Automakers accelerating release of upgraded models, unlike typical 5-year cycle for gasoline cars; Hyundai introduces updated Ioniq 5, and BYD will soon unveil refreshed SEAL; how will this impact used car market?
In recent weeks, two refreshed car models have been launched: Hyundai's Ioniq 5 and BYD's SEAL. Both models, introduced in 2021 and 2022 respectively, are receiving significant updates ahead of the typical five-year facelift cycle. This global automotive industry standard generally involves cosmetic upgrades to keep cars relevant.
However, these updates are more than just aesthetic. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 now features a substantial battery upgrade, increasing from 72.6 kWh to 84 kWh. This enhancement boosts the top model's range from 480 km to over 550 km. Other upgrades include new wheel designs and interior materials, but the major improvements lie beneath the surface.
[...] These updates reflect a broader trend among electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers, who have announced major enhancements to existing models. Unlike mid-life upgrades in gasoline cars, which often focus on superficial enhancements like sound systems and wheel designs, EV upgrades are core technological improvements. This trend is driven by several factors.
[...] Recent trends in the used EV market show that the introduction of significantly upgraded models or superior competing models can deter buyers unless substantial discounts are offered. The new Ioniq 5's increased range and the SEAL's faster charging capabilities could negatively affect the resale value of older models.
Related:
- Auto Woes
- EU Battery Passport - Lifetime Record of BEV and Other Large Li Batteries
- "Corolla Killer:" BYD Launches $US15,000 EV in Direct Attack on Legacy Makers
- A Chinese EV Squeezed 650 Miles Of Range From Its 150 kWh Battery
- Why are All the EVs so Expensive?
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I decided a few years ago that I was sick of standing in the snow at a gas station waiting for the person inside the building to finish selling that lottery ticket and turn the pump on so I can stand there some more babysitting it while it fills up and I freeze. The answer, of course, was to buy a car that didn't need gasoline, one I could plug into the house and go inside where it's warm.
I'm not a rich man, I'm a pensioner who is still paying a mortgage, so I looked for an affordable EV. Used ones are almost nonexistent, and I found out why when I finally bought one: it has a ten year warranty. They haven't been making them much longer than that.
I swore off new cars decades ago when my month old VW stranded me ninety miles from home with a bad alternator, but if you want an EV, new is your only choice. I kept seeing the Chevy Bolt advertised, but could never find one for sale at all. Then I found that they had stopped making them two years earlier.
Why? Well, battery problems, they claimed. Why just the not so expensive one, $30,000? GM is still selling electric Cadillacs and Corvettes, why no cheap cars?
I discovered after buying an EV that the only two advantages of a piston car to an electric one are the lack of infrastructure for long trips, and the high purchase price of the vehicle. Why high? Because only their flagship autos have electric motors, the ones that formerly had V8s.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
An EV from Chinese manufacturer Nio will soon go on sale with a "semi-solid state" 150kWh battery (140kWh usable) that's the largest in any passenger car, Car News China reported. To show [how] much range that will deliver, Nio CEO William Li drove a prototype version of the ET7 1,044km (650 miles) in 14 hours, a distance surpassing many gas-powered vehicles.
The test was run in relatively cool temperatures (between 28 – 54 F) and livestreamed. Driving was done mainly in semi-autonomous (or Navigate-on-Pilot+, as Nio calls it), and speed-limited to 90 km/h (56 MPH). The average speed was 83.9 km/h (a respectable 52.4 MPH), with a travel time of 12.4 hours excluding stops.
"The completion of this endurance challenge proves the product power of the 150kWh ultra-long endurance battery pack," said Li in a Weibo post (Google translation). "More importantly, all models on sale can be flexibly upgraded to 150kWh batteries through the Nio battery swap system."
In fact, the ET7's 150kWh battery will only be available on a lease separate from the car, much as we've seen with some cars sold in Europe. Previously, the company said that the battery alone would cost as much as an entire car (the company's entry-level ET5 EV), or around $42,000.
