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RESEARCH Battery tech breakthrough paves way for mass adoption of affordable electric car Researchers develop new technique that charges EV battery in just 10 minutes a battery on a table This 10-min fast-charging battery was developed for electric cars, with the black box on the top containing a battery management system to control the module. Credit: EC Power. All Rights Reserved.

EXPAND OCTOBER 12, 2022

By Adrienne Berard

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A breakthrough in electric vehicle battery design has enabled a 10-minute charge time for a typical EV battery. The record-breaking combination of a shorter charge time and more energy acquired for longer travel range was announced today (Oct. 12) in the journal Nature.

“The need for smaller, faster-charging batteries is greater than ever,” said Chao-Yang Wang, the William E. Diefenderfer Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State and lead author on the study. “There are simply not enough batteries and critical raw materials, especially those produced domestically, to meet anticipated demand.”

In August, California’s Air Resources Board passed an extensive plan to restrict and ultimately ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars within the state. By 2035, the largest auto market in the United States will effectively retire the internal combustion engine.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05281-0

I've got about a 400 mile range in my petrol car, enough to get me from my home in Mid Wales up to London and back. What's the range on one of these smaller batteries?

>The researchers developed a new battery structure that adds an ultrathin nickel foil as the fourth component besides anode, electrolyte and cathode. Acting as a stimulus, the nickel foil self-regulates the battery’s temperature and reactivity which allows for 10-minute fast charging on just about any EV battery, Wang explained.

Increase in cell complexity means increase in processing cost. Does it scale?

How often do you drive for 8 hours without a break? Or do you stop in London for a bit and then drive back?

Super-fast charging is going to require some pretty beefy cables eventually. If you want to charge a 50 kWh battery in 10 minutes, you'll need something like 300 kW of power supply to that single charger. And that's if it's charging at constant power, which it likely won't, because it'll slow down towards the end. Serving 4 cars at once will require 1.2 megawatts. Not saying it's impossible, but it certainly requires some planning.

Articles like this appear all the time. I won’t believe it until they’re commercially available.

Tired of battery breaktheough news

Question, considering there is hardly any infrastructure, where are they charging them?

This is only new in as much as they are publishing their research. But they came up with this nickel addition nearly 2 years ago: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210118113126.htm

Good for them publishing their findings now, but I'd hardly call two year old science a "breakthrough" in the way this article suggests. If it were that transformative, a ton more cash would have been dumped into this over the last two years. Look at the funders - DOE, DOD and US Air Force. They're funding basic science research (which is not uncommon) in hopes of getting a breakthrough tech that can be commercialized and sold to the government. The breakthrough was years ago, scale is the challenge, and since it isn't scaled today I question whether it could be. Also, academic researchers are notoriously bad at commercializing their inventions, and government orgs are not in the business of commercializing tech. Maybe a third party manufacturer will swoop in and go for it.

Somehow we managed to plan our way to global oil infrastructure, oil tankers and with their associated ports, storage facilities and refineries, oil pipelines that span continents, drilling rigs out in the open ocean that helicopters can land on and petrol retail services along morotoways, at intersections and in town centres all over the planet.

I am fairly confident that we have at leat the ability (if not the political will) to build/upgrade electrical charging stations and their associated cabling.

Probably a similar question that horse traders asked when the first cars started being built.

Nice incremental improvement, demonstrated in a lab. According to the laws of headline inflation, incremental improvement is called a "breakthrough". Maybe we need a new word to describe truly important research

A few days ago there was a post with a showboating senator trying to get oil company reps to take an Oath that their companies were no longer spending money to disrupt a shift away from oil. They wouldn't, telling me they are still spending money. I wasn't sure what on since most people believe in global warming. Given the way that discussion went and seeing u/pseudopad response, I am realizing the oil companies are seeding the public with thoughts that we can't change, so why bother. That this change will be too hard for us. It will be a challenge, there will be problems and unexpected difficulties and setbacks. But we must certainly can do this. We must. If this attitude had existed in the 60s, we wouldn't have made it to the moon.

