is what they are doing now with their prototype. The fact that a tangible prototype exists suggests that the brunt of the core engineering has already been completed, barring any rework on the design that might be required for mass-manufacture.

What is required now, is getting a greenlight from investors, regulators, and safety orgs.

Like most things, the actual design and core science happens much faster than the beaurocracy can actually handle. That is where most projects end up dieing on the vine-- the beaurocratic side, not the engineering side.

Re:When can I buy one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, light one laptop on fire and people bitch about more regulation.

Re:When can I buy one?

[Kenja]

Fall 2011 for around 27,000$ after tax break. Or so says Mitsubishi.

Re:When can I buy one?

[blueg3]

The core engineering require to build a proof-of-concept prototype is a small fraction of the engineering work necessary to put it into readily-available, commercial products.

Re:When can I buy one?

[__aatirs3925]

Yea, light one laptop on fire and people bitch about more regulation.

Less regulations, more great balls on fire! Who's with me??

(relating to the article I'm very excited to see this breakthrough, maybe in 10 years we'll see practical electric cars and charge stations)

Re:When can I buy one?

[jamesh]

It's wonderful to see these new claimed technologies, I just wish they'd actually make some of them available to the public sometimes.

I wonder how much of the delay is development time and how much is reducing any associated safety risks to an acceptable level...

Re:When can I buy one?

[cgenman]

Designing a one-off prototype by hand is far easier than designing a full fabrication and manufacturing process that can quickly and reliably create multi-thousand dollar vehicles en-masse.

Further, there are a lot of engineering challenges potentially left to come... we know how fast it can charge, and we know how far it can drive. They haven't mentioned how long the battery actually lasts as a battery, possibly because they're facing an engineering hurdle. A truism of batteries is that the faster you charge, the shorter the lifespan of the battery. Lots of non-trivial engineering will also go into making it not explode or cover the passenger compartment in toxic chemicals upon impact.

The sexy engineering may be done. But there is a lot of engineering left to do. Heck, the turnaround time on creating and manufacturing a new Simpsons doll is about a year. Something as big as a car is inherently going to take time.

Re:When can I buy one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Affordability is probably one of the larger concerns, which is partially an engineering problem.

Re:When can I buy one?

[squizzar]

I concur. This is especially true given this is new technology. For the obligatory car analogy look at the Prius, it got absolutely slammed for a minor fault, that could have (and similar things have) affected any number of cars. Given the number of people shouting that this 'new fangled hybrid thingy is too complicated, my old mechanically controlled xxx never gave me any problems' I'd bet that it's status as new technology means that any problem with it may lead to the technology as a whole being shunned or at the very least massively shaking consumer confidence and eroding the potential market for the technology.

Re:When can I buy one?

[Anonymous Coward]

naa you don't want one of those.. terribly inefficient, expensive and awful for the environment.

It's still better to buy a reasonably fuel efficient second hand car.

Re:When can I buy one?

[thegarbz]

That depends entirely on the nature of the prototype. In some cases more engineering is required to figure out how mass production could work, in other cases it's a matter of simply calling our friends in China.

Re:When can I buy one?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't read the article but if this is Mitsubishi then expect huge problems. Seriously, I have never seen a Mitsubishi car that didn't have lots of electrical problems and these cars are all electric. Mitsubishi is like English cars, I don't know what they do but the electrical systems are always screwed up.

Re:When can I buy one?

[wierd_w]

This is mostly the result of engineering departments living in a vacuum, or at the very least, not designing things for such utility from the start.

"Innovative" designs that are game changers CAN be designed to make use of existing manufacturing processes, and such designs are often considered preferable to those that do not, and require massive investment in retooling, both by primary contract manufacturers, and any of their downstream partners.

In this case, I would say the battery is the most innovative design component (short charge time, insane energy density) which this company did not design, but instead incorporated. The rest of the vehicle has no reason not to be mass manufacturable at the prototype stage, being just a new spin on the same old technologies used in cars to date. (Gonna use the same welding equipment, the same kinds of milling machines, etc. This would be untrue if they used some exotic material instead of structural steel, but I did not see anything of that nature in the article.)

Most of the time, the need to create some new-fangled fabrication process for a new product stems from the engineer not having a very firm grasp on the requirements for manufacturability, and working within those constraints from the start. It is very much a case of "A stitch in time saves nine"

As an aerospace quality engineer, I can often just look at a part, and tell you how it will have to be manufactured, now that I have been doing it for 4+ years. Is it sheet metal? Will it require a hydropress die, or can it be formed on a simple breakpress? Etc. Can it be mechanically milled, or does it require chemical etch milling? Etc.

Many designers will create a design that is not easily manufactured, shooting purely for asthetics, and try to iron out the engineering details later, which is the source of this problem with moving from prototype to production; The sad reality is that many of these "Beautiful designs" end up getting altered radically for manufacturing reasons. Things move much more quickly, much more smoothly when the design takes into account the nitty gritty of actually making it from the start.

For that reason, I am a firm believer in engineers learning to be machine operators before they get behind the CAD workstation. It seriously cuts down on that kind of crap happening.

Re:When can I buy one?

[geekoid]

Incorrect.

The engineering to PoC is less the the engineering needed to get it 'consumer grade'.

You are drawing a line between the initial PoC work and everything else. That is a falisy.

Too good to be true

[oldhack]

Somebody in the know prove me wrong.

Re:Too good to be true

[zMaile]

batteries actually currently take 4 hours to charge. the 6 minutes is theoretical limit. does that make it seem a little less 'too good to be true'?

Re:Too good to be true

[kiwijapan]

Audi A2 modified by DBM Energy was able to achieve its 375 miles range at an average speed of 55 mph

It was going downhill all the way.

Re:Too good to be true

[vegiVamp]

I can't actually prove you wrong, but I would still like to point out that traveling through the air to other continents was also thought to be impossible, a hundred years ago.

Re:Too good to be true

[somersault]

How about the guys in the article who just did 375 miles at 55mph on a single charge?

The 6 minutes charge time is theoretical with some very high powered tech. Home charging would take around 4 hours (source: one of the comments in the article where a guy works it out from mains power vs the battery capacity).

I don't see what sounds too good to be true here, it sounds pretty reasonable to me. If the manufacturers standardise the battery port and charging stations that are in use in future electric vehicles, then this is full of win.

Re:Too good to be true

[Bigjeff5]

That's not the way it works.

They have a claim with evidence, in order for you to say it is wrong YOU need to offer some evidence to refute their claims.

You don't have to believe them, that's fine, but you have no basis to demand proof for your non-belief when your non-belief has absolutely no substance at all.

You might as well have said "Jesus lives on Jupiter. Prove me wrong."

It's just as moronic.

Finally looking practical...

[linatux]

will it be affordable?

Re:Finally looking practical...

[Valcrus]

Heck no. It will probably cost close to if not more than 100k. I will believe in it when I can charge it to full in 10 mins and buy one for the same cost as a normal car. Everything released so far is more than I want to pay for a car that I drive to and from work in.

Re:Finally looking practical...

[oliverthered]

is that cost to the planet or cost to your wallet?

Re:Finally looking practical...

[shaitand]

The planet doesn't give a damn. It's us who are fucked.

Re:Finally looking practical...

[eleuthero]

Perhaps both given a recent Forbes article on the environmental cost of first gen commercially available electric cars (not the 2011-12 models but older nickel or lead batteries). More importantly, if a car company can get cost down to under 30k initial and 40k 5 year cost coupled with 10 minutes charging time and regular "charging stations" along major highways, I'd switch to electric in a heartbeat even if the car could only go 100 odd miles per charge - why? It's healthy to get out and walk a bit on a long trip and we might see the storied rest stop volunteer projects start up again like they (and I have no direct experience with this) had back in the 50s and 60s.

Re:Finally looking practical...

[oliverthered]

well our kids

Re:Finally looking practical...

[jimicus]

Which is precisely what anyone means when they talk about "cost to the planet" anyhow. Since when did big lumps of damp rock care about anything?

Re:Finally looking practical...

[icebraining]

We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet?

I'm getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day, I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world save for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.

Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We've been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the sun?

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.

You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. You wanna know if the planet's all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilowaia, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer t

Re:Finally looking practical...

[martas]

is that you, George? ***zombie Carlin want BRAAAIIINSSS***

Re:Finally looking practical...

[DaFallus]

FYI, the domain in your signature expired 25 days ago.

Re:Finally looking practical...

[sugarmatic]

Exactly. The MBA-endowed, manically optimistic, pathetically narcissistic rich of the world will always cornucopians. The poor of the world will always be the unfortunate discarded husks that cannibalize the resources from under their feet for the rich. But the tectonic plates simply crawl along.

Re:Finally looking practical...

[oliverthered]

but you need the people paying big bucks to fund the development which will lead to your tipping point.

well under the current economic regime

Power required to charge?

[Sir_Lewk]

Is it really that hard for tech reporters to slip in enough meaningful numbers to give us a full picture of what they are supposedly reporting about? Sure it might only take 6 minutes, but what kind of power was it drawing during those 6 minutes? Will the average house have a connection large enough to actually charge it that fast? Will it be practical to build "gas" stations that can charge several cars like this in a reasonable amount of time?

Re:Power required to charge?

[NixieBunny]

I agree. A couple numbers go a long ways towards allowing the user to make sense of the gizmo at hand.

A range of 375 miles at 55 mph is seven hours of driving at speed. Six minutes is 0.1 hours. So they have to feed at least 70 times as much power into the battery as the car consumes to hold 55 mph. If the car takes 3 HP (2 kW) to drive at highway speed, then they have to feed 150 kW through that thin charging cable.

I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house. Do you?

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house. Do you?

Dr. Frankenstein already solved that problem with lightning rods :)
Next!!

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I COULD, but I'm not sure the power company would appreciate my home made taps onto the high voltage lines. And I REALLY doubt they'll appreciate it when my charging system takes out their substation :)

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know anyone with a gasoline pump at their house either.

It is a mystery how people are able to drive cars without running out of fuel.

Re:Power required to charge?

[mpoulton]

Excellent calculations, but based on an almost certainly flawed assumption of 2kW cruising power. 10-20kW is more likely, based on typical electric car requirements. So... you'd need roughly a megawatt of power available for charging. That's the peak draw of a relatively large office building.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Kenja]

Well, its suposed to charge off of regular house current (going to guess 220v). So it cant be that much of a drain. Its only a 74kwh power source that reaches 97% charge in under 6 min. The rest is down to the utilization of the power source. So this isn't going the route of massive batteries and a standard induction motor. I'd love to get one of these in the shop to see how it works, but since they plan on actually selling these (27,000$ estimated street price) we'll know soon enough.

Re:Power required to charge?

[tftp]

If the car takes 3 HP (2 kW) to drive at highway speed

HA! You are an order of magnitude too low. Otherwise we'd all be installing 50cc moped motors into our cars. I think 30-40 HP is what it takes to overcome air resistance, rolling resistance, and the incline of the terrain when that comes along.

As others mentioned, the article is short on facts. I can drive 300 miles at 55 mph (average) and spend 0 kWh, as long as the road is downhill all the way, or if I use a sail. That fact alone is worthless.

I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house.

My house has 200A, 240V service (2 phases 120V each, 180 degrees off.) The maximum power is, therefore, 48 kW. The car will need 1.5 MW power source to charge in 6 minutes, and the battery would have to hold 150 kWh, or 540 MJ, equivalent to 1/8 ton of TNT or to 3 gallons of gasoline.

Re:Power required to charge?

[nonguru]

I agree. It's the "gee whiz" sales/reporting pitch without context. I'd be interested to know the current and forecast cost of the batteries and the predicted lifetime.

Re:Power required to charge?

[wierd_w]

It is possible that the charger "Cheats" too--

It might contain a very large capacitor array that allows for the boost charging speed, at the expense of the recharger itself requireing several more minutes, to even several hours to "recover" afterward. (That is to say, the charger itself is a glorified high-voltage regulator attached to a very large ultracapacitor bank. The rapid discharge rate required by the battery's charging station would neccessitate such a solution if 150kw service was unavailable/inpractical. When the battery pack is attached, the capcacitor bank discharges to fill the battery, but then the capacitor array has a required recharging period before it can be used again; a process which could occur while the driver is on the road.)

Such a "cheating" solution would pose a significant risk should a short occur inside the charger though.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Spoke]

From what I've been able to dig up, the battery pack holds about 115 kWh.

In any case, your typical EV these days goes about 4 kWh/mile, which matches up nicely with their 375 mile trip.

So if you want to fill the car with 100 kWh in 6 minutes, you'd need about 1000 kW (ignoring charging losses).

Your typical house in the USA has 240V service with a main panel size ranging between 100A-200A - or 24-48 kW. There is no way you're charging this battery in a short amount of time at home unless you use some sort of buffer.

Your typical EV today uses a Level 2 J1772 EVSE - of which the J1772 specification will handle up to 240V AC at 80A or 19 kW. But the first mass produced EVs on the market (the Leaf/Volt) will only be able to charge at 3.3 kW or so using that standard.

The Tesla Roadster can charge at up to 19 kW, but still uses a slightly different plug (Tesla came before the J1772 standard, but existing Roadsters are expected to be converted over).

"Gas" stations to sustain Level 3 charging (meaning anything that spits out high current DC) are currently being deployed with chargers that will push out a max of 50 kW or so. The Leaf will be the first car to use those chargers and can charge it's 24 kW pack to 80% in 20-30 minutes.

I suspect that some sort of local battery buffer will be needed in most locations to support 1000 kW chargers - or you'll need to be very close to electrical substations and transmission lines.

Re:Power required to charge?

[moderatorrater]

The 6 minute charging time is only really necessary for long road trips. Long charging times don't keep people from charging at their home, it keeps them from taking their car long distances. The "gas" stations to charge the car in 6 minutes would have massive power requirements, but it's not impossible or even all that improbable that they could provide it. Then, at home, you have a normal charger that you plug in at night that charges it over a few hours.

Re:Power required to charge?

[NIK282000]

3 HP is a pretty conservative number for maintaining highway speeds but it illustrates the point very well. To charge in 6 minutes using (euro) household voltage you would have to pump 625amps into it. The cable required for that (by electrical code) would be 2cm in diameter x2 conductors. Not something your average non-superman can lift and bend.

To get the current down to a manageable level and the cable to a reasonable (3awg) size, you would have to put the voltage up to 1500votls (100amps). That leaves you with the electrical equivalent of a loaded gun. A very high potential for ark flash or instant BBQ users. They are going to have to come out with a seriously safe/automated charging station for these cars which is more then likely to offset any savings of owning the car in the first place.

Re:Power required to charge?

[DeadboltX]

I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house. Do you

I don't know anyone with a 10,000 gallon tank of gas under their house either
It is perfectly conceivable for a "gas station" (charging station) to get a hookup large enough to service 12 cars simultaneously.

6 minutes is not a long time to wait at a gas station, and I presume you don't have to wait for the battery to be drained before you charge it.

Re:Power required to charge?

[LongearedBat]

I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house. Do you?

Lots of people! For example Bruce Wayne, Lex Luthor, Gru, Tony Stark, etc.

Re:Power required to charge?

[robot256]

74kwh in 6 minutes is 740 kilowatts. They said specifically that this could be achieved with a "DC current source", so they clearly aren't talking about a standard 220V outlet. More likely, to actually achieve this you'd need a large capacitor as suggested by a post above. 74kwh supercapacitors are damned expensive, so I doubt if anyone would put one in their house.

What would be practical, though, is for a bank of supercapacitors to be located at a gas station. There could be six, eight, or however many different capacitors, and when you pull up to the "electricity pump" it would connect you to one of the charged ones. Then the capacitor would go back to charging from a ~30kw mains circuit (for about 3 hours). If all the capacitors were drained, a big red light would turn on at the pump and you would have to wait for one of them to finish charging (or get a partial charge).

Even if the gas station *did* have a 1 megawatt feed line, this kind of huge instantaneous load spike would not be nice to the electrical grid, so capacitors would be the preferred method of implementation. The gas stations could even wire them up to feed power back to the grid if it needed stabilization, or it would be the one place you could charge your phone when a storm knocks out the neighborhood.

Re:Power required to charge?

[sjames]

I would imagine the home charger will take somewhat longer, but then you're home.

The fast charge would be for a charging station when you're out and about and don't really want to wait an hour or two.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really cheating? You're just replacing huge gasoline holding tanks with capacitors. And is the risk really that significant compared to current fueling stations? You're just replacing a gasoline-igniting spark with a short.

Re:Power required to charge?

[F34nor]

Yeah but I'd wait 6 minutes at a "filling station" to get not only clean power but also only one moving part in my car.

Re:Power required to charge?

[espiesp]

No more of a risk than the giant battery pack with wheels you'd be driving around at 70mpg...

Re:Power required to charge?

[F34nor]

Once you are there hot swapping the packs with a life becomes the way to go with even lead acid. People are so focused on perfection here that they miss the opportunity for just better.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore 375miles/55mph*150kWh is over 1000 kWh a giant battery over 50 times that in the Chevy Volt, I wonder what it weighs.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't RTFA, of course, but do they claim a FULL charge after 6 minutes, or just enough to go a few ks?

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent calculations, but based on an almost certainly flawed assumption of 2kW cruising power. 10-20kW is more likely, based on typical electric car requirements.

Even at a 98% engine efficiency? Granted, might be more than 2kW, but certainly less than 20.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and not only that, it's also direct current - revenge for Thomas Edison at last! Take that, Tesla!

Re:Power required to charge?

[gundersd]

Not only that, but the image in the linked article shows something that looks decidedly like a standard extension cord plugged into the car (possibly, at a stretch, a 440v 3-phase supply). I'm not an EE, but I would imagine that for a cable that thin to be charging the car as quickly as they claim, the voltage would have to be pretty high - high enough to require things like exotic looking connectors and insulation around the charge point.

Also, as other posters have pointed out, a car moving @ 55MPH will consume far more than 2kW of power - it's unlikely that would cover rolling resistance, let alone aerodynamic drag etc. Something has to be powering the accessories too (power steering pump, lights?, dashboard, control circuitry etc).

I get the feeling that someone got punk'd.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Shark]

Might be tricky riding in a car with one moving part... Unless you plan to go in through a permanently open window like the Dukes of Hazard... And drive exclusively in a straight line while suffering every bump in the road.

Re:Power required to charge?

[blueg3]

I think the most disturbing thing to come out of your comment is that I hadn't realised that 1 pound of gasoline has the same energy as 10 pounds of TNT. That doesn't seem right.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Snowblindeye]

A range of 375 miles at 55 mph is seven hours of driving at speed

According to this German article the car was driving 130km/h, which is more like 80 mph. Which makes this even more impressive.

Re:Power required to charge?

[NixieBunny]

Yeah, I don't have one of those at my house. but I can conceive of a fuel tank that could fill a car's gas tank in one go. This car, assuming that it really can absorb 150 kW, will need a charging station with a few megawatts of electrical service. It's not something that the average person can wrap their heads around.

I guess the point is that gasoline packs an awful lot of energy into a small space, and replacing it with electricity requires changing the way we think about electricity.

Re:Power required to charge?

[ls671]

Actually, he might have had more than 150kW, but he couldn't sustain it for more than a fraction of a second ;-)

Re:Power required to charge?

[hairyfeet]

Which brings up something I have been wondering for awhile: Are all these hybrids and electric a dead end that we shouldn't be pursuing? As we know most power in the USA is NOT generated by nuclear, but by various fossil fuels, from nasty coal to NG. Now has anyone sat down and actually figured out what kind of pollution trade off we are talking about, from the creation of the machine to its recycling or destruction, along with power required and pollution created by its generation, for even changing out a city the size of Chicago with electrics/hybrids?