[...] Nio is a luxury EV manufacturer in China that offers vehicles without a battery, letting you sign up to a battery-as-a-service (BAAS) monthly subscription. That service also allows you to swap out your battery at any time for a larger one.
The Driven, an Australian car news site is reporting on a new EV offering from Chinese auto manufacturer BYD
From the article:
At $US15,000, BYD's new Qin EV is already being touted as a "Corolla killer" as the world's second largest EV maker continues to disrupt the global auto market.
Launched earlier this week in China, the all-electric Qin Plus has five models priced between 109,800 RMB to ($A23,300) to 139,800 RMB ($A29,700).
The Qin Plus comes with a 100 kW motor and the option of either a 48 kWh battery providing 420 km CLTC range or a 57.6 kW hour battery with 510 km range.
[...] Indeed, most legacy car makers, at least those that are bothering to make EVs at scale at all, are still focused on the top end of the market, selling premium and heavy and high cost EVs, largely to protect their ICE business. In the US, the major car makers are retreating rapidly on their EV plans.
BYD, which is challenging Tesla as the biggest EV maker in the world, says it's "officially opening a new era where electricity is lower than oil."
Additional reporting on the BYD Qin:
https://electrek.co/2024/02/19/byd-launches-15k-qin-plus-ev-kicking-off-price-war-gas-cars/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/autos-hybrids/byd-launches-qin-plus-ev-honor-edition-electric-cars-now-cheaper-than-gasoline/ar-BB1izoNY
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/byd-launches-11000-qin-plus-dm-i-phev-in-china/
After coming across a reference to an upcoming EU regulation for large batteries, such as used in battery-electric vehicles, I poked around and found this link, https://www.circularise.com/blogs/eu-battery-passport-regulation-requirements From their About section:
With our technology, companies can trace products and materials to verify their origins, certificates, CO2, and other material data. Our mission is to enable a circular economy
Here are a few cuttings from the battery passport description:
An update to the 2006 Battery Directive3 aims to ensure that the growth of the battery industry is done sustainably. In July 2023, the EU Battery Regulation Amendment was adopted by the EU Council, laying out the structure to achieve sustainable battery lifecycles. [...]
According to the Battery Regulation update, every industrial or electric vehicle (EV) battery on the EU market with a capacity of over 2 kWh will require a battery passport. This means regardless of the origin of the battery, it will require a battery passport in order to be listed in the European market. It will be the responsibility of the party placing the battery on the market, to ensure that all data required is entered in the digital record and that the information is correct and up to date.
Battery passports will therefore require input from:
Mining and refining companies
Cell and battery producers
Vehicle brands
Battery servicing, refurbishing, and recycling companies
[...]The battery passport must contain information on:
Identification of the battery in the form of a unique identifier.
Basic characteristics of the battery including type and model.
Statistics on performance and durability must also be updated over the battery lifecycle by parties conducting repair or repurposing of the battery.
Car dealers can't sell cars due to living in today's world
Hope you didn't want to buy a car in the near future
Car dealership software-as-a-service provider CDK Global was hit by a massive cyberattack causing the company to shut down its systems and leaving clients unable to operate their business normally.
CDK Global provides clients in the auto industry a SaaS platform that handles all aspects of a car dealership's operation, including CRM, financing, payroll, support and service, inventory, and back office operations.
Brad Holton, CEO of Proton Dealership IT, a cybersecurity and IT services firm for car dealerships, told BleepingComputer that the attack caused CDK to take its two data centers offline at approximately 2 AM last night.
Employees at multiple car dealerships have also told BleepingComputer that CDK has not shared much information other than to send an email warning that they suffered a cyber incident.
Anyone wanna take bets they're running Microsoft stuff?
