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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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?

[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?

[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.

Too good to be true

[oldhack]

Somebody in the know prove me wrong.

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.

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 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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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:Finally looking practical...

[oliverthered]

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

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).

Re:Finally looking practical...

[shaitand]

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

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: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: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...