If we are gonna be handing out tax breaks and other incentives to try to get people to use these things it might be wise to do the math in case people actually do switch in decent numbers, especially since there are other techs like Bio Diesel and Hydrogen that don't require the electrical generation and infrastructure. Maybe someone has, but I sure ain't found it, just some that kinda sorta figure what a single vehicle would cost (and many find they don't pay for themselves compared to highly efficient ICE vehicles like Diesel compacts) when the real question should be if we start switching large numbers over what kind of pollution are we talking here, including any needed upgrades to electrical infrastructure as well as its generation and the cost of the batteries.

Don't get me wrong, not really "for or against" any of these techs, I've just seen how we tend to be short sighted and not see the bigger picture and want to know if that is the case here. Just look at how many adopted those cheapo gas sippers like citation in the late 70s/early 80s to end up with streets full of smoke monsters trailing parts behind them until they mercifully died. It looked like a good idea at the time but I bet when you figure in the smog, the amount of oil those things burned/leaked after a year or two, and finally the cost to upkeep and dispose of them, we probably came out behind. It would be a shame if with all these competing techs we ended up picking one that just passed the buck from the consumer cranking the pollution to the power plants.

Re:Power required to charge?

[ls671]

Well, at least gasoline doesn't waste energy through heat dissipation when you transfer it from one tank to another...

Heat dissipation is non negligible when I recharge my array of deep cycle batteries. I can only imagine that it would be even more substantial in the set up that you are suggesting.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Capacitors are great for storing energy because they charge fastest in the first few moments. It takes more and more power to push energy into them as they fill.

Anyway, this thing isn't a "battery". It's a capacitor, running on a physical reaction (as opposed to a chemical one).

Re:Power required to charge?

[CyberSaint]

I know the feeling... :-(

Re:Power required to charge?

[tftp]

gasoline packs an awful lot of energy into a small space

Yes, it does. Look at that chart and compare gasoline (or even coal) to Li-Ion batteries. Even sugar or fat (as in horses) are better.

Re:Power required to charge?

[eleuthero]

they have residential cafes in Europe... we might end up with a charging station on each block... maybe even stop building driveways at houses and have a carpark at the end of each (short?) block.

Re:Power required to charge?

[eleuthero]

I am definitely in favor of alternating current - the odds of me dying from touching an exposed wire in my house drop significantly from what they would be with dc.

Re:Power required to charge?

[NixieBunny]

I think you're way off in the power requirement. Cars are more efficient these days than the old 1962 Impala that needed that much power to move down the road; that's how a Prius can get 50 MPG while driving at highway speeds. Keep in mind that some small cars only make 30-40 HP total - the Volkswagen Bug was 32 HP for many years, and its aerodynamics sucked.

I may have been optimistic by a factor of 2 or 3, but I think you're being pessimistic by at least as much.

Re:Power required to charge?

[mrmeval]

Look up fuel air explosion. Cars only use 20 percent of the energy in gasoline so the battery only needs to supply that much and enough more to overcome the systems inefficiencies.

Re:Power required to charge?

[camperdave]

Plenty of farms have gas and or diesel tanks, although they are more in the 1000 gallon range.

Re:Power required to charge?

[froggymana]

We all know that a lightning strike provides *exactly* 1.21 jiggawatts (or gigawatts). Didn't you guys pay attention during Back to the Future?

Re:Power required to charge?

[fyngyrz]

Yes, but if the home charging system has storage - and it will - then you only need enough svc to feed it that energy in 24 hours, and even that assumes you drive 300 miles a day. So this whole "omg house svc" thing is a strawman.

Re:Power required to charge?

[canadian_right]

2kw is possible if the car is very aerodynamic. The power required for wind resistance at 25 km/s ( = 56 mph ) and a drag coefficient of 0.25 = about 2 kw or 2.6 HP per m^2 cross sectional area.

Your car has 150hp so it can accelerate up to highway speed quickly. It only needs a few HP to maintain highway speed. 40HP is all you need to keep an average mid-sized car going along on the highway at 100kmh. 40HP is about 30Kw, so for most cars he is off by a factor of ten.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Thagg]

Gasoline only has that much energy if combined with "free" oxygen in the air. Explosives have to react with only the chemicals within them. (I put scare quotes around free because it is astonishing that there is so much wildly reactive oxygen in earth's atmosphere these days)

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house.

If you want to charge such a car at your house, you would do it overnight. Perhaps take six hours to charge.

If you wanted to take only 6 minutes to charge your, then you would have to take your car to a chraging station that had a 150 kW feed available.

Apparently, for this particular electric car, either scenario is viable.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately, gasoline is difficult to "detonate". However, when it does happen, the effects are devastating (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon). What happens in your car is combustion (burning).

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just get a new car whenever it runs out of fuel. It's such a bother, but I do like that "new car" smell.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Though they don't mention whether or not that charge was already stored. Eg, there is a battery pack which charges up continuously, and when you connect the device it discharges.

I could see some trick like this working.

Re:Power required to charge?

[apoc.famine]

Sweet...I can put 3 gallons of gas in my car in about 1 minute...beats this by 5 minutes. While I'm all for saving the atmosphere, the real issue is that liquid hydrocarbons are DAMN convenient. From an energy-density standpoint, they are ridiculously inexpensive compared to any conceivable alternative for the last 1000 years, and next 50 years, at least.

Best thing I ever saw to counteract this was a seminar by a Columbia professor who calculated that if we could manufacture carbon-capture devices on the order of 1/10 our automotive production per year. His idea was not to sequester carbon, but to just return it to fuel. Why? Because we're steeped in a carbon economy as it is. Might as well not fight the system, and do some good along the way.

Re:Power required to charge?

[adolf]

I think the most disturbing thing to come out of your comment is that I hadn't realised that 1 pound of gasoline has the same energy as 10 pounds of TNT. That doesn't seem right.

It's not what you've got -- it's how you use it.

According to Wikipedia:

Gas is 44.4 megaJoules per kilogram.

TNT is 4.184 megaJoules per kilogram.

TNT goes snap. Gasoline, by comparison, goes foop.

I'm really not very surprised by these numbers. Gasoline might make a fine explosive, if it were easier to make it go bang instead of just burn. And TNT might be somewhat useful for fueling cars, if it were easier to make it burn instead of explode.

Re:Power required to charge?

[cynyr]

Okay, so you charge a bank of good caps during the day slowly, and then when you get home you charge your car from those caps. Whats the problem? sure you can only charge 1 car if i did my math right, 31 hours. Looks like we'll(the USA) need to step up home services to 480V 3P. That should cut your "charge your charger" time down to a manageable 5.5 hours. Charge one car when you get home, and the second while eating breakfast in the morning. Not only that, but ho often do you do 300 miles in 1 day? so even if it took your home charger 2 days to be ready to charge your car again, It would likely be ready when ever you needed it.

Re:Power required to charge?

[DMUTPeregrine]

You'd need a capacitor (or bank of capacitors) that can be charged over 24 hours, and can discharge about a megawatt. Not that cheap, but not terribly expensive either.

Re:Power required to charge?

[gandhi_2]

The power of explosives isn't in the energy released, it is in the speed with which it is released.

Imagine if your campfire log burned at 34000 FPS. It would be close to Composition C4.

Re:Power required to charge?

[profplump]

A pint's a pound the world around. 1 gallon =~ 8 lbs.

Re:Power required to charge?

[profplump]

2 MW is a *lot* of power, even for large commercial installations. And it requires a lot more infrastructure to ship electricity than liquid fuel.

It's not unreasonable to think that electric cars might charge at power stations instead of at home, but high-speed charging is not a feasible next-step in the process.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... and at 240V (Typical for your normal household). That would be 625 amps. That's gonna be a darn big copper cable to keep from overheating and catch on fire. But at least there won't be gas that will burn nearby.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Entropius]

It's true, though. High explosives aren't chosen for fantastic energy density; they're chosen for their ability to release stored chemical energy very quickly. They contain both reactant and oxidizer, and thus they can release their energy quickly. Gasoline won't burn in a vacuum, but TNT will still explode.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Eivind]

That's irrelevant.

If you're planning to drive 400 miles in a day, and your vehicle has a range shorter than this -- you need a quick fill. (It'd be real inconvenient to be needing a 4-hour stop for a refuel)

But you really seldom stop at home after having driven a long distance, with intention of leaving again for another long drive in a few minutes.

A 5-hour charge at home -- and a 10 minute quick-charge at the high-capacity energy-station for longer trips, sounds fine to me.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Gordonjcp]

Watch this episode of The Secret Life of Machines. If you're in a hurry, skip to around 2:40 for a demonstration of the difference between gunpowder and petrol.

Then go and download all three series from the Internet. It's okay to do that, because Tim Hunkin told you to do that.

Re:Power required to charge?

[SlashDev]

Do you currently fill up at home? No. This car will not require you to charge it at home, it can probably run 400+ miles before it needs a recharge, then it will get charged at an Electric Station, just like a Gas running car. 6 minutes is a bit more than what everyone spends at the gas station.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Neil Boekend]

The image is clearly not of a car with this battery.
Assuming this is a 240V DC 2.5mm2 cable. This can carry 16 amps safely. So it implies a power of 4 KW. In 6 minutes it could transfer about 0.4 KWh.
For comparison: the Chevrolet Volt has a battery pack of 16 KW. 40 times as much. Tests are talking about 76 km (47 miles for the idiots) all electric distance. 1/40th of that would be 1.9 km (1.175 miles). This is not enough to get the car anywhere useful (any distance a default person can't walk)
Ergo: this is not the battery pack they are talking about. It's just a picture of another electric car of theirs being charged.

When and if these batteries are implemented they would probably not be charged at max speed at home. Overnight charging isn't a big problem for most. The fast charging would have to be done in commercial charge stations on the road, where time is of the essence. These stations would need their own high voltage supply and their own transformers and rectifiers. All very possible at points where roads and power lines cross.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Entropius]

I have a Toyota Yaris with a 100 HP = 70 kW gasoline engine. I've only gone up to 105 mph in it, but I wasn't running the engine flat out; I'd guess it can go 120-125 over level ground, and that's what a quick Google turned up.

If we assume quadratic wind resistance is the dominant retarding force, then it'll take my car 14 kW to sustain 55 mph. I imagine the new car might be more aerodynamic and/or smaller, so it's probably around 10 kW.

Re:Power required to charge?

[sjwt]

High voltage power lines cross all over the country.

Starting at 115kV and going upto 500kV..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnitedStatesPowerGrid.jpg

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

My car stand still at home for at least 10h every night. While 11.5kW is quite a lot it is not really a problem to allow the car to be refilled overnight.
There might still be a need to have those charging station around for emergency situations but I imagine that people would prefer to charge the car at home whenever possible.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe... an adroit response.

Re:Power required to charge?

[91degrees]

The point of explosives is speed of reaction. Part of the reason for speed is that they don't need the air surrounding them to ignite but contain their own oxidising agent. This adds mass and volume. Add the mass of oxygen needed for combustion of fuel you'll find the mass of both is pretty close.

This is the point where someone who has looked in a Chemistry textbook in the last 15 years tells me I'm wrong.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

as long as its not 1.21 jigawatt we'll be fine.

Re:Power required to charge?

[IAmGarethAdams]

My favourite part was where you didn't even read the *title*

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

10,000+ Gallons of Gasoline. 8+ 74kwh Supercapacitors. One standard gas station-sized lot.

You do realize some gas stations don't even allow cell phones to be used at the pump?

This would never fly with the zoning committee.

Re:Power required to charge?

[strack]

if only there was some sort of 'place' where you could go to 'fuel' your car for 6 minutes while its 'stationary'. like some sort of 'fuel station'

Re:Power required to charge?

[mestar]

Only one moving part? So, no doors?

Re:Power required to charge?

[mrjb]

You forgot Chuck Norris.

Re:Power required to charge?

[amorsen]

A wind turbine is 2MW+ these days. We hook them up to the grid just fine.

Re:Power required to charge?

[FishTankX]

Generally speaking what I think the common number for driving an electric car is 200wh/mile.

Given that the volt has a 40 mile range on an 8kwh usable battery pack i'm basing my numbers off that.

Now, given those figures, 375 miles = 75kwh. To recharge to full, in 6 minutes, you'd need roughly 750kw. Thusly, you're drawing about 3/4 of a megawatt.

Pretty much the only way to achieve this would be with another battery pack, or flywheel storage, or a hydrogen based internal combustion, or SOME way of locally generating power at the site, unless you can get 4 industrial 3 phase power connections. It's entirely likely that this might feed straight off the grid, as many industrial customers use significantly more than 750kw. It'd just have to make sure that the power plant is well aware of the energy usage patterns of the charging station.

On the upside, I read at another site (http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=22467) that this battery should be able to endure about 2,500 recharges. Which would put it's range at probably more than the life of the car. Maybe 300,000 miles or so.

Since I imagine that they're using a battery, that is reasonably close to the leaf's cost profile, then this will probably cost about $20,000/pack. Which would probably put the finished vehicle at maybe $45,000. That's somewhat reasonable, given that over the life of the $45,000 vehicle, which will probably make it to 250,000 miles or so due to the more durable nature of electronic propulsion versus internal combustion engine propulsion, it might be a reasonably affordable proposition for those wanting to make an 'ecological statement' and a long lived commuter car. It might end up costing less in maintenance over it's lifespan than a normal internal combustion car, as well, making it even somewhat of a value proposition.

Re:Power required to charge?

[AGMW]

My house has 200A, 240V service (2 phases 120V each, 180 degrees off.) The maximum power is, therefore, 48 kW. The car will need 1.5 MW power source to charge in 6 minutes, and the battery would have to hold 150 kWh, or 540 MJ, equivalent to 1/8 ton of TNT or to 3 gallons of gasoline.

Eh? If you are at home there is no need to charge the EV in 6 minutes 'cos you can plug the sucker in overnight and get 6 to 8 hours. The 6 mins charge would perhaps be at a Charging Station where they could perhaps have organised sufficient power to be available.

Re:Power required to charge?

[ArsenneLupin]

It is possible that the charger "Cheats" too--

It might contain a very large capacitor array that allows for the boost charging speed, at the expense of the recharger itself requireing several more minutes,

More like several more hours... indeed half a megawatt is still a pretty large amount of power to transmit over normal electric wiring.

And if it's hours to "charge" the charging station, what would be the point?:

• For home charging stations, why not just leave the car plugged in over night, and do away with the complicated and inefficient capacitors?
• For public "pumps" (which you still need to allow for long trips), the station would need to be "ready" for the next customer immediately, so you can't afford hours long (or even minutes-long) recorvery times

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gas stations would love 6 minutes, too. What do you want to bet the sales of soft drinks and snacks would go up considerably?

However, the thought of a MASSIVE electrical charging system sitting at the same place a bunch of flammable fumes are coming from (you'd have to have both during the transition) is ripe for action movie class explosions.

Re:Power required to charge?

[FishTankX]

According to the energy density wikipedia article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

TNT is about 4.6mj/kilogram, and gasoline is about 48.

The reason why you might assume that TNT has more energy density than gasoline is because it explodes violently. However, the trick that allows TNT to explode violently is that it carries all of the oxygen it needs for the reaction, inside it's chemical structure.

If you added together the oxygen required to burn a certain quantity of gasoline, gasoline only contains roughly double the energy of TNT, versus 10x.

Regardless ,the fact that TNT has much lower energy density than gasoline is one of the primary reasons why we do not use it to fuel our cars. It's valued for the speed at which the energy is released, and it's detonation versus deflagration.(Detonation releases the energy in materials through compression in a shock wave, and is supersonic, versus deflagration, which releases the energy in materials by heating them up, a subsonic process)

Re:Power required to charge?

[FishTankX]

That's not as nasty as the 100+MW some arc furnaces in steel mills eat up. :/

Re:Power required to charge?

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

If the car takes 3 HP (2 kW) to drive at highway speed

HA! You are an order of magnitude too low. Otherwise we'd all be installing 50cc moped motors into our cars. I think 30-40 HP is what it takes to overcome air resistance, rolling resistance, and the incline of the terrain when that comes along.

I've driven more than 130 kph (80 mph) in a car that barely HAD 40 HP. I don't know how much horse powers you need to keep a Hummer running at 55 mph, but driving a Audi A2 (which is a pretty small car) at that speed will take much less. The most energy efficient A2 produced was rated at below 4 l/100km (i.e. about 80 mpg).

As others mentioned, the article is short on facts. I can drive 300 miles at 55 mph (average) and spend 0 kWh, as long as the road is downhill all the way, or if I use a sail. That fact alone is worthless.

The car was driven from Munich to Berlin. So it was no hypothetical value, but a real drive on a real road. Munich is about 520m, and Berlin at abut 100m, so you gain 420m of potential energy over the course of 600 km, which is basically nothing.

Regarding the charging current requirement: The (german) sources I've read all talk about a 20 Minute recharge time, not a 6 minute time. Additionally in Europe, you usually get 2 phases 230V each. Combined, the involved current seems to be a lot more realistic, even if still a bit steep. Unfortunately, I didn't find any hard data on the capacity and energy density of the battery, so a lot of the calculations has to remain guessworks

Re:Power required to charge?

[sempir]

These cars are going to ruin the special effects in movie car crashes!

Re:Power required to charge?

[Stooshie]

Hey, I have a massive tank of petrol at home that I currently use to refill my car, so installing a massice cable would be no problem.

Oh no, my mistake, I go to a petrol station. Perhaps we could do the same thing with electric car and call it, oh, I don't know, a charging station maybe?

Re:Power required to charge?

[Cold hard reality]

Gasoline takes its oxidant from the air, so it has a much higher energy density.

Re:Power required to charge?

[evilbessie]

(2 phases 120V each, 180 degrees off.)

By this do you mean you have alternating current, as that is not the same as phases, which normally come in threes, 120 degrees separated. This being something which allows it to be a total power across the 3 phases of 0.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

40HP will get you over 80mph. At the sort of speed we're dealing with electricity use would be somewhere around 300Wh per mile. So .3x375=112.5kWh in the battery pack. at 97% efficiency that comes to115.9kWh total. Loading that thing in 4 hours needs a 30kW service. in Europe that means a 3x400V connection. Normal house service is something like 230V at 25 Amps And standard fuse would be 16Amps which makes 3.68kW. So for most people you could charge your brand new shiny vehicle in 31.5 hours. Not practical at all. Actually it's not qoute as bad because a slow blow 16Amp will happilly pass 19Amps continuous.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

One could condense the energy from normal electrical service and charge the vehicle once the base station charge threshold has been met.

One could have a generator at their home that produces the required electrical conditions. Electric cars don't have to eliminate the internal combustion engine completely. But the engine can stay behind as a premise power plant and improvements that aren't practical in a moving vehicle suddenly become possible.

150 kilowatts = 201.153313 HP

One could easily power one's house with such a power plant... or several homes.

Gas stations can become fuel and recharge stations. Other fuels may become more practical given a stationary power plant.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Vegemeister]

Mathematics fail.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Alioth]

You wouldn't need one. A car spends most of its time stationary, the only time you ever need a quick charge is when you need to "refuel" on a long journey, or when doing a great deal of driving during a day. The charging-at-home use case is likely to be an overnight charge. There is no need for a 6 minute charge time when all you're doing is watching TV or sleeping, an at home charge can feasibly be allowed to take 12 hours.

"Quick charge" stations would of course need some serious infrastructure, possibly in the form of a big local battery pack so they don't have huge instantaneous draws off the grid, and a fairly hefty supply. However, the build up of electric cars will likely be slow enough that you don't have to triple electrical generating capacity overnight.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, make that a 7 minute charging time with a minute rampup at the start and end of the charging cycle.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Rogerborg]

Which fantasy electrical grid is this 'gas' station plugged into? I can assure you, it's not any that currently exist in the USA or Europe.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Israfels]

It's surprising how simply varying the time it takes to release the energy makes such a large difference. Take candles for instance; The combustion of paraffin wax released about 42 kJ of energy per gram. Pretty impressive.

