It surprises me how good they are. But they are too big and expensive, we need a Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla of EVs. Simple and affordable.
Neither of those cars are affordable anymore lol. There is no economy class of cars in America
Mitsubishi mirage (if that counts as a car)
What constitutes “good enough”? I drove my EV from Boston to South Carolina and back without any issues at all.
Personally my frustration is that they’re largely kinda luxury vehicles, which makes sense given they’re new, but I think they need to get cheaper going forward. And the cheap options like the leaf need to be better (the leaf’s lack of thermal management for the battery means the battery degrades massively over the car’s lifespan)
Personally my frustration is that they’re largely kinda luxury vehicles
They’re luxury vehicle priced with shitty interiors. The $20k Chevy Trax has a better designed interior than a lot of these techno-junk spartan EVs.
If you compare the $40k or $50k EVs against similarly priced $50k luxury vehicles, its night and day, no where damn close. At the $50k price, you better have massage chairs (Lincoln), or other kinds of luxury features (Volvo’s built-in child booster seats, etc. etc.) that make your interior stand out.
Every EV is the same shitty design. Remove useful features from the driver, and replace them with a 10-inch iPad like screen and pretend that touch controls are fine. Look, we’re all adults here, we all know that capacitive touch screens are cheaper than buttons now. Its 2024, the costs of various design elements are well known. They’re cheapening the interior trying and trying to sell it as “tech”.
A relatively short drive in the US following the most built up and industrialized corridor in the country isn’t representative of viability. Hell just the 4 hour drive between my house in Oklahoma and Amarillo Texas gives me range anxiety in my gas powered Ford Focus due to how carefully I need to plan fuel stops to make it. Meanwhile going from one side of Texas to the other is the same distance as Boston to Florence SC; this country is absolutely huge.
Know what’s good enough? Shoes. All the require is burning calories, which you’re already doing.
Another pro-corporate turd polishing article from The Atlantic, along with astroturfers. Earn that check, guys.
Sila nanotechnologies has a battery that uses silicon and charges in 5-10 minutes from 10 to 80% and stores 20% more electricity than a lithium ion that a uses graphite anode. They plan to improve the battery to the point where it can hold 40% more. There are possible other advancements that can be made too as the science improves — silicon can theoretically hold 24x as a lithium ions as graphite can. The challenge is to make the battery structure stable since adding and removing that many ions causes the battery to physically grow and shrink, which causes degradation.
They have a contract with Panasonic to produce these batteries and the first will be available in a Mercedes-Benz EV in 2026.
Gasoline has 100 times the energy density of lithium ion batteries. From a technical standpoint, increasing capacity by 20% is a huge scientific breakthrough, the issue is that batteries are so much weaker/heavier that 20% is negligible. Going from 100 to 120 is a great increase but when you’re competing against something that is at 1000 it’s not even a drop in the bucket.
I think energy density is not the right thing to look at though. Functionally a battery can give you the same range as a gas vehicle and be recharged in the same time as a gas tank can be refilled.
Its physically impossible.
A huge amount of “energy” in gasoline is from Oxygen, which isn’t even carried inside of a car. In contrast, a Battery must carry 100% of its energy so that it can recharge later. (ex: Cars can let the waste exit as CO2. But a Battery performing that reaction would have to “carry” that CO2 back so that it can recharge somehow by inverting the reaction).
Hydrogen is the only competing technology that takes advantage of this Oxygen effect. H2 inside of the gas tank, release H2O. H2O is common enough that we can later split 2(H2O) -> H2 + O2, save off the H2 and fill back up with H2.