Yeah, I look around the planet at all the stuff we've built. Roads, hospitals, airports, global networks of telecoms cabling, satellites in space, nuclear power stations, tunnels through mountains, mineral mines with multi-kilometer wide pits, railways, undersea power cables, ships the size of skyscrapers, skyscrapers, ports, giant rings for particle experiments, space craft launching platforms, integrated air defence systems . .

And building up renweables and electric cars is too much effort?

Someone's pulling some serious wool.

I feel like this is one of the big breakthroughs people have been looking for in electric manufacturing. Off the bat this is going to be sold at a costly markup but once production evens out then potentially it would become the norm for electric vehicles and at that point yes, but the question is now who wants to be part of that initial round of consumer product testers?

Batteries are good enough now that it's all about the lowest price.

Correct, and the best way to tackle that problem doesn't seem to have been worked out.

I wonder if having a large supercapacitor as part of each public charger might allow for a feasible solution. The supercapacitor's charge time could be much longer than 10 minutes, but its high discharge rate could then allow for fast charging of a vehicle.

Not my field, so feel free to laugh if this is implausible. How large would a supercapacitor have to be to store 100 kWh?

edit: copied from below

100 kWh in 10 minutes would mean 600 kW supply per charger.

A standard house service provides 24 kW, so each charger would have to supply equivalent power to 25 houses. Let's assume a charging lot has 10 chargers - that's 250 houses equivalent in one small location (6 MW), corresponding to one 'gas' station.

A little searching seems to show the Tesla V3 charging locations have 8 stalls at 250 kW each, or 2 MW per location - and even these don't exist in most of the country. Sorry for trying to help.

edit2: That house equivalence is way off since groups of houses aren't pulling max load all the time. 6 MW should service much more than 250 houses. (600 homes per 1 MW is commonly cited, so ~3600 homes)

One of dozens of Level 0 breakthroughs in the last couple years. Works in the lab. Next step: make a usable battery. Then scale to hundreds for prototyping. Eventually, one of these breakthroughs will get to the manufacturing level.

Again.

This stuff gets announced every 5 minutes. Wake me up when I can buy it on the road. I'll be napping in my Tesla.

We already have 300kw car chargers. For example: https://www.drive-electric.co.uk/news/over-5000-new-350-kw-ionity-ultra-rapid-chargers/

And if it does scale up would quite literally make fossle fuel power obsolite as wind solar has the potential to constantly power and store entergy.

I take a break, but would never buy fuel, at the motorway services. Prices are just too high there.

Renewables aren't going to do it alone, you can't rely on them enough, nuclear power on the other hand can.

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There are plenty of locations in the middle of nowhere, e.g. along I-5 or in Baker, CA with tens (50+) of 250kW-350kW stations. Truck charging standards go into the MW. Of course it requires a plan, but it's not hard.

The limit is on the EV battery side. How much can it take...

Yeah sorry, I confused the name Ionity with the car model Ionic.

Kind of old news. Hopium is intoxicating ;)

Edit: I am not anti nuclear power. In it's short usage on this planet it is demonstrably safer than coal and natural gas. But that doesn't make it problem free.

Still waiting for nuclear power to figure out a long term solution to it's waste problem.

That problem alone can't be ignored and in a lot of people's eyes, outweighs the benefits.

Universities commercialize quite well by licensing their discoveries after they patent them.

Hasn't it already been shown a number of times that fast charging of batteries is bad for the batteries in the long run? Unless there is new techniques or something that doesn't damage the battery in the long term that I have yet seen/heard about idk why people get so excited about fast charging all the time if your gonna have to replace the batteries much sooner.

Like maybe if it's an emergency and you need to charge your battery quickly to get to some appointment early or something than yeah. But seems like so many idiots want to fast charge their batteries ALL the time cause they don't want to sit around for an hour or so.

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The faster a battery is charged though the greater the capacity loss over time. I am curious how that issue can be addressed.

