It took one 330 kilometre trip from Chongqing to Chengdu in his Nio ES8, a seven-seater all-electric SUV, for its owner Wang Haichun to be consumed with buyer’s remorse.“Chinese policymakers think EVs will become more like conventional gasoline cars as early as 2025.For most automakers, battery cells cost around USD 200/kWh, the engineers said, although costs for Tesla Inc are believed to be around USD 150/kWh, partly due to its much greater scale of production.Most EVs can get a partial charge in less than half an hour, although several models due out in the next year can get close to a full charge in 20 minutes.“It’s physics,” he said, adding that to charge an EV with the same amount of energy in the same amount of time as a gasoline car, you’d need a charger powerful “enough to run a small city”. China wants NEVs - which also include hybrids, plug-in hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles - to account for a fifth of auto sales by 2025 compared with 5 per cent now.“The turning point is coming. Toward the end of the trip, he shut off the air conditioner and audio system to preserve power. A big obstacle is heated, which increases resistance and in turn, reduces the current.Asked to comment on Wang’s experience, Nio Inc said in an e-mailed statement the ES8 can travel more than 200 km when constantly driven at a 100 km per hour and that battery swap stations are available for quick recharging. That could help double a battery’s energy density.It uses 80 per cent nickel, 10 per cent manganese, 10 per cent cobalt, while a conventional lithium-ion battery uses 60 per cent nickel, 20 per cent manganese and 20 per cent cobalt.But others in the EV industry are less optimistic.Toyota Motor Corp, which does not have a pure EV on the market currently, says it is concerned about battery durability. The statement did not address Nio’s advertising of 335 km on a single full charge.
There are a lot of limitations to solid state drive.Advances in recharging are also key to making electric vehicles mainstream.But others are sceptical.“I wouldn’t want to do that kind of trip again – ever. Most were not authorised to speak to media and declined to identified when describing the shortcomings of EV technology. Even so, South Korean battery makers say the next generation of batteries due in three years or so will cost much less and offer much greater driving ranges.Longer-term efforts to improve batteries are solid state batteries, where the liquid or gel-form electrolyte in a lithium-ion battery is replaced with a solid.To cut costs, firms are working on slashing the use of cobalt, the most expensive part of lithium-ion batteries.That’s because the investment to improve battery quality needs to be factored in, while the cars also need sophisticated battery management systems to prevent overheating and overcharging - adding thousands of dollars to their cost..TE Connectivity is working with automakers to cut charging time to as little as 5 minutes and Chief Technology Officer Alan Amici say that goal may be attained in five years.The engineer was one of five interviewed by Reuters for this article who believe it will take a decade before battery EVs achieve cost and performance parity with gasoline cars. But that’s naive and all automaker engineers would agree with me,” said a veteran EV engineer at Honda Motor Co. Bereisa thinks battery costs could achieve parity with gasoline cars by the late 2020s but his verdict on fast fueling parity is “maybe never”. Despite being billed as capable of going 335 km on a single full charge, the ES8 didn’t get anywhere near that when driving on freeways at speeds above 100 km per hour (60mph). He and his wife have since bought a Lexus NX300h gasoline-electric SUV. Batteries jointly produced by Tesla and Panasonic Corp substitute manganese with aluminium and use less cobalt than NMC 811.
