It leverages the fact that most people make a large number of short trips, and a smaller number of long trips.
Also if it's modular enough, this design could allow replacing one or the other battery if the user does lots of short trips, or lots of long trips.
Also could let the manufacturer do market segmentation, e.g. a high performance model with no LFP, and both parts of the "high-performance" chemistry - and a base model that's 100% LFP.
Not really specific to this dual-chemistry though, the same holds true for normal EVs and for gasoline-powered cars.
Note: I’m a big fan of EVs. I’m just saying that handling is one of their weaknesses until battery density gets a lot better.
Between EVs and crossovers we're suffocating in this current era of uninspired automotive design where it seems like mfgrs take a single car model, open it in Photoshop, resize by 50/70/110/130%, slap on new badge and call it a day. Audi & Subaru are some of the worst modern offenders here.
While the EQXX and the Aptera EV [1] may both be fish shaped, they show quite a range of design variation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_(solar_electric_vehicle...
When the sodium batteries come out, it will be a similar story, sodium having an atomic mass of 11 vs. lithium's 3.
Anode-free is an interesting new direction, will be interesting to see if they can address the dendrite growth (dendrite growth causes short-circuit, thermal runaway and fires several months or years into service life and is notoriously hard to test for, because you might need to test for a decade under all sorts of conditions in order to see if dendrite growth occurs).
If you have the cash, NMC is certainly the better tech. If you want a cost-effective EV, the Chinese have figured this out already (LFP). Mixing them, well, it's somewhere in the middle!
I really hope this turns out well, but given the current lack of specificity, I'm going to guess that overall pack longevity is going to be the Achilles heel of this battery.
Always happy to see people trying innovative new ideas though. Most of them won't work, but we can only find the ones that do if someone tries it. Hope this one turns out better than I fear.
Add a bit of margin and I believe that 300 miles is the point at which charging speed becomes more important than range.
This is why I want my first EV to have a range like that. I’ll be able to the next place I’m sleeping without having to worry about whether I am going to encounter a half-broken Electrify America station that’s going to keep me sitting in a Walmart parking lot for 45 minutes of my day.
If you're driving this theoretical 600 mile vehicle you can't charge it overnight on AC anyways. A level 2 charger is typically 10kW or 40amps. A 600 mile battery is likely at least 200kWh, a 20 hour charge at 10kW.
I.e. plan to charge with 50% or more remaining, and have a low probability option to skip a charge and drive to the next destination. Then, your plan has to adapt as you may have to stay there longer than intended to wait for this much larger charge deficit to be recovered.
If this large capacity battery didn't have charge speed limitations, perhaps the mitigation could be to take a detour to a fast charging station and then return to your planned route.
However that is nice because it means you can do 3 300 miles trips and only charge at home when the price is right. That is the most relevant part to me.
One thing is article doesn't mention is the average speed. I looked at a few EV in the constructors websites and most range in the spec were calculated at ~30kph. This is my average speed in the flat on a bicycle when not even riding hard! While it is pertinent in an urban context where average speed is not much higher it isn't when we are discussing long trips.
Which is weird because I think these are the guys who did a Michigan demonstration of range last year, a classic Midwest long miles to drive state for any travel
Also the notion that rail is cheaper over long haul for people transport might be incorrect. Self-driving (highway self driving is much easier than robo taxis) EVs, and roads are cheaper to build and more flexible than rail.
Rail wins only on really high congestion or very large loads.
Also, 18mph on a bike is hard for almost all people that aren't athletes. I'm a former Ironman triathlete and I know the range of performance for heavily trained athletes.
But yeah, doing range calcs at those speeds is ridiculous, unless you are discussing a pure commuter car use case.
> the new rules also mandate simpler charger payments. As-is, some networks require subscriptions or app downloads. But under these rules, customers must be able to pay with cards or contactless devices, and prices must be displayed to the customer.
You never need to touch or see your credit card or phone at any time before, during, or after the charging process.
Guess what kind of EVs work this way already.
When I am at home, I plug my car in and it goes on my monthly power bill. This is where the convenience matters.
Next, make the vehicles cheap enough by some means that we adopt electric vehicles faster.
Considering I charge at home I actually save time overall vs filling up my old diesel in daily driving so stopping every 2 - 3 hours is fine for occasional long trips. Also I spend about 1/5th per mile too.
Most people coming from an ICE get hung up on the range however. They think they need something that does what they have already.
Joking aside, though, that's a tough problem. It's just an awful lot of current.
621 miles
>The Gemini pack also includes a proprietary battery management system and DC-DC converter to enable the NMC cells to replenish the LFP cells as they get depleted.
