Gel and lithium-ion tech could enable 1000-mile EV range on one charge

Or, better yet, they could provide the same range in smaller, lighter vehicles with less resource use.
- From the article:
  "Moreover, the silicon-gel electrolyte system demonstrated ion conductivity comparable to conventional batteries while achieving a remarkable 40 percent increase in energy density. This represents a significant leap forward in battery technology, offering a practical solution ready for immediate application."
  So, same energy output, lower weight, similar range. Would be good if this soon becomes a drop in replacement option for older EVs that are nearing EOL on their batteries and require new ones anyway.
  
  I've always said that about one of my big reasons for buying an EV several years ago. By the time I'm in need of a replacement battery, it will be better in virtually every way - safer, faster to charge, higher capacity, lighter, and (potentially) cheaper. The first replacement battery might not be much of an improvement, but my 3rd might be light-years ahead.
  
  I would be curious if this technology would be viable in other devices as well. I'd like 40% more energy density in my cordless drill and/or laptop please.
  
  Would be good if this soon becomes a drop in replacement option for older EVs that are nearing EOL on their batteries and require new ones anyway.
  Can't wait for carmakers to fight tooth and nail to avoid making this a possibility for aging vehicles.
- Lots of surveys show one of the primary barriers to EV adoption is range anxiety. I’ve seen people trying to “educate” potential customers out of this anxiety, but it’s pissing into the wind. You’re not going to convince most people to downgrade their current ICE experience while paying the same or usually even more. I think the inflection point is above real world range for ICE. For example my 2016 Honda Civic can get about 7-800km of range on a single tank, and stops are as quick as a few minutes. This provides a lot of flexibility about where and when one stops. The range needs to account for:
  The 20-40 minute charge vs five minutes for gas.
  The lack of chargers relative to gas stations.
  The 30% drop in range in the cold.
  Our annual Austria ski trip takes about 30% longer in our Model Y than the Civic. That’s hours extra on an already very long drive, and the Y costs a lot more. That’s a big downgrade in experience. An appalling experience with a family. We won’t be buying another EV until affordable range is above 1,000km (620 miles). I know many current, former, and non-EV owners who feel the same.
  There is a market for commuter cars with poor range, but primarily in rich places where owning 2-3 cars is common. These rich places have already bought EVs as they are. Most of the world relies on just one car, if they own one at all. That one car needs to perform well in all conditions.
  
  The concerns for range anxiety are well founded too. I had to rent a car the other day, and the only thing they had available was a Tesla model 3. Aside from the issues Teslas themselves have, the 90 miles I had to travel became an immediate concern because it was in a rural area and the town I went to literally had two chargers, and they were privately owned.
  The 280 miles I was quoted as range quickly became 170, despite turning off the heat, not charging my phone, using cruise control at 3MPH below the speed limit, and changing all the settings I could conceivably find to turn down my power consumption. I wound up having to beg a private owner to let me use their charger because what would normally be a simple trip became a massive chore. My other option was waking up hours early to drive to a town 40 miles away where they had a super charger and leaving from there, also just barely making it back to the rental car return.
  The time to charge the Tesla on a 220v charger btw was over 5 hours from 48%. Absolutely none of my experience matched that of the advertised and it's completely turned me off electric cars until they can start fixing some of these issues.
  
  It would be useful for electric bikes and things that you could feasibly own alongside a car and use for 90-95% of trips.
  
  Or, here's a crazy idea, for the one week each year where you actually need the range you rent a Honda Civic and leave your EV at home.
  
  "Save the planet? Sure, but only if it doesn't slightly inconvenience my leisure activities or make me wait a bit longer." This mindset perfectly encapsulates why we're in such a mess: an astounding commitment to personal comfort at the expense of the planet's future. It's like saying, "I'll help fight climate change, but only if it's on my terms and doesn't affect my ski trips." Because, obviously, ensuring our convenience is far more critical than addressing a global crisis. It’s this precise “me first, planet later” attitude that’s steering us towards an ecological disaster, yet here we are....
- Why would we do that? I want to be able to sit in a car for 10 hours, pee in a bottle, and eat sandwiches I prepared ahead of time. This is an excellent way to spend most of a waking day. Who wants to do something as silly as getting out to stretch?

