Elon Musk does it again. He promised that there would be a million mile electric car battery for Tesla and it looks like he’s going to keep it.
One of the biggest limitations of electric cars is that they run on batteries, and batteries lose power and need recharging and they die. Now image an electric car battery that lasted a million miles before needing to be replaced. For me, that equates to pretty much an everlasting battery that’ll still be going even after the wheels fall off and the body needs scraping – essentially, It’ll outlive the car!
Exactly how he’s (or rather his researchers) have done it is, not surprisingly, a closely guarded secret. But his researchers have developed a lithium-ion battery that you can recharge over 4000 times while it degrades by only about 10%. Here’s a link to the Journal of The Electrochemical Society report if you want to have a read.
And here’s a snippet from the announcement on wired.com.
Last April, Elon Musk promised that Tesla would soon be able to power its electric cars for more than 1 million miles over the course of their lifespan. At the time, the claim seemed a bit much. That’s more than double the mileage Tesla owners can expect to get out of their car’s current battery packs, which are already well beyond the operational range of most other EV batteries. It just didn’t seem real—except now it appears that it is.
Earlier this month, a group of battery researchers at Dalhousie University, which has an exclusive agreement with Tesla, published a paper in The Journal of the Electrochemical Society describing a lithium-ion battery that “should be able to power an electric vehicle for over 1 million miles” while losing less than 10 percent of its energy capacity during its lifetime.
Technologically speaking it’s a huge leap forward towards making electric cars even more appealing. But right now, who does the million mile battery benefit? most of us will replace our rides long before the mileage spills over the million mile mark. So, we, the average motorists, aren’t the target market, at least not yet.
The people who would benefit from the million-mile battery right now are taxi drivers, especially those whose cabs run day and night, autonomous taxis (yep they’re on the way!), shuttle buses and long-distance goods vehicles. In fact, any vehicles that run for a long time and long distances. So, Elon Musk is certainly going to put a smile on their faces.
What I think we want are batteries that last longer per charge so we can drive further before having to find somewhere to recharge it, batteries that fully charge in the same amount of time to takes to fill a tank full of petrol/diesel at the pumps and costs the same as it would to boil a kettle (okay that one might be a bit of a stretch, but we live in hope). Sort those little issues out Mr. Musk and we’ll all be piling down the electric car dealerships to buy an electric car.
