Long charging times for electric vehicles stop any journey where the trip is greater than the battery range.
Yes they do, but we don't need this tech to fix it. Existing batteries can do it just fine, if we would only invest in enough high power charging points.
Existing batteries can charge to 80% in half an hour. The only thing stopping us is the scarcity of high-power charging stations, and making batteries charge faster only makes those stations more expensive and less likely to be actually installed. That is why improving battery capacity and efficiency, not the charge rate, and rolling out more infrastructure using the existing standards are the most important things for EVs right now.
There's a pretty big continuum between 2 minutes and overnight. Existing EV batteries can charge in half an hour at a suitable fast-charger station with a manageable cable assembly. Making them charge faster simply doesn't help because it (a) does not solve the problem of needing expensive high-power chargers everywhere, and (b) creates a new problem because you need ridiculously high voltage and/or current capacity in all the charging cables.
They aren't looking at charge swaps because the infrastructure cost is enormous. Better Place tried it in Israel (much smaller country with more political incentive for EV use) and went bankrupt because people really didn't need swaps as much as they thought they would, and because they could only get one model of car to use the compatible battery.
It's hard enough getting people to roll out the standard charging stations we have now and keeping them all operational, can you imagine getting 100x that investment before anyone even buys the cars? Now think about covering a country as big as the US with gas-station-sized underground robotic battery swapping facilities and keeping them all stocked and operational.
And since you will only have as many customers as you have buyers of compatible cars, to make the network viable you need lots of models using the same battery. We only barely managed to standardize the stupid plug, can you seriously imagine them agreeing on a fundamental part of their cars' chassis?
Battery swapping is a logistical nightmare. Sure, we could do it, but we could also build a base on the moon and rid the world of famine if we really wanted to, but we won't. Fixed 200-mile batteries and 10- or 20-minute superchargers are the most realistic way to go. (Tesla's superchargers work just fine without 00 gauge cables.)
Am I the only one skeptical of whether this is real or not? What they describe doesn't make a lot of sense to me:
On one side it acts like a supercapacitor (with very fast charging), and on the other is like a lithium electrode (with slow discharge). The electrolyte is modified with our nanodots in order to make the multifunction electrode more effective.
So is it a battery or a capacitor? Maybe I'm just woefully ignorant of how lithium batteries work, but I was under the impression that it was the surface area of the electrodes and the activity of the electrolyte that govern the internal resistance, and hence the charge rate. Capacitance has nothing to do with it, unless you are charging up a capacitive "buffer" that drains into the chemical battery more slowly afterward, but that seems kind of pointless.
Pulling out buzzwords like "environmentally friendly" materials and nanodot "self-assembly" doesn't really help your plausibility, either. Anybody can make a box with banana jacks and an app with a timer in it.
In recent years at least, this is precisely the method they have used to develop CPR training for the general public. Even if a more complicated routine would result in a better chance of survival in any given case, they have to make the rules simple enough that people can remember and apply them years later and under stress. This increases the statistical survival rate overall, which is exactly the point.
But agree with everyone else, you could have explained this to a mildly intelligent person in about 1/4 of the words.
Reducing the number of pirates reduces the amount of piracy, increasing the efficiency of trade and spurring economic growth, resulting in greater energy use and thus global warming! Q.E.D.
And therein lies the utter whimsicality of the U.S. transportation system. Every day we get up and get into our metal cube and travel 1, 5, 20, even 50 miles to work. Then at the end of the day we get back in and reverse the trip. Wasting billions of man-hours of mental effort every year simply trying to keep our metal cube from hitting someone else's metal cube getting from point A to point B. Yet every attempt to build a transit system that would off-load this responsibility to trained professionals performing it for hundreds of people at once meets almost insurmountable criticism and only the barest of funding offers.
The fact that every one of these metal cubes is burning fossilized dinosaur plants and polluting the atmosphere is just icing on the cake. Electric cars are admittedly only a coping mechanism to deal with this dystopia in the least destructive manner. I'm sure there are many people who simply don't consider or know about their public transit options, and drive as a result. But until we get serious about transit investments, there isn't much choice for a lot of people.