Article states the use of an electron beam to enable this. So not currently scalable, but still a seemingly significant result.
- Oh I know, just put it in an oven. Trust me, I saw one video on impossible blue LEDs, I know what I'm talking about.
  
  A microwave oven? According to some YouTube videos, Apple had this tech in their phones years ago.
  
  I saw that video by Veritasium I think. That just was tenacious.
- Can you expand on this? There used to be multiple electron beams in every house in America.
  
  Ok, maybe it's possible that they aren't using a very focused electron beam, but usually when scientists think about using an electron beam they mean something inside of a machine like an SEM or e-beam lithograph. These only operate on small areas.
  If an unfocused beam (and therefore lower energy density) can be used, then this could likely be scaled more easily. Even if a focused beam is needed, scaling may still be possible, but will likely require additional developments to create that process.
  
  All of the beams in my house have electrons
  
  I'm using mine right now.

Oooohhh, battery revolution claim #3515351657829, one of these days one of em MUST be true!
- It’s not Toyota making the claim this time, it may not be bullshit for once.
  
  You mean Tesla?

1k mile or kilometer range? Which is it? I'm inclined to believe it's kilometers. Time to read the article, I suppose. It's enticing either way.
- A bit misleading but yes, 1000km is what they are talking about. Also the article doesn't address scalability.
  
  Well, there's a lot the article doesn't address. I can say this with complete confidence, even as someone who hasn't read the article
  Edit: don't freak out, I eventually did read the whole article. Every word. And I was right.
- They demonstrated 40% increase in energy density.
  The stuff about the range appears to be simply applying that percentage to common EV ranges, which is nonsense. It’s probably more likely that an increase in energy density would be used to decrease battery size, leading to cheaper and lighter EVs
- The title says “1000 miles”, the the subtitle right below says “moving closer to 1000 kilometers” which is only 621 miles and pretty close to what we already could do with a ridiculously big battery in a Lucid Air or Tesla (if they didn’t bother with the plaid speed bullshit and just build for single motor range).
  Stupid editorial work for maximum click bait.

Sounds nice, wake me up when it's available
- You can probably sleep for a heckin long time.

So how long can we play Steam Deck?
- The only measurement that matters

I wish people would stop obsessing so much over range. Once we have decent charging infrastructure in place and people overcome all the FUD, this will simply cease to be relevant.
- Some people don't want to feel like they have to stop every hour for 15-20 minutes. If I'm going on a long road trip I'm fine driving 300-400 miles without stopping. I'm probably a minority but I'm sure I'm not the only one.
  
  You're certainly not the only one but you're also being grossly irresponsible. Sufficient breaks are essential for staying attentive. Not stopping for five or six hours is just asking for disaster. Just think about what you're going to feel like if you killed someone because you fell asleep at the wheel.
  Edit: and as per usual, lots of downvotes but no counterargument
  
  If there are reliable and fast chargers every 50 miles you’ll have several choices in that 300-400 mile range and we already have plenty of cars capable of that. The goal is not to have everyone stop at every charger. But to allow more people to drive how they are most comfortable and maybe even enable more cars to road trip.
  
  You’re not the only one. Most people try to make as much distance as possible between stops.
  
  We need more data for everyone to see.
  We need to see what the average vehicle owner does with their vehicles.
  Because the people who use their cars they most need the best experience, but they used the vehicle differently than the majority of people.
  Evs need to be released on different models for different styles.
  If you only travel with people that need constant breaks, then there no reason needing a 15 to 20 minute break frequently can't be made to work with a lower range vehicle if you only need to do long trips a few times a year or less. The savings of having that vehicle the rest of the time should be made to more than offset any special needs that aren't needed often.
  There's other options to explore as well. Like it's easy to find example of vehicles with multiple gas tanks. If you need an extended battery there should be a trailer like attachment that extends the range of your vehicle. Make towing something get you better range because the thing you added towing is extra "fuel"
  I'm sure there are technical problems that will need to be addressed or solved and it might require car companies to change designs about to make it seams but it's very doable
- Yea....no. Most of the USA is rural areas, range is a huge deal.
  
  Exactly. Ideally in cities and surrounding suburbs we would want public transportation and no cars. Cars should really be reserved for the more rural places anyway.
  