Sometimes, sure, but I've seen so many great ideas that the PIs then try to take to market and it fails because they don't know anything about building a business. Licensing of course works too but again, for everything that gets farmed out to a manufacturer under a license, there's 100 basic research projects that never escape the lab. The list of patents available for commercialization just from NASA is enormous, and few of those are consumer available, for the same reasons.

I saw a billboard this morning near my office (Near Toronto) that said “The oil sands are on the path to reduce greenhouse gases.”

I had to think about that for a moment. Yes, I suppose it is true that they are on the path. But in the wrong direction!!

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I'm convinced that the next great technological leap will be in batteries and energy storage. It seems to really be a choke point for a lot of tech and renewable energy sources we have already.

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Ya, ya, ya. How many of these amazing discoveries have made it to the marketplace?

No, that's not the issue here.

As the commenter above correctly pointed out, we don't generally have transmission infrastructure in place to supply the current necessary for fast charging.

But we do in most places where people would charge :-) we have plenty of chargers that can charge cars at many MW combined. Some have battery backup. 10MW+ is not a problem. Charging 50 cars is not a problem.

And we will deploy more where we need more.

Maybe capacitors play a role some when, somewhere, but it's not required.

Right now a simple 250kW+ charger will have to slow down because of the car battery heating up....

Tesla V3 could charge at 300kW, and there are dozens per location. They limit to 250kW because of the car. And they are 400V. There are 800V stations that can easily do more.

The """"problem """ of nuclear waste was solved in the 60s. Nuclear waste isn't some green goo dripping out of barrels, it's small radioactive particles mixed into giant blocks of ceramics or plastics, encased in steel containers. That waste is going nowhere.

The radiation is so diluted and well-contained if you stand right next to any of the storage vats with a Geiger counter you won't see higher than background levels.

Yeah, and if we actually utilised technology and resources we have, with proper planning, instead of waiting for "the market to be ready", then I think I might see a space elevator during my lifetime.

100 kWh in 10 minutes would mean 600 kW supply per charger.

A standard house service provides 24 kW, so each charger would have to supply equivalent power to 25 houses. Let's assume a charging lot has 10 chargers - that's 250 houses equivalent in one small location (6 MW), corresponding to one 'gas' station.

Where are you seeing this commonly existing? Do you have a link to a map of these?

edit:

I see you edited your comment without answering my question. Oh well. A little searching seems to show the Tesla V3 charging locations have 8 stalls at 250 kW each, or 2 MW per location - and even these don't exist in most of the country. Sorry for trying to help.

edit2:

The largest sedan battery pack Tesla currently offers is 100 kWh, so I sized for that.

The issue here isn't so much about kWh, but kW. Charge rate, i.e. time spent charging on a trip, seems to be a commonly cited operational obstacle causing so many to keep buying ICE vehicles. People don't want to have to charge for an hour or more every 200-300 miles.

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150kW - 350kW is pretty standard for a DC fast charger today.

Our local mall has a SuperCharger site: 12 stalls @ 250 kW each (3 MW total). There's another one at Target in the town next door; same setup.

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I think we'll end up with multiple chargers at the same time. Like split cells.

I think at least some companies are holding back on lashing out on EV infrastructure in a big way.

They're probably waiting to see if Betamax or VHS is the way to go and just because one system is better than the other doesn't mean that one will be used.

https://www.tesla.com/findus/location/supercharger/firebaughsupercharger

Has 56 stalls. Middle of nowhere.

Harris Ranch may go to almost 100.

Baker, CA has CCS right next to it.

Every new supercharger has been V3 for a while. V4 is coming out soon.

We don't need those in residential areas where people charge at home and slowly. It's not like the residential gas station that people feel up now for their weekly driving. We need those a long major traffic routes. Maybe in some areas with lots of apartments.

Most new houses in the US had 200 amps at 240V for years. That is some 40 kilowatts.

You have to look for industrial sized electricity. Not residential. This is an industrial hookup.

> I am realizing the oil companies are seeding the public with thoughts that we can't change, so why bother.