Why Americans aren't buying more EVs
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Clint and Rachel Wells had reasons to consider buying an electric vehicle when it came to replacing one of their cars. But they had even more reasons to stick with petrol.
The couple live in Normal, Illinois, which has enjoyed an economic boost from the electric vehicle assembly plant opened there by upstart electric-car maker Rivian. EVs are a step forward from “using dead dinosaurs” to power cars, Clint Wells says, and he wants to support that.
But the couple decided to “get what was affordable”—in their case, a petrol-engined Honda Accord costing $19,000 after trade-in.
An EV priced at $25,000 would have been tempting, but only five new electric models costing less than $40,000 have come on to the US market in 2024. The hometown champion’s focus on luxury vehicles—its cheapest model is currently the $69,000 R1T—made it a non-starter.
“It’s just not accessible to us at this point in our life,” Rachel Wells says.
The Wells are among the millions of Americans opting to continue buying combustion-engine cars over electric vehicles, despite [the] President's ambitious target of having EVs make up half of all new cars sold in the US by 2030. Last year, the proportion was 9.5 percent.
High sticker prices for cars on the forecourt, and high interest rates that are pushing up monthly lease payments, have combined with concerns over driving range and charging infrastructure to chill buyers’ enthusiasm—even among those who consider themselves green.
While EV technology is still improving and the popularity of electric cars is still increasing, sales growth has slowed. Many carmakers are rethinking manufacturing plans, cutting the numbers of EVs they had planned to produce for the US market in favor of combustion-engined and hybrid cars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by chucky on Friday August 02 2024, @06:55AM (11 children)
Obsolete sooner than you’d think… Look, I bought my last car with “it has to last at least ten years”. It’s fourteen now. They make far better cars now, but I don’t care, it still does what I need from it. I get to work one day and back home three days later (door-to-door 262 km one way), I can also go over 600 km to see my parents on a single tank of gasoline. If an electric car can do the same for 10 years, I’d be okay. It becomes obsolete when it cannot do that anymore.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Friday August 02 2024, @07:21AM
It's also because it's still a relatively immature market. For the first x% of the life of PCs and phones you bought a new one each year because things were still progressing rapidly. This stopped in PCs in maybe the mid-2000s, and phones maybe a few years ago. With EVs we're nowhere near that stage yet.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Friday August 02 2024, @11:04AM (5 children)
I admit I was surprised to hear TFS say a "5 year lifecycle" for ICE cars is "typical", I think that was added to just make BEVs sound better because I just can't believe it otherwise.
Generally in Europe cars are expected to last at least 10 years before major work/renewal on them is needed. Me, my friends and neighbours bought second hand cars when they were already 10 years old, and many treat their cars like family hairlooms, passed down the generations.
For example I was handed down my fathers car, and I only sold it (when it was 39 years old) as I was leaving the country and it was right-hand drive (the European mainland is LHD). Now I am looking to buy a new daily driver and I don't even consider things like "resale value" as I intend to drive it until it either falls apart, or I pass it down to the next generation.
Looking at the vehicles on the roads in my corner of Europe, there is a range from the 1980s to 2010's, with a minority of post 2010 cars (most likely on lease). And the early vehicles are not all cherished classics, a lot of them have the look of working/daily vehicles.
So I believe that for most people cars are not a throwaway purchase, especially considering their cost (apparently for normal people, they are the second most expensive thing you will buy after your home) it actually makes sense you would want to keep it as long as you can.
The idea that something as complicated and intensive to produce as a vehicle should just have a lifetime of 5 years is horribly wasteful but when I think about it, a lot of modern society has become a very wasteful "throw away" society. An attitude not helped by articles encouraging people to think "5 years" is a long time for something to last, as it really isn't.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday August 02 2024, @03:43PM (3 children)
The new car market is targeted at the people who buy or lease new cars. Many of those people switch vehicles every three years or so. They don't throw out the old car then, it goes to the used car market where people like you buy it. The reason that you are able to buy the car that you want slightly used is that other status obsessed people bought that car brand new and then re-sold it as soon as the new car smell was gone. And those status obsessed people are the ones that auto makers target, because they buy most of the new cars.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday August 02 2024, @08:45PM (1 child)
That is absolutely fine, I don't mind those kinds of people buying new and taking the largest depreciation hit. They get whatever it is this they want from a new car, and I get the car for a price I feel more reflective of its worth.