  Let's take the absolute worst case I could find for North America: in Quebec between Matagami and Radisson there is a 620km (390mi) distance between gas stations. This exceeds the range of many ICE cars, but let's continue. It gets real cold up there, and there's a few days out of the year where it's well below 0F. To account for the cold, let's increase that distance by 40% to get to about 550mi.
  There is one EV on the market right now with a 516mi range, the Lucid Air. So it can't quite make it under the absolute worst case conditions that, even up there, will only happen for portions of the year. Many ICE cars would also fail to make it.
  This problem is completely overblown. The 1,994 combined population of those two Canadian towns will have to wait. Literally everyone else in North America will be fine if we just get our charging infrastructure better.
  Oh, and ICE cars lose gas mileage in cold weather as well. 15% lower at only 20F. So ICE cars that could barely make that trip under warmer conditions probably couldn't under the extreme cold of this exceptional situation.
  
  You just need a charging station every hundred kilometres or so, that's perfectly doable even in sparsely populated areas. In fact, this kind of infrastructure is far easier to roll out than gas stations.
- I drive 82 miles a day on average according to my tracking, but that frequently involves days of 400+ miles. And since I drive in hill country and require air conditioning most of the years I know the range estimates are wildly optimistic versus real-world performance.
  And charging a car isn't like filling up with gas. It's not a 3-minute stop. If a car can get me as far as I'm willing to drive in a day, then an overnight charge seems like an option.
  But even then, since I'm a renter and always will be because of the shit going on with housing I can't get a fast charger.
  All of this is to say that it's not 1 issue. It's all of them. Range, charging speeds, and availability of chargers ALL have to be addressed and essentially 100% reliable before I can risk owning an all-electric vehicle.
  
  Not a 3 minute stop. A whole 15 minutes. Assuming you have a charging station nearby anyway.
  
  I always find it amusing how people go through such mental contortions to justify not buying an EV. If you don't want an EV, just don't buy one. Nobody cares.
- Once we have decent charging infrastructure in place
  I think part of the range anxiety thing is that buyers think of their worst trip, target than the average trip.
  On average, Canadians commute 8.7km to work. Those who commute for more than 60 minutes are averaging 40km. For these trips, drivers don't need charging infrastructure beyond what they have at home. (And yes, public transit would be an even better option)
  There are always outliers, and every time this comes up, people talk about how far they drive on road trips and vacations. Those are not normal use, and they should probably be handled by renting an ICE car.
  
  Or just getting on a plane to go somewhere far, rather than spending three days of your already limited vacation driving past corn.
- What FUD I’ve seen the word a couple times today.
  
  Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt
- Energy density is the key component. It'd mean less weight for the same range so even if you make a 200 mile range vehicle instead of a 1000 mile range vehicle, the much smaller battery and lighter weight of the vehicle would make a huge difference, plus it'd be cheaper to make in general.
- I live in an apartment complex with no chargers. It doesn't matter how much the infrastructure is, if I have to sit once a week to charge my car at a Denny's, then I'm not interested.
  Now, if you say I only need to do that once a month.... Hmmm... I'm listening....
  
  That's not how this stuff works. I never sit in my car waiting for it to charge. Sometimes I'll charge while shopping. Plug in the car, do your weekly grocery shopping come back, drive off. When you use a level 2 (shower) charger, you leave the car and come back after a couple of hours. It obviously depends on the available infrastructure in the places you normally go to. Takes a bit of planning and a bit of forethought. But it's really not rocket science.
- I'm somewhere in the middle. I've thought about getting an EV my case is a 2012 Camry... And it's still doing fine, but it is getting up there in the years.
  I don't drive much at all three days since I work from home.
  When I do drive it's roughly 150 miles to my parents or my grand parents. It looks like without installing something at their houses I could charge up 120 miles in a 24 hour period with the car entirely on the charger (but sometimes I want to go drive around and see friends or things and that's time the car is not charging so ... 120 miles might be an over estimate in some cases). That's a bit uncomfortable especially when the cold weather makes the range drop so the "320" miles total becomes closer to "270". Then there's the whole thing where batteries lose capacity over time...
  That means I'm going to potentially need to plan for stopping at a charger. There really aren't that many chargers available between, e.g. where my parents live in Marietta Ohio, and where I live in Akron Ohio. When looking at a map (provided by Ford for the Mustang Mach-e I was looking at) there were maybe a dozen charging locations with pretty much 1-3 chargers each ... That's compared to a dozen busy gas stations I've encountered with ~8 pumps each.
  I'd probably be fine but ... I think I'd be better off waiting a couple of years and seeing if the 600 mile EV range becomes a reality. At that point all of my regular trips are accounted for and I'm okay looking for charging on the odd times I go on a large trip.
  Alternatively, maybe there will be more chargers by that point (or charging will be faster) and I'll feel more comfortable that I'll be able to find a charger when I need it.
  I don't want my long 2 1/2 hour trip to turn into a 3+ hour trip on the way back ... or turn into a particularly dangerous or sketchy situation because the charger I need is being used by someone else/down for maintenance/broken and it's very cold outside.
  