Re:Power required to charge?

[spottedkangaroo]

Seems right to me. The thing is, the TNT energy comes out really really fast and the gasoline energy is rather difficult to coax out unless you mix it with air and vaporize it just right.

Re:Power required to charge?

[IAmGarethAdams]

My favourite part was where you didn't even RTF *title*

Re:Power required to charge?

[Patch86]

People have already pointed out that a 6-minute charge would be perfectly doable at a petrol/charging station, which could have banks of capcitors to stop it relying on spiking the grid.

It is also conceivable that the battery would be chargeable with a lower feed over a longer time. Perhaps a regular household mains service would be able to charge it overnight as with existing electric cars, while the 6-minute charge would be handy for range-extending mid-drive top-ups.

Re:Power required to charge?

[AI0867]

Oxidizer is heavy. Also, explosives need to dump all their energy in a very short timespan.

I believe the stoichiometric ratio for air:gasoline is 13.7 by mass. Of course, that's with only 21% oxygen, but 21% of 13.7 is still 2.87.
So, a more fair comparison would be 10 pounds of TNT versus 1 pound of gasoline plus 2.87 pounds of oxygen.

Re:Power required to charge?

[deimtee]

It probably is. TNT has the oxidizer built in, which adds a lot of weight, and also a fair bit of nitrogen, which holds the oxygen, but doesn't contribute much energy-wise.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Cyberax]

"HA! You are an order of magnitude too low. "

About 2 times low. Look at GM Volt, they use 8 kW*Hr to achieve 40 miles of range at highway speeds.

"Otherwise we'd all be installing 50cc moped motors into our cars. I think 30-40 HP is what it takes to overcome air resistance, rolling resistance, and the incline of the terrain when that comes along."

Yes, it IS possible to use cars with less than 4 liters of engine volume.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Close but not quite.

You are confusing power and energy.

An electric car combined with a capacitor bank is an easy solution that can be done today. It may be expensive but the technology is really very simple.

Let's say that for the average american home you have 100amp service at 120 volts. That gives you 12,000 watts of power. Multiply by 24 hours and you have 288 kilowatt-hours of energy available.

If your electric car draws 20kw of power to hold 55mph and you drive for 7 hours then you use 140 kwh of energy. That is only half the energy budget available to the average home.

Even half that rate (50 amp) is good.

So if you leave for work at 7am, drive for 2 hours, work 9-5, drive 2 hours and arrive home at 7pm then you have used 80 kwh of energy but the capacitor bank has stored up 72 kwh. More than enough for a quick recharge, a couple of hours out on the town (40 kwh) then back home to charge up for the next day.

Of course a quick charge cannot be done with a little cable, more like a 2 inch solid copper bus with water cooling, but that's for the engineers to work out.

Re:Power required to charge?

[RingDev]

Your house has 200A, 240V alternating current.

From TFA: "when charged from a direct current source"

IOW: You get a huge trickle charge battery/super cap array, you put it in your garage, you keep it topped off with a low amp 120/240V line. After that battery charges up over a day or two, you plug your car into it, and bam, 6 minutes later you're good to go.

-Rick

Re:Power required to charge?

[drinkypoo]

If the car takes 3 HP (2 kW) to drive at highway speed

HA! You are an order of magnitude too low. Otherwise we'd all be installing 50cc moped motors into our cars.

While he's off by an order of magnitude you're off too. We'd all be installing puny engines if we never had to accelerate or go up a hill, and only had to cruise.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Zebedeu]

How about a gas tank which you can "trickle fill" in your garage during the night, or quickly fill at the gas station?

Re:Power required to charge?

[_Spirit]

Not to add the fact that I suspect having a number wheels that can turn would be a definite plus...

Re:Power required to charge?

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

... I think 30-40 HP is what it takes to overcome air resistance, rolling resistance, and the incline of the terrain when that comes along.

An old 1930s Morgan might beg to differ on that. A quick google suggests 40-45bhp for those and accelerating up hills was certainly no problem. Much lighter than an A2 of course, but with the aerodynamics of a brick (which at 55mph is probably more relevant).

Even at 3HP though, a "6-minute charge time" sounds like it needs some serious current going into it.

Re:Power required to charge?

[somersault]

I think it's better to get the electrical infrastructure in place and worry about reducing pollution and the power stations. It's probably much easier to increase efficiency there than it is on a per vehicle basis. Obviously you have to factor in manufacturing and recycling of batteries for each vehicle, but since the overall car designs are simpler etc then they'll require less maintenance which will reduce a lot of unecessary parts transport etc.. though that would probably be bad for the economy! Lots of factors.

Re:Power required to charge?

[somersault]

HA! You are an order of magnitude too low. Otherwise we'd all be installing 50cc moped motors into our cars. I think 30-40 HP is what it takes to overcome air resistance

So, we could all be installing 125cc motors into our cars? You can have over 40bhp pretty easily with a 125. I don't see that happening anytime soon though. Some people are happy to drive around with 1 litre engines, but a lot of people (like me) prefer a car that is actually enjoyable to drive.

Re:Power required to charge?

[somersault]

(having re-read my comment I'll respond to critics in advance and point out that yes, I know 125cc is 0.125 of a litre, but generally 1 litre is the smallest engine you get in cars)

Re:Power required to charge?

[somersault]

It is, but the TNT can release its energy very quickly without much provocation, whereas the gasoline doesn't.

Re:Power required to charge?

[tophermeyer]

If I had a gasoline line already running to my house I would LOVE to just trickle charge my vehicle overnight.

Your scenario is the only one that I can see working. Homes and employers offering trickle charges with quick fills available at stations.

Bonus points if those trickle charging stations are inductive. Tremendous energy loss, but it saves me from forgetting to plug my car in at night.

Re:Power required to charge?

[somersault]

It seems rather pointless for everyone to buy their own high speed automated charging station. If you're at home you can just leave the car charging overnight at much safer power levels. If you're doing more than 350 miles a day, chances are you're not going to be at home anyway.

What's wrong with letting the gas stations buy these things and using them similar to the way you would a gas pump (but with a bit more automation so that you don't end up all crispy!)?

Re:Power required to charge?

[somersault]

Let the man dream. Maybe one day he'll get a car where everything has rusted solid, and the only thing that can now move is the rearview mirror. Or possibly one wheel, but I'm not sure what use that would do.

Re:Power required to charge?

[robot256]

Don't those furnaces usually have their own power plants?

740kW is still 17 times more than a typical 200 amp residential service. Dropping a 3 MW power substation at a gas station would be doable, though. The quick chargers would probably run straight from a 6,000 volt supply.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

My house has 200A, 240V service (2 phases 120V each, 180 degrees off.)

Really? While that's possible, it's more typical that houses have a single phase of 240 volts with a center-tap for selecting 120VAC or 240VAC.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1: Build oil generating plants
Step 2: Take the oil that currently goes into making fuel for gas cars
Step 3: Fuel the power plant with that oil
Step 4: Profit!

An oil power plant is relatively fast to build, and because it doesn't have the requirements of an ICE in terms of weight of equipment, low maintenance costs, and ability to be used while driving down a road at 75mph you can get more than twice the energy out of the same fuel. Even accounting for loss of electricity over the wire and inefficiencies in the battery and motors you're still way ahead using the oil to generate electricity than using an ICE.

Re:Power required to charge?

[suarezvictor]

Why don't you replace a discharged battery with a charged one? the second could have been charged in much more than 6 minutes... and after the swap, you can put to charge the discharged one

Re:Power required to charge?

[Muad'Dave]

In the US we have single split-phase power delivered to most homes. We have a transformer that converts distribution voltage (19,900V in my neighborhood) to a 120V/240V secondary. We can either have 120V or 240V circuits, depending on the load. The power is delivered to a breaker box where the breaker positions alternate which phase they're on. That way two adjacent 120V breakers are on different phases (for load balancing), but a double-side 240V breaker uses both legs.

See also http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_2/chpt_10/1.html

Re:Power required to charge?

[nschubach]

Imagine the marshmallows you could roast with that!

Re:Power required to charge?

[silas_moeckel]

That might have something to do with the other part of an engines characteristics torque. Sure a tiny engine can make enough horsepower/energy to push the car but building a transmission system to make that happen with little torque would be problematic. Your other problems are lifespan and efficiency yes a tiny engine can make enough power at peek but that's generally not it's most efficient at fuel consumption nor will it last long. Think of generators they need to run for a long time and be reliable and fuel efficient this generally means pairing a much bigger engine so that its running at it's peek efficiency while producing it's peek generator output with the added benefit of the lower rpms means it's quieter and last much longer.

Re:Power required to charge?

[nschubach]

He rides a unicycle.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah but the gas in your car doesn't evaporate out of the tank at 10-50% percent per day

Re:Power required to charge?

[Mr Z]

Such a "cheating" solution would pose a significant risk should a short occur inside the charger though.

Well, that's not all. To significantly shorten the charging interval, the capacitor array would need to store nearly as much energy as the battery it's covering for.

Suppose, due to current regulation, the battery's charge rate is linear over the vast majority of the charging interval. (I'm pretty sure w/ these various lithium battery types, that's not too far from the truth.) If the capacitor array only stored half as much as energy as the battery, then it could only "hide" the second half of the charging interval. If it takes "t" minutes to fully charge the battery, then at 0.5 * t, you'd have a half-charged battery, and enough charge in the capacitors to finish the job.

So, if you have a capacitor array beefy enough to take a 3 hour charge (180 minutes) down to 6 minutes, that means you're hiding over 97% of the charging time. If your capacitors can store that much energy, then why do you have the battery?

Now, I suppose if these hypothesized capacitors are "leaky", it makes sense for them to buffer the charge but not be primarily responsible for its long-term storage. They would also be handy for absorbing transient power, such as the spikes you get from regenerative braking.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the capacitor would go back to charging from a ~30kw mains circuit (for about 3 hours)

Hell a busy gas station can run 40-50 cars an hour... What would be the power draw on that...

Re:Power required to charge?

[blueg3]

Hence, 1/8 ton is 250 lb and 3 gallons is 24 lb. So 1# gasoline has the energy of 10# TNT.

Re:Power required to charge?

[penguin_dance]

Just don't cross the streams!

Re:Power required to charge?

[FishTankX]

I imagine were those furnaces to have their own electrical power plants, wouldn't it be more economical to just use the heat directly from the fuel to melt the steel? Or do they do cogen and use electric power to heat the steel along with the exhaust of the power plant?

I would've thought that building a power plant solely for electrical power, to power an electric furnace for a heating application would seem like it'd be a colossal waste.

Re:Power required to charge?

[djlemma]

Not at all.

Instead of the same silly explosions we've seen a thousand times, we'll have sweet electrical arcs and lightning bolts flying out. Then, if they want, the bolts of lightning can ignite other "conventional" cars and make them explode/catch fire/whatever.

Re:Power required to charge?

[ediron2]

And TNT might be somewhat useful for fueling cars, if it were easier to make it burn instead of explode.

Apparently you've never cooked with C-4.

Neither have I, so I was bowled over when my dad started telling about doing so when he worked with military munitions (Germany, 1950's). I knew munitions-rated high explosive needs to be relatively thermal- and impact-stable (it sucks to be blown up by your own gear), but am still amazed that it'd burn kinda like 'sterno' (jellied fuel for non usians).

Re:Power required to charge?

[danlip]

I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house. Do you?

But you don't need to charge in 6 minutes if you are home, you charge it overnight.
The 6 minute charge is only important if you are out on the road and need some
kind of fuel station to recharge at.

Re:Power required to charge?

[danlip]

I don't know anyone with a gasoline pump at their house either.

I do. Many farmers have them.

Re:Power required to charge?

[effigiate]

The risk of any large current source (battery, capacitor) is easily mitigated with proper fusing or some other type of current limiting device. I'd be *very* surprised if the charger wasn't already equipped with some method to handle a short circuit, it is something you can almost plan on happening with any battery charging circuit.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget AC power needs Vrms to calculate power. Vrms = Vpeak * square root of 2 = Vpeak *.707

Re:Power required to charge?

[PitaBred]

The difference is in how fast the energy is released. TNT explodes all at once. Gasoline burns. Getting 1lb of gasoline aerosolized enough that it would explode would be a pretty big volume of air+gasoline, and would be pretty easy to envision as highly explosive.

Re:Power required to charge?

[robot256]

You'd think that, but there could be other factors. For example, maybe electricity can make the furnace hotter than (efficient) direct combustion, or maybe they need to heat up and cool down quickly--something you can't to do with a raging inferno. Your average coal-fired power plant produces 500 MW, so a 100MW furnace would at least have a dedicated contract and transmission lines to a nearby power plant.

Re:Power required to charge?

[allawalla]

Except for in the UK where it is 20 oz...

Re:Power required to charge?

[bjk002]

Your post is very insightful, but I think implied in any significant change over to all electric vehicles is a necessity to bring nuclear and so called "green" electricity production facilities up to demand levels in a more expedited fashion. At least that is the logic progression I have been pinning my hopes to.

Re:Power required to charge?

[hacksoncode]

FWIW, that's 3 gallons ~= 13.5kg of gasoline plus approximately 38kg of *oxygen* for the same amount of energy. The energy density of gasoline+oxygen is only about 2.25 times that of TNT. Which is still impressive. It is true that the car only has to "hold" the gasoline. But it's just a bit misleading to reference the "energy equivalence" of TNT and gasoline this way.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Chowderbags]

It is right (though when you take into account the mass of gasoline+O2, it's only about 2.5 times the energy density). What's more, if you eat 2000 Calories a day, you're eating the energy equivalent of 4.4 pounds of TNT.

Re:Power required to charge?

[wierd_w]

Size, for one thing. Ultra capacitors tend to be large for their storage capacity. Their main claim to fame is the "Ridiculously fast" charge/discharge rate, and long service lives. An ultra capacitor with the storage capabilities of your thin cellphone battery would likely be about the size of your fist. That's why it needs to be built into the charger, and not the vehicle. (You dont suffer drag and weight problems with big bulky hardware, when you don't drag it around with you.)

A gas station has a HUGE tank underground to service the pumps, and when it is empty, the station puts those little yellow baggies over the nozzles to let you know.

Same kind of thing could happen here, but would require some research:

What is the peak use of the "pumping" station?
What is the average charge load per battery pack? (We will assume a heterogeneous battery population, as will surely exist in the future.)
What are the statistical peak use times for the station?
What are the statistical low times for the station?

Armed with that information, you can design the pumping station's capacitor array, and specify what the most optimal baseline power load (from the utility) should be. (Hint, it is less than direct charging from utility power, because it takes into account the interval time between users at the "pump", and the rate of recovery of the capacitor bank; deferring the rate difference over time, and avoiding wasted supply.)

Gas stations get VERY few customers after the sun goes down for some strange reason-- (Could it be that most people work day jobs maybe?) As such, being able to defer the charging station's daily load cycle to late in the evening would increase the workability of the solution. Additionally, the charger array would not be disconnected from the mainline power network while charging batteries, so it would be getting a trickle charge continually, even during peak use. (this makes the capacity of the array a more complicated figure than what you posted.)

Re:Power required to charge?

[wierd_w]

1) Convenience. Let's assume that you are going to go on a day trip to visit a friend in another city/state. Let's also assume that electric cars are now the dominant vehicle. (big assumption, I know-- bear with me here.) We assume that you do not want to spend the night at your friend's house, but instead want to drive there, spend a few hours, then drive home. The problem is that the total drive-time exceeds your battery life, and the time you would spend yakking is too short to charge the battery from raw line voltage. By incorporating it into the home charger, you allow this situation to work, because your friend's charger is charging itself while you are driving there, as well as while you are yakking, and allows rapid recharge of your battery before you drive away for your trip home. (Be that as it may, your friend is still going to get billed for half a megawatt of utility use. He just wouldnt need as beefy a supply line, since the use is intermittent, and not constant.)

2) For public pumps, the charge array can be MANY MANY times larger, where it would replace the current underground gasoline storage tanks currently found there. Since it would be continually fed with line voltage from the local utility, this would work more like a rainwater cistern; The rate of inflow would need to equal the total rate of outflow over each service interval (Day)-- It could deferr most of it's charging to WAAAAY late at night, when the number of customers is far less.

Re:Power required to charge?

[wierd_w]

Ultra capacitors can charge and discharge in seconds with negligible heat production.

It's their claim to fame.

They can do this because they are essentially just very large "laden jars"; the surface area being the storage layer in this technology. (In ultracapacitors, the storage surface is radically increased by using nanoscale activated charcoal ribbons as the collector surface; radically increasing the surface area exposed by the electrolyte.) They essentially store static electricity, and can discharge just as quickly as you discharge it after rubbing your feet on shag carpeting.

Compared to the complex chemical reactions that occur inside battery cells, the reduction of heat production becomes quite apparent.

Capacitors fail at releasing energy at a "Set, consistent rate" (compared to batteries) however, which is why the charging station would need a high voltage regulator built into it.

Re:Power required to charge?

[SleazyRidr]

Now has anyone sat down and actually figured out what kind of pollution trade off we are talking about, from the creation of the machine to its recycling or destruction, along with power required and pollution created by its generation, for even changing out a city the size of Chicago with electrics/hybrids?

Yes.

One of the problems with current cars are that Internal Combustion Engines are seriously inefficient. There's a theoretical maximum of something like 40% efficiency.

Even from the worst coal plant you could find, and even adding in all the losses from transmission, transformers and anything else you can find that would hurt the efficiency, you're still looking at around 60% efficiency.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two points to consider: One-electric vehicles have more efficient drive trains then combustion engines and one huge power plant is more efficient then thousands of tiny gasoline power-plants.

Two-(Any programmer should appreciate this one)-plug in electric cars have modular power sources! replacing a coal/natural gas based power infrastructure is expensive, and will take decades, but all electric cars are automagically brought along for the ride.

Re:Power required to charge?

[MojoRilla]

Damn. How much misinformation can you pack into a single post?

Hydrogen is just an energy storage medium, just like batteries. You still need to generate power or use fossil fuels to make the hydrogen. See wikipedia for more.

For electric cars, the grid won't need upgrading, because electric cars will mostly charge at night. See here for more.

ICE cars aren't efficient. Most cars today are about 20% efficient.

Re:Power required to charge?

[DMUTPeregrine]

The batteries are heavy. Swapping them out is not practical without a powered winch/crane and such.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Stupid McStupidson]

Do you currently fill up at home? No. This car will not require you to charge it at home, it can probably run 400+ miles before it needs a recharge, then it will get charged at an Electric Station, just like a Gas running car. 6 minutes is a bit more than what everyone spends at the gas station.

No, but where I live, there aren't any places to charge other than my home, which in case you aren't following, means that I have to charge at my home. A quick check of my electric bill, and using the numbers others have put up here, each charge of this car is going to cost me about $75. Given the distance I drive to work, and need to drive for other essential things, it will add $375 to my electric bill each month. This is much more than my gasoline bill. Even if you limited a small percentage of people to using this type of recharging, it's going to be huge problems for the grid, since most people will be charging at roughly the same time. So, have some kind of capacitor/battery/phlebotinum device to spread the load throughout the day? That's not going to be cheap. Didn't RTFA, but usually these electric vehicle pressers don't mention price, due to them typically being significantly higher than a comparably performing gasoline vehicle. The additional costs for the whole package are very significant compared to what we already have. I'm not saying the whole endeavor is fruitless or a waste of time. But like so many of these green projects, the 'green' qualities only means the pollution generating portion gets pushed from the end user higher up the line. Great for your conscious/pretentiousness I suppose, but the net result is status quo.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Guysmiley777]

Helps explain why it's hard to wean us off liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Although a significant chunk of the difference is that gasoline requires oxygen whereas TNT contains all the oxidizer it needs. I think gasoline plus the oxygen needed is "only" around 3 times the energy density of TNT.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Mr Z]

Oh, I see, you were suggesting the capacitor goes in the charger to spread the load on the house's or charging station's wiring and local power grid. I get it now. Sorry. On a related note, a distributed array of capacitor banks would also potentially allow for better load balancing on the grid in general, if the charging station could also drain back into the grid. That could help us move toward sizing power plants closer to average load, rather than peak load.