However cars should be designed to last multiples longer than the typical lease length. Yet more and more cars are made with cheap parts that seem designed to fail shortly after the lease expires, thereby artificially shortening the useful life of the car. This is something I object to, for multiple reasons, along with the general attempts to "normalise" the public to the idea that things have a lifetime of 5-10 years max.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2024, @03:07AM
So they last 3 years and you need to get a new car because so much of the plastic stuff has crumbled away.
🤣
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday August 02 2024, @11:26PM
I like and appreciate those people. They absorb the 50+% devaluation that occurs in the first 3-5yrs of a car’s life, so I may buy it much cheaper but still barely used. I do this with a lot of things (bikes, furniture, etc).
Here in Australia, most cars on the road are newish. I notice how new cars are in the cities here when I go overseas then back. It’s sad really. The issue of “cost of living” is near the top of people’s minds and news articles here the past 5 years. I don’t think things are really getting that much more expensive (some things are), but I think the problem is people expecting to constantly buy new stuff and consume like mad whilst being able to pay the mortgage.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EvilSS on Sunday August 04 2024, @04:41AM
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Friday August 02 2024, @03:46PM (3 children)
The average car on US roads is, I think about 12 years old. That's the average, which means that cars are lasting a lot longer.
5 years might be the average time someone owns a car?
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Friday August 02 2024, @04:11PM
No no, it's a solution looking for a problem.
5 years is how often car companies want you to purchase a brand new vehicle. They're just looking at this going "this is a new 'generation' of product, can we nudge our customers from the 7 year cycle we've been - in vain - trying to get them on, to an even crazier 5 year cycle?"...
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Friday August 02 2024, @04:18PM (1 child)
I have friends and clients who ask me to help them purchase a new (different) vehicle from time-to-time. Whenever I'm asked, I have a list of questions I ask them which include:
And there are a few others. Most people I help don't care about longevity, they just want something that's reliable. In those cases I advise them, buy anything you want, just get rid of it when it's got 80-100k miles.
For those that want to buy something and run it until it dies, I recommend, in this order, Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Subaru. If they decide on Subaru I recommend they get rid of it at 150k miles. Anything else will run a long time, generally 250k+ miles, and as long as they keep up w/ the maintenance (rust, chassis repairs, brakes, regular fluid changes, etc.) they can expect to get 250k+ out of it.
My daily driver is a 2005 Pontiac Vibe (basically a Toyota Matrix w/ Pontiac styling) that's pushing 190k miles and I expect to have it for a few more years. And of course I'm going to keep my 50 year-old Jeep J20 forever.
So I'd say go by the mileage, not the age.
Ever had a belch so satisfying you have to blow your nose afterward?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2024, @06:25PM
> So I'd say go by the mileage, not the age.
All good comments, but an issue you didn't mention is rubber components aging-out. Rubber degrades with time, faster if exposed to UV or ozone. That's one of the problems I've had with 20 year old cars--the original rubber seals/gaskets/hoses are getting hard to find.
There's probably not too much rubber on your old Jeep but for that popular niche vehicle there are probably aftermarket parts available to fill in the lack of factory rubber parts.
