Exciting Battery Day topics coming to light

[VolklKatana]

There is little doubt in most peoples' minds that the numbers promised at the reveal had at least some of the anticipated improvements in battery tech baked in. At this point they should have a pretty good idea as to how the batteries they will put in the CT are going to perform. So, assuming as we all are, that they will announce batteries appreciably better than the current tech I don't expect much change in CT specs. But there is the possibility of change in S3XY. I don't know what to expect there. The improvements can be turned into lower cost or greater range or perhaps a mix. With Lucid likely to claim better range than the S (Sept 9) the temptation may be to go for range in the S. OTOH dropping the price of the 3 might be the good move there. ???

Thats the beauty of S3XY right? Tesla hasnt shown their full hand yet and undoubtedly have tricks up their sleeve still. While Elon said 300mi is the sweet spot, pressure from Lucid may change that tune slightly. until the last few weeks, I also thought they new battery tech was built into the CT numbers, with all the new info coming out though, Im not so sure anymore.

in your previous posts, you have shown that the mileage and range was possible with the current battery tech. This is actually another reason why i think there might be some variability in what is brought to market. When putting together the CT presentation, it would be totally feasible to bake the 'targeted' battery price into the truck to get the 'wow 'and still use the range of the current battery tech, as that was already heads and tails above everything else.

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[MEDICALJMP]

Hey, have you guys seen this?

https://newatlas.com/energy/nano-diamond-self-charging-batteries-ndb/

That was a fascinating article. Truly revolutionary if their claims turn out to be reality. Think of the cost reduction in basic consumer goods like cell phones when you can take your battery from one device to the next. Flashlights that don’t work when you really need them because you haven’t changed the batteries in two years or they’ve leaked and now made your devices worthless. Bought a new Tesla? Let me take that battery out and put it into my new vehicle.

 

[lancethibault]

Also remember that you may actually get to your destination faster by driving slower.

This is really pronounced with a motorcycle where energy consumption can be dropped massively by dropping speed., but if only slower chargers are available, sometimes the 30mph road will get you to the end fast than the 70mph one because you can skip a charging point.

-Crissa

This may very well be true and no doubt testable via ABRP or other route planning sites, but nearly impossible to test in real life for anyone like me who got places to be and driving faster seems to be the intuitive way to get there faster. I'm going to have to change my earth driving mindset to more of my space driving mindset. Where we have to slowdown to catch up and speeding up actually makes us fall back. But I still won't be driving 30 MPH on I-70 or I-80 ever. But if I can make my 1350 mile trip 1 or 2 hrs faster by slowing down from 112% of the speed limit to 100% or 85% of the speed limit, I'd have to consider it.

 

[TyPope]

That was a fascinating article. Truly revolutionary if their claims turn out to be reality. Think of the cost reduction in basic consumer goods like cell phones when you can take your battery from one device to the next. Flashlights that don’t work when you really need them because you haven’t changed the batteries in two years or they’ve leaked and now made your devices worthless. Bought a new Tesla? Let me take that battery out and put it into my new vehicle.

Even if it's just low power items, pace makers, other implants, buoys, satellites, garage door openers... man, basically anything that now requires a little button battery or hearing aide battery could be made so much better. I mean, ear buds that last a long time... you wouldn't have to make garage door openers or REMOTES! Hey, remotes for TVs or even car fobs! You wouldn't have to make them with removable panels for battery replacement. You could almost just mold plastic around the buttons, board, and battery... This would truly be a game changer!

 

[Mini2nut]

Tesla's market influence is definitely swaying the legacy vehicle manufacturers like GM. They announced today that effective immediately all Corvette engineers have been assigned to EV and autonomous driving programs. It's rumored that some of the Corvette engineering guys are pretty disgruntled about the move.

At least CEO Mary Barra finally sees the light and is preparing to pivot the vehicle portfolio to BEV's to avoid being a Blockbuster or Kodak. She has been the CEO since 2014 and FINALLY views Tesla as a real threat.

 

[Sirfun]

When I said that extra range hurts because of the extra battery weight I meant to add that the size of the gas tank doesn't effect the amount of gas you burn (other than through higher mpg or Wh/mi) but that it does effect how often you fill the tank. The smaller tank has to be refilled more frequently and there is a time cost with that as you have to at best slow down and enter a rest area and at worst leave the freeway to get to the super charger. This adds time. ABRP used to have a field, defaulted to 5 minutes, to be added to the charging time to account for fiddling around at the super charger before starting the charge and after completing it ("Maude, where'd I put my sunglasses?"). With a smaller tank your choices as to which SC you can use may be limited i.e. you may have to charge at 125 kW ones because you haven't the range to get to the next 250 kW one.

If I run your trip on ABRP with a TriMotor then only two charging stops (they are long ones - over an hour each) are necessary and charging time drops to 2:39 minutes which is about 50 minutes less.

So there are situations where the larger battery can help in this regard and the trip under consideration here is one of them. But also note that you may not want to accept ABRP's plan. Maybe you don't want to charge for over an hour in Pimm, NV or you may be uncomfortable with the fact that you will be arriving there with 10% margin and thus decide to insert an extra charging stop along the way. So there are lots and lots of "it depends" decisions to be made. Keep playing with ABRP. There's only one better way to find out how these trips go in a BEV and that's to drive one which you might want to consider doing. There are places that specialize in renting Teslas.