I had been thinking of something else: Integrating some amount of capacitor storage in the vehicle to allow quick charge transfer from the grid to the vehicle, to hide the longer inherent charge time of the battery. For example, if the battery actually requires 3 hours to perform all of the chemical conversion associated with charging, but capacitors buffer some of the charge in the meantime, then to the user it looks like the batteries charged in minutes. Really, it was just buffered. But, to turn 3 hours into 6 minutes would require unrealistically huge capacitors, as you point out.

A more realistic use of ultracapacitors in an EV would be to buffer the much smaller amounts of charge associated with regenerative braking and the like. The capacity required there, though, would be much lower.

Anyway, it seems like you could charge a large battery array quickly by treating it as a bunch of smaller batteries charging in parallel. Still though, the rate just seems mind boggling, and the heat issues are what really get me wondering. Suppose you dump half a megawatt over 6 minutes into the car at even 99% efficiency--ie. only 1% of the energy converts to heat. That's 0.1 hours * 500 kW * 1% = 500Wh in heat energy. That would be about like running this guy on low for an hour, except it's compressed into 6 minutes. Toasty!

Re:Power required to charge?

[Richy_T]

And not for gas/petroleum which is less dense than water. So double fail there.

Re:Power required to charge?

[sugarmatic]

The car is likely only ~15% efficient where the rubber meets the road, so that means the 2-3 kW turns up to 13-20 kW.

Re:Power required to charge?

[adolf]

I've heard of cooking with C4. I think I even have an Army field manual describing it, somewhere...

But cooking with C4 is rather a very different sort of thing than trying to cook with TNT. :)

Re:Power required to charge?

[suutar]

interesting chart. I assume things like iron are assumed to release the energy by oxidation? Maybe what we need is a car that runs on iron filings :)

Re:Power required to charge?

[tftp]

Behold the power of iron, Lensmen :-)

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention keeping balanced on that lone wheel :P

Re:Power required to charge?

[mjwalshe]

um some Farmers have tanks and pumps on their farms

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you've described isn't anything new. Happens repeatedly. In all reality, the US has struggled constantly throughout its history with fuel sources. This is not the first time we've had to switch the paradigm and juice something else for power. In fact, we're probably liable for most of the whales being dead back when blubber was the law of the land...

In the grand scheme of things, legislatively, narrowing who uses fossil fuel is an ideal way of regulating it. Putting a finger on the 'power plant' level versus the individual consumer appears easier on the surface.

Rob peter to pay paul, perhaps, but there are less issues to mitigate in this way.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, people have done the math. Yes the numbers are on the internet. Yes, you can Google them yourself.

Thanks for playing.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's still a net gain, as it's easier to fix pollution at the power plant end. Each coal plant that is replaced with a nuclear plant will "clean up" the pollution equivalent of thousands of cars. Plus, I doubt that a single coal plant with scrubbers, etc. properly installed produces more pollution per kWh than the average automobile. Scale is the thing. Coal plants produce more volume at one time, in one place. That makes it a pain in the neck, not to mention the amount of radiation they can give off (anthracite has trace uranium deposits that just get burned up with the coal because it's not cost effective to extract.) But if the coal plant is running anyway, might as well move as much load to it as it can handle; the coal doesn't burn cleaner because there are fewer users of the electricity it produces, after all.

But replacing them all with nuclear fission (and hopefully eventually fusion plants or solar thermal) makes for a much much cleaner environment.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Black Gold Alchemist]

According to this German article [tagesschau.de] the car was driving 130km/h, which is more like 80 mph. Which makes this even more impressive.

Even more so, because drag is approximately speed squared. From simple math 375 * (80/65)^2, this car could go about 570 miles on a charge.

Re:Power required to charge?

[bhiestand]

In a nutshell...

I've heard the figure that driving an electric would produce less pollution powered by the dirtiest coal power plant in West Virginia than a Prius powered by gas.[Citation Needed]

Obviously the figures improve if you produce some of that electricity from cleaner sources... and it's nearly free pollution-wise if you're charging the cars from spare nuclear capacity at night. Additionally, pollution controls at centralized power plants are relatively cheaper and more efficient. It's probably a lot more efficient to put scrubbers on all our coal-fired plants than to install catalytic converters on millions of vehicles.

IMO, the hardest part is going to be getting gasoline-powered cars replaced with electric cars. This is going to be a very long and slow process because of its distributed nature, consumer preferences, and expected lifetimes of all the cars currently in use. If we start pushing electric more heavily next year, we'll be lucky to have 50% of cars electric by 2030 without massive subsidies to take old cars off the road.

By contrast, we know when power plants are scheduled for decommission and we can easily speed up their replacement or refurbishment with cleaner technologies.

Re:Power required to charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now has anyone sat down and actually figured out what kind of pollution trade off we are talking about"

Dude, I really don't give a shit about hybrids or EVs, and I even know that years ago that was figured out. Then, it was already known that a car running on electricity output only 40% CO2 for the same mileage for the same weight, rolling resistance, and aerodynamics, than a gasoline powered one.

And it's far easier to fix up coal plants and make them output less crap, then fixing or getting off the road the hundreds of thousands of vehicles that a coal or nuclear plant would equivalently support that otherwise ran an gasoline. Hell, just look at the recalls from the car manufacturers, and what a big deal it is if they numbers exceed 100k vehicles.

Around where I live, tuners and vehicles from the early 90s are still quite prevalent (and smelly). I'd welcome EVs. My problem on the whole scheme is that much of the large transportation industry still runs on diesel, and any pressure on the electricity end is going to drive gas prices down, which means those vehicles would still be quite prevalent despite the benefits of EVs.

Then again, I still have a handful of neighbors who burn wood to heat their homes too and smoke up the whole neighborhood bothering dozens of people's air quality. Still better than all of us burning wood.

Re:Power required to charge?

[tgriset]

This is a very interesting question. Plug-in electric vehicles generally rely on grid-purchased electricity to run, meaning that their fuel costs and that fuels' emissions characteristics will be determined by the policies affecting the overall electricity generation mix. In states with renewable portfolio standards, which require electricity suppliers to source a specified portion of their energy from renewable resources, electric cars may be displacing fossil fuels, whereas in other states, the electricity used for transportation purposes may come from coal or even oil itself. I write a blog about energy policy and technology, including electric vehicles and renewable power: http://www.energypolicyupdate.blogspot.com/ For more on electric vehicles, you might be interested in this post. Or check out this post for more on the mix of generation resources producing electricity that could be used to power electric cars.

One thick cable....

[acnicklas]

I can't see this thing being hooked up to the 120V in the garage and still charging in six minutes... more like 460V 3-phase (disclaimer - I am by no means an EE).

Re:One thick cable....

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, we knew immediately you weren't an EE. There was no need to clarify.

Re:One thick cable....

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, we knew immediately you weren't an EE. There was no need to clarify.

dickhead

Re:One thick cable....

[oldhack]

It's feasible with high quality Denon Super High Fidelity Power Ethernet(TM) cable. You can look it up at Amazon.com

Re:One thick cable....

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't see this thing being hooked up to the 120V in the garage and still charging in six minutes... more like 460V 3-phase (disclaimer - I am by no means an EE).

More likely, it will need 1.21 Gigawatts. Let's see if it can sustain 88mph.

Re:One thick cable....

[nonguru]

I'm sure you can use can use Monster Hi-Fi cables with suitable adapters. The quality of the electrical storage is so much better than with the cheaper alternative - 3/4 listeners recommend it...

Re:One thick cable....

[beernutmark]

Mod parent funny. Perfect setup and spike.

Re:One thick cable....

[Hans Lehmann]

Why the hostility? These stories appear here, and elsewhere on the Internet, pretty regularly... "Drive X miles after only charging your car for Y minutes", etc. Without knowing the energy efficiency, the cost of the batteries, their expected lifetime, etc., these claims are completely worthless. They're written the way they are for a reason, to make those that aren't EE's (i.e. the general public) believe that this really is a magic bullet, and to hopefully invest in a probably-bogus company that will never actually produce anything.

Re:One thick cable....

[strack]

if its a battery technology, you can assume that the efficiency from plug to battery to electric motor to wheel is gonna be around 80%.

Re:One thick cable....

[Vegemeister]

If that means I can get 3-phase service to my house, I for one welcome our new environmentally friendly overlords.

What kind of direct current source?

[Petersko]

"when charged from a direct current source"

Am I gonna need 2000 amp breakers for the garage?

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[zippthorne]

Only if you don't have 10 kV outlets...

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 kV direct current?

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amateurs!!! I just connect it directly to this line,

http://www.hydro.mb.ca/corporate/facilities/ts_nelson.shtml

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[timeOday]

Am I gonna need 2000 amp breakers for the garage?

No, because you normally don't pit-stop at home for 6 minutes at a time. At home you would charge it at night, likely from a 220v source like your dryer and stove use. What the fast charge is for is to also enable the car to make long trips by having special chargers at gas stations.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[MichaelSmith]

Am I gonna need 2000 amp breakers for the garage?

No, because you normally don't pit-stop at home for 6 minutes at a time. At home you would charge it at night, likely from a 220v source like your dryer and stove use. What the fast charge is for is to also enable the car to make long trips by having special chargers at gas stations.

If electric cars catch on I think "gas stations" will be a thing of the past. A charging station could be a box attached to an electricity pylon.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like if the internal combustion engine catches on those troughs in front of bars and those dirty guys with "U" shaped things for horses feet will be a thing of the past...

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm assuming that the "when charged from a direct current source" is a polite way of either cutting AC rectification losses out of the equation or saying that you won't be charging this sucker at home without quite specialized equipment and a fairly obliging utility company. I'm fairly sure that not only is my house wiring not up to it, even if you don't throw in a few percent extra for the AC-DC converter; but neither is the utility wiring for a fair distance from my house.

I'd assume, beyond simple dick waving, that the "6 minute charge" scenario is something you'd do at a specialized facility. Nobody wants to twiddle their thumbs for an hour at the gas station, so a fast charge is highly desirable, even if it requires some sort of scary automated conductor tentacle and a direct substation connection.

If you are just hanging out at home, trickle-charging at much easier rates becomes more viable.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

They probably won't sell gas; but I'd be fairly surprised to see the "arrangement of roads allowing safe stopping by multiple vehicles around a set of fueling points, along with ancillary rest areas and/or vending services" model die out.

The ability to just clip an AC-DC converter to the nearest pylon, connected to a cell-network or powerline networked POS terminal, will make putting low traffic/emergency fueling points in the ass end of nowhere a good deal easier(especially since, the further you are from competition and civilization, the less choosy customers get to be about their charge rate. Something that can dump a 100kw of DC power from an AC line isn't cheap. Something that can do 1 or 2 kw is.)

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[espiesp]

Not for quick charging. You MUST have the electrical equivalent to a gasoline storage tank in order to supply it quickly enough. A big bank of batteries/capacitors.

Yes, you will likely be able to plug in at the local shopping mall and grocery store, maybe even plug into the parking meter! But for a road trip, you use up your 'tank' and want to fill it up quickly. The grid can not support that now or likely ever. Thus, the need for the 'gas station' with the 6-min charge capability (at a drastically increased cost of electricity over a home fillup to pay for the infrastructure.)

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Shakrai]

likely from a 220v source like your dryer and stove use

Not to nitpick but if you are referring to the US and/or Canada it should be 240V, not 220V. The standard residential connection in the US is a split-phase connection where each leg aims for 120V. Cross the two and you get 240V.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[BlitzTech]

Don't forget a credit card mag stripe reader so you can, you know, PAY for the electricity you're dumping into your car. Unless you get free electricity, which is a whole other story.

Around here, we pay $0.10/kWh. Not a whole lot to juice up the car, but definitely not 0.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[MichaelSmith]

Or a data channel in the charging interface. Negotiate account details to get charging current. Similar to USB.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[fyngyrz]

It just means charging it from other batteries. No mystery or difficulty here. Batteries are required anyway to load balance and hold demand to reasonable levels.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[cgenman]

In Rome and parts of Italy, "gas stations" are basically a parking spot in the shoulder, with a small gasoline vending machine. I'm somewhat surprised we don't have those in big cities here in the states.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[MichaelSmith]

The charging interface should have a data channel so that account details can be negotiated.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[adolf]

likely from a 220v source like your dryer and stove use
 

Not to nitpick but if you are referring to the US and/or Canada it should be 240V, not 220V. The standard residential connection in the US is a split-phase connection where each leg aims for 120V. Cross the two and you get 240V.

Not to nitpick but if you are referring to (pick a country), then anything between about 220V and 240V is "220." Or "240," depending on local parlance.

The two are synonymous. Much as "110," "115," and "120" are.

Power, once distributed, isn't very exact -- no matter what the nationality. Here in the States, I've seen unladen "120V" circuits ranging between 112V to 128V. And if we're doing the center-tapped-transformer thing, as common in the US, then this equates to "224V to 256V" when using the entire secondary winding.

It's quite normal for this sort of variation to occur in the real world, and is going to remain that way until we all see auto-switching multitap transformers by the street, or personal motor-generators, or some similar expensive thing (none of which are ever likely to happen).

Quit being a pedant where it isn't required.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[adolf]

likely from a 220v source like your dryer and stove use
 

Not to nitpick but if you are referring to the US and/or Canada it should be 240V, not 220V. The standard residential connection in the US is a split-phase connection where each leg aims for 120V. Cross the two and you get 240V.

Not to nitpick but if you are referring to (pick a country), then anything between about 220V and 240V is "220." Or "240," depending on local parlance.

The two are synonymous. Much as "110," "115," and "120" are.

Power, once distributed, isn't very exact -- no matter what the nationality. Here in the States, I've seen unladen "120V" circuits ranging between 112V to 125V. And if we're doing the center-tapped-transformer thing, then this equates to "224 to 250V".

It's quite normal for this sort of variation to occur in the real world, and is going to remain that way until we all see auto-switching multitap transformers by the street, or personal motor-generators, or something similar (none of which is likely to ever happen).

Quit being a pedant where it isn't required.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[MichaelSmith]

Posting seems to be broken so this may not get through.

Petrol stations here are mixed businesses anyway. They sell convenience store products. Country petrol stations which combine engineering with good service should survive. Many city petrol stations will go, to be replaced by small convenience stores. Shopping centres will provide charging facilities. That way you can shop for food, get a meal and see a movie while your car is being charged.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Canazza]

UK is 230V and Some of Europe is 220V and the rest is 230 (like France, who used to be 220)

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't be needing that arc welder anymore.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Jason Levine]

Exactly. In the short term, I'd expect gas stations to survive both because they would support the legacy fleet of gas-powered cars and also because they would put up charging stations for electric cars. In fact, they would probably make more money on electric car drivers, even if the cost of recharging your car was less than a gas tank refill. Since you are stuck charging, you'd probably stop into the convience store and buy a couple of things.

I've already seen grocery stores which provide gas stations as well (sometimes at a reduced price for their shopping club members). I could see this being expanded to electric chargers. Park your car in a special "charger-enabled" section of the lot, swipe your credit card, plug in, and then get your groceries while your car slowly charges. Of course, as more shops add chargers to their parking lots (as it is relatively easy to do versus putting in a gas tank/pump system) and as less gas-powered cars are on the road, less people will need to stop at dedicated "gas stations" and those will slowly go out of business.

At some point, we'll tell our grandchildren stories of how we gassed up our cars and they'll ask if that's when the drive-through served dino-burgers.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[shadowrat]

Also the amount of power that such a system would likely dispense is dangerous. These stations would probably require service attendants trained in the use of the equipment. I see them popping up in oregon and new jersey first.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[htdrifter]

The power going to your house is AC. Batteries are DC. In order to charge a battery you have to convert AC to DC. You do that with a rectifier normally or an AC motor/DC generator set. The problem with fast charging is the current (Amps) required.

The quantity of energy is KWH (Killo Watt Hours). If the battery stores 30KWH then it would take 30KW (the rate) for 1 hour to charge the battery.

For a discharged 48 Volt battery the charging current for one hour would be;
    I = 30 KW (charging rate) / 48 (charging voltage) = 625 Amps.
If you cut the time to 6 minutes then the current would be 10 times that (6,250 Amps). I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that operation.

The ampacity of wire depends on it's cross sectional area.
A current of 625 Amps is close to the spec for 2000 MCM (depending on temperature rating), which is 1.92 inches (48.8 mm) in diameter, so it would require buss bars. The fast charge rate (6 minutes) would require over 10 times that conductor cross section area.
Conductors that big are not manageable by hand and currents that high are very dangerous.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Richy_T]

Maybe by that time, the drive-through will sell dino-burgers.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Richy_T]

Our little city here in Tennessee still has a few old, dead pumps from when that was the case here.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Richy_T]

This is just a nomenclature change. Europe is now 230V+-10%. The actual voltages generated in the countries concerned didn't change at all.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[Richy_T]

Or maybe 5% which would also cover 220 and 240.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[MichaelSmith]

I can see the other two replies now. Sorry for the noise but I got the notification email for your reply about a hundred times overnight. Was there any explanation for the outage? I didn't see one.

Re:What kind of direct current source?

[espiesp]

People have said the same thing about fuel pumps. Some people STILL say the same thing about fuel pumps. Oregon and New Jersey for sure.

If you're looking at pure energy dispensed we're talking pretty similar amount of energy in a pretty similar amount of time. Gasoline vs Electricity. I personally think it's manageable with the right hardware and the right software handshaking. It's not like they will put the power switch directly in the hands of the end-user!

Until I can buy one it doesnt exist

[grapeape]

Definitely sounds intriguing, capable of highway speeds, incredibly short charge time (real gas station on the go type charging a reality) and amazing mileage between charges. I can't help but think that this will never develop into anything that will actually be a consumer ready product. The science may be there but something tells me that other interests will prevent this from going anywhere. I really think the only way we will ever see competitive advancements in alternative energies beyond research and press blurbs is if we really get conclusive proof that fossil fuels are running out.

Re:Until I can buy one it doesnt exist

[Kenja]

There are many things you cant buy, that never the less exist.

Re:Until I can buy one it doesnt exist

[Angst Badger]

The science may be there but something tells me that other interests will prevent this from going anywhere.

The science probably isn't there, so the Great Petroleum Conspiracy can probably sleep well tonight. What they're describing doesn't violate any laws of physics per se, but the amount of power transferred in the time they're claiming is highly suspicious. The waste heat alone would be enormous unless their secret is room-temperature superconductors, in which case the electric car market is small potatoes, and someone is going to get a Nobel for this.

I'm not going to call bullshit on this story, but I will note that the article makes extraordinary claims without providing the requisite extraordinary evidence. At this point, it's just another startup making unsubstantiated claims. I hope it's true, but I am definitely not holding my breath.

Re:Until I can buy one it doesnt exist

[cgenman]

The 6 minute charge time may be an exaggeration, but the battery company does sell surprisingly long-life batteries for industrial robots.

Ten years ago traction control, electronic stability control, and semiautomatic shifting were experimental prototypes unlikely to go anywhere. Now you can get minivans with semi-automatic shifting if you'd like. It will get here.

Re:Until I can buy one it doesnt exist

[evilviper]

The science may be there but something tells me that other interests will prevent this from going anywhere. I really think the only way we will ever see competitive advancements in alternative energies beyond research and press blurbs is if we really get conclusive proof that fossil fuels are running out.