My 2003 Vibe (5-speed and crank windows!) is at 130K and just had a fuel leak -- rodent bit a pinhole in a plastic pipe leaving the top of the fuel tank. Not cheap to have the tank lowered and a tech figure out a workaround to stop that leak. But the car is fine otherwise, so I went ahead with that repair.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Nuke on Friday August 02 2024, @09:10AM
So if my car maker changes the wheel design or trim on later models, I must drive mine to a scrap yard and cry in my beer? Upgrades happen all the time with IC cars too, including mid-life technical changes. But I don't care. I'll keep driving my 17 year old car until the rust gets it, or until the EU bans getting needed spare parts for it (yes, that's coming). Moreover, I don't agree that newer cars ones are better, especially when they report all your doings to their mothership and won't allow me or my local independent garage to make repairs. In fact I find even my present car is not as nice as my previous one (its model predecessor) that was 15 years older than that.
But I suppose that we will be unable to keep driving an internet-connected car indefinitely anyway, because the maker will brick it remotely when they decide you should buy a new one, playing the "safety" card I expect.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 02 2024, @01:30PM (6 children)
BEVs desperately need huge improvements. Batteries are still too expensive, and and still take too long to recharge. A BEV is great for short trips and light usage, any kind of work in which it can spend half a day plugged in, recharging.
One of the most damaging things about the current situation is the penchant that commercial businesses have for exaggerating capabilities. That 330 mile range of the Tesla model 3 is a lie. It does not have that much range under realistic conditions, only ideal conditions.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday August 02 2024, @02:22PM (5 children)
Well the batteries were always the weak point. After all, after steam powered vehicles the next generation were battery-electric up until the ICE came around and demonstrated its superiority, which it has held to this day (while BEV technology has improved in the last century, so has ICE technology).
The problem is that batteries will never match the energy density of liquid fuels, the laws of physics prevent it. Even the high electrical to motive efficiency of motors is not enough to compensate for the transport/charging/conversion losses and energy density shortcomings, not to mention the degradation of battery capacity over time and charge cycles.
This is why the original idea for "cars of the future" were for them to be powered by fuel cells (mostly methanol/ethanol based), or series hybrid designs where a highly efficient engine (in some cases a small fixed RPM gas turbine) turns a generator to provide the energy needed to move the vehicle (with short term surge power and energy recovered from braking stored in supercapacitors). In both cases the energy storage medium was a liquid fuel, just the nature of energy conversion is different. Personally I think these options are more realistic directions then the full battery-electric vehicles that are being heavily pushed nowadays.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fliptop on Friday August 02 2024, @04:27PM
The EV's have a long way to go, for sure. For an excellent demonstration, I recommend this video [youtube.com].
Ever had a belch so satisfying you have to blow your nose afterward?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 02 2024, @05:05PM (3 children)
I would like to think the reason for pushing batteries so hard is that other methods are inferior for a variety of reasons. But, I have also seen plenty of low hanging fruit going unpicked. You would have thought that manufacturers would grasp at anything to increase the range of vehicles that have range problems, but no. They have not seized on several aerodynamic improvements, such as covering the wheels. The last production car I know of that used wheel skirts was the 2006 Honda Insight. Whatever the reason for this failure, it strongly suggests that low hanging fruit elsewhere is also going unpicked.
Rosen Motors attempted a flywheel powered car. There are many ideas based on the fuel cell. Hydrogen is not the only fuel that a fuel cell can be designed to use. For hydrogen powered fuel cells, there's work on how to store the hydrogen, directly working with the gas having many issues. Can get hydrogen from hydrocarbons, or another substance such as magnesium hydride, and even plain old water. There is of course ICE with other fuels such as methanol, ethanol, methane, and even hydrogen. Even steam power has been greatly improved. We seem to have latched onto lithium-ion battery tech, but there are many, many others. Aluminum-air batteries have among the highest amounts of energy per mass, at approximately 4.6 MJ/kg. Gasoline is 44.4 MJ/kg. Theoretically, aluminum-air could get as high as 37 MJ/kg, nearly as good as gasoline. With electric motors being 3x as efficient at converting energy into motion, aluminum-air would have to get to only 15 MJ/kg to beat ICE. Of course there are several other problems with aluminum-air-- it's a primary battery, can't be recharged, and recycling the spent batteries is a lot of work.