Only if you live in West Virginia and you know they don't have solar panels on their house. But you can rub it in the face of any Prius driver you want. I don't understand how they can be so smug when all they're doing is using a *little less* gas by driving an underpowered, overcomplicated contraption--if they REALLY wanted to help the environment they would be driving electric. That's why I went straight to a Leaf--even better for the environment, AND I get plenty of torque and perfectly smooth acceleration.
This has been studiedextensivelyas well. While specific chemistries have their own pollution issues, most EV batteries are made in Japan, Korea and the U.S., with relatively strong pollution controls. There is general agreement that the manufacturing impact is relatively small compared to the operating costs of both electric and gasoline cars.
It's easy to be skeptical of electric vehicles until you realize just how bad even the best gasoline cars are. All those tailpipe emissions are making you and the people around you sick. All the money you spend on gas goes back to the oil companies, and you know how they treat the environment... Not mention all the motor oil, frequent maintenance and potential breakdowns, and subconscious stress induced by the constant engine noise in a gas car. Whereas EVs are perfectly silent, never smell like gas or exhaust, have no routine mechanical maintenance and far fewer parts to break. And powering it with grid electricity costs between 1/3 and 1/5 of what a 35mpg car costs in gas, coming from power plants which are under constant pressure to improve their emissions. Or just put solar panels on your house and be carbon neutral.
Actually, I should have added: Even though fuel economy has increased dramatically since 2000, so has manufacturing energy efficiency. Most new auto plants include vast solar arrays on site for the simple reason that it is cheaper than buying power from the grid, no matter what the emissions.
Interesting notion, but the devil is in the details.
And the details have been largely worked out. Studies have found that even on the dirtiest grid in the US modern electric cars match the emissions of a 34mpg car. Since this worst case scenario so rarely happens (the US grid is much cleaner than just coal, and getting cleaner all the time, and many EV owners install solar panels on their homes), Mazda will essentially have to race against the electric grid in trying to clean up their vehicles.
"A study by M.A. Weiss et al., published in a 2000 report from the MIT Energy Laboratory, On the Road in 2020: A Lifecycle Analysis of New Automotive Technologies, calculated that fully 75 percent of a vehicle’s lifetime carbon emissions come from the fuel it burns, and another 19 percent was due to the extraction and refining of that fuel.
The raw materials making up the vehicle added another 4 percent, and just 2 percent of lifetime carbon was due to manufacturing and assembly.
In other words, you'll save a lot more energy if you junk your old car and buy a much more efficient new one."
And as everyone in this thread knows, energy == emissions for all practical purposes...
That's what happens when your company doesn't have a pipeline to train new employees, and only focuses on maximizing return on the ones they have. A healthy organization would have people with 20 years of experience to replace those with 30 when they retire, and people with 10 years of experience to replace the ones with 20, etc. Reduces your efficiency in the short term because you have to support some who aren't as experienced but preserves institutional memory much better.
FTFY. They use big-government regulation to favor of businesses that "play the game" and donate to their campaigns. The rest of them are upstarts that they couldn't care less about.
The news here is that Elsevier has given up their unspoken tradition of non-enforcement when researchers share their own papers. It isn't clear here whether the papers in question were the pre- or post-editing versions; typically the former were considered fair game. Now that the contract is being interpreted more broadly than it had been (no matter what their actual rights were originally), it becomes even more onerous for would-be customers.
You would be far better served by installing a 40A breaker. Then you won't have to replace it again in 3 years, and you'll be code-compliant to boot. That's why you're supposed to size a breaker to be 25% more than your maximum continuous load.
The $30k EVs--at least the ones that actually sell--are far from "econoboxes". They come with all the bells and whistles of similarly priced cars, and serve the same purpose if you get one that matches your lifestyle. Buy a Chevy Volt for and you won't have range anxiety, but you'll be among drivers who go an average of 900 miles between gasoline fill-ups. Buy a Nissan Leaf (like my own), and you may have to borrow a gas car or ride with a friend once in a while, but never have to worry about oil changes.
He made an assertion that is dimensionally inconsistent by comparing a dollar amount (tax revenue) with a percentage (profit margin), so he can be safely ignored as someone who doesn't know what he's talking about or care enough to write it properly.