Let's see... Power companies throughout California are in a mad rush to squire as much land as they can get, in order to secure their plans for rolling out numerous massive solar power plants (both PV and solar-thermal). Car companies are shipping dozens of hybrids, and a few even have fully-electric cars with 100 mile range on the market you can go out and buy TODAY.

So, what in the hell are you talking about? We're living in the future right now. The big news recently is that analysts think it might take up to 10 years before fully-electric vehicles make up a substantial portion of car sales, while others think it will happen sooner... Quit complaining, and jump in and help!

Re:Until I can buy one it doesnt exist

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

The german sources I've read claim a 20 minute recharge time, which is much more plausible. The destination of the car was the seat of our Secretary of Commerce, with a lot of press waiting, so unless they pulled a stunt by exchanging cars somewhere en route the rest of the story is to be considered fact. So "just another startup" manufactured some batteries and installed them in a modified Audi A2, while keeping all 4 seats and the trunk in a useable state, and managed to drive that car from Munich to Berlin without recharging. This is an incredible feat, even if the claim on the recharge time in the article (I've not read said claim on the manufacturers website) might be dubious.

Re:Until I can buy one it doesnt exist

[FelxH]

I read a few German press releases about this story and also the website of DBM Energy itself and nowehere could I find the claim that they charged the car in 6min. All I could find was that the breakthrough they achieved was driving a 'standard' car (i.e. same equipment, same amount of space) for 600km with a single charge. The average driving speed appears to have been 130km/h, but references are not really clear (they could have meant a top speed of 130km/h). All in all, still great news if you ask me, but just horrible tech journalism :(

Re:Until I can buy one it doesnt exist

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say the science is there. They did drive the thing. They might be using some kind of 'trick' to charge it in 4 minutes (multiple chargers attached to smaller segments of the battery pack for example). If they had 10 charging cables, and ten chargers, it would get it down to 24 minutes. I would be fine with 24 minutes. Even an hour or 90 minutes would be ok with a 300 mile range.

Well - let's hope!

[SimonInOz]

If this is a real product, than it could indeed change the game.

I admit to a suspicion of a slight whiff of snake oil, but heck, let's dream for once!

Re:Well - let's hope!

[LWATCDR]

slight? that is more than range than my Mazda 3 gets out of a tank. So figure the energy density of around 10 US gallons of gasoline....
That is a lot of energy to put into a battery in a very short amount of time.
I want a lot more info.

Re:Well - let's hope!

[jamesh]

that is more than range than my Mazda 3 gets out of a tank

If you drive this car the way you'd need to drive a Mazda 3 to get less that 375 miles on a tank then i'm sure that this car won't get 375 miles either.

I can get double that range (~1200KM) in my car if I take it easy, and typically get over 600 miles without trying.

Re:Well - let's hope!

[LWATCDR]

Not really I have a Mazda3 s which is the 5 door which in the US is only available with the 2.3 4. That gets an EPA rated 31 MPG.
Now remember that US gallons are smaller by a good bit than imperial. Figuring in an off the cuff fudge factor for improvements I rounded that number up too 37.5 MPG. Still a rough fudge factor but still valid.
Even if you want to take the energy and cut it in half it is still A LOT OF ENERGY. People just don't get it but it takes a lot of energy to push a ton of stuff 300+ miles at over 50 mpg.
And think about how a battery works. When you put energy into a battery is stores it by a chemical reaction. Just charge your cell phone sometime and feel how warm that battery gets.
Now imagine all the energy in even just 5 gallons of gasoline being dumped into a battery in just 6 minutes!
Or save little way to see it in practical terms is find a backpackers camp stove. Get a good one like an MSR. Set it on high and see how long it takes to boil a quart of water. It can usually do it in about 6 minutes. Then look how much fuel it used and do the math.
Until I see it tested by an outside source it is way into the range of probable snake oil.
BTW you get double the range out of your car because I bet it is a TDI. Diesel actually has a lot more energy per gallon than gasoline you can see it in the density of the fuel. Diesel weighs right around 3.25KG per US gallon vs 2.72 which is one of the reasons that diesels get more MPG or KPLs than a gasoline engine does. The other reasons tend to be because a diesel does't have a throttle plate, lower friction from turning at lower RPMs, and a longer stroke to get the maximum power from the expansion phase.
Modern gasoline engines with direct injection get very close to the same distance per KG as diesels do but we don't tend to measure fuel mass.

Charging station?

[Yvan256]

What does the charging station use? Is it ultracapacitors?

Also, last time I checked both Germany, Japan and pretty much the rest of the planet used the metric system, so:

We all know that battery packs are the weakest link in electric vehicles. Not only are they heavy and expensive, but they take a long time to recharge and on average can only provide around 160 km per charge. A German-based company has changed all that with a new vehicle capable of driving up to 600 km at moderate highway speeds. ... It doesn't end there. The company responsible for the battery pack, DBM Energy, claims a battery pack efficiency of 97 percent and a recharge time of around 6 minutes when charged from a direct current source. Unlike the small Daihatsu which was heavily modified by a team in Japan earlier this year that achieved a massive 1000 km on a charge at around 43 km/h, the Audi A2 modified by DBM Energy was able to achieve its 600 km range at an average speed of 88 km/h.

Re:Charging station?

[srjh]

What does the charging station use? Is it ultracapacitors?

Also, last time I checked both Germany, Japan and pretty much the rest of the planet used the metric system, so:

Oh, come on, now you're being unfair. It's not the rest of the planet, Liberia and Myanmar are also yet to adopt the metric system. Sheesh.

Re:Charging station?

[camperdave]

There doesn't seem to be an imperial system for electrical measurements, so the whole planet's metric for that.

Re:Charging station?

[Anonymous Coward]

one thing's for sure, I wouldn't want ultracapacitors in a gas station

Re:Charging station?

[Ksevio]

Britain also still users miles instead of km, though they've converted most other things.

Re:Charging station?

[Neoprofin]

There's no "Imperial standard" for bandwidth either, so I guess the Internet must be metric too?

Place yer bets...

[wcspxyx]

...on which oil or car company will buy these guys so this technology never makes it to market.

I'm skeptical

[swillden]

I need lots more detail to believe this is even remotely feasible. If this was a small American company I would be sure it's a scam designed to extract money from gullible investors. For some reason, the fact that it's German gives me a little more credulity -- but not enough.

Re:I'm skeptical

[sbryant]

For some reason, the fact that it's German gives me a little more credulity -- but not enough.

How about the fact that they charged up the Audi A2 once (not in 6 minutes though), and then drove 600km (375 miles) from München to Berlin? More info here: http://www.lekker-mobil.com/ (the site is in German).

The summary title is misleading. Just because the battery can be charged in 6 minutes from a suitable DC source, doesn't mean that anybody actually has that sort of kit about, or even that the car will have a suitable connector. I'm guessing you can charge it fully in less than 2 hours from a standard 32A 400V 3-phase AC supply - these are quite common in Germany, and the picture showing them charging the car looks like it has one of those.

The most interesting thing about this battery is not the mad charge time from some über-Goliath capacitor, it's the size/weight and efficiency of the thing.

-- Steve

I notice a lot of suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's be practical. Fossil fuels won't last forever and neither will nuclear. Ultimately you are either going to run your cars on pure electric from an alternate source or biofuels and at the current rate of growth you can't grow enough biofuels. Solar roadways with roof top solar and some wind can easily replace the missing fossil fuels without having to worry about storing waste until we evolve into another species, tens of thousands to in some cases millions of years. Ultimately some form of ultracapacitor will run the majority of cars. The odds of most cars being electric in a 100 years is a 100%. The odds of most using some form of electric motors in the next 25 years is extremely high. Everyone in the Slashdot world practically worships nuclear but even it would be electric. If you want either nuclear or solar to take over you'd better embrace electric cars or you'll eventually end up on horses again and then we'll all be debating hay prices.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

WTS several bales of hay, by AH in IF

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

(Different AC here.)

Further, I find it odd that so many of the early posts to this article essentially read "The charger is gonna be as expensive as the car! How could I possibly charge this thing at home? This thing's bullshit vaporware!"

The most interesting thing about this article is that it takes 6 minutes to fill up a vehicle for 375 miles of travel. Sounds like the same thing I did on the way home when I stopped at the Sunoco station. That means after a little retrofitting, that the existing paradigm of going to a gas station to fill up won't change, and frankly that's what most drivers want. Home charging stations means that you're on a tether to your home, albeit one that is in this case 375 miles long. This gives more flexibility, and a true fill-'er-up and go experience that Americans in particular are used to. Further, it means that current owners of gas stations, many of which are still independently owned and operated, can continue doing business essentially in the same way they have for years. And it's a good model. They price the commodity as low as possible, and charge $1.25 for 20 ounces of soda in the convenience store to make a profit. The model works for businessmen and for consumers both.

It has been discussed on Slashdot before that the best way to switch from one technology to another is to keep the experience for all stakeholders as similar as possible to the original tech. Keeping the experience of "gassing" up a car means that for everyone involved with the actual implementation of electric power, there is familiarity for them. That means buy-in from consumers and buy-in from retailers, and those buy-ins are key to a successful switch from the current gasoline-based infrastructure.

(P.S. I find it fitting my captcha was 'refuel')

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

solar isn't energy dense enough. The mining of fissionable materials in space is the future.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

The mining of fissionable materials in space is the future.

Nah... came from there, seen it... it is a Dyson Sphere

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[Shakrai]

Let's be practical. Fossil fuels won't last forever and neither will nuclear.

Got any evidence for the notion that we will run out of fissionable material before the sun goes dark?

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

that would block needed sunlight.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[camperdave]

The easiest way to stretch the fossil fuels, and possibly make solar practical is to wipe out large swaths of the population. Imagine what the US's energy demands would be like if you eliminated the top 100 most populated cities.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[Ihlosi]

solar isn't energy dense enough. The mining of fissionable materials in space is the future.

Once we get energy-positive D-D fusion working, fission will fall out of fashion quite quickly. To top off your tank, just stick a large straw in the nearest gas giant. Once we get H-H fusion working, you won't even need to do isotope separation.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[jabuzz]

Simply not true. There is sufficient desert space available to generate at least 40 times the current total world energy consumption as electricity. This is only assuming a conversion ration of about 12% which is actually quite low from what is achievable.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[zevans]

The sunlight is not needed outside the sphere, or under the desert.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[JTsyo]

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Uranium_supply
70 years with current mines and up to 200 years with new mines.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[Shakrai]

How convenient that you ignored the bit about thorium being a fuel source that we already know how to utilize and which is three times as abundant as uranium. There's also more exotic methods such as seawater extraction that would become economical long before the world ran out of uranium.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment actually assert that GP's statement, "solar isn't energy dense enough", is true.
If solar energy is dense enough, you wouldn't need so much space to capture the energy.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[JTsyo]

But will those supply last until the sun burns out? I was just pointing out what we use now will run out in 200 years, way before the sun. Even if new material is found on Earth to be used that pushes it out to 200 years you're still shy.

Re:I notice a lot of suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

It goes down to 10 years if you replace gasoline and diesel with nuclear electricity.

55 mph deathtrap

[GaryOlson]

If this car can't get to 75 mph in 10 seconds or less, the last 370 miles won't matter. I'll already have been run over or run off the road in the metroplex.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[MichaelSmith]

If this car can't get to 75 mph in 10 seconds or less, the last 370 miles won't matter. I'll already have been run over or run off the road in the metroplex.

WTF is a "metroplex"? Is this something specific to where you live? My bicycle can't get anywhere near 75 mph in 10 or 1000 seconds yet I don't seem to share your issues.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[MtHuurne]

This article has some more info: They got 55 mph average speed, not top speed. The test run was on a highway, from Munich to Berlin. It doesn't say though what limited the average speed: the driver choosing not to go faster, the congestion on the road or speed limits. Since both the start and finish were inside a city, the first and last stretch will have been slow.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the largest Autobot transformers....duh!? Thousands could live inside him and I am sure his other-wordly power source could charge a fleet of these cars in 0.1 seconds

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[Polumna]

Obviously he's referring to this guy, who will get sick of tailgaiting in about five miles, but luckily has a top speed of 70mph.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[LongearedBat]

Those are average speeds, not top speeds. And even if that battey type is better suited as an "endurance battery", it could then be fitted alongside a "strength battery".
Sure, you'd have to fit smaller batteries to fit both, but at some point you're going to have to make a tradeoff, no matter how you look at it.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[LongearedBat]

The Metroplex is the city centre complex in the city called Metropolis.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing he means the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex
maybe not a well known term outside of Texas, but it could refer to any "large metropolitan area containing several cities and their suburbs," in wikipedia's words

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This specific model may have extraordinary limitations, for efficiency reasons or something; but, under typical circumstances, electric motors are capable of delivering torque that falls somewhere between "surprising"(in the case of hobby motors) and "downright dangerous"(in the case of larger ones). And, the closer you are to stall, the greater the torque.

In 2 or 4 motor direct-drive designs, where there is minimal gearing to worry about stripping, electric models are largely limited by the fact that burning rubber is inefficient, and setting your wiring/battery on fire is dangerous.

I would expect, in practice, any mass-production electric vehicle to be governed down fairly aggressively to keep people with internal combustion reflexes from killing themselves or others.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[cgenman]

My mother's old Sentra got 0-60 in approximately 30 seconds. You whippersnappers have no patience.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF!? We are talking about electric cars here. Acceleration is not a problem when it comes to electric engines.

ELECTRIC CAR tzero versus Ferrari 355 0-60 mph
Corvette Vs Tzero Electric Car
Dodge Viper 500 hp Vs Tzero Electric Car
Tesla Roadster vs. Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet

The batteries have always been the weak point of electric cars, everything else has always been superior compared to other cars but without good batteries they are unusable for day to day use.
It would be so awesome if this story was true. I really hope that we could replace all those obsolete oil-driven cars soon. Things like lung cancer, dirty windows, noise pollution, cars getting stuck in snow and a lot of other problems will become so much smaller then.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[Issarlk]

With enough oomph in the battery, or with capacitors, electric cars will leave gas guzzling behemoth in the dust when you push the pedal. The Tesla does after all ; it is expensive, but mass production should help it's motors to land in your next electric car.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[Anonymous Coward]

We are talking electrical cars, and you are doubting its acceleration capabilities?

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[Anonymous Coward]

If this car can't get to 75 mph in 10 seconds or less, the last 370 miles won't matter. I'll already have been run over or run off the road in the metroplex.

WTF is a "metroplex"? Is this something specific to where you live? My bicycle can't get anywhere near 75 mph in 10 or 1000 seconds yet I don't seem to share your issues.

Metroplex. From the comment you quoted I'd say he's referring to DFW. If you rode your bicycle in the places he'd experience those issues you would not share them. Although fire department personnel might have some emotional or psychological issues after they got called to hose you off the road.

Move bitch, get out the way
Get out the way bitch, get out the way
Move bitch, get out the way
Get out the way bitch, get out the way -- Ludacris

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[oddaddresstrap]

:"The Metroplex" is the Dallas-Ft Worth area in Texas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas%E2%80%93Fort_Worth_metroplex

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[Vegemeister]

If he lives in the same area I do, the 'metroplex' is the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, plus the surrounding suburbs and exurbs.

Re:55 mph deathtrap

[zevans]

The Tesla sports cars aren't expensive, when you compare it to roadsters of similar performance, and especially if you factor in the running costs of that sub-20mpg competitor. (Plus, the petrol cars are a lot bigger and heavier, and therefore a worse package overall.)

More info

[Namarrgon]

It's a lithium-polymer battery dubbed "Hummingbird", and it's already in-use in warehouse forklifts. There's more info at dbm-energy.com and lekker-mobil.com (both in German). Still pretty light on details though.

I'd post the link to the FAQ directly, but Slashdot still won't let me paste the URL (yep, Chrome user), and it's way too long to type by hand.

Re:More info

[Anonymous Coward]

The relevant Chrome bug is Issue 60047:
http://crbug.com/60047

You can vote/star/comment on it using a Google/GMail account.

Re:More info

[Anonymous Coward]

Finny, I use Chrome and have no problem posting links with long URLs like this one.

Re:More info

[bloobamator]

Use tinyurl.com to provide the link.

Re:More info

[ebuck]

In model aircraft lithium-polymer batteries are the batteries of choice due to their high energy storage densities. They also can catch fire while charging and sometimes explode.

I've been out of the electric model aircraft game for quite some time, could someone who's current mention if they've addressed the two "issues" which seem to cast doubt on seeing a production version of this car in this form?

Re:More info

[Namarrgon]

Incorrect popup image scaling? How is that related to clipboard paste failure? Did you mistype that URL by hand?

As it turns out though, paste is now working fine for me, so all is well again.

oh crap

[mevets]

Does this mean we have to bomb Germany?

Re:oh crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Again?

House Battery Swapping

[Doc Ruby]

battery pack efficiency of 97 percent and a recharge time of around 6 minutes when charged from a direct current source

Solar photovoltaic and fuel cells generate direct current. Usually they go through an inverter, that loses 10-25% of the energy (as heat, and burns out the part for replacement about every 5 years). A battery like this would mean keeping that energy without losing it. Leaving a battery charging at home while driving the car around, then swapping it into the car when the car returns home - or reverse the positions for batteries charging at work or at whatever daytime destination. That battery can also power household devices, like the many devices that really consume DC, which waste power running from wall current into rectifiers.

This kind of device could improve not only transit energy, but also residential (and commercial sites that reverse the locations).

Re:House Battery Swapping

[dutchwhizzman]

You still need an inverter (or other switching power supply) to control the charging current and required voltage. It's not as if all DC voltage appliances are equal and don't require current control. To convert from high to low voltage, you can get away with just the secondary electronics, but to convert up, you'll need the full switching power supply, with the losses. Having said this, using local energy sources for trickle charge will probably become more popular once we will have more battery powered devices and there will be a standard for these batteries. Since you usually are away with your car during the time that the solar panels will generate power, a hot-swap system will be mandatory for trickle chargers to succeed. Hot swapping for service stations, like we do with gas powered cars, won't work. Batteries are prone to aging and you wouldn't want to swap your brand new battery for one that's 2 years old and barely holds a charge anymore. Grading batteries is labor intensive or will be a magnet to everyone that wants to fraud the system by getting good money for old batteries by artificially grading them higher. You'll have to make so much checks before you'll know the real condition of a battery that it will take too much time for the customer and cost too much money per exchange in labor to be viable. I still see more future in a hot-swap for high capacity hydrogen storage containers. Even tho those will be a hazard for fire and explosives, they won't wear as much chemically. You can convert the hydrogen to electricity with a fuel cell, so you can still run your electric battery car on these.

Re:House Battery Swapping

[Anonymous Coward]

The test run along the A9. This autobahn intersects with the A4 and A92. On both the A4 and A92 I remember seeing solar power plants. They installed solar panels on top of sound barriers. Quite a sheap/nice solution. So next time take a realistic speed, which would be around 150km/h and get a recharge at the intersection of the A9 with the A4.

Re:House Battery Swapping

[Anonymous Coward]

That battery can also power household devices, like the many devices that really consume DC, which waste power running from wall current into rectifiers.

This kind of device could improve not only transit energy, but also residential (and commercial sites that reverse the locations).

A rectifier is the least of the problems with current DC-powered devices in households, they are extremely efficient. The main reason for waste is the voltage conversion for which you need transformers or switchers. Incidentally, converting voltage with DC is much harder/wasteful than converting AC, so unless every DC device uses the same voltage, there is no gain here.

Re:House Battery Swapping

[celtic_hackr]

Or you could just drive it back and forth to work all week, go out on Saturday night, and let it charge overnight while you sleep it off. You'd probably have more than a "quarter tank " charge left after all that (assuming ~50mi/day round trips). No need for hot/cold swapping of batteries. Or you could trickle charge every night and wake up to a fully charged battery every day. I'd buy one of these today if it was on the market.