You're right -- that is the new face of climate change denial::
> "Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.
>
> What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair. But “too late” narratives are invariably based on a misunderstanding of science."

Their efforts are very much just a delaying tactic, though, as the economics have shifted decisively in favor of clean energy, with renewables now virtually all net new electricity generation worldwide and EVs projected to be a majority of the global car market by 2034 or even 2030.

Still, each year of delay is that much more cumulative emissions and warming, so pushing to accomplish the transition to clean energy sooner rather than later will still have tangible benefits.

Anyone looking at the map of Tesla chargers can see that my comment represented the situation fairly, whereas you found 1 oddball charging site in the entire United States and present that as if it's relevant - and it's still just 250 kW chargers anyway. That's intellectually dishonest IMO.

You have a strange agenda, to be arguing with people who would like to see more electrification. There's no good reason for you to be misrepresenting the state of affairs.

You might be confusing combined theoretical peak loads with working demand loads in the real world.

Actual electric cars don't have 100 kWh packs, for starters. Most people are fine with half of that, 50kWh.

Also, very few people go to fast chargers with a 0% battery state. Most people also don't leave the fast charger with 100% battery state. In practice, it's more common to assume most drivers will charge 50% of the battery capacity, which for the sake of argument let's say is 25kWh.

Finally, the actual fast charge rate is proportionate to how close to empty the battery pack is.. a Tesla at 25% SOC topping up to 75% SOC might only start the charge at 100-150kW, tapering down below 50kW.

Yes, a very busy supercharging station in a dense city needs a fair bit of power (and may "peak shave" actual grid demand with on-site battery storage). For most cities however, it's actually not a huge load in practice, and easily implemented (which is why so many cities around the world have already installed them, even cities below 300,000 population like mine).

Is it still Lithium based? Because that's a long term issue as well. We need to get these new Aluminum Sulfur batteries up and running to really bring the cost down.

Love this kind of stuff but will I be alive to see it? There are so many claims to faster, stronger batteries every day. Meanwhile, every battery on market takes a long time to charge

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The MCS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawatt_Charging_System

Supports 3.75 MW charging. The cable weighs about 2.5#/foot

Coincidentally American gasoline pumps are regulated to Federal level to produce no more than 10 gallons per minute, which is about 3.5 megawatts equivalent (factoring in ICE efficiency).

I just read a paper about cooling electric vehicle cables to handle 2kA.

They're working on it, but it looks like it will need active cooling solutions. Or, a massive increase in voltage at the charger.

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As I mentioned in another comment, heat generated in a wire is a function of amperage not power being transferred. That's how high-voltage power lines can transfer energy to power entire cities.

No, it doesn't. No one wants a light duty truck that weighs 9000lb and needs to be recharged once an hour or thereabouts just so they can tow their work or travel trailer. It's going to be a while before EV's are the solution for all things transportation related.

The most important innovations are going to be weight and size reductions. EV batteries are fat pigs taking up a lot of space and adding tons of weight.

The F150 lightning weighs 600lb more than my similarly equipped truck, but can only go for an hour and a half with a trailer. That's just not an option when an ICE driveline will give you over 4 hours with that same load between refills.

Hell yeah, ao it might take awhile but it’s something to be excited about!

I wonder how well that battery will explode...

Yikes didn’t know it was that dramatic. Luckily battery tech will keep incrementally gaining. This is why a lot of people are way too (soon) optimistic. It’s the future yes. But we’ll play it like the internet. 1995 internet to 2022 internet wasn’t overnight . But I’m sure going from 2015-2035 will be similar for electric vehicles. Isn’t density increasing about 5% a year. It adds up. And I don’t know if that 5% is accurate. Up or down.

Anyways I didn’t know the hauling was that poor on the lightning. Maybe the big semi’s can make it work sooner?

Good thing everyday people dont need super duty road queens and just use small cars for transport. Just because its got little utility for one industry doesnt mean it wont solve a problem in another.

Right, hopefully most people here know that. I hope most people here also know that in terms of existing infrastructure, gas station locations are virtually all secondary customers, not primary customers.