I'll admit that for my first five years or so, yes, I was intentionally drowning myself in work, and I loved it. I came into the organization with several skills they had been lacking, and jumped on every opportunity to apply them. Now they are training others to do those tasks as well, and I have spent the last few years learning to moderate my workload. What I got out of those hectic years, though, was the trust and respect of my colleagues and superiors.
I frequently play the role of the shielded guru, but I'm also not afraid to jump into the politics of a decision when it's necessary to get the job done. And when I say "job", I mean "project"--since I consider my job to be getting the project done regardless, not just my part of it.
I'm proactive about learning new tools and often have features ready before they're asked for (but I would never fly myself to a conference for the heck of it--they did pick some extreme examples for the paper).
Most importantly, I earned the reputation of someone who will get the job done no matter what, because I always have the right skill or contact to fill in the missing pieces.
You sound like an excellent engineer, but it takes a very adept manager to make sure all the bases are covered when everyone sticks to their job description precisely. Having members of the team who "lead from within" is a very valid way to share responsibility for a project without having to find a "star manager" who can direct everything himself. And taking the time to understand how your piece fits into the rest of the project should be part of your job no matter what your philosophy, even if your boss doesn't tell you to do it explicitly--perhaps this, in particular, is what the poster really needs to work on.
An interesting observation, though, is that this study was completed in 1999, which was some time ago. My organization has been around for much longer than that, so our corporate culture still has many of the "old ways" ingrained in it. It could be that their research is not as applicable to newer companies, but I would very surprised if there were not a significant degree of similarity.
This IEEE article is the only answer the poster needs. I read it all the way through, and it is spot on, matching my personal experience. I sometimes wondered what exactly I had done to garner such high praise from my colleagues and managers, but as it turns out I was doing all nine of their "Star Work Habits". Paraphrasing some of their findings with my experience:
Those "needless conversations" are where you can ask about other people's projects and experiences. Find out what their areas of expertise are so you can go to them when you need help, or can point others in direction--becoming a clearing-house for technical advice makes you conspicuously valuable and is a great way to gain exposure to all sorts of people and problems in your organization.
At the same time, you can also discover other opportunities. When I first joined as an intern, I quickly became part of the team by volunteering to help out on projects way above my pay grade because knew I had the skills to do them as well or better than the senior engineers. By delivering quality work on those assignments, my boss put me on the fast-track to more interesting projects and responsibilities.
More advanced forms of "communication" include knowing when to push back against your boss on requirements or schedule in order to benefit the organization in the long term, proactively stepping in to resolve conflicts among teammates, promoting others' good ideas when they are not being heard, and learning the ins and outs of the corporate culture so you can communicate effectively with other departments and managers.
It may seem like a waste of time, but you can learn a lot of valuable information by listening to the old-timers ramble on about this and that. More importantly, if you listen to their stores, they will be more willing to help you out when you need their advice.
So my immediate advice for the poster is: Get out there, chat with your coworkers at lunch or the water cooler, and don't worry too much about keeping track of how many dogs they have or where they went to vacation last year. Do ask them about technical topics or share what you are working on--it may be a more comfortable topic for them as well, and vastly more useful.
First of all, your argument is flawed because if a small inventor tried to sue a big company, if there was no cost shifting he would go bankrupt even if he won--which is why they almost never even try. Their only way to monetize a patent is by selling it.
Second, the point of this provision is to destroy the patent troll business model. Right now, when someone receives a patent troll extortion letter, they pay it because even if they know the claim is bullshit it will cost them more to prove it in court than to settle. With this provision in place, folks will be more comfortable blowing off wildly off-base infringement accusations because they know if they go to court they will get their fees paid. The trolls have no intention of taking those cases to court, and rely on fear to keep people paying, so this means there will be no more cases on the docket than before, but the trolls will get less money and society wins.
You fail to account for the fact that in most of the U.S. (outside major metropolitan areas), we have the worst of both worlds: corrupt government officials giving protected monopolies to private corporations. They have no accountability to anyone, and a profit motive to make service as poor as possible. Moving to a municipal system would fix half of this, by at least giving citizens the option to do something about terrible service/management even if they choose not to.
Slashdot Mirror
Long charging times for electric vehicles stop any journey where the trip is greater than the battery range.