Re:House Battery Swapping

[Kintanon]

You do not need to charge your damned car at work. Nor necessarily at home either. If you have a 300+ mile capacity and there are filling stations that can fill the damn thing up in 6 minutes then you drive the damn car around just like it had a gasoline engine and when the charge gets down around the 10% level you stop at the damn charging station and fill it up.

Why is everyone obsessed with the idea that they need to charge their car at home and at work and at the mall? Within the next couple of years regular gas stations will start having one or two electric "pumps" just like they have one or two diesel pumps. Then maybe you'll all STFU about charging your fucking car at the office.

Re:House Battery Swapping

[Doc Ruby]

Because the sun is shining while the car is at work, but not while the car is back home. Battery cars are a great match to the PV that could be on every roof it it had efficient consumption of the power, also making the power infrastructure more distributed, thereby efficient and reliable.

You fucking stupid cunt.

Re:House Battery Swapping

[Smidge204]

A lot of people have problems getting past the "gas station" analogy, and how EVs won't be viable until you can recharge them in a manner equivalent to refilling a gas tank.

But you, sir, are the first person to militantly defend that analogy. Kudos for completely missing the point, I guess.

What would be better: going a little out of your way and stopping for 6 minutes at a charging station maybe once a week, or never stopping at all because every time you get back into your car it's been recharged?

It's an important thing to understand: Electric vehicles are not just a technology, it's part of an entire energy ecosystem. You do not need - nor should you have - a system that mirrors petroleum distribution.
=Smidge=

Re:House Battery Swapping

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually they go through an inverter, that loses 10-25% of the energy...

Besides being an hw and sw eng (MSEE) and electronics tech. I install solar PV systems. Most inverters are up to 96% efficient, have 10 year warranties, and should last a human lifetime. They don't get hot even when running at full capacity. Fronius and Enphase are 2 brands I've been using a lot, others are competitive and excellent too.

Please be more careful about what you write- it becomes accepted "popular misconception" and nearly impossible to dispel.

Just imagine where we'd be if

[CityZen]

the Model T were electric.

Though I must admit: the rate of improvement of many technologies does seem to have increased much in recent years. Even gas engines, which have been around since long before the Model T, seem to be getting much more powerful (per liter) recently compared to when I started driving. Still, I wonder where we'd be now if we'd started with electric instead of gas. Heck, where would we be if GM hadn't killed the EV1, for that matter?

Re:Just imagine where we'd be if

[damnfuct]

Worldwide copper shortage

Re:Just imagine where we'd be if

[westlake]

Still, I wonder where we'd be now if we'd started with electric instead of gas.

We began with the electric.

Lead-acid batteries. Speed five miles an hour. Range about 25 miles.

Serviceable specs for a mid-town home delivery service. The ice man or the milk truck.

But rural electric service and paved roads outside the city limits were uncommon before World War I.

Re:Just imagine where we'd be if

[Anonymous Coward]

We'd be past Peak Lithium by now and be destabilizing the West African Metals Cartel for their precious samarium and boron mines as possible fuel cell reaction substrates, as battery technology is 'no longer sustainable'.

Re:Just imagine where we'd be if

[JSlope]

As strange as it sounds we actually started with electric see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle the gas proved more efficient...

Re:Just imagine where we'd be if

[Smidge204]

Lithium is the 18th most abundant element in the earth's crust. For example, there is more lithium laying around than:

Beryllium
Nitrogen (excluding atmospheric nitrogen)
Chromium
Nickel
Copper
Zinc
Gallium
Germanium
Tin
Tungsten
Lead

Now, I've read (PDF) there is ~30 million tons of lithium on reserve (meaning readily extractable with current infrastructure).

If you need 140 grams of lithium per kWh of battery then today's typical electric car will need 3.4 kg of the stuff, meaning you can make 588 million such cars per million tons. Right now there are about 800 million cars in the entire world. Advances in technology notwithstanding, roughly 4.5% of our currently available lithium supply will satisfy the entire global automotive market.

Peak lithium my ass. and does it need to be mentioned that, unlike petroleum, the lithium can be recycled?
=Smidge=

Infrastructure

[Palmsie]

I understand why increasing electronic car's battery life is important but when the second generation of cars were coming out of Ford, no one was complaining about larger gas tanks. They built infrastructure to compensate for the lack of a 200 gallon tank and the complaint, "well how am I supposed to drive across the state on one tank!? You mean I have to wait, fill it, and pump it myself!?" No, they built infrastructure. When battery life is about equal to gasoline cars, build infrastructure to support them. One suggestion at a TED talk was a station that replaces empty batteries with new charged ones. Imagine a car wash that you drive into, pay for your new battery, the machine lifts up the hood, pops out the empty or half-full cell and pops in a new one. But wait, that's MY battery, how do I know if I'm getting a good battery? Well how do you know you're getting gasoline and not apple juice? You set standards, charge limits and you pay by some standardized metric (gallons of oil to X in electric batteries). This creates new jobs for mechanics and technicians to build these stations, replaces gasoline cars with environmentally friendly electronic cells, and practically eliminates the "range anxiety" problem. Once you can travel a few hundred miles on a charge, it won't be a problem because you can pull over to a station and pay for a full cell. If you want to wait, you can drive home and plug in your car for a few hours. Infrastructure support is the answer, not the ultimate electronic battery. It doesn't need to exist for this technology to work (that isn't to say that the technology doesn't need to improve, of course it does).

stolen from the comments of TFA

[wealthychef]

Translated from this page: http://adacemobility.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/das-wunder-von-berlin/#more-744
"Technical Data Audi A2 DBM *
* Subject
Empty weight (including driver) 1260 kg
Perm. Total weight 1600 kg
Battery lithium-iron-polymer (260 Ah/380 V) cell voltage of 3.8 volts
Battery weight about 300 kg
Charging time about 4 hours due to mains phase current in the household (380)
battery requires 6 minutes (future solution)
Life time 2500 charge cycles (without loss of capacity)
= Service life target: 500,000 km
Top speed 160 km / h
5-speed sequential gearbox (race gear: shifting without the clutch)
E-motor 300 Nm torque"
So, the 6 minute charge is future/theoretical limits of the battery. The actual time is 4 hours; which is still very impressive.
Sincerely, Neil

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Some thing tells me this aint right. The specific energy of Li-polymer batteries are somewhere in between 100-200 Wh/kg. This one achieves a whopping 300+ Wh/kg. Either the journalist reporting misheard or these guys are surely on their way to win the Nobel.

Of course, the most obvious possibility is that this is a big scam.

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Translated from this page: http://adacemobility.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/das-wunder-von-berlin/#more-744
Battery lithium-iron-polymer (260 Ah/380 V) cell voltage of 3.8 volts

That's about 100 kWh, or 1 hour of 100 kW output.

With "375 miles range at an average speed of 55", that's about 6.8 hours of operation, which then allows an average power of a bit less than 14.5 kW. That sounds believable for the given driving profile.

The numbers are consistent at least.

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[GrahamCox]

5-speed sequential gearbox (race gear: shifting without the clutch)

Why does it need this? It should be possible to put the drive motors in the wheel hubs and do away with all transmission, clutches, drive shafts and what-have-you. Motors are efficient over a much wider speed range than IC. A British company already achieved a practical motor/brake combination that is 100kW at the wheel with no greater unsprung weight than a typical current car.

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[doghouse41]

Why bother with a Gearbox? It should not be needed with an electric motor.

I recall that Tesla started off with a 2-speed gearbox. They abandoned it when they found that it was unnecessary and just added complexity and weight.

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

So that's 4-ish hours charge time on what is presumably 380v 3-phase?

Not exactly a normal "household" supply really, but should be readily installable in most semi-urban areas (at least in places like the UK and Germany).

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[wealthychef]

5-speed sequential gearbox (race gear: shifting without the clutch)

Why does it need this? It should be possible to put the drive motors in the wheel hubs ...

I think the idea was to use a stock car basically off the shelf and fill the existing engine compartment. Electric motors at each wheel probably did not fit into the existing body and it was easier to just use a transmission. So a total redesign would yield even more benefits.

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[kehren77]

Okay, I'm a little fuzzy on their math for service life. If it gets 375 miles on one charge that's about 600 km. If it has 2,500 charge cycles before capacity loss occurs, then you should be able to get 1,500,000 km (or about 932,000 miles) out of the battery before it needs replacing.

So where do they get a service life target that is a third of that?

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[Agripa]

Even if the power per volume is good enough, the motors are pretty heavy so mounting them in the wheels would compromise drivability because of the increased unsprung weight. Higher performance cars have inboard brakes for that very reason.

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[GrahamCox]

Yes, except that the company I mentioned developed a combined motor/brake unit with a 100kW output power weighing 22kg. That is in the same ballpark as a conventional disc brake and drive shaft. Sadly, last time I checked they'd gone into receivership, but nevertheless the technology exists for average-car applications. Performance cars might use a slightly different arrangement for ideal unsprung weight, but let's walk before we can run.

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[Agripa]

That sounds like the brushless air core stator design using litz wire. I did not know they had gotten to that kind of power per weight. I wonder why it is not more popular in that type of application. Maybe the cost of the needed rare earth magnets make it uneconomical compared to an in board motor plus drive shaft?

I am leery of a design which lacks mechanical brakes as a backup but I am in the minority who prefers manual transmissions for reliability reasons.

Re:stolen from the comments of TFA

[GrahamCox]

I don't really know much about how the motor works, but Volvo and others are using it for research. The company is called Protean Electric. Unfortunately their website sucks and doesn't tell you much about the technology itself. Seems they found some more investment since I last checked though.

At first I felt similarly about not having mechanical brakes as a "failsafe", but if you think about brakes as a mechanism that removes energy from the wheel, as long as you have somewhere to put it and can do it sufficiently rapidly, there's no reason they can't be as effective, with the bonus that you keep the energy for later use (and if that storage is full, just convert to heat and vent to the air, as all cars do now). Current brakes have a finite limit to how rapidly they can convert energy, as I have discovered on numerous occasions!

With you on manual transmissions, vastly prefer it in conventional cars, but looking forward to the day that no transmission at all is ever needed. The existence of a complex transmission of any sort is an indication of just how unsuitable IC engines are for cars.

100 miles per charge?

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know that battery packs are the weakest link in electric vehicles. Not only are they heavy and expensive, but they take a long time to recharge and on average can only provide around 100 miles per charge.

I call BS!

The chemistries and capacities of batteries chosen by car makers can only provide around 100 miles per charge. We all know that they choose to do this because market research indicates that most users won't regularly drive more than 100 miles in a single sitting and car manufacturers are trying to produce as cheap a product as possible.

Current battery technologies, as demonstrated by the linked article, can easily exceed 100 miles per charge, can be lighter and can be recharged more quickly than overnight.

Re:100 miles per charge?

[zevans]

The chemistries and capacities of batteries chosen by car makers can only provide around 100 miles per charge. We all know that they choose to do this because market research indicates that most users won't regularly drive more than 100 miles in a single sitting and car manufacturers are trying to produce as cheap a product as possible.

Yeah, and I never understood that. Why target consumers one-by-one with a huge cost of sale, when you could be targeting fleet vehicles and build some volume very quickly indeed?

Charge at service stations

[LongearedBat]

Okay, so we won't be able to charge car batteries at home. But we don't fill our cars with petrol or diesel at home either.

We use service stations for that. I'm sure service stations could be retrofitted to charge car batteries.
(Though for safety reasons, a service station should probably not serve both fuel and high voltage electricity.)

Re:Charge at service stations

[Anonymous Coward]

> Okay, so we won't be able to charge car batteries in 6 minutes at home.

There, fixed it for you.

Some numbers

[Animats]

Some numbers from their YouTube video slide show. (That's a bad sign. I'd much rather see a technical paper.) Here's what they claim:

• "300 Wh/Kg"
• "2500 charge cycles with no degradation".
• "6 minute charge time for 100KWh."

Those are impressive numbers, if real. 2500 charge cycles at 500 Km per charge is 750,000 Km. Typical car life today is around 250,000 Km, so the battery will outlast the car.

300 Wh/Kg is very high, but not unheard of. They say it's a lithium chemistry. Lithium tetrachloroaluminate batteries get numbers like that. Unfortunately, it has hazard problems. "Reacts violently with water or humid air to give off corrosive fumes of hydrocloric acid and sulfur oxide." (A basic problem with battery chemistry is that the further you go out on the electromotive series, the higher the cell voltage, but the more reactive the material. Sodium-sulfur batteries have very good energy density, but sodium burns on contact with water.)

It's possible that this battery does everything they say. But they never mention safety or flammability.

Re:Some numbers

[hyc]

They claim the battery construction is completely safe, and that the battery keeps operating even after having a bullet fired through it.

http://www.dbm-energy.com/index.php?ms=KolibriAkkuUnterBeschuss

(I'll leave it to you to run it thru google translate if needed...)

Rubbish

[goombah99]

To propel a honda shaped car at around 60 Mph takes 30KW of power to overcome wind resistance. It does not matter how efficient the storage and conversion is. that is the baseline set by drag. inefficiency just adds more. and anything with less wind drag than a honda shaped car would be like riding in a tubular suppository; ie pointless.

So.. to go 375 miles at 60 miles per hour will take over 6 hours. 6 hours = 360 minutes. 360/ 6 = 60. 60 * 30KW = 1.8 Mega watts.

So physics says the if you want to charge a car to go 375 miles and the car has the same drag as a honda then it takes 1.8 megawatts if you want to charge it in 6 minutes. that's the minimum. bad batteries and motors require more.

My feeling is that delivering that much wattage would probably melt it unless there was some serious cooling going on. Lets suppse that half the power goes into heat. To remove heat takes-- typically-- about an equal number of watts to the heat you want to remove. This varies by altitude and humidity but it's a good ball park.

SO add atleast another 50% to that ignoring the storage efficiency.

Re:Rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

Your math looks weird.

Re:Rubbish

[strack]

riiiight. direct transfer of electricity over a short, thick cable from a trickle charged bank of capacitors at the station where you would fill this thing up is gonna be damn near 100% efficient transfer. how bout you keep your feelings to yourself.

Re:Rubbish

[Vegemeister]

Why the hell do you presume 50% efficiency? That's absolutely atrocious. We can get 85% from ATX switchmode supplies, and those are so under spec'ed that the current folk wisdom recommends supplies rated at twice what any sensible single-socket pc consumes, not to mention the economies of scale.

Furthermore, your estimate of the amount of power needed to remove the heat is incredibly pessimistic. Think of all the pad mount transformers around large buildings. Those are 800-2000 kVA, and every single one I've seen has been passively cooled. Thermal management in large-scale power electronics systems is not a new problem, and is a well-developed industry in itself. The only place heat dissipation might be a concern is in the batteries themselves. This is, of course, the storage efficiency: the one consideration you decided to neglect!

Considering the charging problem, the obvious approach is to charge in series and discharge in parallel. Assuming a single drive motor, a plurality of prismatic Li-ion cells could be connected in 3*N stacks of 400 Volts or so (600V IGBTs). Each phase of the motor could then be driven by N phase legs (like a class B amplifier) with their outputs combined in parallel. Current sharing is insured in the short term by high-frequency chokes, and in the long term by using current-mode control in the phase legs. The current-sharing ratio could also be actively controlled to ensure equal discharge of the batteries.

Alternatively, a two-stage approach is used, in which the several battery segments feed separate phases of a polyphase boost converter, supplying a regulated bus voltage to a traditional voltage source three phase inverter. This provides more fine-grained control of the battery charge state and the advantages of a tested design, at the expense of efficiency and a substantially greater component count.

For charging, the battery pack itself would consist of prismatic cells with large contacts on opposite faces. Spaces between the cells would allow charging electrodes to be inserted. These electrodes would consist of brass plates sandwiching a piece of foam to provide contact pressure. Said plates could incorporate coolant channels through which heat could be removed from the cells.

Re:Rubbish

[jabuzz]

Except they used a modified Audi A2, I would expect because it has a very low drag figure and being made of Aluminium is very light. In fact I would not be surprised if they did not use the 3l variant that has extra drag reducing features to allow a l.2l diesel variant to achieve 100km with less than 3l of fuel. The first production car to do so I believe. Shame Audi stopped production really.

Re:Rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

What is a Honda shaped car?

Re:Rubbish

[lowrydr310]

I thought it was common knowledge that a bolt of lightning provides 1.21 Gigawatts.

All you need to do is capture that lightning and instantaneously use it to charge the battery bank. You'll have plenty of power to charge, and all you need is a large liquid cooled resistor bank to take care of the excess energy. Simple, right? Why hasn't anyone else thought of this?

Re:Rubbish

[ogapo]

What makes you think it's impossible for a battery to charge at 60 times the rate it discharges? It's already designed to discharge at 30KW. Most batteries are an array of cells all of which would be charging in parallel so heat may not be an issue, especially if this one has a large number of cells (as previous electric cars have).

As for getting 1.8 Mega watts (DC) from your home grid, others have already mentioned the likely need for a charging station composed of other batteries or capacitors being topped off slowly.

Also, not all methods of moving charge are equal, think about this. If it takes me 1 second to swap out a car battery containing about 1.8MJ (pretty low actually), I've just "charged" my car at a rate of 1.8 MW. No heating involved.

It's too bad the battery is likely too heavy to just swap (or cycle out whatever medium is carrying the charge) as that would be the obvious solution here.

Re:Rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

Electrical heat is generated by resistance. If the system were in a state of supercapacitance it wouldn't generate any noticeable heat at all. It's like you did half the math and then finished the rest of your argument on gut feeling. Of course we have no idea how much resistance is in the system or where. Let's worry about 6 minute charging now, and then worry about cooling factors later. As long as both are in the realm of possibility that's really the important issue.

Re:Rubbish

[tom17]

RA108

Re:Rubbish

[zevans]

I thought it was common knowledge that a bolt of lightning provides 1.21 Gigawatts.

All you need to do is capture that lightning and instantaneously use it to charge the battery bank.

And as a bonus, we won't need roads where we are going!

Re:Rubbish

[Smidge204]

So... 30kW at 60MPH is the claim.

The second generation Honda Insight has a drag coefficient of 0.25, a frontal area of approximately 26 square feet, a curb weight of up to 2,730 pounds.

From those specs: Power to maintain 60MPH is 13.9 HP - 10kW.

Your math is off by a factor of at least 3 right out of the gate.
=Smidge=

Re:Rubbish

[htdrifter]

So physics says the if you want to charge a car to go 375 miles and the car has the same drag as a honda then it takes 1.8 megawatts if you want to charge it in 6 minutes. that's the minimum. bad batteries and motors require more.

Your numbers look right. The charging current at 240 Volts would be 7,500 amps.
0000 AGW copper is only good for 380 Amps. It would require buss bars.

Standard service is usually 150 - 200 Amp.

Something got misquoted or it's wishful thinking.

Re:Rubbish

[tibit]

I guess the OP's point just whooshed over. It doesn't matter what the car is -- if it's anything feasible, it'll be in the same ballpark. DUH! It doesn't matter if it's 1.8MW of instantaneous power needed, or 0.5MW as you'd have if you were driving a completely infeasible aerodynamic pipe dream. The problems are of the same magnitude.

Re:Rubbish

[burnin1965]

While you bring up an interesting point in the end your conclusion is the rubbish. It is funny because with your comments and many others on this topic we will always be using oil because nothing else is feasible, except this ignores all the arguments on how infeasible gasoline cars would be and yet here we are.

The problems facing the delivery of 1.8MW in 6 minutes is actually not that big of a deal. The electrical power industry has been doing it for decades. The solution will be a complete system that addresses each point of weakness. Your scary images of melting cars, chargers and batteries almost seems realistic when you consider a 600 Volt charger providing 1.8 Mega Watts in 6 minutes is going to push 3000 Amperes or more but in the real world a 3000 Ampere bus bar system at 600 Volts is not an issue and likely would rely on passive cooling and proper sizing to ensure high efficiency.

