EVDL Administrator via EV wrote:
You may see lithium SLI batteries in very high end ICEVs. At least one luxury car manufacturer (BMW?) is already using them.
Yes; it becomes a marketing "feature", used to sell cars even if there's no advantage. The more features, the better, even if the buyer doesn't know what the features are, and will never use them.
But the truth is that lead SLI batteries are good enough for the job, and they are CHEAP... cheap wins every time.
I agree. The status quo can usually prevent change, even if a competing technology is demonstrably better. They'll use simple inertia (people don't like to change), massive advertising, sponsor legislation, buyouts, underhanded/illegal acts, or just plain price to ruin the competition. But once in a while, things get out of control, and a better solution manages to *replace* a cheap solution. The change often happens very quickly and unexpectedly (before the status quo has time to act). Malcolm Gladwell called it the "tipping point". This is what has to happen with lithium batteries (or for that matter, with EVs themselves)!
Most of the places where lithium now dominates are situations essentially impractical without advanced-chemistry batteries... the small-computer-electronics world we know today was largely made possible by the high specific energy of lithium batteries.
That's because the solution we chose was high-power electronics, which in turn required high-power batteries. But that is not the only way the problem could have been solved.
Technology often gives us *many* solutions to every problem. But the way our society works, we tend to (somewhat arbitrarily) pick one, and ignore the rest. We end up with a monoculture, with only one winner and essentially no competitors.
But, there are other solutions. Consider digital watches or solar-powered calculators, for example. They would be impossible if built the same way as smartphones. But they took a different route -- they were designed instead for micropower operation. This cut the power requirements so much that they could be solar powered (most don't even *have* a battery).
To put this in EV terms: The auto companies are taking the "high power" approach. Build a 2-ton steel car, which then requires high-tech batteries to get decent range. Thus, it's more expensive than ICE cars. That's not going to take EVs to the "tipping point".
But instead, what if we followed Amory Lovin's "hypercar" approach? Make the car with newer high-strength materials so it's half the weight. Now you need half the batteries. So the car costs half as much. Now you *can* reach a tipping point, because EVs can be cheaper than ICEVs! And you don't need exotic batteries to do it!
That's what I'm trying to do with the Sunrise EV2. -- The greatest pleasure in life is to create something that wasn't there before. -- Roy Spence -- Lee Hart, 814 8th Ave N, Sartell MN 56377, www.sunrise-ev.com _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