Yes they do, but we don't need this tech to fix it. Existing batteries can do it just fine, if we would only invest in enough high power charging points.
Existing batteries can charge to 80% in half an hour. The only thing stopping us is the scarcity of high-power charging stations, and making batteries charge faster only makes those stations more expensive and less likely to be actually installed. That is why improving battery capacity and efficiency, not the charge rate, and rolling out more infrastructure using the existing standards are the most important things for EVs right now.
There's a pretty big continuum between 2 minutes and overnight. Existing EV batteries can charge in half an hour at a suitable fast-charger station with a manageable cable assembly. Making them charge faster simply doesn't help because it (a) does not solve the problem of needing expensive high-power chargers everywhere, and (b) creates a new problem because you need ridiculously high voltage and/or current capacity in all the charging cables.
They aren't looking at charge swaps because the infrastructure cost is enormous. Better Place tried it in Israel (much smaller country with more political incentive for EV use) and went bankrupt because people really didn't need swaps as much as they thought they would, and because they could only get one model of car to use the compatible battery.
It's hard enough getting people to roll out the standard charging stations we have now and keeping them all operational, can you imagine getting 100x that investment before anyone even buys the cars? Now think about covering a country as big as the US with gas-station-sized underground robotic battery swapping facilities and keeping them all stocked and operational.
And since you will only have as many customers as you have buyers of compatible cars, to make the network viable you need lots of models using the same battery. We only barely managed to standardize the stupid plug, can you seriously imagine them agreeing on a fundamental part of their cars' chassis?
Battery swapping is a logistical nightmare. Sure, we could do it, but we could also build a base on the moon and rid the world of famine if we really wanted to, but we won't. Fixed 200-mile batteries and 10- or 20-minute superchargers are the most realistic way to go. (Tesla's superchargers work just fine without 00 gauge cables.)
Am I the only one skeptical of whether this is real or not? What they describe doesn't make a lot of sense to me:
On one side it acts like a supercapacitor (with very fast charging), and on the other is like a lithium electrode (with slow discharge). The electrolyte is modified with our nanodots in order to make the multifunction electrode more effective.
So is it a battery or a capacitor? Maybe I'm just woefully ignorant of how lithium batteries work, but I was under the impression that it was the surface area of the electrodes and the activity of the electrolyte that govern the internal resistance, and hence the charge rate. Capacitance has nothing to do with it, unless you are charging up a capacitive "buffer" that drains into the chemical battery more slowly afterward, but that seems kind of pointless.
Pulling out buzzwords like "environmentally friendly" materials and nanodot "self-assembly" doesn't really help your plausibility, either. Anybody can make a box with banana jacks and an app with a timer in it.
In recent years at least, this is precisely the method they have used to develop CPR training for the general public. Even if a more complicated routine would result in a better chance of survival in any given case, they have to make the rules simple enough that people can remember and apply them years later and under stress. This increases the statistical survival rate overall, which is exactly the point.
But agree with everyone else, you could have explained this to a mildly intelligent person in about 1/4 of the words.
Reducing the number of pirates reduces the amount of piracy, increasing the efficiency of trade and spurring economic growth, resulting in greater energy use and thus global warming! Q.E.D.
And therein lies the utter whimsicality of the U.S. transportation system. Every day we get up and get into our metal cube and travel 1, 5, 20, even 50 miles to work. Then at the end of the day we get back in and reverse the trip. Wasting billions of man-hours of mental effort every year simply trying to keep our metal cube from hitting someone else's metal cube getting from point A to point B. Yet every attempt to build a transit system that would off-load this responsibility to trained professionals performing it for hundreds of people at once meets almost insurmountable criticism and only the barest of funding offers.
The fact that every one of these metal cubes is burning fossilized dinosaur plants and polluting the atmosphere is just icing on the cake. Electric cars are admittedly only a coping mechanism to deal with this dystopia in the least destructive manner. I'm sure there are many people who simply don't consider or know about their public transit options, and drive as a result. But until we get serious about transit investments, there isn't much choice for a lot of people.
"Burning American coal" is probably the lamest reason to buy an electric car.