But what may be most consequential of all is eliminating the reasons for so much travel. Telecommute instead of commute. No method of real travel can come anywhere close to doing it virtually. Other considerations are to design cities to be less sprawling and less fixated on automobile travel. Another is keeping it remote. Why lug around a human in the vehicle to operate and direct it, if the human can do so remotely? Mind, the weight of a few humans is trivial next to the weight of a freight train, but there are other advantages to doing it remotely. Yes, there's also AI driving, but that, we've seen is yet another overly hyped technology that has so far not lived up to the hopes. We might also consider different kinds of roads, or, with further improvements, at last realize the dream of personal flying machines and cut way back on roads.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 02 2024, @06:36PM (2 children)
> There is of course ICE with other fuels such as methanol, ethanol, methane, and even hydrogen.
Lurking in the shadows is burning anhydrous ammonia NH3 -- no carbon in the fuel, so no CO2 generated. It burns in air and is close to gasoline in energy density, needs a simple catalyst to deal with the nitrogen oxides. There is already infrastructure everywhere there is commercial farming--it's fertilizer.
For solar installations without storage for mid-day over-generation (and thus "wasted electricity"), diverting to ammonia synthesis (commercially available) could be a useful method of adding compact energy storage.
This is being done in Germany and Japan now, but has almost no "traction" in USA.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday August 03 2024, @02:05PM (1 child)
Could it be that NH3 isn't getting traction because it is the precursor to ammonium nitrate, the powerful explosive that was used in the Oklahoma City bombing? Many accidental explosions with this fertilizer too.
Similarly, propane is an excellent refrigerant, but it's not used for that in the US because it is considered too dangerous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 04 2024, @01:06AM
Possible, but gasoline isn't exactly safe(!!) -- some have said that if ICE cars with gasoline engines were just invented and introduced in today's safety-conscious culture, they would soon be banned on the basis of the fire/explosion potential of the fuel.
I'm reminded of Halloween bonfires of a big pile of tree and hedge trimmings, 2-3 meters high. Back in the 1960s there were no burning restrictions where we lived and we sometimes sprinkled several liters of gasoline around to get the wood fire started. One match tossed in from a distance resulted in a loud "WHUMP" as the gasoline nearly lit all at once. Later we used diesel/kerosene, much slower flame spread, but equally effective as a fire starter.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday August 02 2024, @03:12PM (11 children)
1 - Cellphones have batteries that last roughly 3 years even if you're careful - perhaps a bit more if you're truly anal and you never charge over 80% or discharge under 20%.
2 - Electric cars use the same cell technology. Car too are typically used daily, and most drivers are unlikely to keep their car's battery at 80%.
3 - The bulk of an electric car's value is in its battery pack.
1+2+3 = don't expect an electric car to last even if you're careful. It's a throwaway item like a cellphone.
And that's why I've given up on getting an EV and I still ride the bus.
But... Our local transport authority bought a bunch of Volvo 7900s and Yutong electric buses that are great! They're quiet and smooth, I don't have to drive them and I don't have to eat up their depreciation.
So in a sense, I enjoy an electric ride without the drawbacks of owning one.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Friday August 02 2024, @03:30PM
I am using a Samsung J3 phone from 2016. It is still on the original battery. It is just beginning to hold a slightly reduced charge when compared to being new, but it is still enough for more than a full day of use.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Friday August 02 2024, @04:14PM (9 children)
I am ignorant on this subject, can you elaborate on why this extends battery life?
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Friday August 02 2024, @04:23PM
I'm not sure the parent is correct. I have a Motorola G7 that's 5 years old and I have always run the battery down to 0 (the point when it automatically shuts down) and leave it off until it's fully recharged. I can still get about 2 weeks of usage between charges. Note this is w/ everything disabled, including Bluetooth and WiFi.