There are many other scary boogey man points that others will bring up but the fact is there is science and engineering that will address every one of them. When Charles Kettering invented the battery powered electric starter motor to replace hand cranks to start gasoline engines it was thought to be impossible due to the limitations of batteries, conductors and electric motors. But when it comes to new ideas and pushing changes in technology I think Kettering said it best...

"The world hates change, but it is the only thing that has brought progress." - Charles Kettering

Re:Rubbish

[burnin1965]

His numbers do look right but his conclusion is bogus.

And you are right, the charging solutions will likely rely on bus bars not the romex wiring in your house. But the article had no suggestion that the charge would come from the AC service panel in your house. This is what it says...

The company responsible for the battery pack, DBM Energy, claims a battery pack efficiency of 97 percent and a recharge time of around 6 minutes when charged from a direct current source.

I suspect your house does not have a direct current source and I am positive they are not referring to a direct charge from a 240 Volt AC service. But then your house likely doesn't have a 5,000 gallon underground double walled gasoline storage tank and a pump in the garage to fill up either.

Re:Rubbish

[goombah99]

I did not assume 50% efficiency. I assumed they would need cooling and was trying to say it would be a fractionally significant number. In the worked example, I pegged it at 25% loss. (that totals to a 50% loss since you have the original 25% loss plus a roughly equal amount of electricity for cooling).

Anyhow if you want to ignore cooling and heat losses that does not really change the point I was making.

Re:Rubbish

[goombah99]

Thank you! at least someone gets it.

Re:Rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

So... 30kW at 60MPH is the claim.

The second generation Honda Insight has a drag coefficient of 0.25, a frontal area of approximately 26 square feet, a curb weight of up to 2,730 pounds.

From those specs: Power to maintain 60MPH is 13.9 HP - 10kW.

Your math is off by a factor of at least 3 right out of the gate.
=Smidge=

Does your car have rubber tires or does it run on magnetic levitation? Is the conversion from fuel or electricity to work 100% efficient? There are drags beyond air. That's why you need 30KW or there abouts.

Moreover any real car is going to have other drags such headlamps, acceleration and deceleration, air conditioners, maybe uncovered wheel wells. Perhaps more headroom or length than an insight. Not to mention passengers. Those are not "variable" losses but all are addative to the baseline.

And being right within a factor of 3 is generally considered a compliment to most scientist when trying to get something in the ballpark.

I wish you luck with your 10Kw turdmobile.

Re:Rubbish

[Smidge204]

The weight was included for calculation of rolling resistance on rubber tires.

"Other drags such as headlamps" and wheel wells are picked up as part of the vehicle's published drag coefficient.

Acceleration and deceleration are irrelevant because we're considering constant speed.

Total efficiency of the drivetrain, air conditioning etc. are similarly irrelevant since we're talking power required to maintain speed - not the total power the vehicle is capable of producing. (That makes your "10kW turdmobile" snipe pretty stupid...)

Additional passengers would make a slight difference, however that would be true for any kind of vehicle so that is also irrelevant for purposes of comparison. The effect of additional passengers is slight since that only increases the relatively minor rolling resistance: each additional 120lbs passenger adds a whopping 0.2HP to the requirement.

The point here is his fundamental assertion (30kW just to maintain 60MPH) was complete bullshit. I'm not sure what you do for a living, but if you think a 300% margin of error is acceptable you probably shouldn't be allowed to do it.
=Smidge=

Re:Rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy it's amazing to watch someone so confidently convinced by their own figures that they have lost all touch with reality. I don't know how you calculate your numbers but I've seen plenty of charts that give the HP needed to maintain highway speed and 14HP is on the very tail end of the vehicle curve. Yes it's indeed possible. Much like the OP that you sniped at said so eloquently: tubular suppositories. The honda insight you pluck out like it was a normal car is hideous: it even has funky wheels with skirts and inhuman back seats.

Why not cite some of those x-racers if were going to go to your fantasy land.

Re:Rubbish

[Smidge204]

So you don't know how to do the math, but I must be wrong because you saw a graph that disagrees with me?

What were the charts of, exactly? What vehicles, if anything specific, were they for? What conditions were they assuming (CD, weight, speed etc)?

Your insults don't really stick unless you can back up your smack talk. The math is grade school algebra level. Try it yourself.

I chose the Insight because that's the kind of car an EV is, aerodynamically speaking. It's a good approximation for a generic electric vehicle. Even the weight is fairly close. Your personal preference for aesthetics is completely irrelevant.
=Smidge=

Re:Rubbish

[Bigjeff5]

But then your house likely doesn't have a 5,000 gallon underground double walled gasoline storage tank and a pump in the garage to fill up either.

No shit right?

They didn't say you could charge it in 6 minutes at your house, they simply said it is possible to charge it in 6 minutes.

The first time a reasonable person started crunching the numbers they should have simply said "Oh, they obviously aren't talking about charging it at home here". They should have then realized that those same cables they were saying couldn't possibly work for a 6 minute charge would work just fine for a 3-6 hour charge, no problem.

But, unfortunately, this is Slashdot. We've finally got something that would make an "Electricstation" practical and it's just going over most Slashdotter's heads.

Re:Rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

Your personal preference for aesthetics is completely irrelevant.
=Smidge=

you like tubular suppositories then?

More Details

[cowtamer]

(Stolen from a comment in: http://www.allcarselectric.com/blog/1050863_electric-car-drives-375-miles-at-55-mph-recharges-in-6-minutes )

Translated from this page: http://adacemobility.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/das-wunder-von-berlin/#more-744
"Technical Data Audi A2 DBM *
* Subject
Empty weight (including driver) 1260 kg
Perm. Total weight 1600 kg
Battery lithium-iron-polymer (260 Ah/380 V) cell voltage of 3.8 volts
Battery weight about 300 kg
Charging time about 4 hours due to mains phase current in the household (380)
battery requires 6 minutes (future solution)
Life time 2500 charge cycles (without loss of capacity)
= Service life target: 500,000 km
Top speed 160 km / h
5-speed sequential gearbox (race gear: shifting without the clutch)
E-motor 300 Nm torque"

The skepticism about this battery technology ...

[quax]

... is understandable especially since this comes out of left field. Yet, if this was fraudulent they either managed to get the German government to go along with it or managed to snooker the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. The latter reports about this on their official governmental web site and take credit for funding the technology (German). The current Minister Rainer Brüderle was also very happy to have a photo op with the record braking vehicle.

If this was fraudulent somebody's political career just ended.

Not from the USA

[Required Snark]

Note that there are no USA companies, or technologies mentioned anywhere. It's already too late: the USA has lost it's technical edge, and it won't be coming back any time soon. Japan, Europeans, China and India are investing in basic technology. In the US the way to make money is high frequency trading and patent lawsuits. Who needs to invest in anything with a long rate of return, even if that is where future profits will come from?

Just look at the mental state of the people who plan to "take back their country". The Tea Party morons deny global warming. http://www.newser.com/story/103446/among-tea-party-widespread-global-warming-doubt.html

The Conservapedia thinks that Relativity is a liberal plot: http://newsdesk.org/2010/08/conservapedia-calls-theory-of-relativity-a-liberal-conspiracy/

In its “Counterexamples to Relativity” website, Conservapedia says, “The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”

The Texas Board of Education (take that title with a grain of salt) is putting Christian thought into text books, including trying to teach creationism http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/24/texas-state-board-of-education-confirms-irony-is-dead/

The forces of stupidity have a lot of practical power, and they are using (abusing) it. The net result will reduce the USA to a third world country. Most of the people reading this post will live to see it happen. Well, the USA had a good thing going for a while, at leas from 1945 to 2000 or so.

Re:Not from the USA

[pedestrian crossing]

Note that there are no USA companies, or technologies mentioned anywhere.

Look no further than the first 75% of the comments on this article. It's not just our technological edge, it's the incredibly skeptical attitude to EVs (and pretty much everything else on the alternative energy front) that you see. Nothing but naysayers as far as the eye can see.

Instead of picking apart every solution because it isn't perfect (which apparently is the prevailing US thinking), the Germans know that even if you come up with a 10% solution, you only need to come up with 10 of them.

What we've lost is our ability to look at anything in the long-term. Short-term thinking is what is holding the US back...

Regenerative braking is a killer app

[mike449]

I don't even care about the range. I would really like a gas hybrid car with a much smaller battery of this type as long as it can absorb the energy released during braking. This gives an instant 20-40% fuel efficiency boost for city driving, at a modest cost increase. Ultracapacitors can be used for this, but they are expensive and have lower energy density.

This clearly shows that we need battery swap

[haruchai]

nothing else will work in the short term. Fast charging can defy the laws of physics. If you want to have a high-storage battery AND you want to charge it quickly, you need to be able to feed high current to it. That's not an easy thing to do, especially if tens of thousands of cars are going to be doing it all at the same time in a city.

Battery swap stations with high electrical feed or perhaps with energy storage ( NaS, ZBr, whatever) will be a better solution, and would be even faster than quick charging, so long as they have enough stock.

If only there was a way to accumulate electricity

[name_already_taken]

This car, assuming that it really can absorb 150 kW, will need a charging station with a few megawatts of electrical service.

If only they made some kind of device that could store a large amount of electrical energy, which could be slowly charged from a house's normal electric supply but then deliver a high amount of current over a shorter period of time to charge the car.

Unless you're operating a public filling (recharging) station, you don't need to get all the electricity from the grid simultaneously with the car charging operation.

Probably something like the type of battery pack used for an electric forklift truck could do the job, coupled with a appropriate electronics.

"thetruthaboutcars.com"

[gavron]

This article makes some interesting points: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2010/10/the-berlin-miracle-or-just-another-ev-hoax/

Notably that DBM went from "revolution" to "ready for production" instantly, and that's not likely, and that there is no DBM manufacturing plant. (I'm not sure how they make forklift batteries then, but hey, I shouldn't be so inquisitive.

E

Economies of scale

[name_already_taken]

74kwh supercapacitors are damned expensive, so I doubt if anyone would put one in their house.

Actually, what's more correct is that 74kWH supercapacitors are damned expensive now, because they're not being produced on a huge scale for deployment in every home garage. Maybe they'd be a lot cheaper, if they were.

I remember a project review I sat in on some time around 2000, when someone was getting raked over the coals for buying a 42 inch plasma TV for some project. It cost over $16,000. I just bought a 42 inch plasma TV last month for my bedroom. It cost $489, uses less power, doesn't burn in as easily and has a better picture.

Isn't it likely that once something becomes a commodity product, the cost is going to be engineered out?

Re:Economies of scale

[robot256]

Actually, what's more correct is that 74kWH supercapacitors are damned expensive now, because they're not being produced on a huge scale for deployment in every home garage. Maybe they'd be a lot cheaper, if they were.

Isn't it likely that once something becomes a commodity product, the cost is going to be engineered out?

While this is true for some technologies, things like supercapacitors and lithium batteries contain large amounts of precious metals and rare earth elements--and the supply of those elements can play a bigger role in price than the manufacturing process itself. Maybe they will invent some new super cheap polymer that will do the job, but the sheer amount of power required means that either a ton of copper or room-temperature superconductors will be needed to carry power out of the capacitor. Neither of those will cheap for a rather long time.

Re:Economies of scale

[celtic_hackr]

What large amount of precious metal do lithium batteries contain? They are mostly lithium, which is most abundant metal on the planet.. The only reason lithium batteries are expensive is due to patents on insanely obvious chemical compounds.

A journalist accompanied the record setting drive.

[quax]

The journalist is from the periodical of the German automobile club ADAC (i.e. the German equivalent to AAA). They report on the drive here (Sorry again in German).

You'd expect the journalist would have noticed if there was a conventional engine involved - although he was not allowed on board so that still leaves some room for doubt.

I predict battery swap out stations

[spineboy]

A better solution might be a battery swap out station. Drive your car over a lift/pit, and some guy swaps out your entire battery pack.
Takes 2 minutes.
Everyone has membership fees/deposit - easy to do.

Battery life?

[hcdejong]

According to this, the faster you charge a li-ion battery, the more dendrite growth you get. So you're looking at replacing the battery rather soon with these 6-minute recharge cycles.

Re:Battery life?

[Smidge204]

Solution: Use fast charging only when necessary - which shouldn't be often since the battery should be topped-off every morning at the very least anyway.

=Smidge=

"News for nerds" -- but still imperial?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get why this supposed "used for nerds" sites insists on using the outdated imperial system rather than the SI ("metric"). Might as well use furlongs per fortnight if you're insisting on eschewing the SI.

Re:"News for nerds" -- but still imperial?

[JTsyo]

Because it's an American site. Get over it.

Is it safe?

[MrEricSir]

Look I'm no materials scientist, but if you can charge a battery quickly, my guess is that the compromise is in safety.

We've already seen laptops explode due to slight manufacturing defects. Imagine the result of an entire car, loaded with batteries, blow up.

Say what you will about gasoline -- and I don't like gasoline either -- but it's relatively safe compared to today's battery technology. Until we see a battery that's as safe as gasoline, I wouldn't want to have one in my car.

Imagine the power lines

[SpaghettiPattern]

Imagine the power lines used to hooking up the car when charging.

Either a huge current -needing extremely thick cables- at low voltage or low current and high voltage -direct current at higher voltages is more dangerous that alternating current.

Then comes the requirement that the charging stations should be used by service station employees and other mortals.

I think I'd be more afraid of one of those power lines being damaged than of a petrol hose being accidentally cut.

Electric Car

[dontgetshocked]

Now that's impressive and would work in the real world.

Suspicious name

[chocapix]

The CEO of the company that makes this miracle battery pack is named Mirko Hannemann. Coincidence? I think not!

Suspicious name

[chocapix]

The CEO of the company that makes this miracle battery pack is named Mirko Hannemann. Coincidence? I think not!

How expensive does gas have to get?

[VShael]

Before this 6 minute ultra charge (or all night long 220volt recharge) becomes relatively affordable?

Suspicious name

[chocapix]

The CEO of the company that makes this miracle battery pack is named Mirko Hannemann. Coincidence? I think not!

In Europe

[justleavealonemmmkay]

In Europe, "mph" don't mean shit, and 55mph is not moderate highway speed, it's 2km/h below the official limit on country roads.

Re:In Europe

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Europe and I can safely tell you that in fact here miles per hour do mean shit. The exception is in American and old English texts, where for some reason 'mile' is used as an exotic word that stands for 1.608 kilometres.

Don't charge but swap

[PietjeJantje]

Personally I don't get this charging thing. It will be slow and inefficient.

Why can't I just swap batteries at the "gas" station? Problem solved.

Re:Don't charge but swap

[snspdaarf]

Because the rest of us, with brand new cars and brand new batteries, don't want some nasty half-dead battery pack when we swap. Why does swapping keep coming up?

(now, there's an opening for you!)

Re:Don't charge but swap

[ebuck]

The ideal battery is still more of a concept than a commodity. Manufacturers are attempting to out-engineer each other, as the ideal battery is still to be discovered and produced en mass. So what you will see with a battery swap program is a bunch of incompatible batteries.

If they could get the size down to a shoebox, the weight down to 20 pounds, the energy up to an average person's five day drive, and the duty cycle up to about 100 charges, and the battery design incapable of suffering from easy damage as it's being removed and attached, then you might have a chance at a swappable battery. Right now you might as well ask for a bag of pixie dust sitting on top of a large gold brick. It can't be had yet, and there's no guarantee it can be had in the future.

Note that the above just gets the battery into specs where it could replace gasoline, and a pure replacement has a negligible incentive for change. To actually see gas stations converting over, you would need to increase the gas station's profit margin and provide a large enough customer base for them to justify the overhaul. Without the larger profit margin, nobody's going to pull up one of the gas pumps to put in a battery swap station.

I expect that initially, an ideal battery swap program will cost the consumer just as much as gasoline, as the providers will be keen to soak as much profit as possible. Only when it becomes competitive will the consumer have an opportunity to see prices drop (if it is less expensive in the long run).

Re:Don't charge but swap

[tibit]

EV batteries won't be "half-dead". It's not like your average notebook or tool battery pack.

Each cell has a management board that knows its condition, measured capacity, and that can bypass it. When you swap batteries, the price you pay includes some depreciation cost that covers replacement of dead cells etc. over time. So you pay for energy and upkeep of the batteries. Not unlike when you replace propane cylinders -- you pay for cylinder upkeep and testing, and for the propane (energy carrier).

An EV battery can still be fully functional with a few cells completely dead (as in open circuit) -- the management unit would bypass such a cell. The cells also don't die as easily since they are never overcharged or over-discharged.

Re:Don't charge but swap

[Richy_T]

FWIW, I don't exchange propane cylinders. But it's more because of the monkey games Blue Rhino is getting up to (Google for it)

Re:Don't charge but swap

[Anonymous Coward]

The battery in the Tesla Roadster costs around $33K. Are you willing to swap your brand new one for someone else's with unknown cycles on it?

That's like saying you should swap cars at the gas station and let them refill it.

Re:Don't charge but swap

[Anonymous Coward]

Swapping batteries have its own set of problems:
- quality control - would you want to swap your new and good battery with a beaten up one?
- who own the battery?
- warranty
- need a common form factor - EV is still new, it don't see us settling on one any time soon.
- batteries are heavy, so the "battery stations" probably need to have machines to replace the batteries, and the machines are better not car-specific.

Re:Don't charge but swap

[haruchai]

Swapping keeps coming up because it's really the best option until we invent the magical power source (call it the Shipstone, if you like).
I think that for the present and the near-future, battery leasing is a business model that works in favor of the customer.
I've looked into the Better Place business plan and it's well conceived. Part of the plan, as I've heard it explained in YouTube videos, is that, depending on the mileage option to which you subcribe, there's a max number of trips to the swap station included.
If you exceed that number, you get money BACK - the thinking behind it is that they want to battery swap to be as quick or quicker and as convenient ( or more so ) than a gas fill-up. If you're making more trips to a swap station than you would for gas, the convenience diminishes.
So, for folks who occasionally take long trips, it works to their advantage. They may drive the same total distance as the neighbor who never leaves the city, but he plugs in every night while they have to find a swap station every 100 or so miles. He might never come close to his swap station limit while the cottage-loving family might start getting refunds midway through the year.

Re:Don't charge but swap

[Anonymous Coward]

I am guessing here, but I imagine for the same reason you don't swap your gas tank at the gas station... one, it's heavy as hell, probably requiring an engine hoist (electric engines aren't very big or heavy, it's the battery that weighs so much). two, if there is any charge left in it, I would imagine it may be slightly dangerous to allow the local gas station dregs of society to man-handle it... you'd be lucky to go a week without some simpleton gas slave electrocuting himself.

Re:Don't charge but swap

[geekoid]

Presumable you would be swapping for something that isn't half dead..but.

It would be like sharging the battery in the home, only it's being down at a station allowing you to swap batteries. Your argument is lame.

Look at it this way. What if when you bought your car, it came with two battery packs. So you could charge one and just swap them when the other one gets low. Would that be bad? Of so, why? if not why is it different then having a station that does it?

Re:Don't charge but swap

[rossjudson]

Yeah. That Blue Rhino thing for BBQ fuel will never work. I'm not swapping my crappy old rusted out...oh wait I am. Works perfectly.

Re:Don't charge but swap

[mcgrew]

Personally I don't get this charging thing. It will be slow and inefficient.

Why can't I just swap batteries at the "gas" station? Problem solved.

Did you bother reading the summary? Six minutes. It would take quite a bit longer than that to swap a battery, and changing a battery will require something to lift the things; we're not talking about a cell phone or netbook battery here. hell, the 12 volt lead-acid battery in your car isn't light. I'm not sure I can get my gas tank all the way full in six minutes if it's empty.

Re:Don't charge but swap

[PietjeJantje]

Yes I bothered to read the summary. Now fuck off.