Yep, my family does a lot of long road trips. Being retired with my wife and daughter not flying, we drive. 2 years ago we drove the van to Vancouver, BC. This year we had a trip to Yellowstone that we cancelled because of Covid. The Ford E250 gets about 14mpg on a good day, so I REALLY hope there's a large reduction in wait times for Supercharging. ABRP is a great tool to play with. You can even go into settings and change the consumption, your speed and lots of variables. As far as them being on the conserative side, I kind of expected that. They don't want to tell people they can make distances, only to have them not make it and sue them. It's like on the computer in cars estimating distances to empty.

 

[Sirfun]

Very true, but I have a need. A need for speed.

OK Maverick!

 

[lancethibault]

This may very well be true and no doubt testable via ABRP or other route planning sites, but nearly impossible to test in real life for anyone like me who got places to be and driving faster seems to be the intuitive way to get there faster. I'm going to have to change my earth driving mindset to more of my space driving mindset. Where we have to slowdown to catch up and speeding up actually makes us fall back. But I still won't be driving 30 MPH on I-70 or I-80 ever. But if I can make my 1350 mile trip 1 or 2 hrs faster by slowing down from 112% of the speed limit to 100% or 85% of the speed limit, I'd have to consider it.

I ran 12 scenarios for the long trip and hunting trip. Turns out speeding is faster for both.

 

[MEDICALJMP]

Hey, remotes for TVs or even car fobs! You wouldn't have to make them with removable panels for battery replacement. You could almost just mold plastic around the buttons, board, and battery... This would truly be a game changer!

Think about appliances. Television with the battery built-in. You could hang it up on the wall and not have cords hanging all over the place. A truly portable radio. Laptop computers and tablets that don’t need recharging. There’s so many things in your home that could be powered by its own built-in supply and if the power from the grid goes out you could still have your refrigerator working enough to keep food from spoiling.

Caution: one big negative. You can’t use the excuse that your cell phone battery is nearly dead when trying to get out of those annoying conversations with the spouse or co-worker.

 

[Crissa]

Very true, but I have a need. A need for speed.

Me too ^-^

But add in regen, that means you can take that side road and not worry about it using more fuel than the straight line freeway.

I'd druther go fast on a 30mph mountain road than fast on a 70mph freeway.

-Crissa

 

[ajdelange]

driving faster seems to be the intuitive way to get there faster.

And it obviously is unless you need to consider refueling time in the denominator of your speed calculation. Clearly if you do not need to charge on the trip you do not need to consider refueling time but if you must charge along the way you do. The mechanics are simple. The faster you go the less time you must spend in transit but going faster causes your vehicle to consume more energy per mile traveled so you must spend more time at the charger replacing it. If you define trip time to include time to replace the charge consumed and use minimizing that time as your optimality criterion there is an optimum speed. It is tricky to find as it depends on so many things but as we often do we can make lots of assumptions to at least give us some insight. The following graph uses a model of average consumption as a function of average speed based on my driving history in my Model X plus. The various curves are labeled in total time to drive 100 miles plus the time required to replace the charge as a function of available recharging rate and driving speed. The goal is to minimize total time which means to get onto one of the low time curves at the upper right of the picture. The graph clearly shows that one does this by driving fast and using a powerful charger.

But a driver can't, in general, pick the charger size he wants but rather must use what's available. Thus his strategy given, for example, a 50 kW charger, is to move to the right as far as he can along the 50 kW horizontal line until an incremental increase in speed results in an increase in total time. That happens when he passes the mimum point on each time curve. As these are hard to see the heavy blue line indicates the optimum speed for each power leve (about 92 mph for a 50 kW charger).

The broad conclusion we may draw from this set of curves is that for an X one can shorten overall trip time by increasing speed up to over 100 mph as long as 80 kW charging is available. And we note that this about the average rate observed from 125 kW Tesla Super Chargers. Coincidence?

 

[CappyJax]

That was a fascinating article. Truly revolutionary if their claims turn out to be reality. Think of the cost reduction in basic consumer goods like cell phones when you can take your battery from one device to the next. Flashlights that don’t work when you really need them because you haven’t changed the batteries in two years or they’ve leaked and now made your devices worthless. Bought a new Tesla? Let me take that battery out and put it into my new vehicle.

The power density is very very low. <150uW/kg.

 

[MEDICALJMP]

The power density is very very low. <150uW/kg.

Breakthroughs don’t normally start out as a giant leap. They are small steps that become leaps and bounds. What was the power of the first Roadster battery?

 

[CappyJax]

Breakthroughs don’t normally start out as a giant leap. They are small steps that become leaps and bounds. What was the power of the first Roadster battery?

At least 411W/kG as the battery weighed 450KG, and the motors produced 185kW. The nano-diamond battery is less than 0.000150Wh/kg. That means the Roadster battery had a power density of 2,740,740 times more than an NDB battery.

The energy density of the NDB is higher because it will produce that very small wattage for over 50 million hours, compared to the 17 minutes that the Roadster battery would last at 185kW if it could without overheating.

 

[jonny]

So... Is Tesla more likely to increase range while keeping the battery packs the same size or will they decrease the size/weight of the battery packs while keeping the range the same which would, in turn, make the vehicle more efficient as it wouldn't be as heavy?

I am just guessing here, but I think they would make the battery packs smaller. same range (that they figured they needed for a reason) but lighter car =faster and lighter car=less batteries to get same range. but for Tesla. less batteries more profit.