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Samsung Unveils New Electric Car Batteries For Up To 430 Miles of Range (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: At the Frankfurt Motor Show (IAA Cars 2017) this week, Samsung's battery division, Samsung SDI, showcases a new "Multifunctional battery pack" solution to enable more range in electric vehicles as the Korean company tries to carve itself a bigger share of the growing automotive battery market. Most established automakers, like Nissan with the LEAF or even GM with the more recent Chevy Bolt EV, have been using large prismatic cells to build their electric vehicle battery packs. Tesla pioneered a different approach using thousands of individual smaller cylindrical li-ion battery cells in each pack. Earlier this year, Samsung unveiled its own '2170' battery cell to compete with Tesla/Panasonic. Now they are claiming that they can reach an impressive energy density by using those cells in new modules: "'Multifunctional battery pack' of Samsung SDI attracted the most attention. Its users can change the number of modules as they want as if they place books on a shelf. For example, if 20 modules are installed in a premium car, it can go 600 to 700 kilometers. If 10 to 12 modules are mounted on a regular sedan, it can run up to 300 kilometers. This pack is expected to catch the eyes of automakers, because they can design a car whose mileage may vary depending on how many modules of a single pack are installed."
Beat me to the punch ;)
Gravimetric energy density is one of the least important aspects these days. Back in the lead-acid days, improving it it was a huge deal because lead-acids made cars impractically heavy for a reasonable range. Those days are gone. As noted in this post:
"Casual hello, it's me, Zoidberg, act naturally."
Obviously both Wh/kg and$/kWh are important. Until the Wh/kg and Wh/m^3 figures for a new tech get good enough to make it physically practical, $/kWh is irrelevant; but beyond that with most new tech there's usually an adoption curve.
After you've done all the lab based tinkering you can to make new tech affordable, there comes a time when the only way to make it cheaper is to make it in quantity. But unless you are lucky (or persuasive) enough to be swimming in unlimited investor dollars, chances are you don't have the money to set up an operation on that scale.
That's why you target niche applications and early tech adopters. Elon Musk was smart about this: he didn't set out to build the electric equivalent of the Model T; he started out with an exotic roadster and then a near-as-exotic high end luxury sedan.
But then Henry Ford didn't start out with the Model T either; his first car was the Model A. The original 1903 Model A cost $800, at the time when the median US income was $543. He sold about 10,000 of them. The Model T was introduced in 1908 for $825, but five years later he managed to drop that price down to $440; sales increased twentyfold. By 1925 he'd managed to drop the price to $260 (the equivalent of less than $3700 in 2017 dollars) at a time median income had risen to $750. Not surprising he sold nearly two million of the things that year.
That's the power of the adoption curve. Early adopters bootstrap economies of scale you need to make something cheap enough for everyone.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Exactly; when you run the numbers it's easy to see the profit margin on them. They buy power at industrial rates (huge bulk), which in the US average something like $0.06-0.07/kWh, and sell it back for $0.20/kWh. The demand charges can be significant at low/uneven utilization rates, but that's not what we're talking about here, we're talking about "when electric vehicles become more popular". The station is much cheaper than a gas station to build; a typical 8-stall supercharging station today costs around $250k on average, and we're nowhere near mass production now. Punch in the numbers at say 30% average utilization and you find that it's easy to show significant profitability.
"Casual hello, it's me, Zoidberg, act naturally."