I pulled into a Supercharger with my LFP-battery EV last winter. The temperature outside was -15C and I had not set the navigator so there was no pre-warming activated.
By the time I had finished my coffe, SoC had gone from 30-ish to 90-ish percent.
LFP tech anno 2023 is perfectly good enough for road tripping in large cars in severe winter conditions. For almost everyone.
So your battery was preheated. I once did the same with approx 0C battery temperature and whole ordeal took at least 2x longer. Yes there was farmers market in front of charge station so I had a good time with kiddo. That’s not the point.
Let’s not pretend better batteries shouldn’t exist.
Which doesn’t matter if your about to charge either way and just want to optimize time spent?
This can’t be more than single digit days per year? This is the case where people in for example Sweden have 230V engine block and passenger compartment heaters for their car.
It’s -30C and the heat pump doesn’t really work. Is there any advantage to heating the cold side with, say, a resistive heater?
Conservation of energy says no, but what if it’s also being heated by waste heat from charging the batteries?
(Maybe the answer is “if that’s the case, you are actively cooling the batteries with the heat pump!”, but I’d like to think someone more clever than me could make the scheme work.)
Quoting Bender from Futurama: "Great is OK, but amazing would be great."
I'm not against further progress, I'm just stating that using current gen LFP in cold climate for large cars driving long distances is not a problem. It is more than fine. At least Tesla's implementation of LFP, I can't speak to any others on the market.
Because it doesn’t solve the problem, it merely works around it. Solving the problem would mean coming up with a battery chemistry that doesn’t suffer in the cold. Instead the answer is “just don’t have it get cold”.
It’s not to say a hack/workaround isn’t useful, and I would say that it’s perfectly acceptable to simply use a battery heater in the winter. But calling it “solved” confuses solutions and workarounds, and that’s an intellectually dishonest thing to do.
Leave your car with 5% SOC overnight and then try to find energy in morning to preheat battery. People have painted into corner themselves before. It’s perfectly adequate for my very mild climate and even then I get limited regen about 6 morning months per year.
I'm not against better batteries. I'm against people who choose to operate with such a small safety factor for something as serious as operating a giant rolling 2 ton piece of metal and volatile chemistry. Just like I'm against people who don't know how to change a tire or properly drive with etiquette on the interstate; If you can't do it, you kind of deserve some teasing.
In my friend group, if you run out of gas you get made fun of. You forget to flip your kill switch and can't crank your motorcycle, we all laugh and call you a dipshit.
Getting stranded isn't always harmless, and proper adults don't get stranded. Proper adults manage their vehicle safely. That's my point. Yes, exceptions are allowed, but we need to make sure everyone knows they are exceptions. Don't leave 5% on your battery when in the freezing seasons, it's improper.
It's not obvious because you're still making the excuses for baby-adults. No one is saying battery tech should stop being developed, nor should pain points be unaddressed.
After market electric engine heaters and remote starters are typical for ICE vehicles in cold climates (e.g. Alaska). Not sure why you consider this to be a hack for EVs if its builtin to the battery pack design.
That's a hack, not a solution.
> Given CATL is scaling sodium-ion production to to GWh scale next year, it sounds like they are betting for a much shorter timeframe.
Wanna bet? LFP is ~1,000 GWh scale right now. GWh scale is 0.1%.