Ever had a belch so satisfying you have to blow your nose afterward?
(Score: 3, Informative) by bryan on Friday August 02 2024, @05:03PM
Many battery chemistries do not like being fully charged up or fully depleted. Keeping the charge between the 20%-80% is generally considered the best practice, as this stresses the cells the least. Also, the vast majority of the time spent charging a battery pack occurs in the 80%-100% range. Since the charging rate slows down and it slightly damages the cells, most cars have the option to stop charging at 80%.
Note that some battery packs have a buffer that may not be visible to the user. For example, they make claim to only have X capacity, even though they actually have a bit more that they keep in reserve.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PhilSalkie on Friday August 02 2024, @05:18PM (2 children)
(Rough explanation, but close enough to get the meaning across - there are a number of different chemistries lumped into the "Lithium Ion" cell type, and they each behave differently to charge/discharge extremes.)
Conventional dry cells, lead-acids, NiMH use a process of corrosion and re-building to store and retrieve electrical energy. Trouble is, that rebuilding process is random, and when metals don't plate back where they came from, the cells don't work as well.
Lithium-Ion cells use a different process - the electrodes are somewhat porous at the molecular level, and Lithium ions can "intercalate" - they fit into the plate material without breaking it down or rebuilding it. This has issues, though, because those ions have a size - push enough of them into a charge plate, and the plate swells up. That's cute in the lab, very problematic in an actual cell where the plates have to fit tightly into a fixed space.
Some Lithium Ion cells use a liquid polymer electrolyte which can solidify, irreversibly coating the charge carrying foil plates with a non-conductive material. That solidification is triggered by the voltage on the cell, not far above the 100% charge level. So, each time you charge to 100% and leave the cell sitting like that, there's some amount of plate surface area that gets blocked off, decreasing the amount of charge that can be recovered from the cell. There can also be mechanical changes as the movement of lithium ions causes plate swelling and (possibly) gas formation.
Discharge to "0%" is not the same as "no stored power at all" - you don't want to bring a lithium cell below some minimum voltage, or it may never be rechargeable again - that's due to swelling of the plates and potential to damage the thin separator layer between the foil plates, causing an unrecoverable short.
Lithium Ion batteries have "Battery Management Systems" - BMS - to do what they can to minimize the damage to the cells by balancing the charge between cells and preventing overcharge and overdischarge.
If you just wanted to maximize lifetime and had no other constraints, you would just rename "20%" to "0%" and "80%" to "100%", using only the middle of the charge range and never approaching either end. Obviously this costs more and takes up more space, which would cause huge issues in putting together an affordable EV with long driving range. So, the BMS has lots of tricks to get as much power as possible into and out of the pack, while causing minimum damage to the cells.
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Friday August 02 2024, @06:06PM
Thank you for the explanation, very informative!
So with this in mind, do these BMS's in - say - phones or laptops perform what you are describing above themselves already (roughly speaking that is, because of course we can't know for all of them) and this thus eliminates the need for the user to avoid 0-20% and 80-100% or should an individual user still apply this practice?
How would one find this out (in a non-destructive and predictive fashion)?
(Score: 2) by chucky on Friday August 02 2024, @07:48PM
Thanks for this. It is what I’ve been thinking for a long time - change the scale and suddenly you’ll catch more customers on “long-life” batteries.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Whoever on Friday August 02 2024, @07:01PM (3 children)
Depending on the exact battery chemistry, Lithium Ion batteries tend to lost capacity if kept at 100% or discharged to 0%. I am shocked that any reader here doesn't know this.
I use an external device to prevent my cellphone routinely charging to more than 90%. I typically keep my EV between 30% and 70%.
(Score: 2) by optotronic on Saturday August 03 2024, @01:57AM (2 children)
Care to share? I wasn't aware such a device existed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Saturday August 03 2024, @08:52PM (1 child)
"Chargie".