Re:Don't charge but swap

[snspdaarf]

Lets turn that around. You take your car in to the tire store to get the tires rotated. They pull four tires off the shelf, rims and all, and put them on your car. Same kind of rims, same size, same performance rating, same number of miles on them, even the same brand. Would you be happy with that? Or, would you want your original tires back? The ones that you know have not been driven under-inflated, or overloaded, or taken an impact at speed. Or, you go out to your conventional car, find you left the dome light on, and your battery is dead. You call a service truck, but instead of jump-starting your car, he takes your battery and puts in one he has on the truck. Same group number, same CCA, but your battery is 3 months old and this replacement is 4 years old. Your car starts. Are you happy with this? I would be happy with neither. I want my stuff. I could be wrong, but I think most people would feel the same way. That's why I don't think battery swapping will ever work.

Re:Don't charge but swap

[mcgrew]

Than you're just trolling?

what they don't tell you

[kiwijapan]

the Audi A2 modified by DBM Energy was able to achieve its 375 miles range at an average speed of 55 mph.

mind you, it was going downhill all the way.

The Audi A2 was a technological marvel ...

[Ihlosi]

... with a stock version that got 80 mpg (diesel).

Unfortunately, too few people wanted to spend >$20k on a small car. Economically, it didn't make sense, either - the price difference to a competitively priced small car would buy _lots_ of gasoline/diesel.

The Audi A2 was a technological marvel ...

[Ihlosi]

... with a stock version that got 80 mpg (diesel). Since the body of the car is made from lightweight material, it presumably makes an excellent starting point for modifications (towards all-electric or hybrid).

Unfortunately, this also caused it to be less than successful commercially. Due to the expensive materials, it was way more expensive than your average small car - and the price difference was enough to nullify the lower fuel consumption.

Daimler learned from this when designing the Smart, btw. It uses mostly plain-vanilla steel for the body of the car, which makes the little thing surprisingly heavy for its size, but also keeps the price down in bearable regions.

Battery lifetime?

[hcdejong]

According to this, fast charging increases the rate at which dendrites are formed. A 6-min charge cycle would severely limit battery lifetime. I'm not looking forward to replacing 300 kg of batteries every year.

55mph "moderate"... in GERMANY?

[evilandi]

55mph as a "moderate highway speed"? In GERMANY? Clearly another USian who doesn't own a passport.

Germany is the land of the no-speed-limit autobahn. Elsewhere in Europe the usual speed limit on an interstate/motorway is just shy of 85mph (135km/h).

"Moderate highway speed" in Europe is typically 80mph.

In the UK the motorway speed limit is theoretically 70mph, but outside urban areas, you won't get a ticket below 85mph unless you're doing something else daft as well.

Travel on any highway in Europe at 55mph and you'll have articulated lorries (semi rig trucks) up your arse blaring their horns in no time.

auto-translation of units in /. stories

[gilleain]

Also, last time I checked both Germany, Japan and pretty much the rest of the planet used the metric system, so:

Yes, but slashdot is American, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that non-metric units creep in a lot of the time. It would be nice if there was automated translation of the units in articles, set by user preferences. So I (as a Brit) would see 600km...1000km....43 km/h...etc and US citizens (and Liberians, and Myanmar..er...ians) could choose the 100 miles...etc version.

Maybe there is a firefox plugin for this?

Someone in the know: RTFL

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone in the know: RTFL. You know, the people MAKING this, should be "in the know", but you don't, apparently, believe it, therefore you WILL NOT accept proof from "someone in the know", will you.

bigger wires

[OrangeTide]

I've used multi-stranded cable much thicker than half an inch. It was for an experiment that needed to burst 2500 amps, I needed the heavy wire for low resistance. You could probably do 480V @ 1875A on a loop of 9 conductor wire of OO gauge (.33") per strand. it would be pretty heavy but no bigger than a gas pump hose according to my primitive napkin math.

Re:bigger wires

[VolciMaster]

I've used multi-stranded cable much thicker than half an inch. It was for an experiment that needed to burst 2500 amps, I needed the heavy wire for low resistance. You could probably do 480V @ 1875A on a loop of 9 conductor wire of OO gauge (.33") per strand. it would be pretty heavy but no bigger than a gas pump hose according to my primitive napkin math.

And I've run DC 500A in wiring about the diameter of a pencil .. of course, it was NbTi in a Cu sheath bather in liquid He, but still.

Sounds awfully fishy...

[dskoll]

They claim a 6 minute charge time for 100kWh. So the charging power is 1 megawatt (1 megawatt * 6 minutes = 100kWh). If we assume a charging voltage of 220V (double the usual North American line voltage), the charging current is about 4500 amps. You'd need rather thick cables.

But wait... the real charge time is 4 hours, charging power 25kW and charging current 113A. That's doable providing you have at least 120A service to your house.

Also, going 375 miles (=600km) on 100kWh sounds suspicious. Let's say you do that at an average of 60km/h. That means you drive for 10h so the motor's power is 10kW or about 14 horsepower. Can such an underpowered car be realistic?

Re:Sounds awfully fishy...

[KozmoStevnNaut]

RE: the horsepower issue, with a sufficiently aerodynamic body, a car really doesn't need much power to sustain 60km/h. Any fuel-powered car with a fuel mileage display will tell you this; cruising at reasonable speeds uses relatively small amounts of fuel and therefore horsepower compared to acceelerating or driving at high speeds where the wind resistance gets exponentially worse.

I can do over 30km/l in my diesel hatchback if I limit myself to 80km/h on a smooth road. I can also get as little as 4km/l occasionally if I floor it up a steep grade in a head wind.

Some more questions:

[FridayBob]

1. 1.) Since an electric car's battery is a relatively expensive component, it should last long enough. However, seeing as Honda en Toyota guarantee the batteries in their hybrid vehicles for 100.000 miles and hardly ever sell replacements, we probably shouldn't worry. However, the guarantee that DBM Energy will eventually offer for their car batteries remains to be seen.
2. 2.) A battery like this should not make an average electric car unnecessarily expensive. How much do DBM Energy plan to ask for their product?
3. 3.) When not using a hefty DC charging station, how long does it take to charge the battery with only 110-220V? Actually, even if it does take eight hours, I personally would not consider it a major problem, but I would expect those charging stations to be available along the highways.
4. 4.) Quick-charging this type of battery usually ends up shortening its lifespan. To what extent would this be the case with DBM Energy's new invention?

LiPo batteries tend go go 'boom' when mistreated

[BubbaDave]

Lithium-Polymer batteries do not cope well with physical damage, or being charged faster than their designed charge speed, or being overcharged, and are damaged if discharged beyond a certain point.

You wouldn't believe what these friggen' things can do in a model airplane, though. Awesome capacity and very light.

The post-crash explosions are a nice realistic touch, too.

Dave

375 battery

[Anonymous Coward]

For slashdot you guys really fail on this one.
Your focus on how many watts to charge in 6 rather than 375 mile.

If only I could put one in a chevy volt.

You see the 40 miles is fucking awesome living in phoenix. I never go that far most the time.
And 8 hour charge off peak = 50 cent a gallon gas.

But I use my solar panels = no on going coal or nuke and approaching zero per gal gas.

Now with 375 if it will go 40 miles after 8 hours charge and 375 after say 7 days that would be great for the trip to los angeles once and awhile.

Or 80 100 miles after a weekend of charging.

Other than the trip to LA I dont need to buy gas or electric to drive around.

The future is bright indeed.

Having two battery's would help so you can keep charging while at work in the day unless of course you work nights.

Re:375 battery

[Smidge204]

Having two battery's would help so you can keep charging while at work in the day unless of course you work nights.

Or you could use a charging station that's been installed outside your office, or at the train station if that's how you commute. A full charge for most EVs will be under $7 even in places with the highest electric rates in the country. If there aren't businesses and municipalities installing charging stations for free use just to attract people, then they could be set up like parking meters.

Unfortunately it's a chicken-egg problem. EVs won't become more popular until there are sufficient charging stations, and sufficient charging stations won't appear until EVs become more popular... but this is exactly the same problem people had when the gasoline powered car first came out; and fortunately there are people on both sides of the problem willing to take that early-adopter risk.
=Smidge=

Limited and misleading info

[Futurepower(R)]

From the parent comment: "I'm pretty sure it's not trivial to turn a dead, degraded cell into a shiny new one."

True. I really, really dislike it when stories about energy generation and distribution fail to include all the issues and costs. I found two articles about degradation of lithium cells:

Abstract: Highly reversible lithium metal secondary battery using a room temperature ionic liquid/lithium salt mixture and a surface-coated cathode active material Quote: "... the degradation of the LiCoO2 cathode-solid polymer electrolyte interface is dominant."

PDF file of the full paper: Building a Battery by Vapor Deposition Quote: "... aging for LiCoO2 cathodes cycled above 75C is associated with a trigonal to cubic transformation."

Reading those quotes seems to indicate that degraded batteries could be renewed, but only by taking them completely apart, re-processing the lithium, and building an entirely new battery.

Misleading: Quote from the story: "The company responsible for the battery pack, DBM Energy, claims a battery pack efficiency of 97 percent..." Most of the inefficiency is in converting line power to the DC at high current necessary for the battery. Another area of inefficiency is in the transmission lines from the power station to the car. Talking about only one inefficiency is misleading to those who don't understand the technology.

Re:Limited and misleading info

[tibit]

Perhaps the battery could be designed so that it's easy to take it apart and reuse most of the parts -- as opposed to recycling that would imply grinding them and reprocessing into feedstocks. The only teensy weensy problem is that no such reusable designs have been demonstrated so far. It may be a simple thing to do, or it may be a very significant engineering feat -- I don't know.

New way to call me a jerk.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. Now I will be a resource hog whenever I stop at the recharging station.

"If people like you would charge your car overnight, we wouldn't need these stations."

Then the Green Gestapo would show up and attach the electrodes to my balls.

I don't understand...

[zevans]

... so can someone provide a car analogy please?

Why not swappable batteries?

[bdparsley]

There' s a few things to get around, but why not? They've been used for years in electric forklifts and pallet jacks in warehouse operations. Battery runs low, its swapped for another battery that's been charging in a central station and has the equipment to load and unload the batteries. You'd have to have some standard sizes determined, but I don't see why something like a giant AA battery wouldn't work (using multiples in parallel or series as needed). Seems to solve the problem of range (swap as needed), mass production (using a standard design), issues related to distribution infrastruture (if you need new power infrastructure for charging, it can be done in central locations, rather than at the home), and current draw (swappable means you can trickle charge, rather than try to dump a Mw of power in 6 minutes). Standards and integration are the remaining hurdles.

Si I guess it's a James Bond car then

[Provocateur]

but even he wouldn't know where to recharge the thing, if he's ever in the middle of a desert chase.

The vehicles uses 8-1 kWh, HP is irrelevant.

[celtic_hackr]

According to this German article and another German article. The engine uses between 8-15 kWh in normal use.

The trip was 605 kM (377+ miles) at 130 kM/h (81 MPH) or 90kM/h (56 MPH). The 130 in one article seems wrong, and a commenter posted a correction. So, likely it was 90 kM/h.

At the end of the trip the battery pack still had a 18% charge, but the inventors say the range is 600 kM (

So charging to 97% in six minutes required a 79% charge or 90kWh or about 0.9 MW in 6 minutes.

You could drive it for more than 375 miles on a single charge, depending on how deeply you want to drain the battery. Still, who wants to drive more than 7 hours a day. Now if you had just three available stations. you'd be able to drive then entire North-South distance of the US (in 29 hours - I've done it in 21). With seven stations, you'd be able to drive across the US (in 56 hrs ). 377 miles on a "tank" is fairly standard. that's about the range in my cars. There are certainly better ranged cars. The one thing the article breezes over, is that over 55 MPH, you'd likely see polynomially decreasing range.

Damn forget about the less than sign

[celtic_hackr]

I was saying the inventors say the range is 600 kM ( "less than" 375 mi). so that is where the 375 comes from. Also, screwed up my title. The other German article is tagesschau.de article already linked to by another /.er. It has some good comments.

PIC of the charge cable

[jbuck]

There is a PICTURE of the charge cable in TFA

Parallel Charging?

[sac13]

My knowledge of battery technology is somewhat limited, but could this be accomplished (discounting the power requirements to do the actual charging) by creating a battery pack of multiple cells that are charged in parallel rather than one big cell? I know there are some varieties of lithium based batteries that charge fairly quickly. Would an array of batteries charge any quicker than a single battery of the same capacity? Do we lose any efficiency with an array (other than the natural resistance of additional wiring)?

Dah dah dah dah dah, HEY!

[GameboyRMH]

Oh let me join the hyper-pessimistic skeptic conga-line!

"B-B-But...range anxiety! What if I want to drive more than 375 miles and I don't want to stop for 6 minutes! I bet you could fill a gasoline car's tank in like 2 minutes! And what if the power goes out!? WHAT THEN HUH? DO I CALL A TOW TRUCK!?"

The fine print...

[igaborf]

Although the car weighs 2 kg and was driven by squirrels.

Re:The fine print...

[treeves]

And they're not sure it really weighs 2 kilograms.

Publicity stunt seeking Funding.

[guidryp]

It wasn't charged in 6 minutes.

This is a company looking for financial backing and they are providing about as much detail as EEstor.

If they truly have a world beating battery, you simply have to submit one cell for rigorous testing and they would get all the funding they need.

A publicity stunt with little data sets off my scam alarm bells.

55mph?

[mseeger]

the Audi A2 modified by DBM Energy was able to achieve its 375 miles range at an average speed of 55 mph.

If you see an Audi A2 on a german highway at 55 mph, it will be a towed one :-).

In germany, driving is a martial art.

CU, Martin (German, car free)

Damn. No catalytic converters on petrol cars

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn. No catalytic converters on petrol cars, therefore there can't be any cars on the streets, since that's a requirement now.

Because, as you say, palladium and platinum (used in cats) aren't exactly lying around in droves in our streets...

27 miles per hour?

[PNutts]

623 miles on a charge at around 27 mph

Considering the folks that drive 27 miles per hour, were the miles traveled affected by the drain on the battery of having the turn signal on the whole way?

If he's talking on the mobile

[Anonymous Coward]

If he's talking on the mobile while filling your car with petrol, he's risking igniting the petrol fumes.

So why do you trust him with that risk, yet not with the hypothetical high-power plug (which would, in all likelihood, just fry the doofus plugging it in incorrectly, not you or your car or your children [unlike the big fireball from petrol explosions])?

Re:If he's talking on the mobile

[tehcyder]

I don't know about the mobile phone thing, I thought that was a bit of an urban myth.

It would be the smoking that would worry me more.

why are people so suprised at something we've alre

[duck_run]

we've already had a car like this before it was called the EV1 gm made it around 1996 then stopd and repoed them in 1999 so they could destroy them. reason being is because they were cheap fucks and were losing money from them even though it would of helped out with our "fuel" issues today so much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1

Usless article

[Anonymous Coward]

The only facts about the battery were "DBM Energy, claims a battery pack efficiency of 97 percent and a recharge time of around 6 minutes when charged from a direct current source"

Most batteries have efficiencies in this range so who cares.

Range is useless because we do not know from the article if the trunk and back seats were packet with batteries... IE commercially not viable.

Charge time is nice to know but is this a full 0-100% charge or what? What is the energy density of the batteries?

They don't even say what type of battery technology, life expectancy/recharge cycles, memory effects, usefullness in hot/cold weather or any volatility issues (kaboom!) ..

If you are going to bother writing an article it would be nice to ask a reasonable number of questions to inform the reader rather than simply parroting talking points of the vendor.

Irrelevant

[Brannon]

Supercapacitors/batteries in your home charging station (or in a station around the corner). Charge those up slowly from the grid and then quickly dump the charge into your car battery.

30-40 HP to move?, then how do horses move?

[Brannon]

Can horses only overcome air resistance if they travel in herds?

Hot swapping battery packs...

[Brannon]

...is the most absurdly impractical solution that I've seen seriously discussed.

screw cars

[shadowrat]

I want this battery in my laptop! Computers suck a fraction of the amps that a car does. With one of these magic batteries you could be mobile for months (if it actually works)

Hoax

[Parhelion]

There is scant little information about this company online. Checking Google News for "DBM Energy" shows this startup company has only been mentioned in news stories for the last three days, and there is nothing before that. Even more peculiar is that searches for KOLIBRI AlphaPolymer show articles from about eight months ago where the company was hawking their battery (called "Hummingbird" then) as being better than standard lithiums because it would catch on fire or explode if punctured by a metal spike. It looks like they are just making things up to see what kind of investors come running their way with cash.

On the contrary

[jopet]

DC transmission has a much higher efficiency and in most situations a lower cable cost for a number of reasons (no magnetic and dielectric losses, DC lower than equivalent peak current etc). The main problem is transformation and converting to the AC required in the grid. However, with high frequency transformation, even the transformation can be made more efficient.
AC was preferred historically because efficient and cheap transformation (which requires creating AC from DC and then rectifying to DC again) was not possible cost-effectively with traditional technology.

Re:On the contrary

[Bigjeff5]

That and it's just a hell of a lot simpler to generate AC and convert to DC than the other way around.

Passenger Rail Electric Power

[KenSeymour]

A subway third rail system puts out between 1000 and 5000 Amps at either 600 or 750 Volts. These systems have their own substations. That is easily enough to charge a few cars at once at the 6 minute rate.

I imagine the charging stations for electric cars could be connected to a substation with similar sized conductors.

Transmission lines to the substations are on the order of 10000 Volts with transformer and rectifiers and breakers (the size of refrigerators).

But you would never have this kind of power at home.

Re:Passenger Rail Electric Power

[LWATCDR]

So what you are saying is that you would need the same power a subway line to charge this car in 6 minutes.
Tell you what. When you try this let me know. I will want to be a good 200 meters from that experiment and in a bunker.
The speed and amount of chemical reaction that would involve is also mind numbing. Think about it even if the battery is 98% efficient in charging how much heat will be dumped into the battery in 6 minutes.

Re:Passenger Rail Electric Power

[KenSeymour]

It is the same amount of chemical energy being transferred into you gas tank. Those familiar systems have been designed to be as safe as possible as long you don't smoke while you are filling up.

This style of electric charging station might bring back "full serve" as only thoroughly trained people would be near your car as it is charged.

Today, some people's jobs require that they step over live third rails 3 or 4 times a day. But they don't let the general public do that. I was
trained to do this and thankfully have only done it 2 or 3 times (in the dark, in the rain, carrying a laptop). More employees get killed
being hit by trains.

We are in close proximity to lots of energy all the time. Kinetic energy driving on the freeway or standing on the train platform. Chemical energy driving around town with 10 or 20 gallons of gas in the tank (think Pinto).

Of course they are going to have to engineer the whole distribution system for these kinds of safety issues.

But it is technically possible to provide a 2 MW electrical feed to a vehicle full of people. It happens every day.

Re:Passenger Rail Electric Power

[LWATCDR]

"It is the same amount of chemical energy being transferred into you gas tank." Yes it is but it is in a stable from and not being changed from one form to another.
That is the key. When you charge a battery you are causing a chemical reaction that stores x% of the energy and the rest is heat. So take 5% of say 10 gallons of gas and burn it in only 6 minutes... I think you will see the problems. Until I see it ,in this demo they took 4 hours I will not believe it.
Lets see some proof.

WTF no one remember Ohms Law Re:How long does it

[mjwalshe]

How the fuck is this insightful does no one remember ohms law from your school physics classes.

Sorry mate go and look up ohms law and do some basic calculations. To charge that much power in 6 mins is a non trivial and expensive proposition (and not to mention Fucking dangerous when applied to everyday use in Cars).

The only places that have this sort of feed are BIG industrial plants then you have to rectify it into DC, and DC power at industrial voltage levels like this is freaky stuff even more so than AC.