  I live in California, so the infrastructure is likely more built up here, but I regularly make trips from the SF Bay Area all the way to San Diego or Las Vegas just fine. On a shorter 2.5 hour trip, I could see it being annoying, but a couple charge stops on an 8 hour trip offer a nice time to take a break to grab a quick bite and carry on. Just my two cents.
- Could not agree more.

If anyone cares, I think this is the research paper. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202305298
- Thanks for the source. I wish I understood it better
  
  This research was focused on the lithium battery anode. Ideally we could just put a chunk of lithium in there but the stripping and deposition chemistry doesn't work well long term. Modern batteries use graphite instead. But of course you waste a significant amount of cell volume and weight with all of that carbon, and the potential is lower than Li metal. Alloying Li with silicon gets you properties more similar to Li.
  So this paper talks about their efforts to make LiSi more viable as an anode. They gave it a coating to protect it from electrolyte side reactions and created a new gel electrolyte formation reaction. The capacity they report isn't remarkably higher than what's out there now since the cathode is the heaviest part of the cell.
  As to the results I do have to say 60% capacity retention after 200 cycles is not nearly good enough for real world use. And I have no clue where they got the "1000 mile range" headline from.

That would go a long way towards solving the range anxiety barrier. 1000km is close to the maximum that same people can do in a single day. Yes, you could push further in a day in a pinch, but not comfortably unless you're rotating drivers. It's pretty close to the limits enforced on long haul truck drivers in Canada or the US (depends on speed limits and traffic density and a few other things).
- How many gas powered cars can go 1000km without refueling?
  
  Refueling takes 5 mins max, recharging right now takes 15-20 mins if there is a super charge station.
  
  Diesels.
  
  It’s not 1000km. You lose 30-40% range in the cold. And charging cadence is typically 10-80%, not 0-100%, so you lose another 30% on road trips. Now your 1000km EV does 420-490km between chargers. That’s around three hours on the Autobahn at a rather leisurely 150kph, with a 25-40 min stop. I agree with the user above. Affordable 1000km range is minimum before I’ll be buying another EV.

Sodium is the future of batteries right now.
Projections from BNEF suggest that sodium-ion batteries could reach pack densities of nearly 150 watt-hours per kilogram by 2025. And some battery giants and automakers in China think the technology is already good enough for prime time. 1
+1 for them not exploding too.
- and Glass pack batteries
- Why is it superior to Li-Ion? Li-Ion has an energy density of up to 180.
  
  because it has the potential to be sustainable, cheaper, and less explosive. It's not technically superior as far as energy density goes, but right now batteries are prohibitive in many applications, moreso due to cost than weight.

I won't be buying a new car. ICE or EV. Specifically because my old car doesn't have a lot of the things that allow the car manufacturer to spy on me, and I won't upgrade to any of the nonsense. Right now I can fix pretty much everything in that car for less than the price of a new vehicle.
- I've managed to somehow make friends with the owner of a local junkyard. Not quite sure how I did that it wasn't intentional but it's quite useful because I can get parts for my car that the manufacturer would want hundreds of pounds for otherwise.
  In the future I bet they pull some apple style rubbish and start software locking components to individual vehicles so you can't just pull them off a donor car to fix yours
  
  Better hope donor parts don't start getting used to by pass security features or this will happen in an instant

The problem is we can't keep the same resources waste up. Lower range and smaller cars is what is needed. The perfect car of the future would be a one-seater that is as small and light as a electric velomobile (~70kg). Build a few millions of them and replace all cars in a city with those. Ideally self driving and as a robo-taxi, but even without the self driving this would be good. Of course cars isn't really that high on the list for climate change.
But as a civilization we are simply not an intelligent species.
- A single person vehicle will never be the solution because families exist. No parent would want their kids in a separate vehicle.
  