Only if you live in West Virginia and you know they don't have solar panels on their house. But you can rub it in the face of any Prius driver you want. I don't understand how they can be so smug when all they're doing is using a *little less* gas by driving an underpowered, overcomplicated contraption--if they REALLY wanted to help the environment they would be driving electric. That's why I went straight to a Leaf--even better for the environment, AND I get plenty of torque and perfectly smooth acceleration.
This has been studied extensively as well. While specific chemistries have their own pollution issues, most EV batteries are made in Japan, Korea and the U.S., with relatively strong pollution controls. There is general agreement that the manufacturing impact is relatively small compared to the operating costs of both electric and gasoline cars.
It's easy to be skeptical of electric vehicles until you realize just how bad even the best gasoline cars are. All those tailpipe emissions are making you and the people around you sick. All the money you spend on gas goes back to the oil companies, and you know how they treat the environment... Not mention all the motor oil, frequent maintenance and potential breakdowns, and subconscious stress induced by the constant engine noise in a gas car. Whereas EVs are perfectly silent, never smell like gas or exhaust, have no routine mechanical maintenance and far fewer parts to break. And powering it with grid electricity costs between 1/3 and 1/5 of what a 35mpg car costs in gas, coming from power plants which are under constant pressure to improve their emissions. Or just put solar panels on your house and be carbon neutral.
Actually, I should have added: Even though fuel economy has increased dramatically since 2000, so has manufacturing energy efficiency. Most new auto plants include vast solar arrays on site for the simple reason that it is cheaper than buying power from the grid, no matter what the emissions.
Interesting notion, but the devil is in the details.
And the details have been largely worked out. Studies have found that even on the dirtiest grid in the US modern electric cars match the emissions of a 34mpg car. Since this worst case scenario so rarely happens (the US grid is much cleaner than just coal, and getting cleaner all the time, and many EV owners install solar panels on their homes), Mazda will essentially have to race against the electric grid in trying to clean up their vehicles.
This MYTH has been debunked:
"A study by M.A. Weiss et al., published in a 2000 report from the MIT Energy Laboratory, On the Road in 2020: A Lifecycle Analysis of New Automotive Technologies, calculated that fully 75 percent of a vehicle’s lifetime carbon emissions come from the fuel it burns, and another 19 percent was due to the extraction and refining of that fuel. The raw materials making up the vehicle added another 4 percent, and just 2 percent of lifetime carbon was due to manufacturing and assembly. In other words, you'll save a lot more energy if you junk your old car and buy a much more efficient new one."
And as everyone in this thread knows, energy == emissions for all practical purposes...
That's what happens when your company doesn't have a pipeline to train new employees, and only focuses on maximizing return on the ones they have. A healthy organization would have people with 20 years of experience to replace those with 30 when they retire, and people with 10 years of experience to replace the ones with 20, etc. Reduces your efficiency in the short term because you have to support some who aren't as experienced but preserves institutional memory much better.
The three sponsors of this are all Republicans.
The party of less government and pro-donors.
FTFY. They use big-government regulation to favor of businesses that "play the game" and donate to their campaigns. The rest of them are upstarts that they couldn't care less about.
The article is pretty lame, and appears to merely be ad click-bait.
Well, he does work from home. Be a sucker and click on a link so he can have a cup of coffee.
The news here is that Elsevier has given up their unspoken tradition of non-enforcement when researchers share their own papers. It isn't clear here whether the papers in question were the pre- or post-editing versions; typically the former were considered fair game. Now that the contract is being interpreted more broadly than it had been (no matter what their actual rights were originally), it becomes even more onerous for would-be customers.
You would be far better served by installing a 40A breaker. Then you won't have to replace it again in 3 years, and you'll be code-compliant to boot. That's why you're supposed to size a breaker to be 25% more than your maximum continuous load.
The $30k EVs--at least the ones that actually sell--are far from "econoboxes". They come with all the bells and whistles of similarly priced cars, and serve the same purpose if you get one that matches your lifestyle. Buy a Chevy Volt for and you won't have range anxiety, but you'll be among drivers who go an average of 900 miles between gasoline fill-ups. Buy a Nissan Leaf (like my own), and you may have to borrow a gas car or ride with a friend once in a while, but never have to worry about oil changes.
He made an assertion that is dimensionally inconsistent by comparing a dollar amount (tax revenue) with a percentage (profit margin), so he can be safely ignored as someone who doesn't know what he's talking about or care enough to write it properly.
