Batteries dead after 5 years

[DonkeyApple]

Evanivitch said:

DonkeyApple said:

The key (assuming autonomy can work in an urban environment) lies in monetising the vehicles during the endless hours that they aren't being utilised by humans. The immediate idea would be if they could also transport goods. Otherwise the system of an individual owner wearing the cost of non use remains cheaper and more efficient with a percentage of those owners whoring their vehicle out to bus wkers when they aren't using it. Just as used to happen with S Class owners in London.

Or using them as big battery banks...

That's the more logical eventual use of the mobile battery pack, to form an integral part of the home energy management system. I suspect that what we will eventually see is EV users with excess fuel connecting to carpark networks and putting that fuel up for sale. Being able to recharge at home, at night on a cheap tariff and then sell the excess when parked remotely to users who cannot charge overnight domestically will return a lot of efficiency robbed by half ton battery pack.

I'm not convinced that autonomy will ever play a robust role. It's being pioneered in parts of the world with very simple road networks and an absence of pedestrians, when you transpose the concept to an environment such as London it breaks down on the simple fact that on key thoroughfares the only thing that keeps pedestrians on their pavement is the fear of injury. As soon as you program cars to always stop for pedestrians then pedestrians will simply make them stop like Moses and the parting of the waves.

Conversely, I can see autonomy in the UK working in much more simple environments such as assisting rural mobility where taxis are few and far between.

Although, autonomous tech to date remains a farce compared to even the most incompetent or drunk driver.

[anonymous-user]

Max_Torque said:

Evanivitch said:

How are the pods different to the taxi model we use today?

Because minimum wage


Average speed in the uk is about 30 mph, but in towns our average speed is sub 10mph

So at the approx £8/hr min wage, thats a cost of between 30pence and £1 per mile


The robbo taxy doen't have a wage bill, so right away your taxis is between 30 pence and £1 a mile cheaper!!

Not quite.

The robo taxi has a whole new labour requirement, for software developers, programmers, systems people, engineers to maintain the systems that the taxis use to operate...........

[rscott]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

That cost (per vehicle) reduce as fleet sizes increase though.
The number of developers involved in writing the code remains the same whether there are 10 taxis or 100,000.

[Evanivitch]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Like a normal car then...

[DonkeyApple]

Max_Torque said:

Because minimum wage


Average speed in the uk is about 30 mph, but in towns our average speed is sub 10mph

So at the approx £8/hr min wage, thats a cost of between 30pence and £1 per mile


The robbo taxy doen't have a wage bill, so right away your taxis is between 30 pence and £1 a mile cheaper!!

Uber's entire model is constructed on not paying minimum wage. The actual issue with modern taxis is that like the moody cabs of old they all have to loiter where the fares are likely to be so that when an app request is triggered they are in range to grab a few shekels so they can put a bowl of rice in front of their children tomorrow. You go to any London hub and almost all the congestion today is minicabs loitering, double parked or just driving round in a small circle waiting to pounce like a pedo at the playground gates.

And then there is the hideous environmental issue of Uber's being far too cheap so people are using them to cover walking distances.

And currently they are all hybrids so spewing out fumes all day long as they switch shifts between drivers and never get charged.

Uber is an utterly toxic enterprise for its exploited slave labour and all those who live around where they operate but because it's all done through a trendy app with a cool name it gets lapped up by the over consumer.

Killing them off with autonomous electric pods would be nice but the economics don't stack up unless the units are permitted to be made so incredibly cheaply and pedestrians are somehow banned.

If someone lives in a provincial town then it would probably work better but not in major cities.

[NugentS]

amstrange1 said:

Don't confuse what the OEM tells the customer is 100% SOC with true state of charge.

BMS strategies are not trivial things, but key parameters aside from pack life and safety are to ensure consistent performance for the customer. A common (e.g. Tesla) strategy is to not utilise all the available energy within the pack when new, but dynamically alter this as the pack ages. So your "85kWh" rated pack may actually start off at 95kWh available energy, but you never touch 10kWh of it. Then as it ages and becomes an 88kWh pack through degradation you start leaving only 3kWh in reserve. Net effect is the customer is happy that they still have 85kWh and a healthy battery, but the story in the electro-chemistry is different. (Numbers are made up to illustrate the point.)

Clearly with cells still being expensive and heavy, the OEMs are all working very hard to characterise pack aging and ensure that they're not carrying around too much additional capacity as their anti-aging insurance policy. One of the big challenges with this at the moment, is that accelerated durability/aging tests on batteries don't have lots of real-life market data to correlate their approach against. e.g. Nissan's own tests suggested that doing lots of mileage and rapid charging would be hugely detrimental to the packs (hence rapid charging warranty limitations on early cars), but in practice this seemed to be unfounded. On the other hand, it seems that their predictions for thermal impact on aging weren't conservative enough if the hot market data on Gen1 cars is anything to go by - or maybe they knew this all along and took a calculated risk.

Some real approximate numbers
Vauxhall Ampera - 16+kWh Battery, 10kWh useable

[Evanivitch]

NugentS said:

Some real approximate numbers
Vauxhall Ampera - 16+kWh Battery, 10kWh useable

16kWh and 10.5kWh useable.

But it's a car that is incredibly conservative with its battery. Including using the engine when it gets too cold, and only charging at 3kW.

And users see no decrease in useable capacity over lifetime.