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I saw one on here yesterday where they had it down to five minutes on an EV. Its kinda like coming out with a video for 30 minute abs when there’s already one for five minute abs.

Thanks for the update

Your seeing it dude it’s been happening

Yeah towing and hauling are going to be the last places that electric overtakes ICE's. But they'll likely get there eventually.

Yep, the energy density of batteries is a long way from hydrocarbons, where most of your reactant can be pulled from the atmosphere on demand. To some degree you save some weight on drivetrain and ICE, which can go into a bigger battery, but you get a lot better range increase by upsizing a gas tank than a battery.

if you break a fueltank in an accident, most of the time it will spill out and nothing happens if there is not any firesource. if a battery is hit in an accident, how high are the chances, that the stored energy will instantly explode?

I hate these articles. I work in the pharmaceutical industry and they remind me of the articles about some amazing cancer treatment that worked in a mouse. Until someone can reproducibly make a million of them at a competitive price, they don’t exist.

This is complete nonsense as it relates to their improved battery: " it is now possible to build a 90 kWh electric vehicle (EV) pack with a 300-mile cruise range."

How on earth do these pass peer review?

This, and how reliable is it? I would assume it would have at least the life expectancy of older methods.

does it speed the rate of damage

I don’t understand how it could charge faster. Isn’t the charge rate limited by the wattage of the charging station?

>1.2 megawatts.

Not 1.21? Doc!

So now we're down to 5 times the amount of time it takes to pump gas.

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This is a super weird take. Punctured fuel tank is a huge fire/explosion risk, orders of magnitude more dangerous than punctured battery, that can catch fire slowly.

Battery is much larger, for sure, so it has more chances to get damaged, but overall flammable fuel is a bigger risk still.

its not weird at all. how often do you hear about exploded car tanks? nearly never. if a car starts to burn, it mostly happens at the engine.

a fuel tank can never explode or burn only by itself, it always needs a firesource while a battery can burn by itself simply from a shortcut.

I guess we better give up then since this one part of many hasn't been solved yet. Then the example is "my decades-tested ICE vehicle lasts longer than one of the first EV trucks ever on the market". Yeah.

> Somehow we managed to plan our way to global oil infrastructure

This took the better part of a century. We do not have that much time.

Coal power plants release more radioactive materials into the atmosphere than nuclear, because coal contains trace amounts of Thorium.

This was my first question. Faster charging generates heat quicker and heat is the primary enemy of batteries.

They are failing because I have never once considered "not being able to do it". But it literally is difficult.

Nah, the blocking issues for renewable / battery combinations isn't having a limited charge rate, it's having limited total capacity, and a high cost per kWh of capacity. Although if this allows a more rapid discharge rate it might help with handling peak loads, which would make the grid more efficient

Sounds like a key breakthrough is the nickel foil, which self regulates the temp and reactivity of the battery.

With the extended range battery it's almost 3 hours towing

Keep in mind that faster charge means higher power and potentially more network cost. Still useful for long travels though.

I am unconvinced by just an article that a few grams of nickel can regulate the temperature generated by 50~ish mWh being shot into a box of 18650s in the space of 10 minutes, but I do hope that I'm wrong.

Well I’m not here to convince anyone but it does state that from what I read, as well as saying the nickel foil cools from the inside somehow vs outside, as is the usual approach, so it is fundamentally different at least.

We already have that in Europe, check Ionity stations

Oh, certainly. I've grown sadly skeptical of advances in the tech sector when it comes to batteries. The steam engine and internal combustion engines have had slow, steady, measured progress over the years, and batteries... Well... We got electric cars to work, mostly.

In 20 more years we might be there for everyone. That's the dream.

Now when are electric vehicles going to be actually equally as affordable to the gas only models so that those of us living on a low income as low wage workers can afford an electric vehicle as a daily driver for work commutes

Tesla’s v3 super chargers already use water-cooled cables. They can deliver 250 kW while being thinner and more flexible than the 150kW v2 cables.