I'll admit that for my first five years or so, yes, I was intentionally drowning myself in work, and I loved it. I came into the organization with several skills they had been lacking, and jumped on every opportunity to apply them. Now they are training others to do those tasks as well, and I have spent the last few years learning to moderate my workload. What I got out of those hectic years, though, was the trust and respect of my colleagues and superiors.
I frequently play the role of the shielded guru, but I'm also not afraid to jump into the politics of a decision when it's necessary to get the job done. And when I say "job", I mean "project"--since I consider my job to be getting the project done regardless, not just my part of it.
I'm proactive about learning new tools and often have features ready before they're asked for (but I would never fly myself to a conference for the heck of it--they did pick some extreme examples for the paper).
Most importantly, I earned the reputation of someone who will get the job done no matter what, because I always have the right skill or contact to fill in the missing pieces.
You sound like an excellent engineer, but it takes a very adept manager to make sure all the bases are covered when everyone sticks to their job description precisely. Having members of the team who "lead from within" is a very valid way to share responsibility for a project without having to find a "star manager" who can direct everything himself. And taking the time to understand how your piece fits into the rest of the project should be part of your job no matter what your philosophy, even if your boss doesn't tell you to do it explicitly--perhaps this, in particular, is what the poster really needs to work on.
An interesting observation, though, is that this study was completed in 1999, which was some time ago. My organization has been around for much longer than that, so our corporate culture still has many of the "old ways" ingrained in it. It could be that their research is not as applicable to newer companies, but I would very surprised if there were not a significant degree of similarity.
This IEEE article is the only answer the poster needs. I read it all the way through, and it is spot on, matching my personal experience. I sometimes wondered what exactly I had done to garner such high praise from my colleagues and managers, but as it turns out I was doing all nine of their "Star Work Habits". Paraphrasing some of their findings with my experience:
Those "needless conversations" are where you can ask about other people's projects and experiences. Find out what their areas of expertise are so you can go to them when you need help, or can point others in direction--becoming a clearing-house for technical advice makes you conspicuously valuable and is a great way to gain exposure to all sorts of people and problems in your organization.
At the same time, you can also discover other opportunities. When I first joined as an intern, I quickly became part of the team by volunteering to help out on projects way above my pay grade because knew I had the skills to do them as well or better than the senior engineers. By delivering quality work on those assignments, my boss put me on the fast-track to more interesting projects and responsibilities.
More advanced forms of "communication" include knowing when to push back against your boss on requirements or schedule in order to benefit the organization in the long term, proactively stepping in to resolve conflicts among teammates, promoting others' good ideas when they are not being heard, and learning the ins and outs of the corporate culture so you can communicate effectively with other departments and managers.
It may seem like a waste of time, but you can learn a lot of valuable information by listening to the old-timers ramble on about this and that. More importantly, if you listen to their stores, they will be more willing to help you out when you need their advice.
So my immediate advice for the poster is: Get out there, chat with your coworkers at lunch or the water cooler, and don't worry too much about keeping track of how many dogs they have or where they went to vacation last year. Do ask them about technical topics or share what you are working on--it may be a more comfortable topic for them as well, and vastly more useful.
First of all, your argument is flawed because if a small inventor tried to sue a big company, if there was no cost shifting he would go bankrupt even if he won--which is why they almost never even try. Their only way to monetize a patent is by selling it.
Second, the point of this provision is to destroy the patent troll business model. Right now, when someone receives a patent troll extortion letter, they pay it because even if they know the claim is bullshit it will cost them more to prove it in court than to settle. With this provision in place, folks will be more comfortable blowing off wildly off-base infringement accusations because they know if they go to court they will get their fees paid. The trolls have no intention of taking those cases to court, and rely on fear to keep people paying, so this means there will be no more cases on the docket than before, but the trolls will get less money and society wins.
You fail to account for the fact that in most of the U.S. (outside major metropolitan areas), we have the worst of both worlds: corrupt government officials giving protected monopolies to private corporations. They have no accountability to anyone, and a profit motive to make service as poor as possible. Moving to a municipal system would fix half of this, by at least giving citizens the option to do something about terrible service/management even if they choose not to.