(Score: 2) by optotronic on Sunday August 04 2024, @01:26AM
Thanks!
Learn more at https://chargie.org/ [chargie.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PhilSalkie on Friday August 02 2024, @06:06PM
Two Model S - a 2015 85D with "Autopilot 1" and a 2017 P100DL with "Full Self Driving (Supervised)". Both bought "Certified Pre-Owned" from Tesla.
2015 - 115,000 miles, we've put 100K of those on there. Numerous road trips over the years all around the east side of the USA. Some warranty maintenance early on, pretty trouble free since then - biggest issue we had to pay for was a cracked steering bushing. The battery range has dropped about 10% to around 210 miles at full charge (you rarely fully charge these, so it's more like 190 for normal use.)
2017 - 155,000 miles, we've put on 100K of those as well. Again, many road trips, minimal maintenance - all autopilot cameras and computer replaced by Tesla because they determined they needed more compute power to provide the FSD service. Trunk latch, charge port replaced out of warranty. Paid to upgrade the center screen to their "V2" to get more functionality and responsiveness. This unit also has lost about 10% of battery range, 100% is around 280 miles now, 255 for normal daily use.
For both of the vehicles, we find that the driving range is longer than we want drive without some sort of stop - never been the "Drive 12 hours straight through, stop only for gas, eat while driving, go go go" sort of travelers, so charging the car while getting lunch or dinner, or while stopping for groceries, or while sleeping at the hotel, works out perfectly for us. Usually, 20 minutes of bathroom, get coffee, maybe answer an email or two is enough to drive until wanting to stop again. Personally I'll often charge to 100% at home, then start the trip on a long hop, after that the jumps get shorter because I just don't want to be sitting there that long. FSD is remarkable - can typically go on 100 mile-plus trips driveway to driveway with the only intervention being speed adjustments where it thinks an access highway is 35MPH because there wasn't a sign saying it's really higher, or road that's actually signed 55 is going 75 - it'll increase speed to keep up with traffic, but that seems not to meet NJ driver standards. :-)
As to obsolescence - the 2015 will never support Full Self Drive. The 2017 will never get FSD Hardware V4, nor another center-screen upgrade, so there are features and functions the cars won't get.
That said, both vehicles are amazingly more capable than they were when purchased - a program of over-the-air software updates has improved the functionality of the vehicles dramatically from what they were at purchase time - that's not something that figures into most "used car" sorts of calculations, and helps prevent a feeling of obsolescense.
Having added 100K miles to each of two vehicles, we don't have plans to replace them, they're totally mechanically sound and there's no new features that are so necessary that we're looking to upgrade. (Honestly, most people who get introduced to either of the vehicles are stunned at the capabilities - the things the software is capable of, the cargo space available, and the rocketship feeling of the drivetrain.)
One thing that I hope will become common would be third-party battery pack upgrades - if a pack failure occurs, putting either a remanufactured or new-technology (cheaper cells, etc) pack into an otherwise perfectly serviceable vehicle and getting it back on the road would be a great way to help with the affordability of EVs. That's starting to show up, but I suspect it's a whole industry waiting to happen.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Friday August 02 2024, @06:53PM (2 children)
Toyota has been claiming that a solid-state battery EV is imminent for years. It's a bit like how fusion power has been 20 years away for the last couple of decades.
(Score: 2) by PhilSalkie on Friday August 02 2024, @08:09PM (1 child)
If a solid-electrolyte cell becomes feasible (at the moment, they don't have good cycle life or they need significant physical compression to work or both) it _should_ be much easier and cheaper to manufacture - to the point that making retrofit packs for existing vehicles will become big business.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday August 03 2024, @08:54PM
We all know that.
My point was that the development of a practical solid-state battery has been 5 years away for the last decade or so. I don't see it happening any time soon, but the Toyota enthusiasts and others are holding off buying an EV because of the claims from Toyota.