They’re supposedly adding liquid cooling to the handle as well for the megacharger.

Electric vehicles are cool when you rent one, not buy them on your own. Because the cool factor drops when you have to replace a worn battery with a new one for... freaking $20'000. I don't remember, but replacing a fossil fuel tank doesn't cost an owner $20K, not even a 1% of that, and it doesn't wear in 5 or 10 years. It's a lifetime car part.

It takes time, at one point horse and buggy was way cheaper than automobiles. The more adoption, the cheaper the cost. We gotta start somewhere.

Yes, update me in 10 years. There’s new breakthroughs constantly that would push production costs up making scaling difficult for the end consumer.

I don't think there is a university in this world that doesn't have a research program on this problem complex. I know mine has. Many companies are probably on this, too. I'm confident we'll figure it out.

Wider utilization of EV's require advancement in Battery tech. It isn't that EV motors are competing with the internal combustion engine, it's that batteries are competing with the stored energy in a conventional vehicles fuel tank. Similarly, broader utilization of current alternative energy sources requires the development of large format energy storage. Both technologies must advance simultaneously.

Exciting times for sure

I am not anti nuclear . And whataboutism is not intellectually honest.

Nuclear waste is a problem that can't be ignored, a half life for 5000 years means engineers need to figure out how to turn waste into something beneficial or harmless.

It depends. It could mean cars don't require as much battery as the charging is relatively fast. This would cost less

That is not a solution, that is a stop gap.

I can be ok with nuclear power AND be concerned about long term problems.

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Towing... a utility trailer with a lawnmower in it?

Check out TFL's tests on YouTube. You aren't getting 3hrs of towing on the extended battery with anything but a small trailer. Their larger trailer cut it to 150 miles. If you're dragging a travel trailer through the wind, will probably see 100-120 miles.

I agree, it's just not going to happen by 2025 or even 2035. Most of the amazing improvements to batteries that get announced take at least a decade to put into use, when they don't come up against conflicts that prevent them from making it to market, like an inability to scale and bring the cost down.

We've also got some infrastructure woes that need to be resolved. The amount of throughput needed to have corner electric stations that can recharge vehicles like they fill gas tanks is insane, almost no cities have anything close to that kind of power capability, and we know infrastructure takes forever to get updated. Even if everyone were to sign contracts right now, there aren't enough works to make all the components and to install everything within a decade.

EV's are advancing at a great pace, but ICE is still going to be around for some time.

I don't think they are really delaying anything, when the major US automakers are all in on EV's its a lost cause.

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its becoming a non issue, your car will wear out before the battery will now.

that isn't how it works, speed of charge is about resistance heat and keeping the battery and charger cool the number of times that you charge has been historical the issue with wearing out the batteries cathode but that is becoming less of a issue as cathodes are getting better.

I think what they are saying is that this specific system would be used on a vehicle with a smaller battery so the heat would be less of a factor. Maybe something like a delivery vehicle that makes short trips and might sit often. If you never intend on taking the vehicle on a long trip then the larger battery wouldn't be necessary and an unneeded cost.

It says that quicker charging will allow for smaller batteries. But I don't want to stop to charge my battery every 125 miles, even if it's quick. So...but quick charging is definitely good. I am under the impression, perhaps wrong, that battery life is related to the number of charging cycles which would defeat some of the saving from using a smaller battery.

I doubt we ever see those for non commercial vehicles, I can see semi's needing them but what people are not getting is that the number of DC fast chargers for regular cars isn't going to be that great, most will be fully charged at home overnight so the idea of a "gas station" is a thing of the past. What we will see is a ton of 20 kw level 2's at destinations places like sports stadiums were people might drive 200 miles to go to.

The heat will be towed outside of the environment.

Question is whether or not this will become the next applicable tech for rechargeable batteries in general, and be viewed as the newest feature Samsung or Apple can use to push the next model. If so, there's your initial round of consumer product testers... or well, they'll probably do a ton of accelerated testing in-house of the tech, but you know what I mean.

> I don't think they are really delaying anything, when the major US automakers are all in on EV's its a lost cause.

