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Gemini Battery, The Ultimate Disruptor, 700 Mile Battery

Arthur Hanson

Well-known member

It looks like a US company may have come up with the ultimate disruptor in the battery field. Any thought or comments would be appreciated. They have actually tested the battery and pushed the range of a car to 700 miles. This may be just one of many advancements to come at the rate technologies are accelerating.
 
How about fast trains along our interstate routes? Gordon Danby in the office next door got a patent in 1970 for the Maglev train. Nothing happened. Japan waited 15 year to implement it to avoid the patent. To this day, we still didn't make the trains. We can make metal traces 24nm wide, but we can't make train tracks. Elon's purpose of the battery car is to make them cheaper. Sorry, not buying into it. You need to go 700 miles, get a train ticket.

I hope taxpayer money isn't going towards batteries. Is it Arthur?

Edit: Trains are the ultimate disruptors to both the battery field and the airline industries.
 
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It looks like a US company may have come up with the ultimate disruptor in the battery field. Any thought or comments would be appreciated. They have actually tested the battery and pushed the range of a car to 700 miles. This may be just one of many advancements to come at the rate technologies are accelerating.
It's an interesting idea, pairing LFP chemistry for short-term charge/discharge with large cycle count but low energy density (400Wh/kg) with anode-free NMC for super-high energy density (1000Wh/kg) but much lower cycle count -- the LFP acts as a cache to shield the anode-free cell from most of the charge charge/discharge cycles.

I wouldn't say it's an "ultimate disruptor", they claim a doubling in energy density compared to conventional NMC batteries but it's not clear whether they're comparing with the latest state-of-the-art or something older and inferior, which is what a lot of these "magic battery startups seem to do.

They also don't expect production before 2026 and it will undoubtedly then take several years after that to scale up to take any significant fraction of the EV market, if it ever does -- because this will probably mean licensing the technology to the really huge-scale manufacturers outside the US, not doing it themselves in the US.
 
How about fast trains along our interstate routes? Gordon Danby in the office next door got a patent in 1970 for the Maglev train. Nothing happened. Japan waited 15 year to implement it to avoid the patent. To this day, we still didn't make the trains. We can make metal traces 24nm wide, but we can't make train tracks. Elon's purpose of the battery car is to make them cheaper. Sorry, not buying into it. You need to go 700 miles, get a train ticket.

I hope taxpayer money isn't going towards batteries. Is it Arthur?

Edit: Trains are the ultimate disruptors to both the battery field and the airline industries.
I'm all for trains, but we don't have even close to enough track. I'm for autonomous buss systems because we need more point to point. Trains in the US are useless for most trips. Autonomous on demand vehicles I feel will be the future for they will provide the flexibility needed. One will subscribe to a system that meets their needs and wants, for most vehicles sit idle the very vast majority of the time, a real waste.
 
I'm all for trains, but we don't have even close to enough track. I'm for autonomous buss systems because we need more point to point. Trains in the US are useless for most trips. Autonomous on demand vehicles I feel will be the future for they will provide the flexibility needed. One will subscribe to a system that meets their needs and wants, for most vehicles sit idle the very vast majority of the time, a real waste.
Which all sounds great, but will need a complete mental attitude change to how people see/use cars -- many are emotionally committed to owning a car, possibly a bigger/better/faster one than their neighbours, especially in the US (but many other countries as well), and I suspect they're going to view CaaS (Cars as a Service) in the same way as gun control -- you can take my car from my cold dead hands... ;-)
 
Which all sounds great, but will need a complete mental attitude change to how people see/use cars -- many are emotionally committed to owning a car, possibly a bigger/better/faster one than their neighbours, especially in the US (but many other countries as well), and I suspect they're going to view CaaS (Cars as a Service) in the same way as gun control -- you can take my car from my cold dead hands... ;-)
Many of us are not committed to owning cars per se, we are committed to the freedom to go where we want, when we want, with time efficiency, and with privacy and safety. You have to pry these freedoms from my cold, dead hands. (Incidentally, paraphrased from a quote by actor Charlton Heston, when he was president of the NRA.)

Autonomous vehicles are a minimum of a decade away from broad application. Nah, I don't believe a decade. It'll be longer.
 

It looks like a US company may have come up with the ultimate disruptor in the battery field. Any thought or comments would be appreciated. They have actually tested the battery and pushed the range of a car to 700 miles. This may be just one of many advancements to come at the rate technologies are accelerating.

Each month has an article like this.
Each month has a company or university with a breakthrough.


There are several aspects to all new battery technologies, including but not limited to:

-Range / energy density
-Cost; yield (Usually as % OEE),
-Mass manufacturability
-Tool availability (many tools have leadtime of more than one year)
-Lifetime / degradation
-Potential clients
-Potential investors
-Competetive landscape, is it better than the alternatives by other startups?
-Raw material availability
-Raw material price
-Safety
-Availability of employees
-Energy price / availability
-Environmental compliance, handling of production waste

Many articles of startups will only mention a breakthrough in one or two aspects. Usually range / energy density.

However, if the mentioned technology is going to be a breakthrough, it has to score on _all_ these aspects.

If it fails on only one point, it will never come to fruition.

So, what you should do is, contact the company, and ask them to see how they score on _all_ these points.

If you do this for 10 potential technologies, you can sell your report for $6000 / reader.

What we currently see is, there is pressure in the EV market to be 'first to market', even if it is not profitable and OEE is terrible. But in the longer run, that strategy is not viable.

