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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 26 2018, @12:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the shocking-news dept.

Car companies, starting with Volvo last summer, have laid out plans to electrify entire lineups of vehicles. But the fine print makes it clear that the coming decade and beyond will focus not just on massive battery packs powering electric motors, but also on adding a little extra juice to the venerable internal combustion engine.

Increasingly, that juice will arrive in the form of new electrical systems built to a 48-volt standard, instead of the 12-volt systems that have dominated since the 1950s. Simpler than Prius-type drivetrains and less expensive than Tesla-scale battery power, the new electrical architecture both satisfies the demands of cars made more power hungry by their gadget load and enables the use of lower-cost hybrid drive systems.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/electric-cars-48-volts.html


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  • (Score: 2) by hamsterdan on Monday February 26 2018, @11:31PM (1 child)

    by hamsterdan (2829) on Monday February 26 2018, @11:31PM (#644303)

    Don't underestimate bean counters. My friend's leaf has a standard 12v lead acid battery, even if the car is 100% electric. when his battery died, the car wouldn't start. because the single 12v battery was dead. An F-150 gave him a boost, a V8 gas-guzzling jump-started an electric car, so yes, everything is possible.

    One of the advantages of switching to 48v is wire size, even on gas-powered vehicules, we're talking about lots of pounds that could be shaved from the vehicule's weight, but if they leave legacy 12v in there for *everything* on the market, fine by me. For those of you old enough to remember the cigar lighters in cars, it was a legacy from when it was really used to light cigars.

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 27 2018, @03:02AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday February 27 2018, @03:02AM (#644427)

    The Leaf most likely has a 12V battery because off-the-shelf parts from Nissan's parts bin are all 12V, and a single not-top-selling model just isn't enough to get a bunch of 48V accessories made (which wouldn't help the Leaf that much at this point anyway, because its main battery is 380V, and the auto industry has been talking about a new voltage standard for decades but never actually agreed to one). If a large carmaker switches ALL its models to a new voltage standard, the old 12V stuff will be disappearing pretty quickly, if not within one car generation, definitely two.

    Here's [mynissanleaf.com] an interesting post about those Leaf batteries BTW.