I largely agree -- EVs started getting mainstream when batteries started getting cheap. No amount of online astroturfing is going to change the fact that EVs will be cheaper than ICEs in most major markets within a few years (source), or the fact that wind and especially solar are increasingly cheaper than fossil fuel power generation.

The economic forces propelling our transition to clean energy are almost inevitable at this point.

Their delaying tactics -- doomism and hopelessness -- are causing significant psychological distress to vast numbers of people, especially young people. As a result, even if their propaganda is not causing any delay in the energy transition it's still worth combatting for the mental health benefits alone.

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This. Plus batteries are heavy. Less mass is always better.

Adding a nickel foil layer is inevitably going to increase the size and weight of a battery cell, so they're arguing that you don't need as many cells because charging more often is not as big of a deal if each charge is shorter.

It's trying to frame the downside of their solution as less of a downside.

A quick search shows a nice (non-ac) fiberglass buggy costs 7,000$ and a Standardbred race horse (whatever that means) is 3,000$. The harness is another 500$. So all in you're at 10,500$. The average new car price in the US is 47,000$. So it seems as though horse and buggy is still way cheaper than an automobile. I'm not sure that your example works well in this situation.

Sure you're right but what I meant is that while a car is still more expensive than horse and buggy, you still choose the car. You're paying for convenience or practicality of the times. Meaning you don't have to take care of a horse and you get more distance out of a car than a horse, etc. Also I'm sure the differential between a car and horse at that time period was way larger than it was today. Not to mention, you'd have to adjust for inflation, standards of living, etc. You can do the math but I'm not disagreeing that they should cost less.

I think electric cars should cost less than ICE car. There's way less parts but with raw materials market the way they are now, not sure what's going to happen. Almost all the manufacturers are supposed to release cheaper electric cars but they keep adjusting the price with the damn subsidies the gov provides which is plain f'd up.

I read a review by insideev's where they towed a campervan, that's where the number came from, that may be better aerodynamically though, apparently weight is not such an issue, but simply enclosing a trailer then would give enourmous range benefits

I think we are both saying the same thing, you are just getting more into the details. The faster chargers generate more heat which is what causes that loss in capacity. My statement was based on the SAE EV Engineering program which presented several studies showcasing number of cycles to 10% loss in capacity and when going from .5C to 1C the cycles went from 5000 to 200 cycles.

After doing some more digging it looks like the study I mentioned used Nissan Leafs which don't have a robust thermal management system for their batteries (they are air cooled) so newer EVs probably perform much better.

right, the heat would be a issue if they weren't managing the thermals and since batteries are getting much bigger the cycles are going down so there is less strain on the cathodes along with cathodes just getting better. I think most batteries will far out last the suspensions and bodies of cars.

If you can find that, I'd appreciate a link, didn't see anything on their website.

Geeky Schmidt towed a small Airstream camper, and it cut his range in half. Unfortunately, that's not the typical camper as those things are ridiculously expensive, and they also sit low to the ground, which limits where you can go with them.

I average 20mpg unloaded, 10mpg with a 7ft wide cargo trailer. Although I wouldn't tow a camper at 70mph like in the above situations, a typical hard side camper is 8-8.5ft wide and sits about two feet higher at the roof. At 60 mph, it's also going to cut the range in half, or worse, depending on the trailers actual dimensions and amount of junk attached to the exterior.

Camp-inn did an aero study of their teardrops and found their trailer that curves at the corner side walls in the front cuts through air better than the traditional teardrop style of cutting at the top and bottom. Probably has to do with how the air becomes turbulent exiting the sides of the vehicle's. Would like to see more mfg's try alternate designs for better aero, including stuff like lower skirts and those things the truckers put on the rear of their trailers.

And twice as long as it takes to feed a horse!

5EAM is involved in mining boron used in EV batteries because the company has a large deposit of the mineral, and it's a strategic resource for the production of electric vehicles.
Boron is a key ingredient in lithium-ion batteries, which are used in electric vehicles.