Also, sometimes something makes economical sense until raw material prices rice. Lightyear One was also a breakthrough, was manufacturable, but the price has risen dramatically.
The product became too expensive and now the company is bankrupt and almost all engineers fired.
 
I am not anti-car (not anti-gas either). For long trips, hook up the cars up like a caboose. Hire Sheriff Joe to put the prisoners (and illegals) onto laying tracks. Work a day, reduce your sentence by 2 days. Soon you have more tracks, more trains, more usage. Electric cars.. bah humbug.

Note: I still drive a stick and am against automatic windows.
 
There are a lot of super interesting battery startups like this. It's a very exciting area right now.

I think once we have a 700mile battery charging speed becomes less important.
 
Interstates. Service stops every 100 miles or so (at hookup locations). Like taking a ferry.
Private sector, go for advance batteries. Good luck. Government funding, no good.
 
Interstates. Service stops every 100 miles or so (at hookup locations). Like taking a ferry.
Ferries have restrooms.

I hope you're really, really good at electrical engineering, so I don't have to worry about you making a living as a transportation consultant.
 
How about fast trains along our interstate routes? Gordon Danby in the office next door got a patent in 1970 for the Maglev train. Nothing happened. Japan waited 15 year to implement it to avoid the patent. To this day, we still didn't make the trains. We can make metal traces 24nm wide, but we can't make train tracks. Elon's purpose of the battery car is to make them cheaper. Sorry, not buying into it. You need to go 700 miles, get a train ticket.

I hope taxpayer money isn't going towards batteries. Is it Arthur?

Edit: Trains are the ultimate disruptors to both the battery field and the airline industries.
US cities are design based on car commute. Lack of subway make it hard to implement train transportation.
For example, a high speed train from LA to Vegas will be perfect only if both cities have nice and complete subway systems.

 
Would you like me to plan your itinerary? LA to Vegas is only 270 miles. I only plan routes on interstates. Please hook up your car at the closest autoloading stop. If going without a car, please carry on your commuter bike. If you would like to ride in your hitched car, I recommend bringing an empty 1 quart container per passenger.
 
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Edit: Trains are the ultimate disruptors to both the battery field and the airline industries.
If you look closely, trains succeed in countries where cities are not build for cars. It helps to have a dense population and an undeveloped flight system as well. The reason is carless cities have transit systems to feed the train stations, as well as a public more accustomed to public transport. Topography helps - although China does have a few spectacular trains they came much later than connecting the heartland which is mostly flat.

Oh, and ruthless eminent domain without compensation can make things easier, too, if you do not already have rights of ways for trains.

I love trains, have travelled on high speed in Japan, China, and Europe. But the things that make them work are not really building tracks. No point having tracks without customers, and that in turn depends on the cities they would serve.
 
Would you like me to plan your itinerary? LA to Vegas is only 270 miles.
Vegas is fine, you can visit there without a car, public transport is fine (I have no idea how well that works in the burbs for residents). But LA is a gigantic sprawl. From the parts of my family out in Riverside it is almost easier to drive to Vegas than to central LA. When the tire companies colluded to destroy the urban rail in L.A. they succeeded wildly in making it a city with miserable public transport, but that rapidly became a city with miserable any transport.

OTOH for batteries, there are thriving Tesla-using limo services from LA to Vegas. They have some of the highest-mileage Teslas that show up in the blogs about battery life.
 
Can this be manufactured in large volumes?

/thread

A little more seriously -- a few observations:

- They don't list the size or weight of this battery -- you could simply stack 2 x Model S batteries on top of each other and achieve > 700 miles highway range today
- The pouch style used here has historically been more expensive to manufacture than standardized cylinderical cells
- Not seeing much in the way of fire safety protection from the pictures, but it may be more than I'm thinking..
- Additional manufacturing complexity from two chemistries in one battery, though the idea has merit.
- The LFP density of 441 Wh/L is roughly twice existing LFP. Grains of salt.
- No info on how fast the battery can charge or the temperature range it works in

Lastly - I wouldn't get too hyped on 700 miles. A typical LFP can do 3000-5000 cycles before losing 20%-30% of capacity; even a 400 mile range battery still has > 300 miles of range at > 1.2 million "miles" of use. There's no need for 99.9999% of use cases in a car.
 
Can this be manufactured in large volumes?

/thread

A little more seriously -- a few observations:

- They don't list the size or weight of this battery -- you could simply stack 2 x Model S batteries on top of each other and achieve > 700 miles highway range today
- The pouch style used here has historically been more expensive to manufacture than standardized cylinderical cells
- Not seeing much in the way of fire safety protection from the pictures, but it may be more than I'm thinking..
- Additional manufacturing complexity from two chemistries in one battery, though the idea has merit.
- The LFP density of 441 Wh/L is roughly twice existing LFP. Grains of salt.
- No info on how fast the battery can charge or the temperature range it works in

Lastly - I wouldn't get too hyped on 700 miles. A typical LFP can do 3000-5000 cycles before losing 20%-30% of capacity; even a 400 mile range battery still has > 300 miles of range at > 1.2 million "miles" of use. There's no need for 99.9999% of use cases in a car.
Indeed, these are some of the other points I mentioned.

If the heaviest and most expensive part of an EV car is the battery pack, you are not going to solve it by instead putting two battery packs in a car. The question is also how many people actually need 1200 kilometer range, and want to pay for it.

Where I live, charging poles are nearly everywhere, 700km is enough for most people because that happens to be the range of many petrol cars as well.

If quick charging is available and chargers have the same density as petrol stations,many people will probably not want to pay for this range.
 
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