  I wish my kids would have separate vehicle sometimes. I'm sick of playing eye spy with people that can't spell.
  
  Yeah it's not a solution to everything. I imagine the standard "super light" robo taxi as a two seater with the seats facing each other. Without a driver seat you can redesign individual transport to be narrower which improves aerodynamics.
  But yeah for families or cargo transport you still need larger vehicles. Or take two. And I also imagine this to be more of a "gap filler" besides public transport or bicycles. It would really require a pretty big redesign of how we live and work to reduce our energy and resource usage to zero.
- I’d love gel and lithium-ion batteries in an ebike or a velomobile. It would result in a 40% increase in range with no extra weight, making them more of a viable alternative for somewhat longer commutes (think 10-15 miles). Sure we should be serving those by high speed public transit, but this would be a faster stopgap/alternative.
  Oh and it would be useful for electric trucks too, even short-range ones could be made lighter with less batteries.
- Actually surprised how little cars actually contribute to climate change I thought it was a major factor but they're not really. If everyone in the world just switched to using LED light bulbs rather than incandescent it would be equivalent to removing half of the world's cars from the road. And honestly seems easier to upgrade everyone's light bulbs to LED than to replace every car.
  
  I too watched veritasium today
  
  Directly via exhaust? It's a significant number, but maybe not the biggest one. But add manufacturing, oil (or battery materials) extraction and refining, road infra construction and maintenance, emissions connected to suburbanization, microplastic pollution from tires, health and safety impact, and you'll get a much grimmer picture. LEDs won't cut it, and cars do not scale to 8B people.
  
  Yeah, the single biggest thing we could do is ban industrial meat production and regulate food production to be more local. But the overall scale of change needed is staggering. We're not going to do much really.
- Lmfao tell me you're an over privileged fuck in some hyper urban city without using those exact words
  My life, and lives of hundreds of millions of people in the global south would go TO SHIT if this euro-centric shit takes™ ever get any light of day
- how do we magically get goods to and from?
  grocery store trips?
  what about other items from the store such as TVs?
  what about families?
  have you seen what is required daily or weekly for a baby?
  what about a Micro Center trip?
  https://www.velomobileworld.com/
  not intelligent to be able move people and objects around?
  travel over 3,000 miles every few months for work out of state and could not see myself in that taking naps at a rest stop comfortably
  with such out of touch comments the petrol conundrum may never be solved
  
  Consider something like 50% bigger than a podbike.
  3000 miles is not something we as a society should accommodate to travel by car. The whole problem is that everyone thinks we can keep doing the same lifestyle just with zero carbon. We simply can't. We need to change how we live and work.
  
  Huh this video just dropped which is one possible solution to design a different work / live environment. If you imagine a village like that but large enough to have a school and some more amenities: Building a village designed for people (not cars) near Phoenix
  But you'd still want public transport, bikes and delivery vans. But in Europe you also get a lot of cargo quadricycles to deliver goods.

gasoline cars and motorcycles will be missed, like analog film cameras and quarter inch reel tape. people will imagine what it must have been like when cars were bad ass.
- Some people will. The majority won't care.
- Lots of electric cars outrun their dinosaur juice powered counterparts, but do feel free to go off about how they don't go vroom so you can't be as obnoxious with them.
  
  I don't think there's any need to be snide about this comment. A 2015 Honda Civic is objectively superior in almost every way to a 1967 Corvette, but the 'vette is inherently cooler in a way that the Civic will never be. It's just nostalgia for a bygone era, that's all.
  
  for example? i didn't think evs had been around that long. there are lots of gasoline engines from 1950 that still run.

Obsession with one of the least energy efficient and one of the most harmful ways of transportation has to end.
Build a fucking train.
- I want to go to space
  build a train
  Grandma fell in the shower
  build a train
  Why do bad things happen to good people?
  build a train
  Space train would be incredible though.